The first methodological problem with Ossessione is that the version available today is Visconti’s own self-edited version, rather than the one shown in cinemas at the time of its release. Nevertheless, the film still stands as a pivotal visual example of how to redefine and renegotiate the creative limits for expressing a critical view of society within a dictatorial regime, using a crime story and a foreign country - America - as narrative and cultural pretexts.
Visconti’s political influences and the development of his visual style have to be ascribed to the period of French cinema called Poetic Realism. This movement, or tendency, in French cinema of the thirties, aimed to make films about the lower strata of the population, particularly its underclass - workers, criminals, deserters etc. (Vincendeau, 1998, 11). These visual stories were told in a stylised and lyrical way, often including the environment or landscape as an essential part of the gloomy mood or the tragic destiny of their characters’ doomed lives (Williams, 1992, 239). Graham Greene described them as a trend that raised ‘the thriller to a poetic level’ (Greene quoted in Andrew, 1995, 225). Unlike their contemporary American counterparts, which capitalise on the maximum shocking effect of fast pace, visual violence, songs and screeching car tyres, these films relied on their quiet internal composition (Andrew, 1995, 220). This included very carefully selected locations (harbours, train stations, secluded urban or exotic environments, primitive rural settings etc.) as transitional spaces seemingly suspended between two worlds - as indeed were the films’ protagonists (Andrew, 1995, 221). Moreover, the choice of location was meant to express, spatially, the psychological conditions of enclosure, estrangement and constriction in which such protagonists were caught. The visual style, based on a combination of of studio décor and location shooting, supported this depiction of people within still landscapes, on the brink of erupting in an outburst of rage, violence or desperation (Williams, 1992, 236). It is this particular ‘symbiosis between (social) subject and (stylistic) treatment’ that, according to Durovicová, makes French cinema’s fascination with crime and the criminal hero so distinctive (quoted in Andrew, 1995, 227). This attention to the ‘style of the crime’ distinguishes this cinema from its international
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counterparts (Vincendeau, 1998, 32). ‘Crime, the transgression of the laws that regulate this world, is first and foremost a fingerprint, a signature, a sign of style’28 (Andrew, 1995, 32).The stylistic combination of studio with outdoor location is accounted for by the presence, within French cinema, of numerous German artists and technicians (Andrew, 1995, 162, 172, 265), whose contribution to the emergence of this distinctive ‘French’ look was essential. Studio décor, in fact, involves the use of lighting and set design as part of the narrative and mood in interior scenes. German Expressionism was famous for its mastery in handling shadows and designing sets, as well for the use of a particular (subjective) type of camerawork, as key features for expressing subjective feelings, inner visions, or dreamlike states of hallucination (Huaco, 1965, 14-15). Location shooting, on the other hand, is based on a more ‘realistic’ way of shooting exterior scenes, closer to French naturalism, and involving less attention to the technical quality of light and setting than to the close-to-reality look in a primitive, pastoral setting, where characters seem to be connected to and almost naturally complemented by their surroundings (Andrew, 1995. 220).
The combination of these two contrasting systems of representation is at the core of our discussions of film noir, since it relates to the debate about the so-called ontology of the photographic picture in post-war cinema: its reference to an external reality (Bazin, 2005; 2005a; Tagg, 1993; Wollen, 1998). As systems of representation, Realism and Expressionism are in fact two extremes in the reproduction of ‘external’ reality. Bazin, referring to painting, calls these two modes the symbolic and the realistic (Bazin, 2005, 10), where the former, primarily aesthetic, attempts to transcend its model in order to express a spiritual reality, while the latter seeks to reproduce or duplicate reality (ibid., 11). With the advent of photography, according to this French critic, plastic arts are freed from an obsession with verisimilitude to pursue the aesthetic route, while photography takes over in the realistic reproduction of the world (ibid., 12-13). Bazin stresses some qualification of this bold statement, but his position is made clear in most of the debate about cinema in post-war France and continental Europe. The favourite cinematic form, from this perspective, is Realism, in particular Italian Neorealism, as it becomes the model through
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28 I refer to the concept of style as the ‘recurrent features of texture and structure’ (Huaco, 1965, 11) of a
symbolic form, but also the historical conditions and individual circumstances that have promoted its emergence and development.
