Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space

Comedy, Italian Style

Natalie Fullwood

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137403575
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film & Video

Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs.

Part I

Contexts

Chapter 1

Cinema, Space, Gender

In Giorgio Bianchi’s Il moralista, Alberto Sordi plays Agostino, a man with a double life. By day, he works as General Secretary of the International Organization for Public Morality, a fictional body campaigning for the censorship of sexually explicit entertainment and advertising. By night, he manages a chain of successful strip clubs, and travels the nightspots of Europe to find new girls to work in his venues. The hypocrisy of his position creates ample comedy, as he works to conceal each part of his life from the other. It also recreates—at a narrative level—the madonna/whore binary that runs throughout so much of Italian cinema’s representation of women and female sexuality (and not only Italian cinema, of course). However, this is not just a narrative device; the binaristic view of female sexuality is also mapped out spatially, as the two sides of his working life play out in very different spaces. By day, he inhabits plush offices in an ornate Roman palazzo that speak of male power, where he instructs wayward advertisers to remove nudity from their adverts. By night, he moves among nightclub spaces, which are arranged specifically for the display of a commodified form of female sexuality to be consumed as entertainment spectacle. In the spatial world of the film, women signify sexuality, and they must either be contained, removed to the corridors of power and edges of the frame as secretaries, or they must be center stage, naked, and looked at by an audience.

Il moralista is by no means an exception in using space to speak to issues of gender, sexuality, and power. The central thread running throughout this book is that all cinema expresses gender through space, and space through gender, and Comedy, Italian Style provides numerous examples of this process in action. A vast array of scholarship has addressed “cinema and space,” “space and gender,” and “cinema and gender,” but the relationship between the three terms—cinema, space, and gender—has yet to receive the attention it deserves.¹ This book builds upon a small but crucial body of work, by scholars such as Giuliana Bruno (1993 and 2002), David Forgacs (2002), Julianne Pidduck (2004), Merrill Schleier (2009), and Pamela Robertson Wojcik (2010), which has begun to explore the intersection of cinema, space, and gender. My understanding of the interrelation of space and gender—in both society and cinematic representation—has been informed by a wide range of thinkers spanning critical theory, film theory, geography, architecture, gender studies, and beyond. There has been much talk over the past two decades of a “spatial turn” in the humanities, as scholars from across disciplines have incorporated ideas of space into their thinking, but we still have much to do to bring these insights together across disciplinary boundaries.² Geographers and film theorists in particular frequently speak to each others’ concerns, especially when the topic under discussion is gender. One of the key contributions of feminist geographers has been to show how gender operates within society’s organization of space. One of the key contributions of feminist film theorists has been to show how cinematic representations of gender relations are never neutral, but instead both express and have the potential to reinforce or challenge unequal gender relations in wider society. My contention is that these two spheres of enquiry are in fact different sides of the same coin and need to speak to each other. Before I turn to the spaces of 1960s Italy and its cinema, I will first set out in this chapter exactly what I understand by my key terms—cinema, space, and gender—how they interrelate, and what an approach that links them can reveal.

Cinematic Space

Thinking with ideas of space courts the risk of descending into loose spatial metaphors. I am acutely aware of this and want, as far as possible, to make it clear what I mean when I use the word “space.” For the purposes of my discussion, like the anthropologist Shirley Ardener (2000: 115), I do not place any particular emphasis on the distinction between the terms “space” and “place.” Across disciplines, the terms have been conceptualized in a variety of frequently contradictory ways. One view, prevalent among geographers, sees “place” as a geographically and historically specific instance of the social use of space. Michel De Certeau, on the other hand, states that “space is a practiced place,” in a configuration that is more or less the opposite of the standard definition in geography (1988: 117).³ Writing from the perspective of film studies, John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel define place as “a subset of that larger category, space” (2011b: ix). In their edited volume Taking Place, the two authors place significant weight on the distinction between the two, aiming for “a redirection from space (as a uniform property of cinema) to place (as a strikingly heterogeneous and specific element recorded by or sensible in a film)” (2011b: xii). For Rhodes and Gorfinkel, the concept of place allows for the specific, the historical, and the local—the “accretion of history in a given location” (2011b: ix)—which stands in opposition to a more generalizing, globalizing, and totalizing concept of space associated with the postmodernist theory of thinkers such as Marc Augé and Fredric Jameson. The individual chapters of Taking Place largely deal with specific geographic localities and their representation in cinema: place as proper noun, as a point identifiable on a map. I highlight the place/space distinction made by Rhodes and Gorfinkel to emphasize that I want to do something slightly different in this book. I am interested in the gray area that lies on the spectrum between the “subset” place and the “larger category” of space. “Beach,” “office,” “car,” “kitchen”: each of these terms could refer to a specific geographical place, to a point on a map. However, as a type of space—a social/spatial category—they also conjure up cultural meaning, including gendered meaning, which varies through history and across geography. Although I write about films that, for example, represent the geographical places of Viareggio, Ostia, or Taormina, I am interested in how these representations contribute to ideas about the wider spatial category of the “beach,” as it was understood in Italy during the 1960s. I want to explore how certain categories of place—what I call social spaces—can accumulate cultural meanings through repeated representation in a cinematic genre. How does this repeated representation create common assumptions about social spaces that might cut across regional or geographical differences? A vast array of different beaches are represented in the genre, for example, but regardless of where they are located on a map, they all become associated with the display of semi-naked female bodies. As Rob Shields has pointed out, the picture becomes even more complex in a multi-lingual debate (1999: 154). In the Italian context “space” and “place” can be translated by the three terms “spazio,” “posto,” or “luogo.” I use the English “space” to refer to everything from the geometrical space of the frame to the social spaces of everyday life, such as kitchens or beaches (which a geographer might call “places”). I do this partly for consistency, and partly because it is precisely my aim to explore the way in which the physical places of society and the fictional spaces of representation are inextricably bound up with each other, in a way that the space/place distinction can sometimes mask.

