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| THE SWEETNESS OF DOING NOTHING |
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1953 |
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ANNA MAGNANI WAS TO HAVE STARRED in Rossellini's
original version of Stromboli, which would have been completely
different picture. So it was, actually, when Magnani made her own volcano
movie with another director, after Rossellini left her for Ingrid Bergman.
(Magnani's Volcano was upstaged by her ex, not least by opening the
day Bergman gave birth to his child.) With Anna Magnani, Stromboli
would have featured a domestic quarrel indeed, in the sense that the stormy
marriage portrayed would have been all-Italian. By switching the female lead
to a Swedish actress, and casting her opposite an Italian fisherman, the
conflict became one of North and South, between the Nordic and Latin regional
types and their respective ways of being at the world. This struggle seemed
to have already been in the back of Rossellini's mind in his postwar films
anyway and, by marrying into it, it became a central conflict in his best
films with Bergman.
The North-South divide maintains a persistent geographical-philosophical
correlation. In C. S. Lewis's allegory Pilgrim's Regress, the further
one goes north, the more scientific, material, abstract and cold the
landscape: the pole is an arid wasteland. The further south, the more
romantic, poetic, soft and warm: that pole is a swamp. In American history,
the same divide separated a Northern industrial from a Southern traditional
society. In the 1930s, the Southern Agrarian movement rose to the defense of
spiritual, natural, and community values against the threat of urban
industrialism and "the uncritical worship of material progress as an end in
itself".
This fight of traditionalism against modernization was given a new twist by
the 1960s counterculture who, as we've seen, identified with St. Francis as
an exemplar of more organic values. Its no surprise that Rossellini came to
identify with the counterculture, and his postwar cycle can be seen as a
revolt against modernity that was taken up and made more explicit by
filmmakers like Godard and the French New Wave, who were associated with the
Sixties revolt.
In Europe, however, the conflict between North and South in Europe seems to
have existed even before modernization. Stereotypical Northern sensibilities
(cold, logical, orderly) have long been contrasted against those of the sunny
South (poetic, emotional, anarchic). The split coincides with the
Reformation divide, which some make the real basis of the differences —
though I have seen speculation that climate had something to do with it (i.e.
because of the cold, the North had Lent but no Carnival!). Then there's that
Simpsons episode where Homer has a vision of the respective Catholic
and Protestant heavens: in the former, he sees Southerners (Irish, Italians,
Latins) feasting and fighting, while in the latter rich white Episcopalians
play croquet. Sounds about right, except in America the Black church might
feel less home in that Protestant heaven. So, since African-American culture
is originally Southern, perhaps geography is the key after all!
In any case, whatever the geographical, philosophic, religious, or even
aesthetic cast such battles take, they all seem to be variants of ancient
quarrels between opposing human tendencies, as in the War of the Poets
against the Philosophers, or between Apollo and Dionysus,
or simply between Order and Freedom.
Engaged in European terms, the North-South conflict is central to a myth of
"the Magic of Italy," involving a strange, healing power, wherein the warmth
of the South melts cold Northern hearts. This aspect isn't foregrounded in
Stromboli, in which the Italian island is itself a wasteland, but it
hovers over the background of all these films and becomes a primary tension
within Viaggio. Italy, in fact, has been described as a main
character in this film, a living presence that affects the Northern visitors
not as an "It", their dominant mode of being and relation, but as a
Thou.
Yet while this film presents a voyage to Italy — with all its
heart-melting magic — Viaggio is foremost a voyage —
a journey. It starts and ends in a car, giving us POV shots to make it our
journey. The main characters are a pair of Northerners who know how to
travel, but have no idea where they are going: they're lost, in fact, as
individuals and as a couple. If they can just keep moving, they seem to
think, they may never have to notice this. Like Karin in Stromboli,
the worst thing of all is silence, to be deprived of one's chosen
diversion from… whatever is gaining on you.
Alex is a workaholic: he can't stop thinking about the office, reliving
business deals, longing for the rat race, even on vacation. He's entirely
goal-oriented, hates not being busy, dreads being bored. And yet
everything (except work) bores him, boredom being whatever fails to
divert him.
His wife Katherine seeks escape not by immersing herself in this world, but
by transcending it: she's a romantic, employing that classic romantic
strategy of travel, in chasing after adventure. The tourist, says Dean
MacCannell, offers a model for Modern man in general: in his effort to fill
his emptiness with Otherness, his falseness with a lost "real" life, and in
his flight from Modernity's daily threat of depersonalization and endless
nightmares (Auschwitz, Dresden, Nagasaki, etc.)