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which to establish an existential bond between fact and image, world and film (Wollen, 1998, 92). Expressionism with its artificiality, at the other end of the spectrum, was the enemy, since its emphasis was on lighting and design, as opposed to the realist movement’s lack of make-up (ibid., 93). Similar limitations were found in Soviet cinema, based on editing, with the work of Eisenstein, for its editing and aestheticism, and in American cinema for its predictable narratives (Bazin, 2005, 41; 2005a, 148). Italian Neorealism found its main source of inspiration in Poetic Realism as interpreted by Jean Renoir (Bazin, 1971), with its emphasis on faces, situations and choral outdoor scenes. This drew on the tradition of the Impressionist painters, creating a visual dialectic between reality and abstraction (Bazin, 1971, 84-85) which permits the filmmaker to say everything without chopping the world up into little fragments. In this way the Realist mode of representation 'would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them’ (Bazin, 2005, 38). Bazin goes on to acknowledge Jean Renoir’s influence on Italian Neorealist cinema (Bazin, 2005a 18) and in particular on the most aesthetically inclined of the Neorealists, Luchino Visconti, as a former disciple of Renoir (Bazin, 2005, 37).These statements about issues of representation are intrinsic to our research, since Bazin was at the forefront of a French critical movement, around the magazine Cahiers du cinéma, that was very important in the appraisal of the noir American movies coming to Europe after World War II and the subsequent debate about their critical and aesthetic value (Hillier, 1985; 1986).
4.5 Jean Gabin: ‘Oedipus in a cloth cap’
French actor Jean Gabin is central to most of the poetic realist films, articulating his characters’ emotions in outbursts of rage and violent confrontations with less authoritative characters29 who stand in his way. In films such as Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1936), Jean
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29 Secondary characters, surrounding the main performer, were called the ‘eccentrics’ in French cinema,
‘forming a dense population of familiar and much-loved faces and voices’ (Vincendeau, 1998, 26) and eliciting a broad response and numerous followers among cinema and theatre audiences. Subsidiary to the main stars, they ‘served them’ with their theatrical repertoire of emphatic gestures, voices and performances - essential for offering on-screen a richness of linguistic nuance and witticism proper to the tradition of popular
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Grémillon's Gueule d’Amour (1937), Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938) and Marcel Carné’s worksLe Quai des Brumes (1938) and Le Jour se Lève (1939), he established his tragic screen persona in
combination with ‘a myth30 of charismatic ordinariness’ (Vincendau, 2000, 69). In all these stories,
Gabin’s character dies ‘tragically’ after a series of fights, verbal duels and sexually charged encounters with fascinating, but ultimately unattainable, women. This was to gain him the appellation of ‘Oedipus in a cloth cap’ (Bazin quoted in Vincendau, 2000, 62). In most films, Gabin played the ordinary worker driven to crime by social hypocrisies that prevent solidarity between members of the same social group. In other stories, he played the criminal who is good at heart, as the focus shifts from his criminal actions to his personal feelings of nostalgia, impossible love, or doomed fate, emphasising the inner workings of the mind and sense of isolation over the unfolding of external events. In this respect, Andrew has noted how, within blurring of boundaries between working class and criminality, resides ‘the very attraction of marginality, isolation and authenticity’ (Andrew, 1995, 226) on which Gabin’s myth is based. Underlying this view is the assumption that these films’ general tone of regret, nostalgia or lost illusions stands for an admission of momentary defeat of a certain social aspiration, while still holding the hope of a better future for generations to come (Andrew, 1995, 350). From this perspective, films could be seen as the symbolic response to, or corresponding visual meditation on, inchoate social problems and parallel political expectations proper to the Popular Front. Gabin became the ‘icon’ (Vincendau, 2000, 70) of this movement in the sense that his character, his persona, embodies its ideals, expectations and political goals.
