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Cinema’s poetics of history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2017

Noa Steimatsky
Noa Steimatsky*
Affiliation:
Department of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
*
*Email: steimatsky@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

In the movie theatre, history risks drowning in sensory response, in pleasure, or in shock. Yet the cinema can also contribute to a special knowledge of history. Cutting across genres and modes of filmmaking, exploring the effects of duration, gesture, movement, mise-en-scène, framing and editing, recognising affective connotations and the intricacy of figural-poetic devices, this article weighs the impact of the senses and the imagination vis-à-vis the cinema’s historical task. In transforming the narrative past tenses of both fiction and history into the present tense of film viewing, the cinema may be said to loosen the critical grip of writing (history’s ‘proper medium’), to destabilise legibility and interpretation, to interfere with the retrospective, synthetic work of history. But this variability, the inherent ‘impurity’, even promiscuity of the medium also invests cinematic experience with a vitality and urgency: it implicates us in what we see, it animates our response, which is at once aesthetic and ethical.

Italian summary

Nel buio della sala la storia rischia di essere sommersa dalle risposte sensoriali, dall'esperienza del piacere, o da quella di shock. Eppure esistono forme in cui il cinema, in quanto mezzo di comunicazione, esperienza, arte può contribuire alla conoscenza storica – al di là di dati quantificabili o della propria forza storiografica, analitica e narrativa. In questo articolo considero l’impatto dei sensi e dell’immaginazione a fronte della missione storica del cinema, tramite un’analisi che spazia attraverso generi e modi della cinematografia, esplora le esperienze di durata, la gestualità, il movimento, la mise-en-scène, la fotografia e il montaggio, e riconosce le connotazioni affettive e la complessità di formule figurative e poetiche. Si può ipotizzare che il cinema, nell’atto di trasformare il tempo passato narrativo della storia e della finzione nel tempo presente della visione, allenti la presa critica della scrittura (il mezzo ‘proprio’ della storia), destabilizzando cosí la leggibilità e l’interpretazione, interferendo con il processo retrospettivo, sintetico, accademico della storia. Tuttavia questa variabilità, l’‘impurità’ – la promiscuità addirttura – inerente al mezzo riesce anche a investire di urgenza e vitalità l’atto stesso della visione cinematografica: ci coinvolge in quello che vediamo e anima la nostra reazione rendendola al contempo estetica ed etica.

Keywords

poetics of cinemaimage and imaginationtemporality and historySergei Eisenstein’s OctoberGiorni di GloriaWilliam Wyler’s Best Years of Our LivesMarco Bellocchio’s Vincere
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 22 , Special Issue 2: History and Memory in Italian Cinema , May 2017 , pp. 105 - 122
Copyright
© 2017 Association for the Study of Modern Italy 

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