Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film

Fabio Vighi

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781841509501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

'Traumatic Encounters' addresses the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and film in a thoroughly original way, bringing together Lacanian theory and Italian cinema as a means to unravel the deepest kernel of repressed knowledge around which film narratives are constructed. The primary theoretical reference of the book is the Real, the most under-represented of the three Lacanian categories (Symbolic, Imaginary and Real), which designates the traumatic dimension of reality that cannot be integrated in the order of language and communication. Exploring the relationship between film and its unconscious underside, the author argues that only by locating the elusive "traces of the cinematic Real" can a given film narrative be reconstructed in its entirety. Like the Lacanian subject, film here appears as fundamentally split between a traumatic dimension beyond signification (the Real), and awareness of its fragile symbolic status. Always stylistically innovative, thematically defiant and driven by a strong political agenda, Italian cinema lends itself particularly well to a critical investigation aimed at radicalising the impact of psychoanalysis on film. In doing exactly that, the book deliberately avoids the standard cultural and historical approaches to film. Instead, it moves freely amongst some of the most widely celebrated – as well as lesser-known – Italian films of the post-war period, discussing the ways in which they tackle such themes as desire, fantasy, sexuality, violence and the law, to mention but a few. The main focus is on the work of those directors who most effectively engage with the divisive nature of the moving image: Antonioni, Pasolini and Rossellini. In addition, the book provides ample and insightful references to films by Visconti, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Moretti, Petri, Fellini, Ferreri, and many more.

1

FIGURATIONS OF THE REAL: LOCATING THE UNCONSCIOUS

1.1 EDITING AS REAL, OR DEATH-DRIVE IN FILM THEORY

In Pasolini’s La ricotta (1963) Orson Welles plays an intellectually lucid but supercilious leftist director; when asked what he thinks of death, his answer is: ‘As a Marxist, it is a fact I do not take into consideration’. Although the Welles character is meant to voice many of Pasolini’s own controversial views on modernity and religion, his categorical “ban on death” is exactly what the film sets out to refute, as by the end, after the tragicomic demise of the film’s sub-proletarian hero Stracci (Mario Cipriani), the Welles character is forced to acknowledge: ‘Poor Stracci, he had to die to show us that he was alive!’ The idea of the constant interpenetration of life and death is perhaps the founding theme of Pasolini’s cinema.

In 1967 Pasolini wrote a series of short essays in which he argued that a finished film is comparable to a finished life insofar as both are constituted by a series of significant facts retroactively selected by editing and death respectively. Only after editing and death, that is, can film and life be submitted to critical analysis and interpretation, for only then are they withdrawn from the contingency of time and arranged into a past that cannot be modified any further.¹ The paradoxical point is that the encounter with meaning is correlative to the death of the subject and the editing of the film:

It is therefore absolutely necessary to die, for while we are alive we lack sense, and the language of our life (with which we express ourselves, and which we hold in the utmost importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, an endless search for relations and meanings. Death accomplishes an instantaneous montage of our life: that is, it chooses its truly significant moments (not modifiable anymore by other potentially contrary or incoherent moments), and puts them in succession, turning our infinite, unstable, uncertain (and thus linguistically undescribable) present, into a clear, stable, certain (and thus linguistically well describable) past […]. Only through death does our life help us to express ourselves. Editing, therefore, does to the filmic material […] what death does to life (Pasolini, 1995, p. 241).

Pasolini’s fascination with death was certainly not as morbid as many critics have hastily intimated. As the above parallel with editing suggests, it should rather be taken with a degree of theoretical flexibility. My working hypothesis is that to fully appreciate the significance of Pasolini’s argument we need to read it through a Lacanian lens: as an attempt to dialecticise the relationship between what we generally assume to be visible and teeming with meaning (film/life), and the dimension which, on the contrary, alludes by definition to an abyssal (non-)place outside space and time (editing/death) – if we think, that is, of editing as a series of spatio-temporal gaps between shots, and simultaneously if we perceive death, as Pasolini did (1995, p. 252), from a lay, completely immanent, perspective.² The specific Lacanian issue at stake is that the opening of the space of meaning depends on a radically displaced kernel of absolute negativity, whose inaccessibility is guaranteed precisely by the editing procedure and, on an existential level, by the event of death. Slavoj Žižek makes this point forcefully apropos of any symbolic constellation:

