Reverse Shot [III]: ‘Exterior Night’ (Marco Bellocchio, 2022)

Third entry of a three-part text on Marco Bellocchio’s mini-series ‘Exterior Night’, where the director returns to a crucial episode in Italian history that he had already tackled in his masterpiece ‘Good Morning, Night’ (2003): the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. This entry explores the religious themes of Christ and the Passion, as well as self-referentiality and the double/alternative endings.

Reverse Shot [II]: ‘Exterior Night’ (Marco Bellocchio, 2022)

Second entry of a three-part text on Marco Bellocchio’s mini-series ‘Exterior Night’, where the director returns to a crucial episode in Italian history that he had already tackled in his masterpiece ‘Good Morning, Night’ (2003): the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. This entry explores the intersection between history, politics, and psyche (paying special attention to fantasies, dreams, symbols, and Cossiga's psychic breakdown); and traces the different ramifications of the presentation of Moro as a father figure.

Reverse Shot [I]: ‘Exterior Night’ (Marco Bellocchio, 2022)

First entry of a three-part text on Marco Bellocchio’s mini-series ‘Exterior Night’, where the director returns to a crucial episode in Italian history that he had already tackled in his masterpiece ‘Good Morning, Night’ (2003): the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. This entry explores the kaleidoscopic construction and narrative strategies of the series, as well as the themes of rhetoric and the Eros Principle.

John Cassavetes: A Primer

In a Cassavetes film, everything is an event. The way someone enters a room, a scene, or a shot. The way that the drama rises or subsides. The framing of an image, the way it moves. The play of light and darkness, colour and hue, the grain of the film stock. The interplay of views from multiple, simultaneous cameras (one of them frequently worked by Cassavetes himself). The violence of the soundtrack, open to waves and intensities of every kind of voice, noise or musical note. And the amazing work on editing, to which Cassavetes and his collaborators could literally devote years...

Double or Nothing: ‘+1’ (Dennis Iliadis, 2013)

According to a logic that especially marks genre cinema – whereby the fantastic, the horrifying and the paranormal appear as symptoms or bodily manifestations of hidden desires, fears and traumas – here the threat of the doubles who advance in time is perfectly linked with the problematic of the relationship between Jill and David: it is, at once, a sharp psychoanalytic deconstruction and a perfect allegorical dramatisation of the female fear of replacement and stagnation.

The Bear Attack and the Talking Fish [II]: ‘Siberia’ (Abel Ferrara, 2020)

In my previous text I discussed the bear attack happening early in the film; here, I'll concentrate on the last scene of 'Siberia' with the talking fish. It is highly significant that, at the end of the film, Clint finds his post destroyed. The storm of fantasies that is 'Siberia' has knocked down the walls of Clint's refuge; his psyche is raw, tender, naked and exposed. The defenses to which he clung in order to keep the unconscious at bay have been severely weakened...

The Bear Attack and the Talking Fish [I]: ‘Siberia’ (Abel Ferrara, 2020)

There are only a few episodes in 'Siberia' that can be unmistakably traced to Jung's 'The Red Book' (its source of inspiration). Neither the scene with the bear, nor the scene with the fish, are among them. But, since everybody seems to agree that 'Siberia' is a trip to the unconscious—and since the unconscious speaks in symbolic language—I'll attempt here a psychological interpretation of these two scenes (influenced by Jung's discussion on symbols and archetypes), while offering a close analysis of their filmic form.

Desire as Pedagogy: ‘The Academy of Muses’ (José Luis Guerin, 2015)

In 'The Academy of Muses', pedagogy is portrayed as the circulation of desire between teacher, students, and texts—while becoming also the trigger of the central dramatic conflict: Rosa, Raffaele’s wife, starts to feel that her husband’s teaching philosophy is a threat to their marriage… Desire is not just the literal (and literary) object of study in Pinto’s seminar; it is the force that propels the whole film.