The problem is that they've come to Italy, the land of Dolce far
niente — "the sweetness of doing nothing." Worse, they're going
south, and this is a condition that becomes more pronounced the further south
one travels. Neapolitans, as one of them notes here, have a reputation for
especially savoring that sweetness. "This country absolutely poisons you
with laziness," complains Alex. People sleep the day away in siesta or
otherwise present obstacles to his forward motion, forcing him to slow down,
even stop, which he terrifies him above all else.
In fact, the couple slows down enough in Italy to realize that their marriage
is dead, reduced to a cruel parody of love, a malign symbiosis of attack and
withdrawal. Both Alex and Katherine have closed themselves off from the
world and one another behind thick walls of egoism. Both long to escape, and
each has moments where they let down their guard. These moments,
unfortunately, almost never coincide. Attempts to reach out only trigger
defensive mechanisms in the other, sending both scurrying back inside their
walls, firing madly. The pain they inflict on one another seems to be now
their only way of assuring themselves they still exist.
Alex, of course, is hardly one to vacation, and his reason for coming to
Italy is work-related: to sell off recently-inherited property. We never
learn to which side of the family Uncle Homer belongs. His name and
civilized lifestyle suggest an embodiment of the rich Western cultural
patrimony. His death and the impending liquidation of his assets suggests
the end of that civilization. This theme is underscored at a dinner party
with Homer's titled aristocrat friends, who compare their position to that of
shipwreck survivors trying to stay afloat. Against this background, the
zero-sum game that is Katherine and Alex's marriage is like two passengers
fighting over the last life jacket. The idea seems to be that finding a
resolution of their conflict is something we all have a stake in.
OF COURSE, NEOREALISM ESCHEWS reducing anything or
anyone to just a symbol. This is a basic moral position for both Bazin and
Rossellini, akin to the categorical imperative that human beings must always
be treated as ends in themselves, and not only as means. That "only" is
crucial, for even Kant allows people to be treated as means so long as
they're also treated as ends: e.g. you can use somebody for information,
provided you say "please" and "thank-you". In the same way, the materials of
neorealism, while ends, can also sometimes be used as means.
The volcanoes, for example, which dominate the landscapes in Stromboli
and Viaggio, while they are overpoweringly themselves, can't help
also being symbols: for death, meaninglessness, the Unknown, the
Uncontrollable, the Void, the brute reality we all would avoid if possible.
The ominous smoking peak of Stromboli is in fact literally an inescapable
brute reality in the film, and drives the story to its climax. Rossellini
even managed to capture an eruption of the volcano to underscore the threat.
In Viaggio, Ingrid Bergman's character visits the Phlaegrean Fields,
that smoking, burning, bubbling, thermal and seismic reminder on the slopes
of Vesuvius that something powerful and threatening is brewing not far
beneath the surface of la dolce vita.
Artifacts from the Roman cities obliterated by the volcano are on display at
the archaeological museum in Naples, organized by category: bottles, dishes,
statues, busts — from a certain angle, this collection of objects can
seem more like a sterile catalog of Roman life than a visceral reminder of
universal death. I once saw a touring exhibit on Pompeii which took a
different approach, arranging the artifacts according to where they were
found — which was usually next to the bodies of the people who carried
them. These weren't a range of household goods but
valuables, snatched on the run, like Hurricane Katrina evacuees fleeing with
their televisions and photo albums. Here the possessions were gold rings,
bracelets, a wicker-basket full of coins (all melted together) and —
most poignantly — oil lamps to light a day cast into darkness by what
would be those poor souls' death cloud. The message: "He who dies with the
most toys is still asphyxiated by volcanic soot and/or is incinerated in a
thousand-degree pyroclastic blast." Those monumental surges of smoke and ash
thundering down the streets of Pompeii were reminiscent of those that swept
over Manhattan on 9-11, though infinitely more thick, poisonous, and hot.