One of the lessons of Lacanian psychoanalysis – and at the same time the point at which Lacan rejoins Hegel – is the radical discontinuity between the organic immediacy of “life” and the symbolic universe: the “symbolization of reality” implies the passage through the zero point of the “night of the world”. What we forget, when we pursue our daily life, is that our human universe is nothing but an embodiment of the radically inhuman “abstract negativity”, of the abyss we experience when we face the “night of the world” (Žižek, 2001b, p. 53).

In this section I intend to show that Pasolini’s incursions into film theory were neither theoretically naive nor, as Joan Copjec (2002, pp. 200–01) has recently insinuated, incomprehensible. Instead, they intuitively anticipated what was to become (and still is, since its potential has not been fully exhausted) the debate on the most stimulating contributions that Lacanian psychoanalysis has made to film studies, namely the theories of suture and, indirectly, of the gaze, which will be discussed in the following sections of the book. More specifically, I shall argue that the notions of suture and gaze, once extremely popular theoretical references for film studies, both share with Pasolini’s understanding of editing a decisive connection with what Lacan termed the Real, the traumatic domain inaccessible to meaning and yet inescapably related to it.

I begin by reading Pasolini’s argument through the key psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious. The claim that what guarantees the consistency of film is the operation of editing qua death (i.e. qua inscription of the abyssal void of death) should indeed be taken as a Lacanian paradox, insofar as the Lacanian subject is, strictly speaking, a void (in the form of unconscious desires) that gives body to a being: ‘Once the subject himself comes into being, he owes it to a certain nonbeing upon which he raises up his being’ (Lacan, 1988, p. 192); ‘everything exists only on a supposed background of absence. Nothing exists except insofar as it doesn’t exist’ (Lacan, 1966, p. 392).³ Put differently, Lacanian psychoanalysis, in its theoretical and analytic capacity, always deals with a subject that constitutes itself against the backdrop of the impossible relationship between conscious and unconscious self: between the ego as a place of fictional misrecognition generated by the interplay of fantasy and desires, and the “acephalous” (impossible to assume or subjectivise) unconscious.

Such radical division can perhaps be grasped more comfortably by considering the three orders of Lacanian theory, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Since his famous 1949 paper on the Stade du miroir (mirror stage), Lacan (1989, pp. 1–8) granted the Imaginary and the Symbolic dimensions a central role in the formation of subjectivity. If the Imaginary implies that the subject has a first insight into self-consciousness through narcissistic identification with the other, the formation of subjectivity proper can only be secured in the Symbolic, the realm of language and meaning, which we access through the Oedipus complex. The bottom line, which leads Lacan (1989, p. 1) to state that psychoanalysis opposes ‘any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito’ (i.e. from a self-transparent and autonomous understanding of subjectivity), is that entrance in the Symbolic is ontologically equivalent to the incision of a radical cut in the subject (which he calls fente or refente in French, and often Spaltung from Freud), a wound that the subject will never be able to heal. As soon as we say “I”, in other words, there intervenes a division between the subject of the enunciated (the subject of consciousness), and the subject of the enunciation (the subject of the unconscious enunciation). This break (Ichspaltung, the splitting of the I) corresponds to the formation of the unconscious, just as much as it is the necessary precondition for the emergence of self-consciousness.⁴ This is why Lacan (1966, p. 830) can say that ‘(t)he unconscious is a concept forged on the trace of what operates to constitute the subject’.

