(translated by Kate Willman)
Before Luchino Visconti’s film Bellissima, before directing the actors on the set, shooting, editing and cutting for censorship, all of which took place between June and December 1951, there was the script written by Cesare Zavattini almost ten years earlier, then transformed into many later variations (in the first, the protagonists are an ambitious widowed father and his son). The final short script by Zavattini became a long treatment written by Visconti with Cecchi D’Amico and Rosi, and then there were various different versions of the screenplay. This was an intertextual and interdiscursive transformation combining the different skills, styles and discursive contexts of the various authors. The transition from the screenplay to the film radically changed the means of expression, as it produced a syncretic text made up of several languages. This changed the type of translational transformation taking place, becoming a more complex intersemiotic translation. But this is only one of the forms of the film’s intermediality.
We can already see in Zavattini’s script that the various media and institutions of the time are very much present in the story: the state radio that broadcasts the news of the competition, the poses for the photographer, the acting school and dance classes, the film audition. Visconti’s film would magnify these elements by showing the intermedial fabric of Cinecittà and by showing film-making, because, from the first audition scene, we can find promotional photographers at work, the director Blasetti posing for them, cameramen and sound and lighting engineers. The same actors who are the protagonists of Bellissima, Anna Magnani and Walter Chiari, were professionals and even divas of the moment, acting as catalysts for both writing and directing.
Like other films from the beginning of the 1950s, such as Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) by Lattuada and Fellini, Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik) also by Fellini, La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) by Antonioni, Visconti’s film reflects on representation and on the state of the media at that time. Bellissima is a film that shows itself at work, using various threshold spaces (between inside and outside, but also between one institution and another), and it often dwells on images reflected in mirrors. The film opens with an orchestra playing and a choir singing a lyric opera by Donizetti, but this is being transmitted over the radio, as we discover when the camera moves to the host’s recording studio. To arrive at the second film audition, the decisive one, there are various stages for Maddalena-Magnani and her daughter (a “via crucis” according to Zavattini) to go through: the photos of the girl by the photographer, a dance class, prissy acting lessons, etc. Bellissima is not only the story of disappointed ambition, but it is also the story of the making of a film. This can be seen in the sequence of shots of the daughter’s audition seen by Maddalena hidden in the projection booth, whilst, in the movie theatre, the director, producer and assistants cruelly laugh. Visconti’s directing maintains absolute control of the story and of its artistic interpolations, but he manages to give each different sequence a metadiscursive or self-reflexive angle. Moreover, by working on the spaces and the discursive strategies, the film reorganises the modes of signification for every art and every medium it “stages”.
Reconstructing a complex system of discursive and intersemiotic relations in a film means referring to Foucault’s discursive “training” but also to contemporary French socio-semiotics. Eric Landowski (in his Les interactions risquées, Paris, PUF, 2005) proposes regimes of meaning and of interaction, which he calls “adjustment”, between discursive instances and the actors involved. The various phases of the writing and directing (and reception) of the film can thus be considered to be a translation process. This is a process of adjustment and negotiation, in which the metacinematic construction that is hypothesised in Zavattini’s script finally becomes intermedial.
