Postmodernism Archives - Interdisciplinary Italy

Dario Fo: Crossing Borders

Beatrice Blake — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 07:38:56 +0000

Dario Fo (1926-2016) absorbed a wide range of arts into the field of theatre. Trained as a painter and architect, he entered the world of theatre and radio broadcasting in 1951. He wrote, acted, directed, designed, choreographed, composed music and songs, and produced political theatre throughout his career, except for a two-year spell in Cinecittà where he starred in Carlo Lizzani’s film Lo svitato (1956) and was a scriptwriter for a number of film directors. Later in his career, painting became prominent in his work. His eclectic skills therefore, drew from the world of design, painting and music to build stage sets and choreography, music and songs for his theatre.

In La signora è da buttare (1967) Fo used circus setting and techniques to construct theatrical action able to give metaphorical meaning to the play. Drawing on a stylistic form used by Mayakowsky and Mayerhold, Fo employed summersaults, slaps, magic tricks, acrobatics – even two professional clowns, the Columbaioni – animation of objects, and imaginary circus animals, to create symbolic, metaphoric images for his political satire. In Grande pantomima con bandiere e pupazzi piccoli e medi (1968) he borrowed from puppetry to construct allegories of Fascism using The Big Puppet, the King’s stupid puppet and others to signify categories of power, along with a huge dragon to represent people. In Tutti uniti! Tutti insieme! Ma scusa, quello non è il padrone? (1971) Fo turned to music. Instead of words, his characters communicated only with sounds made from musical instruments. Circus and puppetry and the medium of music enabled Fo to widen his means of communication with the public. He increased the theatricality of the medium adding visual representations, gestures and actions, and expanded its vocabulary giving musical sounds the status of words. This highly allegorical theatre allowed political satire and hindered censorship.

In Il funerale del padrone (1969) Fo used cinematic techniques, probably inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s “intelligent montage” (Strike, 1924) by means of which two unrelated images, the slaughter of a bull and the workers charged by the police, when juxtaposed construct the meaning (workers killed by police), which is unrelated to the images when shown separately. Similarly, Fo set out to slaughter a lamb on stage against the background of a worker being crucified. The meaning conveyed was of a worker murdered like a lamb, which contained a further reference to Christ as the Lamb murdered for humanity. In his Manuale dell’attore (1987) Fo acknowledged his use of film techniques in describing his performance of Storia della tigre. He refers to a “spettatore con la cinepresa in testa”, a spectator who observes through the lens of a camera, receiving and reading images according to the different cinematic angles employed by the actor. Eisenstein’s technique enabled Fo to draw correlations between images, creating a virtual meaning in the mind of the audience, that was not evident from the single image and, at the same time, avoiding the constraint of the censor.

Beatrice Tavecchio Blake, Dario Fo: Teatro di attivazione e comunicazione 1950-1973, Milano, Mimesis, 2016. ISBN 978-88-5753-804-4

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Pasolini’s Intermediality: Translating Auerbach’s Literary Theory into Film Practice

Emanuela Patti — Tue, 10 May 2016 17:16:39 +0000

Throughout his career, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) experimented across a variety of artistic media, including poetry, fiction, cinema, drama, and painting. Yet it is in his early cinema – the so-called “national-popular phase”, including Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La Ricotta (1963) and Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) – that he first originally interpreted the “conceptual fusion” of different arts, taking inspiration from a text of literary criticism translated into Italian in 1956: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Such a crucial encounter between literary and film theory in his work was recorded by Pasolini himself soon after his collaboration with Federico Fellini for Le notti di Cabiria in 1957: “Fellini dragged me through that countryside lost in a honey of ultimate seasonal sweetness as he told me the plot of the Nights. A Peruvian kitten next to the big Siamese tomcat, I listened, Auerbach in my pocket” (“Nota su Le notti”). Auerbach is not simply evoked per allegoriam here, but he proves to be the main model through which Pasolini rethought representation from literature to cinema. In particular, two concepts had a strong impact on his cinematographic style: the “mingling of styles” and “figural realism”.

In Mimesis, the German philologist and comparativist identified two significant moments in literary history, in which the traditional separation of “high” and “low” styles was surpassed: the history of Christ, which combined everyday life and sublime tragedy; and the Divine Comedy, which, drawing on the Christian tradition, again mixed divine and human elements. The concept of figura was employed instead to explain how Dante represented his historical characters as a prefiguration of their divine destiny. Figural interpretation establishes indeed a connection between two facts or people, in which one of them is not self-referential in its meaning, but also means the other; and the other also includes and resolves the former.

