Limitaciones del proyecto

As discussed,¹¹¹ in spite of its distinctiveness, Ciprì and Maresco’s cinema can be defined within a postmodern framework. In this chapter we look at how the ‘neo-baroque’ brings together many of the aspects that are usually attributed to the postmodern, and how both are of particular relevance in the discussion of the body.

In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), Angela Ndalianis identifies neo-baroque as a formal quality of the postmodern and observes that the strongest connection between the postmodern and the neo-baroque emerged in the 1950s in Latin America, where neo-baroque became a form of resistance against ruling political systems. Ndalianis provides us with a description of Latin American neo-baroque that helps us to see the connection with the postmodern and its relevance to Ciprì and Maresco’s cinema. Neo-baroque is defined as a poetics of

[…] minimal or lack of concern with the development and a preference for a multiple and fragmented structure that recalls the form of a labyrinth; open rather than closed form; a complexity and layering evident, for example, in the merging of genre and literary forms [...]; a world in which dream and reality are indistinguishable; view of the illusory nature of the world – a world as

111 See the third part of the Introduction.

98 theater; a virtuosity revealed through stylistic flourish and allusion; and a self-reflexivity that requires active audience engagement. (Ndalianis 2004: 15)

Gilles Deleuze’s Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque (1988), published in English as The Fold (Deleuze 1992b), elucidates the concept of neo-baroque. Deleuze argues that Leibniz's concept of ‘monad’ is the basis for a reflection on the status of contemporary arts. Leibniz’s monad is explained as a ‘simple substance’, defined in terms of folds of space, movement and time; each of them is indivisible and immaterial and has no parts as it does not depend on anything else for its existence.

The number of monads is infinite and they are all different from each other. The world is therefore imagined as a continuum of folds and surfaces that turn and interleave through compressed time and space. According to Deleuze, Leibniz anticipates contemporary ideas of history as multi-layered combinations in which signs are always in motion and the subject is always in the process of becoming.

It is however thanks to Omar Calabrese that the importance of the neo-baroque in the arts is brought into focus. In his L’età neobarocca (1987), published in English as Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (1992), and included in Il Neobarocco. Forma e dinamiche della cultura contemporanea (2013), Calabrese highlights that in the current age there is a taste for the neo-baroque that remained latent in the past, in part because an ideological prejudice persisted for centuries against the ideals and conventions of 1600s and early 1700s baroque (Calabrese 2013: 21). Calabrese points out that the concept of the ‘straight line’ has in modern times been rejected and instead the ‘fragmentary’ and ‘dispersed’ have come to the fore leading to a life obsessed with labyrinthine images.

The most characteristic aspects of the neo-baroque are surprise, virtuosity and originality at all costs. These qualities, according to Calabrese, have nonetheless over time become stereotyped and all too often form has come to prevail over content. The

99 idea of art as a game, and therefore by definition disengaged, ‘art for art’s sake’, is also connected to this. Calabrese sees this as the loss of balance between expression and content and when one of these aspects prevails over the other, style ‘degenerates’

because both are essential. Calabrese adds that when we are watching a film that lacks formal beauty and is built around an overcomplicated plot, with twists and turns and too many characters, we are witnessing a negative evolution of style because what we are seeing is a search for complexity that has become estranged from the need for form (ibid: 38-42). In an interview with Krešimir Purgar, Calabrese cites Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) as an example of neo-baroque, maintaining that with the third of the series, The Matrix: Revolutions (2003),¹¹² ‘we have almost the same thing, perhaps trying to reach some sort of conclusion but using the exact same special effects’ (Purgar 2006b).

Calabrese suggests that a discussion of the merits of individual artists is counter-productive, though a distinction seems implicit when he talks about different levels of ‘degeneration’. Besides, what Calabrese says about The Matrix, several years after the publication of L’età neobarocca, points to a new neo-baroque that is even more deprived of innovative drive. However, by categorizing the late neo-baroque as degenerative, we fail to take into account the importance of artists like Ciprì and Maresco who reject the idea of art mainly as entertainment and instead aim to provoke the spectator, and within whose poetics irony becomes a form of resistance.¹¹³

Ndalianis’ aforementioned Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment is helpful to our analysis since, although referring in the title to

112 The Matrix series is set in a future where what seems to be reality is in fact the ‘Matrix’, a complex simulation created by intelligent machines to control and subjugate people.