Prefiguration and Apparition: ‘A Burning Hot Summer’ (Philippe Garrel, 2011)

The most haunting image of 'A Burning Hot Summer': Angèle naked, on her back, lying over the blue linen of the marital bed. She turns her face toward the camera, extends her right arm, and mutters a word that we can't hear because the sound of this fragment has been suppressed. Where does this image come from? Is it a memory, a vision, an hallucination? The stillness is only broken by Angèle's rhythmic breathing, by the movement of her head and lips, and by a gesture (her arm extended forward, in a pleading attitude) enacted, almost exactly, twice in a row.

Blood Ties: My Most Wicked Childhood Act

Once, I told my brother that he was adopted. I might have been around 12 or 13—my brother being three years younger than me. During that time, I was facing an important quandary in my life: I wanted to become an actress, but this is something I never dared to express aloud. There were two things that stood in my way and that I couldn't overcome—two things that made of my wish a secret that I was even ashamed to entertain...

Out of the Blue: Remembrance of Dresses Past

The only memory I keep from kindergarten is from Carnival day. We were all gathered at the playground, waiting for our pictures to be taken. A girl came toward me and, out of the blue, slapped me in the face. I remember her name: Natalia. I remember her princess costume: a silky dress in royal blue and dark turquoise. And, of course, I remember her brutal slap—and not just for its violence (that still stings) but, above all, for its arbitrariness (which hurts even deeper)...

That Cube Caught My Fantasy…

Some months ago, I found in YouTube this wonderful video of Carl Gustav Jung at his Bollingen Tower. The footage prominently features a stone that he carved and put in his garden, next to the lake, as an offering for his 75th birthday. Following the trail of two sets of image-associations, this essay goes from Telesphoros (the bewitching figure carved in one of the sides of the stone) to Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' and Krzysztof Kieślowski's 'Dekalog I'.

Dreams I Don’t Have

A few years ago, I read C. G. Jung's autobiography, 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'. At that time, I was purposefully trying to remember my dreams. Instead of just fantasising myself into oblivion (which is my most natural attitude when I go to bed), I attempted to get into a state of receptiveness and relaxed attention (quite an endeavour for a person like me!). I don't know how I came up with this idea: I guess it seemed more respectful with the unconscious than just trying to control every thought by driving it exactingly where I wanted it to be...

Petty

This is the picture from my current ID card. It was taken in August—a month before my 41st birthday and a few days before my renewal appointment. I remember the day because I woke up early: I didn't want to cross the village when the sun was high; I didn't want to have my picture taken while in a terrible mood and sweating like a pig. But each season has its whims and, this past summer, I used to wake up in dread and despair. So, that morning, I had to undergo a few hours of crying therapy (or whatever that is) until I could compose myself...

Nothing

I've met people who weren't depressed, yet wouldn't detect a strand of humour even if it was showed right up their asses. That's just to say, by way of introduction, that I am not, in fact, surprised that depression is associated so often with some sort of nihilism on account of the nothing to which the depressed clings. Because the depressed—above all—clings. She clings onto nothing and the nothings she feels, and sees, and utters, seem completely incomprehensible to anybody else...

Le moi et le je: ‘Jane B. par Agnès V.’ (Agnès Varda, 1987)

Singing a Gainsbourg song isn't easy. He likes his syllables unnaturally stressed or flattened, lengthened or sharpened; he enjoys writing with unequal, undulating metric; he's fond of enjambements that break—across different verses—single sentences and, sometimes, even single words. Many of his lyrics frolic in wordplay; they delight in polysemic and homophonic terms—disseminating multiple meanings and messing with similar sounds...

Brain Massage

Usually, I would have cringed in disbelief and horror at the mere suggestion of a vague link between "what I feel" and the state of the world at large. (It's a long story, but to make it short: if you've lived feeling acutely the separation between you and others, between you and a world without a place for you, this idea just does not make much sense; in fact, this idea is deeply offensive.) I've learnt that this belief in the separation between oneself and the world is a quite common delusion. But knowing I am delusional doesn't stop me feeling how I feel...