Most of these stories became very successful internationally as early as the thirties, and during the war, for both educated and popular audiences, as they portrayed a certain image of France before the German occupation, and were celebrated for their tragic and libertarian tone. The Gabin phenomenon sparked a series of international imitations, spoofs, homages and remakes that
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French theatre based on vernacular and slang (the boulevard theatre). ‘Where the ‘eccentrics’ act for the spectator in the back row, Gabin acts for the camera’, as Vincendeau puts it (Vincendeau, 1998, 28).
30 Borrowing Barthes’s definition of myth as a narrative device for articulating tensions and ambiguities
(Barthes, 1993, 126), myth for Vincendeau is the cultural phenomenon of representation that resolves sets of opposed values into a character who is perceived as coherent, natural and authentic (Vincendeau, 2000, 64). In this sense, the conflation of political aspirations proper to the Popular Front with certain constructions of working-class character and masculinity ‘appear natural despite their roots in cultural artefacts such as literature, song, and photography, and despite their deeply divided nature’ (Vincendeau, 2000, 64).
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would establish his status as an international star (Vincendeau, 1998, 7). In this context, the concept of ‘star’ has to be taken not as providing fixed meanings, or role models, but as ‘a focus in the continuous production and struggle to define and redefine desires, meanings and identities’ (Gledhill, 1991, xix) in a social context.Gabin’s status was quite different in the two periods separated by the war, as the tragic working-class hero gave way to the patriarch and godfather figure of the second part of his career (Vincendeau, 2000, 63). It is to the former I refer to find out how and to what extent Ossessione is related to French Poetic Realism, to the myth, star and icon of Gabin, to Italian Neorealism and American film noir, with their distinctive representations of crime and social order.
4.6 Ossessione as challenge to dominant forms of representation
At this stage it is important to stress how Visconti used noir narrative techniques to reveal the intolerant, authoritarian and aggressive quality of the nationalist mentality inherent in the fascist regime (Bencivenni, 1995, 17). To find out how the authors of Ossessione achieved this, we must turn our attention to the concept of representation and the importance of its analysis within a cultural context.
According to Elizabeth Chaplin, representation in terms of its communicative potential ‘implies that images and texts (…) do not reflect their sources but refashion them according to pictorial or textual codes,31 so that they are quite separate from, and other than those sources’
(Chaplin, 1994, 2). The author is referring here primarily to still images, but her approach is valid in the case of cinematic visual narratives too. Ossessione in fact has its sources both in an American crime story and in French cinema, one providing the plot of the story, while the other provides the visual style of storytelling. As this story required changes in its geographical setting to
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31 Codes, in this case, have to be understood as the implicit rules by which certain ideas entering the social
practice of communication can be expressed through mass media. For example, codes in cinema are lighting, editing, picture composition, or mise en abyme (i.e. image within an image), camera movement etc. (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, 351), while codes in culture are the discourses available at a certain time about specific topics, as they are selected through communication practices by institutions and individuals (Hall, 1992).
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adapt it for a different audience, Visconti’s choice was the Po valley, in north-east Italy. This geographical location is distinguished by its history, its working class, and its past involvement in social disturbances and strikes that spread to different areas of the Italian peninsula (Gramsci, 1971, 76). The working title of this film was Palude or marshland (Bencivenni, 1995, 13), a reference to both the geographical setting (Po delta) and the psychological condition of the characters on the verge of sinking into despair and obsession in consequence of their actions. On the other hand, the screenwriters insisted on including in the film a character not present in the original novel: lo spagnolo, ‘the Spaniard’ (Licata quoted in Faldini e Fofi, 1979, 61). The reference to Spain here has to be framed in the historical circumstances of that time, as this nation had become fascist after a long and ferocious civil war involving volunteers from all over the world on both sides: the republicans, and Franco’s armies (ibid.). The Spaniard became the moral, political conscience of the more frivolous main character.The casting confirmed the tendency to political bias in the film. The actress intended to play the main character was Anna Magnani, one of the most expressive and dramatic actresses in Italian cinema. From a popular background, she became famous for her expressive roles in Neorealist cinema a couple of years after Ossessione. As she was pregnant at the time, Clara Calamai stepped in instead (Bencivenni, 1995, 13). Calamai was already a film star under fascism, with a quite elaborate and sophisticated urban appearance, and easily identifiable with a certain type of fascist cinema. For these reasons she had to undergo a thorough change of make-up, costume and haircut, in order to strip away the glamour with which previous films had invested her, and the cinema audience would be expecting (Landy, 2008, xvi). Visconti’s aim in this particular case was to counter stardom and the escapism of mainstream fascist cinema in order ‘to fuel a new conception of popular cinema’ (ibid.). The male character Gino, played by Remo Girotti, had neither the same cinematic presence as Jean Gabin, nor was he the icon of any group’s revolutionary programme. His character was not the proactive male who bursts onto the scene, and who plays the leading part in a team of actors at his service. Visually Gino is, rather, the ‘object’ of desire and contention from the very first scenes of the film, while his hesitations and doubts make his character an adolescent-like figure amidst more scheming, deceitful or experienced characters.