113 Calabrese admits that ‘there are as well positive developments’, that fortunately the spirit of invention remains, but he nonetheless maintains that these elements are, all the same, ‘hidden’ and therefore not predominant (Calabrese 2013: 24).

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‘entertainment’, it nonetheless acknowledges the subversive spirit that the baroque has instilled into the arts. Quoting Henri Focillion, Ndalianis (2004: 8-9) points out that the concept of baroque should not be confined to any particular historical period but should be seen as trans-historical, an artistic attitude that has traversed centuries, the effects of which can be found in artistic movements such as modernism and surrealism. Ndalianis adds that it is misleading to define the neo-baroque as ‘simply something that stands outside any recognisable schematic or not to have any canon’.

With reference to directors such as Peter Greenaway and Federico Fellini, Ndalianis reminds us how the neo-baroque is also associated with a certain type of art cinema, with artists who work creatively within specific formal canons (ibid: 9).

A neo-baroque aesthetic can be found in the work of Italian directors who have influenced Ciprì and Maresco and whose legacy they have carried forward:

Federico Fellini (as acknowledged by Ndalianis), Pier Paolo Pasolini and Carmelo Bene. Fellini’s cinema celebrates the concept of invention and continuous spectacle. It is no surprise that the term most used to describe Fellini’s cinema is ‘illusionism’, explored by Sam Rhodie in relation to one of Fellini’s films, E la nave va / And the Ship Sails On (1983),¹¹⁴ a film that involves a continuous overturning of classical cinema conventions, especially the way in which narration manipulates reality. In the film a journalist who acts as narrator casts doubt on the veracity of the story told in the film, while at the same time the documentary the journalist is supposedly working on is shown being made in the film itself. The film reveals that ‘all you see and all that occurs has been staged’; the pleasure therefore consists not in the truth of things but in ‘their staging as make-believe’ (Rhodie 2002: 70).¹¹⁵

114 And the Ship Sails On (1983), set in 1914, follows the journey of a cruise ship that leaves Italy with the ashes of a famous opera singer on board, accompanied by her former friends and colleagues.

115 Other aspects in common between the baroque visions of Fellini and Ciprì and Maresco will be discussed in chapter 3.1, through an analysis of the self-reflexive and polysemic nature of Ciprì and Maresco’s film Il ritorno di Cagliostro.

101 The same characteristics appear in Pasolini who, before becoming a filmmaker himself, worked closely with Fellini as a scriptwriter. Pasolini defined himself as a

‘mannerist’, referring to a historical period of the later years of the Italian Renaissance/early baroque in which a greater balance between form and content is reputed to have been achieved and therefore before the ‘degeneration’ attributed to the late baroque of the XVIII century. The term ‘manner’ was already being used in the XV and XVI centuries to indicate what we today refer to as style and which was seen as the search for perfection that goes beyond naturalism. While the masters of the previous generation, inspired by classical art, codified the rules according to which nature could be imitated, mannerist artists were able to bend them to their will, making reality more ‘subjective’ by going beyond the mere representation of nature and towards ‘pure’ creativity. In La ricotta (1963), for instance, a film about the making of a film on the life of Christ, Pasolini switches between black and white and full colour representations in tableau form of the depositions of Christ respectively by Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540) and Pontormo (1494-1557), two of the most unconventional mannerist painters. Inspired by Mannerism, Pasolini is visionary in his approach, making use of the richness of his many and varied references both literary and filmic, including self-references, often in contrast with each other.

While in Fellini the overturning of traditional film conventions and the predilection for spectacle leads to a certain balance between form and content and in Pasolini the drive to express his political views sometimes leads to the favouring of content over form, in Carmelo Bene we find the most extreme expression of the concept of neo-baroque, where the distinction between form and content ceases to exist. We witness a complete upheaval of the cinematic medium in a spectacle imbued with a whole tradition of baroque in which Bene grew up, a highly decorative

102 late flowering in the South of Italy known as barocco leccese,¹¹⁶ which he pays homage to in his best known film, Nostra Signora dei Turchi (1968). The film is a sort of imaginary autobiography, constructed around references and self-references, which the author himself has defined as ‘a collage of sounds and images in which the plot is merely a pretext’ (Saba 2005: 56). Disregarding any rules, concentrating above all on a continuous game of twists and turns and employing complex editing and different coloured film lenses, Bene aims to present a fluctuating ‘fluid’ vision of reality (ibid: 55).

