CAPÍTULO III: MARCO METODOLÓGICO
3.5 Tabulación e interpretación de datos
The concept of ‘procadence’, with its disruptive charge and its ability to reconfigure sets of relations, seems to drive us back to an idea of modernity as a ‘disarticulated’ notion in which heterogeneous temporalities and spatialities overlap. Deleuze’s definition of Fellini’s cinematic image in terms of ‘procadence’ seems indeed to intersect with the analysis of the concept of modernity developed by the group of Italian
intellectuals gravitating around Nuovi argomenti, above all with that of Ernesto de Martino. In Deleuze’s description of Fellini’s ‘procadent’ image, which focuses on the splits of time into ‘two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past’,44 one could indeed recognize echoes of de Martino’s concept of disarticulation of the temporal dialectic, in which ‘[l]’ombra del passato che non è stato fatto passare si distende sul progresso del fare, spia l’occasione per riproporsi’.45
As both Deleuze’s and de Martino’s statements suggest, a process of breaking up of temporal linearity characterizes the investigation of time and history in modernity. This aspect, which was first recognized by Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory at the beginning of the twentieth century,46 and then by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,47 appears also to inform intellectual and artistic debates in the modernizing Italy of the 1950s and 1960s. In light of this, we could interpret the disarticulated, paratactic and fragmented way in which Fellini’s La dolce vita stages historical time as a response to the dynamics of fragmentation generated by the advancement of modernity. The trajectory of fall followed by Steiner and Marcello, but also by Emma and Maddalena, seems indeed to stem precisely from the presence of an interstice caused by the temporal disarticulation which characterizes time and space in modernity.
In this respect, Fellini’s La dolce vita appears to belong to the same constellation of Aby Warburg’s atlas of images, Mnemosyne (1929), as they both seem to deconstruct linear ways of representing their object of investigation – for Warburg the survival of ancient patterns of representation of human expression in modern visual culture; for
44 Deleuze, p. 81.
45 Ernesto de Martino, ‘Perdita della presenza’, p. 50.
46 See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
Fellini, Rome’s modernity in the late 1950s – through a methodology of representation based on the accumulation and re-organization of fragments.48 Despite their different aims and objectives and their distinct fields of work, Fellini and Warburg seem to respond to the chaotic and accumulative progression of time – the accelerated time of modernity – through the creation of a system that is able to incorporate the returns, the anachronisms and the discontinuities of history. In this system, each meaningful snapshot taken from the heterogeneous assemblage of history has to be re-organized next to the others according to a shared index, a similar marker which activates a bipolar dynamics of attraction and rejection, resemblance and dissimilarity.49
The methodology of composition adopted in their works, and above all the priority given to visual images, seems to suggest the possibility of tracing a line of correspondence between Fellini’s La dolce vita and Warburg’s Mnemosyne project. The
Mnemosyne project was conceived by Warburg as an atlas in which he aimed to re- arrange a vast and heterogeneous series of pictures representing ancient sculptures, frescoes, paintings, newspaper clippings, stamps and press photos. The project occupied the last five years of Warburg’s life, from around 1924 to 1929, and his aim was that of combining and cataloguing these images in thematic series according to their relationship of similarity in order to illustrate the movements of human expressions throughout history. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, Warburg’s atlas ‘era un gigantesco condensatore in cui si raccoglievano tutte le correnti energetiche che avevano animato e ancora continuavano ad animare la memoria dell’Europa, prendendo corpo nei suoi “fantasmi”’.50 What differentiated Warburg’s project from apparently
48 For an analysis of the relationship between Warburg’s work and cinema see Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
49 In light of this, a strict and intimate marker appears to link together Warburg’s notion of pathosformel, Benjamin’s notion of ‘dialectical image’ and Fellini’s ‘procadent’ image: these three concepts are indeed based on the idea of the clash of opposites which, differently from Hegel’s idea of dialectic, never finds a synthesis but keep coexisting together in their singularities, as in a field of tension.
