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Federico Fellini: a Deconstructive Cinematographic Project Mircea Valeriu Deaca Unversity of Bucharest, CESI Doctoral School E-mail:
[email protected] (Conference paper, Luton International Symposium: Applied Derrida, 1995, University of Luton, England, 20-23 July 1995)
1. Fellini’s view of the actor - an allegorical text Fellini proposes a definition of the actor: ‘‘(l’acteur est (un masque) qui ne doit pas dénoncer immédiatement le personnage...) ’‘ 1 a.1. ‘‘(l’acteur est un masque) ’‘ The definition of the actor - a presence - is expressed under a rhetorical composition. A double bind structures this syntagm. At a literal level the expression defines the actor as a displacement, he is the sign of something else, his essence is the absence of completude (he is a mask or a sign) or a heteroreference. At a rhetorical level it is a figural equation; i.e. the ‘actor is a mask’ is a metaphor. The conceived entity of the actor is a mask; an absence or a sign that indicates an absence, i.e. whatever the mask is supposed to designate (the character for example). But this rhetorical expression inscribes
an identity. We can say that the actor is, in itself, a mask ; he is thus just a role to be played. To be an actor is to be a fictional operation. The actor is, from the very beginning, an iterable sign and, as such it is constituted with reference to the trace in it of other elements situated in the system. The actor, as a mask, in constituted by an originary lack. a.2. ‘‘ (un masque qui ne doit pas dénoncer immédiatement le personnage) ’‘ The kind of mask Fellini makes reference to is one that designates not the character, but the fact that it has to designate in a certain way the character by an act of denunciation (dénoncer). In other words it’s a type of mask that has as specific feature a certain kind of action or way of designating. We can say that the actor is defined as a rhetorical figure (a kind of fictive entity similar to the one of the character), it is identified with a rhetorical figure (the one that it has to differentiate itself from). Thus we can say that it is founded not only by a rhetorical figure but by the very absence of the fictive entity it has to designate. This mask refers to a process or a sequence ; he is in a way the transformation of a moment into an allegory, a sequence 2. But this process is just the hesitation of unveiling the character hidden under the mask. b. The sign (mask) has its own presence. This presence is defined as an ambiguous operation: opaque in the sense of not designating the entity it must reveal (the character) - a suppression of différance - , and transparent in the sense that 2
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‘‘The actor is a mask that must not denunciate immediately the character ’‘.
The passage from simultaneity to a diachrony, an experience of time is the mark of the rhetoric. See in De Man 1979:131.
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this entity has to be conceived through its presence. Its characteristic feature is the operation of hesitation between those two states. Its typical character is to insert a pause, a hiatus or a fold (a pli) in time. He is a screen - or a veil (a hymen). The actor unveils himself by temporary veiling the artefact that he is supposed to unveil (the character). The entity defined thus is a parergonal operation ; neither inside nor outside, neither state nor process. His characteristic feature is to keep - for a while; in the experience of time - a secret (to avoid speaking). It’s, in other terms, an expression of denegation3. c. Let’s see for a moment the kind of operation the mask is supposed to do in order to manifest itself. The mask hides and denounces at the same time. To denounce (dénoncer) is a figure that means - among other senses - also the act of treason. The action of denunciation is double: the mask reveals the character (makes him visible) but, on the other hand, the mask reveals what is hidden behind the character, his true nature or, in other words, rips off the mask of the character. The mask refers to the character in an ostensive act, but by this very act of reference it denounces or it operates treason - or else - indicates that the character is an artefact, a convention, a sign or, finally, an actor; i.e. that he is in the end the actor
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In Derrida (1987:557) on dénégation ‘‘ un secret doit et ne doit pas se laisser divulguer (...) Il faut ne pas divulguer mais il faut aussi faire savoir ou plutôt laisser savoir ce ‘‘ il faut ’‘, ‘‘ il ne faut pas ’‘, ‘‘ il faut ne pas ’‘ ’‘ ‘‘ Comment faire pour qu’un secret reste secret ? Comment le faire savoir, pour que le secret du secret - comme tel - ne reste pas secret ? ’‘ ‘‘ Il n’y a pas de secret comme tel, je le dénie. Et voila ce que je confie en secret à quiconque s’allie à moi ’‘ (1987:558).
