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| KNOWLEDGE, INNOCENCE AND SCANDAL |
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1948 |
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IL MIRACOLO IS A MIRACLE of acting, script and direction, a dense
interpenetration of the most primal of mysteries, incarnated fully in the
performance of Anna Magnani, the star of Open City. L'Amore
was Rossellini's two-part homage to the talents of his mistress, who was a
match for his whirlwind of passion and creativity. The first part, Una
Voce Umana, was written by Jean Cocteau and features Magnani in her
bedroom in a solo tour de force of emotional range during a phone
conversation with an ex-lover. Il Miracolo, set on location in a
seaside village, is almost as nearly a solo performance, when Magnani's
addled shepherd girl does all the talking to a drifter she mistakes for her
patron saint, Joseph. Played by Rossellini's young collaborator Federico
Fellini, who wrote the story, this St. Joseph is all-to-human, with
predictable intentions, and aided by the girl's innocence, piety, and wine.
When the saint vanishes and she turns up pregnant, Nanni insists hers was an
immaculate conception, a miracle. Her steadfastness to her faith in the
grace that she believes she has received enables her to withstand the
temptations to confess herself unworthy. Within this inside-out Gospel cum
Creation Story, the image Nanni embodies shifts from Mary to Mary Magdalene
to Christ as she is rejected, and in a certain sense crucified, resurrected
and transfigured. At the same time, all these flickering images alternate
with yet another womanly architype, that of Eve: Earth Mother and Original
Sinner. Rossellini and Fellini probe the alternating shades and connections
of things, of carnality and knowledge, suffering and redemption, sinners and
saints, and curious reversals prone to the righteous and the scandalous.
The scandal extended to real life when this dance among the mysteries was too
much for the Official Righteous in America. Astonishingly tame by today's
standards, the seduction scene made for a windy ruckus, and ultimately a
landmark US Supreme Court case that declared movies to be subject to the same
protections as speech. American religious authorities added to this
commotion with fulminations over Rossellini's use of religious imagery they
couldn't find any way to process but to declare blasphemous. It seems highly
relevant that the film provoked no such controversy in Italy by either Church
or State. This experience with the hair-trigger pomposity of American
Puritanism (regardless of creed) was not to be Rossellini's last.
In Open City, the hero (and martyr) was a member of the Resistance
— a Catholic priest. The director treated monks with gentle respect in
both Paisan and The Flowers of St. Francis. The priest in
Stromboli is sincere and compassionate, if less-than-effective, and
religion presented there as the cement of a society. In Europa '51,
though, after going a few rounds with religious scandalmongers, Rossellini
presented the Church as just one more of the blind and legalistic authorities
whose primary concern seemed to be maintaining its power and
socially-acceptable notions of normalcy, forces liable to unite (like the
Grand Inquisitor) against the scandal of any true saint. Il Miracolo
presents Nanni as a Holy Fool, truly devout, but rejected by religious
people. She sleeps outside the Church until her condition is discovered,
then turns away from religious hypocrites and locked church doors to make her
own arduous spiritual ascent with God alone.
Despite Christianity's entanglement in the dynamics of institutional power
and social structure, the religion cannot disavow the troublesome, even
renewing, reality that it is actually built on scandal. The "Scandal of the
Particular" is one name given the Incarnation of a transcendent God in a
particular body, culture, time and place — the fruit of which has been
in no small part the redemption of the ordinary and the individual. The
Scandal of the Cross, says St. Paul, is a stumbling block to the
philosophers, who prefer a more conceptual salvation, and to the Jews, who
reject the notion of the Deity subjecting Himself to the weaknesses and
humiliations of flesh.
The vortex of scandal for the religious, of course, is SEX, that mysterious
confluence of animal materiality with the spiritual purity of human love.
The image of a Virgin who gives birth goes right to the heart of this
paradox, though it has threatened for some to put sex on the side of
impurity. That the Fall of Man happens after an act suspiciously resonant of
sexual awakening doesn't help, and even though the Incarnation is seen as an
affirmation of the body, the whirl of knowledge, innocence, carnality and
fertility that make for a primeval stew the filmmakers don't bother to parse
here, but merely set aboil. Magnani's face is a reflecting pool of
ambiguities, now shining with a hearbreaking piety and purity, now pulsating
with pagan sensuality. Then passion becomes Passion, as Nanni takes on
(simultaneously ironic and deeply felt) an identification with the Blessed
Virgin and persecuted Christ. Alone, amid her labor pains — her Via
Dolorosa — she stops to suck the very teat of the Earth when, thirsty,
she licks water from a rock. This imagery resolves into a picture of her
offering her own breast to her newborn child, the true miracle, in whom all
these whirling hopes and fears are met. For the viewer, it no longer matters
if this conception was immaculate or not, or even whether this figure is
Nanni the goat-herder or Mary the Mother of God when she sighs, "My God. My
child. My creature. My blood. All mine…"
Rossellini, in his postwar cycle, keeps approaching his target from multiple
angles, first noticing the irresolvable contradictions of simplicity and
complexity in Romagna, later separating them in subsequent films into
semi-isolated treatments, but not before facing down the paradox here. The
Miracle is an incredibly beautiful and moving little film, and fits into
this series of films less as a guidepost out of the postwar rubble than as a
glimpse of wholeness in life's ultimate mysteries.