Walking those streets, a couple thousand years later, my family made friends
with a stray mutt near the tree-lined passage along the Palaestra, or
gladiator's quarters, where so many bodies had been found. The dog followed
us into the nearby arena; we played fetch in the grass. It made me think of
that Pompeian doorway mosaic: Cavem Canum, "Beware of Dog". On that
fine autumn day it was difficult to imagine all the chaos and terror. Then,
much later, in the touring exhibit, I saw a plaster cast of a little Pompeian
doggie, left tied to guard somebody's property, twisted in an appalling
tail-chase of death. Of all the agonies I've seen depicted in stone, none
were as horrible, or horribly real, as that of this poor suffering pooch.
The Neapolitans, then, enjoy their sweet nothing in the shadow of this, the
world's most dangerous volcano — part of a "death zone" ringing the
crater that Italy's most densely-populated region. Twice yearly, a vial of
the blood of Naples' patron saint, Januarius, liquefies — a miracle
taken as the sign of his promise for another six-months' worth of
supernatural protection from Vesuvius.
We Moderns who dismiss such things as superstitious have no such protection
or assurance. No wonder we work so hard to escape the frightening realities
of this world — through our own superstitious faith in frantic
activity. But if the cost of blocking out the terror is also blocking out
the good things of life, including meaningful relationships, whose
superstition is more rational?
In Voyage to Italy, Mount Vesuvius looms over the terrace of Uncle
Homer's villa, which in turn overlooks the sparkling bay of Naples, with the
island of Capri and the curve of the Sorrento Coast. Sitting on the terrace,
Katherine recalls a verse composed in the vicinity by a dead poet friend.
The scene which follows is lifted almost verbatim from James Joyce's "The
Dead" — and thus it is no small coincidence that Alex and Katherine's
last name in this film is "Joyce". That author's short stories can still
shock readers with how little actually happens in them. George Sanders, the
Hollywood actor who played Alex, was more than just shocked at how little
action there was in this film. Rossellini's dolce far niente style
nearly drove him to a nervous breakdown — thus his onscreen frustration
is real (vindicating Rossellini's approach, and making Sanders a neorealist
after all!)
Still, it's hard not to sympathize with actors or moviegoers unaccustomed to
such "Boring Art Films". I became very frustrated myself once with an
art-house documentary I felt was taking a needlessly roundabout way of
presenting information. At one point, the camera was left on a windowsill
during a rainstorm at night, leaving the screen entirely black for several
minutes which seemed an eternity. All I could do was listen to the rain.
After awhile, I found myself getting into it. There was more to the sound of
falling rain than I'd ever realized, or taken the time to consider. Then
suddenly there was a lightning flash — it took my breath away, and
became for me a different kind of lighting flash. I understood that
"presenting information" shouldn't have to be the main objective in a film in
the first place.
That experience was for me an epiphany: the term is James Joyce's,
given to sudden revelations of truth, squeezed in his blank or "objective"
style from scenes of ordinary life. In other words, il dolce far niente.
The epiphany in Joyce's story "The Dead" is provoked by a woman's memory of a
long dead admirer, a young doomed poet with an insatiable passion for life.
The depths revealed in the flash her of recollection served to illuminate for
her astonished husband the emptiness of his own smug middle-class existence.
In that story, this revelation is the final in a series of blows against the
husband's egoism. In Voyage to Italy, this borrowed bit comes earlier
in the story and is deployed differently. Both Alex and Katherine are in
need of an epiphany here. Yet their walls are too thick to be broken by just
this memory. Each go off in separate directions to employ their differing
strategies for dealing with the silence — the niente they not
only do not find sweet, but in fact are terrified by. Alex tries to make
something happen, but only meets dead ends. Katherine becomes filled with a
determination to track down whatever moved her poet to write:
Temple of the Spirit
No longer bodies but pure ascetic images
Compared to which mere thought seems flesh
Heavy, dim.
In a series of day trips in and around Naples, Katherine tries to locate this
"temple of the spirit". Each of these sightseeing outings end up giving her
more than she bargained for, though, confronting her with the same clues to
some mystery. At the archeological museum, she finds not bodilessness, but
flesh, sensuality — sex. Despite the decontextualized presentation of
objects, despite the attempted reduction of the ancient statues to a dead
list of facts by her droning tour guide, she feels a power that cannot be so
easily contained — a startling Thou speaks to her from these
museum pieces. And despite her repressed self, Katherine becomes captivated
by the rippling muscles, the dancing maenads and drunken fauns, the
bloodthirsty emperors — who all seem so alive and make her seem so cold
and stoney by comparison. She also fails to transcend the flesh at the
ancient ruins of Cumae, where — to her great distress — the guide
points out nooks where lovers rendezvous, and where lusty Saracens ravaged
their captive maidens.