himself. As we have seen in a. the actor is a figure (a mask or a metaphor). In fact the actor is self-reflexive figure. The actor is thus a mask that must not, at the same time, show the character and denounce the conventional character immediately. It is supposed to float or wave in an ambiguous state : a figure recognised as an artefact (a mask) that has, at the same time, to postpone its integration in a fictive domain or world (the character) and its integration in an artificial one (an actor). We could say that the mask must not denounce the character in the mask that is the actor (not to show or denunciate the fact that within the actor-mask is hidden the character) and, at the same time, must nor denunciate the fact that within the character is hidden the actor-mask. The mask is thus a machine that merges the entities and keeps them separate (undecidable hymen) 4; inscribes the iterativity in an originary , an originary reversed ; as if the actor would be a species of an archi-character. The effect, the character denunciated in its adjournment (denegation) causes and brings into existence the mask of the actor (the one that is supposed to cause the character). The weaving and the period between the mask-actor and the character-actor (the repetition or the quotation) inscribes the creation of an singular event; an event created in the act o selfquotation ; a kind of s’entendre parler 5. 4
An operation that at ‘once’ brigns about a fusion (confusion) between opposites and stands between opposites. See in Culler 1982:145. 5
In Derrida 1987:23-32 ‘‘ l’événement inventif, c’est la citation et le récit ’‘ , ‘‘ elle invente par le seul acte d’énonciation qui à la fois fait et décrit, opère et constate ’‘, ‘‘ raconte une histoire qui n’a pas lieu, qui n’a pas lieu hors d’ellemême et qui n’est autre qu’elle même en sa propre in(ter)vention inaugurale ’‘.
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This circuit is a deconstructive praxis of a continuos figural (where identity is lost and recuperated in the labyrinth of the constitutive « différance » of the sign.
2. Thematic instantiation of the allegory: the quest of the fellinian character The quest of the fellinian character reveals a similar rhetoric. The protagonist never finds an originary; but only substitute figures. We can say that he operates an archaeology of traces (textual or iconic envois), the recovery of a disseminated body. In films like : The Clowns (1970), E la nave va (1983), 8 ½ (1963), Casanova (1976), the protagonist is looking for an originary figure : the clown, the film (8 ½ ; Fellini nel cestino (1989); Intervista (1987); The Clowns), the feminine figure, the moon (La voce della luna, 1990), the music (Prova d’orchestra, 1979), a sexual lost power (Satyricon, 1969), the actor (Ginger and Fred, 1985) or the city of Rome (Roma, 1972). The quest is realised as a scenario of death and resurrection: this symbolic unit designates - in a figurative way - the translation of an originary figure from its absence to its presence as sign; as a ghostly figure. The quest then becomes a textual investigation. The initial object of the quest, absent, is another figure. The clown and the woman figure (the Goddess Venus or the singer Gloria) manifest as images of themselves. In The Clowns the protagonist (Fellini) discovers
the ancient clown as a misty image in a French film archive; a silent movie where the images are fainting. In Casanova or La voce della luna the protagonist seeks a feminine figure (an ideal mistress or a definite character), but will be confronted to a multitude of feminine characters and fragments of the irrecoverable invariant. For example the Venus like-figure is recuperated through the iteration of the specific postures of the feminine characters present in the composition of the Three Graces. The postures are the woman who is facing face to the spectator and the woman that turns her back upon the spectator. Those postures are present in long series of iconic representations of the motif 6. The significant gestures are quotations of an iconic description of the Venus entity. The quest - or the figure (the scenario) of the quest is, by figural displacement; - another form of spectacular investigation7. It is as if one could not refer directly to the entity of the quest but only obliquely, in a neo-platonic vein through the mediation of second order representations. The origin of the spectacle or the representation itself is, in the end, identical to the continuous shift from one representation to another ; i.e. what the film itself does and is.
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See in Wind 1992:fig.61 (the paradigmatic figure would be Rapahel’s composition of the motif of the Three Graces ; Chantilly, musée Conde) 7
This procedure is appropriated from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili where the quest for the beloved one, Polia, is amalgamated with the quest of the temple of Venus. The quest of a feminine principle, a neo-platonic divine order, is accomplished in a series of artifact descriptions. The text of Hypnerotomachia is a long description of the allegories depicted on sculptures and architectural artifacts ; representational objects.