In relation to cinema, “space” can refer to many layers of meaning: the geometry of the frame and its composition, the screen delimited by the frame’s borders, the profilmic space used for filming, the industrial spaces where filmmakers, producers, and distributors work, and the position of the spectator in the cinema theatre. When I say that cinema’s formal properties make it an art of space, I mean that its very nature as a medium requires the manipulation and reconstruction of material spatial realities. The nature of these material spatial realities has changed over time. In this book, I discuss celluloid-based filmmaking of the 1960s that mainly follows the conventions of continuity editing. Of course, all art forms and all media create their own forms of space, which may or may not be material, and many, such as theatre and opera, can create coherent spatial worlds in which their characters move. However, performing arts such as these operate within the same three-dimensional spatial realm as their spectators, and they cease to exist in space, in the same way, after the performance has ended. The cinema I discuss, on the other hand, creates a plastic object—the celluloid film—which reconstructs a space similar to that of our own perceptual experience, but which is nonetheless different from that experience: two-dimensional, bounded by a frame, and captured to be repeated through time.

I have chosen the term “cinematic space” to describe cinema’s own particular construction of space. While I am certainly not the first to use it, I have adapted the term to my own ends. As I understand it, what I call “cinematic space” is constructed by the transformation of profilmic space into filmic space, in a process that both influences and is influenced by the extra-cinematic spaces of society. Unlike animation, computer-generated images, or digital filmmaking, celluloid cinema, of which Comedy, Italian Style is an example, takes spaces that actually exist in the world as its raw material. Any such space which is filmed by a camera is a profilmic space, whether actual social spaces (locations) or recreations of such spaces (studio-based sets).The importance of neorealism in Italian film history has meant that considerable emphasis has been placed on the realist significance of location shooting as distinct from studio-based filmmaking. However, it is worth remembering that these practices share as many similarities as they do differences. Both sets and locations are profilmic spaces that are subject to similar processes of fictionalization, adaptation for narrative ends, and transformation from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional. The very choice of a particular location over another is an act of selection with its own aesthetic and ideological connotations. Whether the profilmic space in question is a purpose-built studio set or a real-life location, it is still necessary to adapt the space to the scene’s requirements. Vincenzo Del Prato, production designer for Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), makes this point explicitly in his manual for scenographers: “There is no such thing as a location ‘set’ where it is possible to go in and shoot without having to make changes to the scenography” (1990: 47). Even if one were to use a “real-life” profilmic space without any practical modifications, the very act of using the space within a fictional construct alters its meaning. When it is chosen for filming and adapted for the needs of narrative, the historically and geographically specific place in question undergoes an ontological transformation: it becomes a profilmic space.