These insights into the neo-baroque will be used as the basis for focusing on one of its core elements, the human body. The discussion of the body in postmodern aesthetics covers both mainstream cinema, with its emphasis on ‘splatter’ and ‘gore’

and, above all, a cinema that aims to be a divergent and stimulating counter-culture, whose relationship with its audience is provoking and upsetting (Samuel Bayer, George Romero, Eli Roth, Lars von Trier, etc.). This is consistent with a tradition of provocative art from the Dadaists (Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Francis Picabia, etc.) to the surrealists (Luis Buñuel, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Alexander Jodorowsky, etc.), from the underground and avant-garde (Jack Smith, the Kuchar twins, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, etc.) and to audiovisual installation artists (Vito Acconci, Bill Viola, Matthew Barney, Pipilotti Rist, etc.).

In classical baroque itself the preoccupation with the body and its senses becomes the centre point between the two poles of experience: the one directed towards the outside world and the other directed towards inner knowledge. From this perspective the body often assumes richly curvaceous ‘abandoned’ forms and can,

116 Rudolf Wittkower, in his Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, highlights the ‘charming, volatile, and often abstruse’ nature of this distinctive type of late baroque, giving an overall impression of ‘stylistic unity and uniformity’ (Wittkower1982: 399). It takes its name from the Apulian town of Lecce, its development being favoured by the ease with which the local stone could be sculpted.

103 taking up Deleuze’s discussion, be understood as an eternal wave, epitomised by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina [Figure 9]. Bernini (1598-1680), considered the ‘greatest genius of the Italian Baroque’ (Wittkower 1982: 143), showed in his figures the ‘transitory’, ‘their immediacy and near-to-life quality’, supported by the gripping realism of detail and ‘the differentiation of texture’ (ibid:

145). Pluto’s fingers, literally sinking into the flesh of Proserpina’s thigh, and the harmonious composition of curvaceous forms render the scene extremely realistic and dramatic.

Figure 9: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (1621-1622)

A preoccupation with the human body and a predilection for large forms is a characteristic element of Fellini’s cinema, shaping it throughout. Bodies that are grotesque, deformed, or contorted out of shape and unconventional faces abound, forming a haunting world. Fellini’s influence is noticeable in Pasolini, though in Pasolini the emphasis is on the male body. For Pasolini the body itself is a signifier of a cultural context and from this derives his lack of interest in professional actors, favouring instead individuals whose mere physicality is capable of adding layers of meaning to the film. Based on an approach to film-making where traditional acting skills are of secondary importance, Pasolini aimed at a ‘language of physical

104 presence’, ‘because things, by the mere fact of being there, act upon the subject’

(Viano 1993: 34). It is in relation to this aspect that a comparison with Ciprì and Maresco is most valuable, since they also, like Pasolini, place a particular emphasis on the nude male form, a re-appropriation of the male body that can be seen as a reaction to a female-centric cinematic tradition.

In Bene, too, the male body is central, but rather than searching for a grotesque or expressive body, Bene concentrates on negation, mutilation and the consequent attempt to ‘escape’ from the body. This recalls a baroque tradition according to which privation of the body and self-inflicted pain were used to procure a detachment from reality and removal to a higher plane. In Bene this does not correspond to a form of religious ecstasy but to a state of grace, that of the ‘cretini’

(simple-minded) as he defines them in Nostra Signora dei Turchi. It is a state of mind that becomes a form of resistance against the dominant culture, a kind of ‘non thinking’ that, as in Christian tradition, celebrates the ‘purity’ of the unquestioning faithful. In Bene this state of grace is continually elusive and never achieved, while in Ciprì and Maresco it becomes the fixed object of parody, revealing by contrast the meanest and most vile sentiments of a certain kind of humanity. Emblematic of this is the character of Paletta in Totò che visse due volte,¹¹⁷ who represents a type of individual that accepts with resignation even the most extreme humiliation and infliction of physical pain, forming one of the trio of crucified figures in the story.

As in Bene, the neo-baroque in Ciprì and Maresco is focused on an aesthetic of excess and the desire to constantly provoke, even though, like Pasolini, they are also driven by anthropological concerns related to the passage from a rural to a post- industrial society. The two directors have in common with Bene a lingering fixation on the body, while their taste for the grotesque and conception of cinema as a magical

117 See chapter 1.1.

105 illusion recall Fellini.¹¹⁸ However, in Ciprì and Maresco this is turned around and viewed from an ironic perspective, highlighting the alienating and isolating effect that art can have on the artist, threatening physical and mental health and leading to a dangerous sort of regression.¹¹⁹