TWO FILMS OF ROSSELLINI'S POSTWAR CYCLE cycle
identify the opposing polarities between which much of the discussion is set.
In Germany: Year Zero we get rubble, fragments, disillusion, and most
interestingly, the loss of childhood in the figure of the young but
old-before-his-time Edmund. There seems to be something particularly
resonant of rubble and ruin in the loss of childhood innocence. The Dardenne
Brothers, who cite Germany: Year Zero as their "model" film, also
make this connection. Their stories of lost childhood turn their films into
rubble films even without that sort of wartime devastation. In our series,
images of brokenness are opposed by an image of wholeness and repair in
The Flowers of St. Francis. In European history, Francis of Assisi is
an archetype on the opposite end of one spectrum from Hitler. He is the
opposite end of another spectrum from Edmund. It is worth noting again that
Francis's mission was originally rebuilding from the rubble, and that he is
seen as a sort of embodiment of childlike wonder. Hence the genius of
Rossellini's choice in the saint as a new foundation upon which to rebuild
Europe.
Yet the Romagna episode of Paisan, which frames the opposition
as between simplicity and complexity, makes plain Rossellini does not offer
us St. Francis as a non-problematic option. Indeed, Europa '51 shows
us how problematic combining Francis with postwar Europe will be. As we've
been noting, that problem is our problem, too: somehow regaining or retaining
simplicity, some bit of the childlike perspective, in a complex, compromised,
grown-up world.
A further consideration of that curious connection between knowledge and
innocence may be helpful in keeping a thread of continuity from the earlier
films on through The Miracle. One way I've been able to think about
Edmund in Germany: Year Zero is to compare him with another rubble
child, the young son of Roberto Benigni's character, Guido, in his film
Life is Beautiful. Two very different films, I understand, and with
the fans there are great detractor's of Benigni's "Holocaust comedy," or,
indeed, any film about the Holocaust that ends happily or with any sort of
resolution. I'm interested in the central business in Life is Beautiful
whereby Guido works so hard to keep certain knowledge from his son.
Essentially, you might say he lies to him throughout the film. I
certainly sympathize with the impulse. There came a time when it was right
to begin to talk to my own little girl about the Holocaust, though I wished I
could have put that off forever. Her mother is better about that sort of
thing than I am, so I let her brief our daughter before we visited the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. We were walking up the steps of the
museum, holding hands, and my ten-year-old squeezed mine, saying, "It's okay,
Dad. Mom already told me about the 'showers'." I was proud of her, but it
hurt me, too, to know that she was going to have to live in a world where
people did such things to one another and try to understand that.
There is some inevitable connection between the Knowledge of Good and Evil
and the explusion from Paradise: in this case, it heralded the end of
childhood, something I was in no hurry to see. The end of childhood
generally means, for most of us, a loss of a certain kind of openness to the
world, a sense of relentless wonder for each moment's new revelation, a sense
that something wonderful can be found anywhere, anytime, and a disposition
that awaits it, ready to receive. All that go with that disposition to
openness — curiosity, trust, humility, unselfconsciousness, playfulness
— these things are at risk of being destroyed as we experience that
death that is growing up. Believe me, when you've lost it, you can easily
become addicted to tasting it again in the eyes of your child — and
somewhat hesitant about losing it again as your children grow up.
Now back to Edmund, amid the rubble of Berlin. Obviously, this little boy
didn't have anyone to hide from him the terrible knowledge of what grownups
are capable of, of evil and of death. His efforts to try to slip back into
the role of childhood by joining a game as he walks among the rubble capture
his heartbreaking condition in an unforgettable way: capture, perhaps, the
condition of the West, or the world, after Auschwitz, when a last bit of
innocence was destroyed. What, if anything, could have restored Edmund's
innocence after gaining his terrible knowledge? A miracle, no doubt. For
innocence, like virginity, once lost, are humanly impossible to restore.