Unlike literature, cinema requires a space in which to stage its action; a profilmic space of some sorts is a requirement of the medium and, it should be stressed, an essential part of its production. It is worth remembering the fundamental point that spaces dictate the film production process. The shooting schedule, or, in the Italian case, “piano di lavorazione,” is structured first and foremost by setting, and then only secondly by actor. ll moralista’s shooting schedule illustrates this point. The document is held in the Italian national state archive in Rome (the Archivio Centrale dello Stato) and is part of a series of papers submitted by the producer to apply for state funding.⁴ It is typical of Italian shooting schedules from this period held in the archive. The planned shooting schedule is arranged in a grid with scenes listed in chronological order along the top. Actors’ names are listed down the side and the grid indicates which actors will be involved in shooting each scene.⁵ Shooting is planned to begin with the scenes at the International Organization of Public Morality’s headquarters, including scenes in the entrance, corridor and Agostino’s office. There are three separate nightclub spaces where shooting will take place at different points in the schedule. Scenes in homes, the airport, as well as interior shots in a car are planned on different dates. As is typical of film production, all of the scenes in any profilmic space are shot together, regardless of their order in the narrative (the opening credits are slated to be shot almost last). Space, as cinema’s raw material, is at the center of the way films are made.

Film production takes three-dimensional profilmic spaces and transforms them into two-dimensional images, creating a coherent spatial world—filmic space—that resembles our own experience of space in its illusion of depth, but which is not at all the same. As Stephen Heath puts it, this space is “‘unlike’ [real space] but at the same time ‘reconstitutes’, using elements lifted from real space” (1981: 41). David Bordwell terms this space “scenographic space,” which he defines as “the imaginary space of fiction, the ‘world’ in which the narration suggests that fabula events occur” (1985: 113). The nature of filmic space has received considerable scholarly attention. Noël Burch conceptualized space in cinema as comprised of “two different kinds of space: that included within the frame and that outside the frame” (1973: 17). For Burch, the frame is key to filmic space and he details six different types of off-screen space that are excluded from the frame. Heath suggested that Burch’s division between on-screen and off-screen space is inadequate. Instead, he envisaged filmic space as composed of the interplay between these two types of spaces, where off-screen space is replaced by on-screen space “in a constant movement of reappropriation,” as exemplified, for instance, by the shot/reverse-shot (1981: 45).

The importance of the interplay between on-screen and off-screen space emerges from the analysis of almost any sequence of film which follows the conventions of continuity editing. It can be seen at work, for example, in a scene in Il moralista, where Alberto Sordi visits a nightclub to watch a striptease performance. The scene appears about half way through the film. Sordi has been sent to represent the International Organization for Public Morality at a conference in Munich, where he delivers a speech against striptease as a form of entertainment. Accompanied by the German and Austrian delegates—two austere older women in dark suits, berets, and glasses—Sordi attends a nightclub strip show to learn more about the phenomenon he is campaigning against. Their entrance into the nightclub uses the interplay of on-screen and off-screen space to construct the fictional world of the nightclub through which the characters move. Sordi and the two women are framed in medium shot as they arrive in the club. Sordi requests a table, but the waiter explains that they are all full. “That table is free,” Sordi says, as he points toward screen left, gesturing to an off-screen space that the spectator has not yet seen. As the three characters move to occupy the table, the off-screen space becomes on-screen space as the camera pans left and pulls back to reveal another area of the room. It finally rests on a shot of a group of small tables filled with customers, where Sordi and the delegates take their place in a table at the front. As the striptease show begins, the scene cuts between shots of Sordi and the delegates watching from their table, and reverse-shots of the stage where the performance takes place. Sordi repeatedly gestures toward the camera, in the direction of where the performance is taking place, and, in the reverse-shots, the striptease performer also directs her attention toward the camera, as if the diegetic audience were in the camera’s position. Thus, although we never see the two spaces in the same shot, the interplay between on-screen and off-screen space in this shot/reverse-shot sequence gives the spectator a coherent sense of a nightclub space with a seating area facing a performance space. There is nothing particularly unusual about the construction of space in this sequence, but it is worth pausing to remind ourselves how even the most straightforward of sequences involves the manipulation of a three-dimensional profilmic space to construct a two-dimensional fictional space comprehensible to the spectator.

Debates about filmic space have emphasized the importance of narrative. David Bordwell shares Stephen Heath’s insistence that in narrative cinema, space is entirely at the service of narrative. For Heath, “frame space [ . . . ] is constructed as narrative space. It is narrative significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and ‘read’” (1981: 36). For Bordwell, “once grasped as three-dimensional and furnished with recognizable objects, cinematic space is typically subordinated to narrational ends” (1985: 128). Space is certainly constructed at the service of narrative in Comedy, Italian Style. It is important to emphasize that rather than merely following or echoing already established narrative concerns, the use of space can play a crucial role in the construction of narrative meaning. In Il moralista, for example, in the scene immediately following the striptease, Sordi returns to the club without the female delegates. This time, he moves toward screen right as he enters, passing the bar, walking across the dance floor in front of the st...