Further clues to this Great Mystery revealing itself to her can be seen along
the way to and from these various tourist destinations, among the people
Katherine sees on the busy Neapolitan streets, including pregnant women,
mothers with baby carriages, and children playing everywhere — even on
the steps of the great underground cemetery of Fonanelle, where Medieval
bones are "adopted" by the living. This comfortable co-existence of life and
death dismays Katherine every bit as much as it did the pagans, who were
scandalized by early Christians' blasphemous violation of the border between
the living and the dead in their repulsive "cult of saints." Yet it all
seems of a piece with an existence spent in the shadow of death cast by that
ominous black mound on the bay. Katherine's visit to the Phlaegrean mudpots
makes reveals the volcano as a living, breathing force as well as a mystery
which, as at the other tourist sites, transcends any explanation.
It all seems to be leading to some kind of peculiarly Southern Italian
epiphany…
BUT PERHAPS WE SHOULD PAUSE AND DULY NOTE that
even Italy, even the South, has not been immune from modernization and its
affects. The "sweet life" as depicted by Rossellini protege Federico Fellini
in 1960 was less devoted to doing "nothing" than to that familiar tactic of
filling one's existence with frantic activity in an effort to block out the
emptiness and despair (which, just as Rossellini feared and Michelangelo
Antonioni further documented, accompanied the prosperity of the postwar
Italian "Economic Miracle.") In a 1994 rubble film by neorealist-influenced
Italian director Gianni Amelio, L'America, it is the Italian
characters who are hopelessly modern and alienated and in need of some kind
of antidote to Modernity. And in the 1993 comedy Caro Diario, Italian
funnyman Nanni Moretti feels so alienated by a perversely globalized Italian
culture that he tries to escape it — to Stromboli, whose mayor he finds
now has plans to develop the island in LA-style, with palm trees and glitz. On the
slopes of the smoking volcano where Ingrid Bergman had her shouting-match
with God, Moretti shouts down to a group of American tourists in order to ask
them for an update on the soap-opera The Bold and the Beautiful
— but this for his intellectual friend, Gerardo, who ultimately runs
screaming from Stromboli for telephones and TV.
Without a doubt, there are downsides to traditional life and upsides to
Modernity which are not always necessarily represented fairly by advocates of
the simple life, including sometimes Rossellini, who for example depicts St.
Francis in an ideal way that does not raise the questions that trouble
Romagna or Europa 51. Yet taken as a whole, the postwar cycle
plunges us into the problem of integrating simplicity into an irredeemably
complex world. And if the series doesn't provide simple answers or neat
resolutions, the films engage us with the task in such a way as to suggest a
path alternative to both evasion and surrender. Indeed, Rossellini's
non-resolved resolution transcends the usual stalemate of pat answers and
reorients our vision so as to offer hope among the ruins after all.
For Katherine and Alex Joyce, their voyage in Italia can have only one
ultimate destination: Pompeii. As with the shots of young Edmund walking
through the actual rubble of Berlin, the reality of the haunted ruins of the
Vesuvian eruption overpowers any story that might be imposed upon them. Like
all ruins, these are evocative of so much — of this city and its doomed
inhabitants, of the lost classical world, of a Western world that is indeed
shipwrecked and lost as well. Of course, what ruins evoke most are
intimations of personal mortality and the brevity of life: when Katherine and
Alex make stock comments along these lines, they seem so forced as to be
false and serve ironically to underscore their defenselessness in the face of
an overwhelming unknown. Yet even against the extraordinary epiphany
Rossellini uncovers in Pompeii, this tormented couple makes a desperate last
stand, a pitched defense at the walls guarding their hearts. The Joyces seem
truly lost; like Western Civilization, or all of live lived in the shadow of
death. They seem beyond earthly help and in need of a miracle.
Of course, we get one. Throughout Viaggio, Italy, the living Force,
the relentless Thou, keeps battering at Alex and Katherine's walls, throwing
herself into their path. Fleeing Pompeii and its lessons, their car is
blocked again, now by a religious procession in one of the villages planted
on the slopes of Vesuvius. Bazin identifies this as a celebration of St.
Januarius, the saint who keeps back the lava. Alex, predictably, decries the
ritual as superstition. But amid the crowd, the couple experiences the first
instance we see when their moments of openness to one another coincide.