The originality of Pasolini’s intermediality is based on the manner in which he translated Auerbach’s concept of “mingling of styles” into a form of hybridization of artistic media, at the same time using the concept of figura to create semiotic interconnections between the protagonists of his films (Accattone, Ettore, Stracci, and Jesus Christ) and the figura Christi. The attractive feature of Mimesis was for Pasolini the radical mingling of “high” and” low” cultures, as a revolutionary characteristic of Christian religion (Christ impersonating at once altitudo and humilitas in his life and passion). Pasolini’s early films can be seen in fact as a progressive figural approximation to the passion of Christ, first only suggested through symbolic associations with music (such as Bach’s in Accattone), paintings (such as Mantegna’s Cristo morto or Pomtorno’s Deposizione, in Mamma Roma or La ricotta respectively), and sculptures (the figure of the Angel and the cross in Accattone), and then through the full identification with Christ in person in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. The mingling of styles was thus used in his cinema as an aesthetic strategy to re-define the hierarchical boundaries of social representation. At the same time, through his figural realism, Pasolini constructed the filmic discourse on his “poveri Cristi”, the dimension of sacredness, namely of “exclusion” from society (in Agamben’s definition of homo sacer), being his form of resistance to Italian society in the 1960s.

[This topic is discussed more extensively in this recently published book: Emanuela Patti, Pasolini After Dante. The “Divine Mimesis” and the Politics of Representation, (Oxford: Legenda, 2016)

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Postmodernism R.I.P.?

Florian Mussgnug — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 17:46:31 +0000

Art is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. This is why critical debates about contemporary culture matter, not only to specialists. This is why we are fascinated by “-isms”, by new names for our age, by intellectuals who explain the present for posterity (or, at least, for the next five years or so). For most of these thinkers, postmodernism has lost its sparkle. Once widely hailed as the definitive and all-defining category, “post” no longer cuts any conceptual Gordian knots. Its evanescence reflects – fatally or perhaps cathartically – the flux of our fast-paced world. But what comes next? Conceptual openness is, of course, a good thing, but without shared cultural categories, how are we going to define the scope of future debates? (How are we going to prepare for the future?) The problem is well expressed in Raffaele Donnarumma’s Ipermodernità : Dove va la narrativa contemporanea (2014), a timely reflection on cultural historiography. Much of Donnarumma’s intelligent polemic is directed against a widespread but simplistic practice of critica militante as a wilful, often capricious labelling of the present. It is surprising, then, to see how much of Ipermodernità is devoted to postmodernism: a category, which (also as a result of Donnarumma’s earlier efforts) appears obsolete to most critics. Donnarumma, in fact, begins with a distinction – first sketched by Fredric Jameson and developed by Romano Luperini – between postmodernità (a historical period, here assumed, in general agreement with Remo Ceserani, to date back to the Fifties), postmodernismo (a specific cultural movement, defined by its inherent relationship to modernism); and postmoderno (the wider cultural context). He then makes two essential claims: we still live in a postmodern age (postmodernità) but the unspecific and overused notion of postmoderno has outlived its usefulness. In other words, Donnarumma rejects postmodernism in the arts, but embraces David Harvey’s account of postmodernity as an ongoing epoch in which advanced societies – particularly in the West – experience de-industrialization; globalization on an economic, social and ecological level; the rise of new media and communication technologies; the transformation of cognitive processes and aesthetic preferences. While Donnarumma’s understanding of postmodernity is nuanced and acute, his attacks on postmodernism echo a dated polemic. If we accept his contention that postmodernist theory exhausted its force in the Nineties, how are we going to assess the enduring relevance of works of art, which, inevitably, still reflect our cultural and socio-political conditions? We may of course describe them in different words, but there exists, at present, no consensus about terminology, and Donnarumma’s hypermodernity is only one of many contenders. Postmodernism, then, continues to be a necessary point of reference, even among those who wish to lay it to rest. Let us focus on what matters most: not the critical jargon of “post”, but the social conditions of late capitalism, which, many years ago, Jameson evoked as its base, and which continue to persist. Without postmodernist theory and art, how are we going to fare in this all-too-postmodern age? Or, as a friend once put it, what if postmodernists had been too optimistic, all along, about the lateness of “late” capitalism: who knows how long it will last?

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