Thus, if on the one hand the unconscious appears inextricably entwined with the Symbolic, on the other hand it is also connected with the Real, the inaccessible domain of what resists symbolisation absolutely. This is why it would be misleading to think the unconscious as a latent narrative waiting to be rescued to signification, temporarily occupying the place of what is repressed. Its peculiarity is that it remains radically other, in as much as the thinking self can only establish with it a negative relationship, a rapport based on non-recognition. Precisely as the ‘censored chapter’ of the history of the subject (Lacan, 1989, p. 55), and at the same time that which is ‘structured like a language’ (Lacan, 1993, p. 167), the unconscious takes the form of an uncanny message in which the conscious subject does not and cannot recognise himself or herself.⁵ As Žizek often suggests, David Lynch is one of the directors who best exemplifies the paradox of the Lacanian unconscious, for most of his films are structured around an enigmatic phrase (for example, “Dick Laurent is dead” in Lost Highway, or “The owls are not what they seem” in the Twin Peaks series) that can only be subjectivised at the price of the hero’s death, or symbolic destitution (see Žižek, 2000, p. 299). As we will see later, in the final years of his teaching Lacan abandons his early idea of the linguistic constitution of the unconscious to propose the latter’s substantial coincidence with the Real, which in turn is firmly associated with the notion of jouissance, the obscure realm of enjoyment.

At this stage, however, we should emphasise that the paradox of the unconscious is supplemented, in Lacan, by another paradox, which this time concerns ethics. Despite the impossibility of bringing the content of the unconscious under the jurisdiction of the conscious self, the subject is nevertheless requested to assume responsibility for its dislodged underside, as it is there that its destiny is played out. Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s famous Wo Es war, soll Ich werden contains a clear ethical stance which ultimately coincides with the very aim of the analytic treatment: the self must come to be where the unconscious is, it must attempt to disturb the fantasmatic kernel of fundamentally disavowed enjoyment that an unconscious desire always-already is,⁶ for that is the only way to accede to the truth of the subject. What does this task, if taken seriously, imply for film studies today? Let us propose, for the time being, that the aim of our approach to film is to assess if, how and to what extent a given film allows us to locate and describe the dialectical relationship between its narrative structure and what “ex-sists” therein, i.e., those elements which antagonise radically that structure despite being integral to its significance, functional to its symbolic economy. The basic assumption in place is that the reason why the meaning of a given film can only be endlessly discussed and rediscussed, written, rewritten and, in a sense, recreated (as our postmodern wisdom has it), is that, precisely as symbolically constituted, a film “never succeeds”, it always-already gives way to its own unconscious destabilising desire, which seeps through the narrative and stains it profoundly. And the Lacanian point is that it is only by learning to read these traces of unconscious desire, these cinematic signifiers that speak the film’s “discourse of the Other”, that we can attempt to accede to the truth of film. Needless to say, only certain films will demonstrate the potential to express, in one way or another, the deep-seated logic that governs their own representational status.

By focusing on the foundational ambiguity of cinema, Pasolini’s intervention on editing takes us to the heart of the above question, allowing us to explore further Lacan’s notion of the Real. Following Pasolini, we have suggested that editing actively participates in the production of the cinematic unconscious, as it introduces the paradox of a structuring cut that anchors film in the Symbolic and, simultaneously, dislodges some of its content to an unconscious foundation. In doing so, therefore, editing also intervenes in the Real, since the cinematic Real can be thought of as a nucleus of traumatic fantasy that operates at the level of the unconscious; or, put differently, as an impenetrable hard core of enjoyment that signals the presence of an unconscious desire. We should be absolutely precise in defining the status of the Real in Lacan. As Žižek has repeatedly claimed, the Real is not simply a domain beyond the remit of language and symbolisation (as the early Lacan seems to imply), ‘the terrifying primordial abyss that swallows everything’, but instead it emerges as a traumatic formation produced by language itself, a troubling surplus of sense which inevitably “bends” our vision and understanding of reality: the Real is ‘that invisible obstacle, that distorting screen, which always “falsifies” our access to external reality, that “bone in the throat” which gives a pathological twist to every symbolisation, that is to say, on account of which every symbolisation misses its object’ (Žižek, 2003, p. 67). If therefore any symbolic configuration is intrinsically dependent on its hidden relationship with the Real, filmmaking is nothing but the distortion it shapes itself into whilst trying to achieve meaning. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, it coincides with the effect of the “gravitational pull” it suffers from the self-generated Real.