Whether this moment will be enough to save their marriage, we might be
skeptical (as even Rossellini was.) Yet perhaps this glimpse of a world
usually blocked by Self will give them each a taste for that wider world, and
lead them to further experiences of transparency and mutuality.
Still, this climax is abrupt as any in Rossellini, especially as it seems to
dissipate into the crowd. It might be argued that this ending is similar to
that of "The Dead," when the main character's ego-centered point of view
dissolves into a identification with all of humanity, "all the living and the
dead." Nevertheless, many who have followed Rossellini all this long way may
feel he's led them into the middle of nowhere: instead of closure,
Viaggo trails off into breathtaking ambiguity. Yet if that ambiguity
seems but a continuation of the Joyce's tragic lostness, it is in fact the
ultimate destination of Rossellini's postwar journey.
Consider the questions people tend to ask about a film: "What does it mean?"
or "What is it about?" These are usually requests for explanation or
information, plot points or statement of theme. One can answer a question so
phrased only with that which reduces to the form implied, namely with a
recitation of facts, like the museum guide. Looking for a "message", or
thinking of a film in terms of what it is about — something we might
call its "about-ness" — suggests an entire way of looking at the world.
It is a sort of wholeness which can only be the sum of definable,
categorizable, listable parts. But we all know the difference between
knowing about a person and knowing that person: it is the
difference between a description and that which can never be so totally
reduced. About-ness involves an "objective" point of view, a looking AT
something, a making of that something into an It. But a human being isn't
just "about" anything; that's like asking what a person is "for", a
utilitarian, ultimately anti-human perspective. A human being, above all
else, simply "is". The individual person has value and significance and
being that is impossible to exhaustively categorize and quantify. To
perceive that "is-ness" of another human being is to look not AT them, but
WITH them; to look with them is to see from the inside, though their eyes,
letting them see through yours, a mutual interpenetration that is the mark of
true mutuality and communion; it is to treat human reality not as an It, but
as another subject: as a Thou.
The essence of St. France's alienation from the "normal" world is his
concern for is-ness; he treated all of reality as a Thou. From his own body
("Brother Ass") to his siblings the sun, moon and stars. His sympathetic
imagination enabled him to not just see through other eyes, but to identify
himself with others. He didn't have pity "at" or "for" others, but he felt
WITH others. This relation between compassion for others — a way of
seeing people — and a way of seeing reality, should get our attention:
it certainly had the attention of moralists like Rossellini and Bazin.
For if there does exist a relation between a particular way of encountering
reality ("disposing our consciousness to see things whole," as Bazin says) and a
way of being in the world, that would seem extremely worth considering —
especially if it implied that by changing our way of being in the world we
might actually make a better one. This becomes most intriguing as we ponder
the extraordinary overlap between neorealist ethics and aesthetics, how these
two become one in what they ask of the viewer: To counter the diminishing,
abstracting tendencies of the age by respecting the dignity of the individual
and the ordinary. To slow down our relentless forward motion — which
drives our frantic desire for more, bigger, newer, best — to do nothing,
in fact, or rather to stop doing and learn to just be. To
loosen our grip on narrative, the need for control and predictable structure,
for pat answers and neat endings, to learn to accept and appreciate ambiguity
and so be able to make room for Otherness. To stop reducing people and the
world to means to furthering our own ends, but rather to accept them as ends
in themselves. To restrain ourselves from imposing our own designs on
reality, but to receive and listen for what is already there, and so to open
ourselves to taking in something new, and thus to the possibility of growth.
To make peace with our organic, material humanity, yet infuse matter with
a transcendent meaning.
Rossellini avoids the trap of offering a facile solution for the mind-body
split — magically resolving the estrangement of Alex and Katherine,
flesh and spirit, North and South. But as in most of his films, Rossellini
manages at the last second to generate a spark that leaps from pole to pole.
Or, to adjust the metaphor, he doesn't presume to catch lightning in a
bottle. But he does assemble the materials to call the lightning down: the
epiphany, when in a flash, heaven touches earth and in the resulting glimpse
of unity we are fed in that part of our being that otherwise goes hungry in a
world already in fragments and ever threatening to break into more.
Rossellini's antidote for a world in perpetual ruin is a new consciousness,
one that cannot be described, but only glimpsed from the inside.
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