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The fact that Remo Girotti was not a professional actor seems to confirm this interpretation. The actor’s body is in functional service to the greater social landscape within which he is portrayed. There are not many close-ups in the film - being the emphasis on the social context where the story takes place - apart from at the very beginning32 where the sexual attraction of the two protagonistsis stressed (Wood, M.P., 2007, 240). However, instead of romance, the tragic development of the story recalls the atmosphere of fatalism and desperation among working-class people as portrayed in Popular Front stories and their characters. Visconti’s style tries to tap into the ‘political implication’ of a certain cinematic style (French Poetic Realism), based on location shooting and roving camera (Andrew, 1995, 161), emphasising the creative use of expressive possibilities in landscape and architecture as indicators of narrative development. This call for more realism in cinema counters the dominant code of the ‘white telephone’ melodrama already described as the equivalent of a ‘standard’ film during fascism. Interior scenes, however, deserve a separate account as they reproduce Expressionist techniques of lighting and chiaroscuro effect, to dramatise domestic settings where characters are seemingly trapped, contrasting with the sense of freedom in open spaces (Wood, 2007, 240). In this way, Ossessione does not replicate the codes of fascist cinema in its process of representation, but challenges the conventions of this visual practice by offering an alternative way of telling a crime story about ordinary people. Noir appears to be a good source for social subjects and narrative style that would later be developed in post-war Neorealism (Wood M.P., 2007, 263).
4.7 Representation and social practices
In Chaplin’s account, ‘representation can be understood as articulating and contributing to social processes. These social processes determine representation but also the social practices and forces which underlie them, with which we interpret the world’ (Chaplin, 1994, 2). In this way,
Ossessione articulates social processes at work in film production, drawing on visual techniques or
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narrative styles already employed in previous works, while adding some new ideas and solutions that make the film a visual meditation on a certain subject, in a particular style, or create certain expectations or doubts in a viewer. Moreover, the images of this film create a particular account of the social world, drawing our attention to the way visual language uses certain narrative resources to generate specific ‘knowledge’, in Foucault’s sense (Foucault, 1977, 26) - for instance, in the public representation of crime stories under certain circumstances and conditions. An analysis of the two still pictures below shows us, for example, how emphases of lighting, shadowing and foregrounding enable the film to invoke repetitions that have ambiguous implications.Image 1 Image 2
The repetition, almost mirroring, of the same scene - a bed with Gino and Giovanna (the restaurateur’s wife) in the first case (Image 1) and Gino and the Spaniard later in the film (Image 2), - ‘might’ have homosexual connotations, as some critics have suggested (Van Watson, 2002), or might simply play with audiences’ expectations of a romantic relationship in a film, with two people on the same bed. Whatever the ‘final’ meaning, the emphasis is on generating multiple readings of similar scenes, while indirectly criticising strict gender roles and identity such as those portrayed in Italian cinema of the thirties and forties (Duncan, 2000, 103). In this connection, one of the screenwriters noticed that, despite the intention to add the character of the Spaniard as a moral and political figure supporting the reckless Gino, once the film was made this figure was much more ambiguous than expected (Alicata, quoted in Faldini and Fofi, 1979, 65). In any case,