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The cinematographic text itself is the folding of this trajectory (path). The text is a space of melting and transcription of a chain of figures, envois and quotations that are inscribing the movement of différance of an absent literal content: that is represents an allegory. The end of E la nave va is significant. The camera shifts back from the diegetic world and let’s us discover the ‘‘scène ’‘ of the studio (the artefacts, the crew of studio : an actor); it denounces the character : i.e. the fictive or the diegetic world . The camera pan’s further on and approaches the eye of one camera installed on a trolley. ‘‘Inside ’‘ the eye of this camera we discover again the diegetic world in which the character addresses to us spectators aware of the presence of the studio. We discover by another turn of the screw that the denunciation equates in fact to the addition of a further layer of fictionality ; the studio is another fictive world produced by the first one 8. The graft of the studio or the description of the context of the ‘‘utterance’‘ of the diegetic 8
Marginalia. We can say that meaning in film is produced at the tense junction between two reading modes: a documentary and a fictional one. Any perception contains the object of the perception and the conditions of the visual experience (See Searle 1983). Seeing under a fictional mode means not inquiring about the conditions of the visual experience (the suspension of disbelief). Taking into account those conditions means a shift into the documentary mode. A documentary mode implies the description of the fabrication of the visual representation. But any such graft of the context of fabrication is included in second order fictional mode: i.e. it is perceveid without any inquiry about the conditions of the visual experience. We can further say that a cinematographic representation seen under a fictional mode is a repression of the documentary one : a denegation. The end of E la nave va inscribes this rhetoric in which a fictional mode is included in a documentary stance that is included in second order fictional mode. The rhetoric of the self-referential text makes manifest what is implied and repressed in any perceptive act.
world makes possible the displacement of the initial limits. The studio is then conceived as a case of the fictive world, another representation9.
3. Cinematographic instantiation of the allegory : the film The quest is represented in a figural manner - by the use of the motifs - quotations - revealed as such by the cinematographic discourse. The figural discourse (verbal or cinematographic) reiterates in a mirror gesture (posture) the figural quest of the character ; his journey in the world of signs, cinematographic signs. Fellini’s films are a combinatory of elements (motifs of symbolic units) who are iterated constantly; re-contextualized10. The mechanism of the moving picture is the quotation of itself in an endless chain of substitutions. The film is a kind of écriture. The most evident is 8 ½ where the chaotic search for a film is the film itself. The images of this film are auto-recursive signs and selfquotations. Nevertheless in other films the images present on 9
We see at work the mechanism of the ‘‘ greffe ’‘ (grafts) in Fellini nel cestino where fragments of several films are displaced from their context of origin and are included in new discourse (a ‘‘ supplementary ’‘ one). This film instantiates the figure of the indeterminate interview and of the discours de femme, constative and performative; a documentary and a fiction. The film is a commetary upon several fellinian sequences but it is made as an amalgame of the same fellinian motifs. Its structure quotes the very cinematographic motifs and images it is supposed to comment upon. At the level of the fellinian text it is a fake commentary or a story of its own invention. 10
See Deaca, Second Degree Carnival in the Work of Federico Felllini, Ph.D. thesis 1995, note 31, vol II: 442.
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the screen are quotations of images from other fellinian films. If we extend the limits of the text to the entire cinematographic work of Fellini then those images are also to be judged as selfreflective quotations. Fellini’s films are the rewriting of a finite set of motives (figures). The combinatory is done under the model of the discarding of the cards : each new combination is a new particular text. Each text, different from the other is the reordering of this finite set of motives. Nevertheless a certain set of features are to be extracted from the continuos recontextualization of this set of motives. These features permeate entities which belong to different domains. Disseminated through different entities that Fellini’s films constructs those feature create the structure of recursive pattern, where each entity designates another context of occurrence or a variant (a parent) one. The reference is made to indeterminate entities - ghosts in the machine - that contain ambivalent characteristics: i.e. have opposite features in their recovered or constructed aspect. As such the film becomes a continuous chain of quotations. Those quotations, by successive displacements, tend to the auto-recursive quotation, a final (eschatological) figure that engenders the fellinian cinematographic discourse itself. In a way Fellini’s work establishes a bridge between neo-platonic thought and derridean practice11.
