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.They take a trip to Italy in the vague hope that things will improve, but of course they don’t.The man is tempted by other women.As for the woman, she seeks isolation, solitude, in the city of Naples or in nearby nature, around Mount Vesuvius.But the film ends with their love really being revived, which is actually a sort of miracle.What Rossellini is trying to tell us is that love is stronger than will, that when you make an effort to save your relationship you are merely involved in something abstract, and that in reality something about the couple must save itself on its own, as if love were a new subject, not the object of a negotiation.Basically, what Rossellini is trying to tell us comes down to a radical proposition: love is not a contract; it is an event.If it can be saved, it will be saved by an event.In the last scene, Rossellini films the miracle.You can film a miracle in cinema, and it may even be the case that cinema is the only art that has the potential to be miraculous.Painting a miracle is difficult, telling the story of a miracle isn’t easy, but filming a miracle is possible.Why? Because you can film the miracle from within the sensible, simply by making some minor adjustments in the value of the sensible and in particular by using light.Cinema can make the inner light of the visible appear.And at that moment, the visible itself becomes an event.This is one of the great syntheses that are possible in cinema, which is basically a synthesis of the sensible and the intelligible.I think there is an intimate relationship between cinema and love, first of all because love, like cinema, is the eruption of the miraculous in life.The whole problem is whether or not that miracle can last.As soon as you say “It can’t last,” you fall into a cynical and relativistic conception of love.But if you want to have a positive conception of love you have to maintain that the miracle can last forever.The amorous encounter is the symbol of discontinuity in life; marriage, on the contrary, is the symbol of continuity.This raises the philosophical and cinematic question: “Can a synthesis be created within rupture?” Love, along with revolution and cinema no doubt, has always been a typical example of this problem.Furthermore, cinema is similar to love because it is not an art of speech.Please don’t misunderstand me: people speak in the cinema, speech is important.But let’s never forget that cinema could be silent, it can be quiet.So speech is very important, but it is not essential.Cinema is also an art of silence, an art of the sensible and an art of silence.Love, too, is silent.Let me suggest a definition of love to you: “Love is the silence that follows a declaration.” You say “I love you,” and then all you have to do is keep quiet, because, in any case, the declaration has created the situation.This relationship to silence, this presentation of bodies is tailor-made for cinema.Cinema is also an art of the sexual body.It is an art of nudity.That creates an intimate relationship between cinema and love.And so I think that cinema is a movement from love to politics, whereas theater is a movement from politics to love.The two trajectories are opposite ones, even if the problem is ultimately the same: What is a subjective intensity within a collective situation? To illustrate this, let’s take some examples involving World War II and the question of the relationship between the situation of love and that of war.There are two very different, paradigmatic films on this topic: a classic film, a melodrama, A Time to Love and A Time to Die, by Douglas Sirk and a modern film, Hiroshima, mon amour, by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras.In A Time to Love and A Time to Die there are some extremely powerful scenes dealing with the war on the Russian front and the ruins of Berlin.In Hiroshima, mon amour, the atomic bomb that was dropped on that Japanese city is the issue and so is the German occupation of France.The historical and political situation is very important.But you enter into these figures through the words of love, through the encounter of bodies, through the intensity of intimacy.And that, I think, is cinema’s real movement.Theater’s movement is different, because the theater must ground the general situation in language and construct individuals on that basis.You can also see that when you go from love to politics, when you go from love to History, the technique of the image is twofold.On the one hand, you have the image of intimacy, which is necessarily a compact image, a tightly framed image, and, on the other hand, the image of History with a capital H, which is an epic image, an open image.Cinema’s movement involves opening up the image, showing how, within this intimate image, there is the possibility of the larger image.This trajectory of opening up is typical of cinema: its genius lies in such opening up.It could be shown that the problem of theater is associated with condensation while the problem of cinema has to do with opening language up.Cinema and the invention of new synthesesFinally, let’s take the question of the multiplicity of the arts: cinema proposes new syntheses.Even before people began to talk about multimedia, the cinema was itself a kind of multimedia.For example, there has always been a problem with regard to the relationship between visual and musical values.It is a problem that runs through the whole history of art.How can there be a synthesis of visual and musical values? That is the whole problem of opera as a genre.Cinema does in fact propose such a synthesis, however: it is the great resource of slapstick films, for example.Go see or see again the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera … Or Visconti’s Death in Venice, especially the beginning of the film when the character arrives in Venice.We don’t know a whole lot about him.We see him arrive with his luggage, get in the boat, and move through the canals of Venice.Naturally, we experience intense visual values, associated with the esthetic relations existing between Visconti and Venice.But these are not just beautiful images of Venice; it is already a sort of mortal poem, a magnificent, melancholy journey.And Visconti incorporates into the sequence what will become the musical leitmotif of the film, the Adagio from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.Now, what is extraordinary is that at no time is it ever just decorative [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]