For Pasolini, this crucial pull that gives body to the signifying cinematic chain originates in the editing procedure: editing is Real since it functions as the receptacle of an inherently disruptive fantasmatic excess, whose displacement situates film within a linguistically consistent and yet anamorphically distorted dimension. And if the key point for our approach is ‘to assume fully the impossible task of symbolising the real, inclusive of its necessary failure’ (Žižek, 1993, pp. 199–200), can we not argue that, by pairing editing and death, Pasolini was pointing us precisely towards such a titanic task – a task hinging on the Lacanian paradox that everything exists only against a background of absence? It is this kind of investment in the Real qua structuring “motor” of film which lends Pasolini’s theory a strong psychoanalytic bias, prompting us also to call into question, after the unconscious and the Real, a third key notion, which complements and brings to fruition the first two: that of death-drive. For what is the typically Pasolinian (decadent) topos of the ‘symbiosis of sex and death’ (as he put it in a famous poem on Antonio Gramsci, of all people!, see Pasolini, 1993, p. 226), which cuts across and problematises his entire oeuvre, if not the libidinal persistence of that very reference to Nothingness which qualifies the death-drive? The Freudian death-drive designates precisely ‘the paradox of “wanting unhappiness”, of finding excessive pleasure in suffering itself’ (Žižek, 2003, p. 23). In another essay on cinema (‘Il cinema impopolare’, The unpopular cinema), published in 1970, this persistence of drive becomes apparent:

‘“Freedom”. After giving it considerable thought, I have realised that this mysterious word only means, after all, in its deepest connotation ... “freedom to choose death”. This no doubt is a scandal, because to live is a duty: on this point both Catholics (life is sacred as it is a gift of God) and Communists (one must live as it is a duty towards society) agree. Nature also agrees: and, to help us be lovingly attached to life, it provides us with the “conservation instinct”. However, differently from Catholics and Communists, nature is ambiguous: and to prove its ambiguity it also provides us with the opposite instinct, the death-drive. This conflict, which is not contradictory – as our rational and dialectic mind would like it to be – but oppositional and as such non-progressive, unable to perform an optimistic synthesis, takes place in the depths of our soul: in the unfathomable depths, as we all know. But “authors” have the responsibility to render this conflict explicit and manifest. They are tactless and inopportune enough to reveal, somehow, that they “want to die”, or else that they want to disobey the conservation instinct: or, more simply, disobey conservation as such. Freedom is, therefore, a self-damaging attack on conservation. Freedom can only be expressed through martyrdom, either an insignificant or a substantial one. And each martyr martyrs himself through the reactionary executioner’ (Pasolini, 1995, p. 269).

Pasolini’s ‘freedom to choose death’ represents a stubborn endorsement of the constitutive surplus of sense, and as such it demands to be read alongside the theorisation of the deathlike quality of editing. His notion of death essentially coincides with Lacan’s death-drive, ‘the dimension of the “undead”, of a spectral life which insists beyond (biological) death […] the excess of life itself’ (Žižek, 2003, p. 94). And, again, editing is Real precisely because it entails the insistence of the death-drive in its reference to a hard kernel of fantasy that remains utterly non-symbolisable. Hence, the invisible spatial and temporal gaps between cinematic images function as a paradigmatic, ante litteram receptacle for all the unconscious desire whose disavowal allows filmmaking to become film. As Freud and Lacan would have put it, “the cinematic letter kills”,⁷ and Pasolini’s aim is precisely to show how the many “cuts” of film correspond to its many necessary “deaths”, implying that film is a symbolic structure whose coherence is negotiated, strico sensu, through its relationship with its own foundational void.

1.2 Pasolini as a reader of Hegel

But let us reconsider the core of Pasolini’s argument: the truth-content of a film is connected with the constit...