50 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg e la scienza senza nome’, in La potenza del pensiero (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), pp. 127-52 (p. 136).
similar art historical albums was its open form as well as the anti-chronological methodology of combination between the images: Warburg constantly re-arranged the pictures of his atlas moving away from a uni-linear system towards a ‘diagrammatic form’.51 In the series of the nymph, for example, the picture of the fourth century BCE bas-relief of the Gradiva could be placed next to a picture representing Domenico Ghirlandaio’s swirling female figure in ‘Birth of Saint John Baptist’ (1486-90), or to a portrait of a contemporary golf player. This arrangement offered the possibility of giving new readability to the pictures, as one shed a new light on the other, and of finding out new iconographic themes, such as that of the nymph itself. As Gombrich said ‘it was the philosophy of “bipolarity” in particular which Warburg was testing and developing in these kaleidoscopic permutations’.52
The connections between Warburg’s Mnemosyne and Fellini’s La dolce vita seem to lie in their application of a montage technique based on a bipolar combinatorial methodology. The wall of Fellini’s office and the wall of Warburg’s library in Hamburg – the place where he initially displayed the plates of his atlas – appear to be haunted by the same anti-linear idea of time and space, as they are both constructed through a bipolar dynamic of attraction and rejection. In this respect, Georges Didi- Huberman’s analysis of Warburg’s notion of montage could be also read as a commentary of Fellini’s way of assembling shots in La dolce vita:
Il montaggio […] non è la creazione ingannevole di una continuità temporale a partire da 'piani' discontinui disposti in sequenze. È, piuttosto, un modo di dispiegare visivamente le discontinuità del tempo all’opera in ogni sequenza della storia. Ogni montaggio all’opera in Mnemosyne fa emergere, mi sembra, questo genere di paradossi: le disparità manifeste sono quasi sempre le marche di legami latenti, e le omologie manifeste sono quasi sempre le marche di antinomie latenti. 'Montare immagini', qui, non deriva da un artificio narrativo per unificare i
51 See Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986): ‘Warburg had been fond of mapping out these complex relationship in diagrammatic form in which the work he was studying was represented as an outcome of various forces’ (p. 286).
fenomeni sparsi ma, al contrario, rappresenta uno strumento dialettico in cui si scinde l’unità apparente delle tradizioni figurative.53
For Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s montage is the most apt methodology for capturing the moving image, because it responds to the discontinuous nature of historical time by visually displaying it. The technique of montage at work in Mnemosyne relies indeed on a dialectical system in which the disparities between one image and the other usually work as markers of concealed links between them, and, conversely, the apparent similarities are often markers of unnoticed dissimilarities. As we have seen, a similar idea of montage animates the sequences of La dolce vita, based on a principle of ‘structural discontinuity’54 and of ‘disparity’ between the images.55 The bipolar opposition which gives shape to the unraveling of facts and events in Fellini’s tableau – the relationship between Marcello and Steiner, the duality between Emma and Maddalena, and the dialectical coexistence between ancient and modern in Rome – seems then to operate, at the level of the cognitive exploration of time and reality, in a very similar way to that which pieces together the images assembled in Warburg’s atlas. The feeling of going through a period of fast development led Fellini to realize the impossibility of capturing Rome in a unitary way, and brought him to fragment the big picture of Rome into small snapshots. These pictures, which started off as still images hung up and re-composed in ever new series on his office wall, stand out as synecdochical images of Rome’s modernity, as they capture the movement of disarticulation and fracture produced by modernity while it is still an on-going process. The emergence of these porous, osmotic and expanding ‘vernacular’ images which characterizes Rome’s modern cityscape; the discontinuous, non-linear, paratactic aesthetics at work in Fellini’s film as well as in Flaiano’s prose; the revision of the
53 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’immagine insepolta: Aby Warburg, la memoria dei fantasmi e la storia
dell’arte, trans. by Alessandro Serra(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006), p. 436.
54 See Burke, p. 113. 55 See Richardson, p. 111.
montage technique in terms of a dialectical and ‘procadent’ mechanism in which each snapshot seems to be bound to the other by a bipolar opposition of attraction-rejection – all these elements seem to suggest the emergence of a new modality of exploration of the flowing real, based on an equally new, anachronistic conception of historical time.