The Long Road: ‘Liberté et Patrie’ (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 2002)

The 'and' functions to always carry the links forward—but it also operates across each pair ("freedom and fatherland, fatherland and freedom": the visual and aural back-and-forth is a constant in the film). It's the movement effected by the 'and' that frees the terms from themselves, and frees the pairs from themselves—threading relations that multiply and amplify, that give substance, background and meaning, that constellate a veritable cosmos out of those two initial notions...

The Audition: ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’ (John Cassavetes, 1976)

What is a scene? Some books and manuals say that a scene is a portion of a film where the action has a spatio-temporal unity. Well, maybe that's what some people call a definition but, personally, I'm amazed that anybody can do anything with that. I like to think of a scene in terms of its internal movement: how it shifts parameters from one shot to the next; how it builds sections animated by different energies; how it introduces, combines and recombines its elements; how it brings something new to the atmosphere or transforms the atmosphere altogether...

Love Yourself (?)

Lately, I've been seriously thinking about seeing a shrink. It's difficult to choose, because there are so many different approaches, methods, therapies that, when I begin to think about it, the pressure to choose wisely adds another level of anxiety to my everyday, general anxiety, and that makes me backtrack. Then, of course, there's this other problem: I have to like him (him, let's be straight). I'm told that this – to like him – is actually not mandatory. But it is mandatory for me...

F

In 2009, I became fascinated by a young man – I'll call him F – who lived in the streets and used to beg for money near my workplace. The year before, I had walked past him several times. There was a group of about ten people – mostly Eastern-European women – who used to line up at the front and back doors of a cathedral, asking for money from the visitors (sometimes, also stealing wallets via tricks that were so crude I could not believe tourists let themselves be fooled so easily). Amongst these people was F, whose looks and manners were different...

On Doubles and Revelations: ‘The Double Life of Véronique’ (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1992)

My mother and brother were standing there, with their backs to me. I must have walked very stealthily, because they remained unaware of my presence. "Hey, what are you doing?", I asked. They both shuddered and turned towards me. What I remember most is their looks of astonishment. As happens in the movies after a character has seen a ghost, they were awestruck and could barely speak. "We … thought … you were there", mumbled my brother signalling the window. He invited me to come closer so that I could see it for myself...

The Sadness Will Last Forever: ‘À nos amours’ (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Before becoming a director, Maurice Pialat had been a painter. In his youth, he adored Van Gogh. Later in life, he spent years imagining a project about the last months of the Dutch painter, culminating in his 1991 film, Van Gogh. Despite all this, in a 1992 interview, Pialat remarked: "Van Gogh was quite unlike me". Quite unlike him, but not so unlike him as to not cling onto his last words and hurl them against the people seated at this dinner table – his family in the fiction, but also his film family, his group of collaborators...

The Art of the Oxymoron: ‘Life of Riley’ (Alain Resnais, 2014)

Writing about 'Heaven Can Wait', Jean Douchet proposed that whenever Ernst Lubitsch’s characters are living in the ephemeral moment, they long for what is permanent; but when they face the permanent, they yearn for the experience of the instant. This contradiction is also at the heart of 'Life of Riley', and is tackled in a particularly poignant way. Whatever it is that the female characters expect from George, one thing is certain: it won’t last. Because George is about to die, he embodies a kind of safe detour from their ordinary lives...

89%: WordPress Stats, Social Media, and Other Catastrophes

There's a genre of story I've always enjoyed: those about famous writers receiving letters from their readers. The letters are often nice, but not especially profound or refined. And, yet, the very gesture of writing a letter, stamping it, posting it in the mail, is endowed with a ceremonial aspect that carries its own significance. This has been lost with the arrival of e-mail, social media, online blogs and magazines. You would think that, now that the specialness of the gesture is gone, the writing itself – even if only in an attempt to make up for this loss – would become richer...