And we know that devastated neighborhoods the world over remain filled with
Edmunds. The Dardenne Brothers - taking Germany: Year Zero as a
"model" — have been followed these sorts of alternative Edmunds out of
their own rubble and into some kind of redemption. Rosetta is the
female version: robbed of her childhood, disillusioned, closed, and
suspicious, she takes steps that will lead to a better place. The Son
is another story set amid family ruins, with a personal connection the key to
an exit. The same goes for La Promesse, though with these films and
especially in L'Enfant the directors consider along with the child who
has lost childhood the grown-up who has yet to grow-up. That end of the
spectrum is equally familiar: the adult who exhibits all the
self-centeredness, short-sightedness and refusal to face reality of the
child.
Perhaps a hopeful implication of exploring these crooked paths might be that
a straight one exists. Most people, however, find themselves strugging at
either extreme. Reconciling simplicity and complexity seems to require first
of all a capacity for paradox, a sense of the meaning of the verse Rossellini
uses to open Europa '51 : "God has chosen the foolish things of the
world to humiliate the learned, the weak to humiliate the strong, the vile,
the despicable, and all the things that are not, to annihilate all those
things that are." (1 Corinthians 1:27-28)
ONE MORE SCANDAL involved here might be called
the Scandal of Myth, which may actually have been what disturbed the peace of
the keepers of orthodoxy in the case of The Miracle - as much as the
sensuality. Naming, describing, and categorizing are powerful means to
create order from chaos; yet we so often fall under the spell of that power,
coming to believe that reality is limited to that which can be named,
described and categorized. And to any systematic dogma which assumes nothing
can be real or good outside its own categories, myth is certainly a
blasphemy. American religiosity is ecumenically situated in a legacy of
Rationalism and Puritanism, which at its extreme denies both the
transcendence of its own categories and also the body, and so is left
resisting both material and transcendent manifestations of reality - and thus
human wholeness.
Il Miracolo is a perfectly structured neorealist myth, its multiple
facets flashing with each subtle turn, a gem which cannot be analyzed into
parts without destroying the whole. It may seem that myth should be the
opposite of neorealism, but that, of course, turns on those suppositions
about what is real. Certainly mythic means can be used toward ends
antithetical to neorealism, manipulatively, destructive of ambiguity. But
enchantments can be both wicked and wonderful, and, at best, "mythic" means
"poetic," offering entrée to a dimension that transcends categories.
The term for such a holy moment left to us by James Joyce is "epiphany":
truth, suddenly revealed in ordinary life. For pagans, an epiphany was any
sudden appearance by the gods. For Christians, however, God appeared in the
lowliest, must ordinary of ways: as a human baby, born in a stable (which was
probably a cave) to an illiterate teenage peasant girl, the lowest class of
an insignificant backwater of Mediterranean civilization. Epiphany is the
embodiment of the Unspeakable Unseen in a way that dignifies concrete reality
in all its scandalous particulars. It seems odd that Christians should so
often lose sight of this and tend toward what are essentially anti-Christian
ways of looking at matter and the Incarnational significance of myth. Then
again, it seems odd that Christians so often act in ways contrary to their
Gospel of love and acceptance, a point which is made most provocatively in
The Miracle, in the depiction of the villagers use of the same hymn to
the Blessed Virgin while mocking Nanni, and later during a religious
procession which Nanni observes from above, climbing her own difficult and
solitary path toward the Divine.
Nanni's mode of relation to the world seems to be one of mythic
consciousness, of wholeness. She is situated within a deep sense of
meaningfulness and security, like the baby at her breast. The shot of her
taking suck from the rock pictures her childlike relation to a personal
cosmos. She knows what temptation is, as she tells her St. Joseph. She has
been tempted to throw herself off the rocks — but she knows that's the
devil trying to trick her out of Paradise. She is tempted by a nun to
confess her sin, which she honestly knows not of, and to do so would be to
deny the grace which she believes she has received — likewise ejecting
her from Paradise. Certainly she has been tempted to doubt the goodness of
the universe by the treatment she has received at the hands of others —
yet she resists this temptation as well. The has been driven from her bed of
rags, from the village, but her true home is the state of grace she
stubbornly clings to. In so doing, she holds onto something Edmund loses,
and Francis has regained, and is echoed in the Blessed Virgin: an openness
and expectation that makes possible the conception of the Divine within each
of us. A capacity for receiving a glimpse of wholeness via myth requires the
same sort of openness and humility, receiving without analysis, accepted
whole, on faith.
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