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A discussion commented by Derrida in ‘‘ Comment ne pas parler ’‘ (1987:557sq).
The film produces (causes) a representation that represents and is its own structure; the cinematographic images are instances of use and mention of the sign or otherwise they are part of the diegetic world and comments upon it for and in the external world. Another main figure of fellinian film is the carnival itself. The Carnival represented is a structure that describes (designates) the film itself. The whole process is a quest of the absent that discovers, at the end of the journey, its own figure manifested as ‘‘ invention of the other ’‘ as différance. Fellini’s cinematographic texts are to be conceived as inventions (Derrida 1987) where ‘‘ l’archéologie et l’eschatologie se faisant signe dans l’ironie d’un seul istant ’‘ ‘‘ une bicorporalité ’‘ auto-reflexive ; ‘‘ un événément qui semble se produire en parlant de lui-même, par le fait d’en parler ’‘, that is produced ‘‘ en inventat le récit de son invention ’‘ because it invents itself by quoting itself. Fellini’s carnival is, in this sense, a second degree carnival. The definition of the actor - or the film itself - is figural definitions of figural entities12; they are the practice of the content designated. By their own construction - figural - those 12
Fellini comments in a figural manner upon the circus, en entity which he designates as ‘‘ the origin of all forms of spectacle ; even if that is not correct from the point of view of the chronology, we can say , at any rate that it encloses them altogether ’‘ (Renevey 1977).This figural manner is auto-recursive ‘‘ I am tempted to tell about the circus in a circus ’‘ and expressed as a denegation ‘‘ je ne sais rien du cirque (...) il me faut avouer aussi que je ne suis allée au cinéma que très peu de fois dans ma vie ’‘ ‘‘ même si je ne sais rien du cirque, je connais tout du cirque ’‘. This originary entity is designated by a denegatory text - a figural - and confounds itself with it.
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texts are allegorical in the sense that their are comments and practice of their own figural functioning13 4. Fellini’s film definition Fellini expresses his opinion about the ideal film. This film is founded by an absent and immobile image, the stand still picture hidden behind the moving picture: ‘‘ Le film est un tableau incomplet ; ce n’est pas le spectateur qui regarde, c’est le film qui se laisse regarder par le spectateur, selon des temps et des rythmes étrangers et imposés à qui le contemple. L’idée serait de faire un film avec une seule image éternellement fixe et riche d’un mouvement continu ’‘.14 Painting is passive; its meaning is internal and based upon a presence that one discovers. The film is an incomplete picture. The film differs continuously from itself. It can’t be grasped in itself it needs the other (the spectator) in order to be. But the other, the one that has the responsibility of the film, is created by the film itself (which imposes the rhythms 13
See in Deaca 1995:chapter 2:7 and 2notes:3-4-5, and 2notes:7 (Renevey 1977). 14
’‘ the idea would be to make a film with only one image forever fixed and at the same time full of a continuous movement ’‘) (the movie is an incomplete picture ; its not the spectator that sees, but the movie that lets himself be seen by the spectator, with times and rhythms external and imposed upon the one that looks at it (...) the picture everything is internal one must see in order to discover it ’‘
and the time). The relationship is indeterminate in the sense that is neither fully passive (be seen by the spectator) neither fully active (lets himself be seen). The meaning comes after, when the moment has passed, when the image is absent - an aporetical movement based on difference and deferral. We can call that a meaning continuously differed (différé). The cinematographic act is based upon the mechanism of absence; the mechanism of ‘‘différance’‘ is founding the cinematographic sense production. The spectator (and the meaning negotiated between the film and the spectator) himself is bound to a deconstructive co-presence of self and the other15. For Fellini the essence of cinema is this absence, 16 i.e. the fixed image which contains a paradoxical movement (an abstract movement). The ideal film would be a obtuse amalgam, an ‘‘impossibilia ’‘ that reunites the movement and 15
In Derrida 1987:10 : ‘‘ L’invention de l’autre, cela implique-t-il que l’autre reste encore moi, en moi, de moi, au mieux pour moi (projection, assimilation, intériorisation, introjection, apprésentation analogique, au mieux phénoménalité) ? Ou bien que mon invention de l’autre reste l’invention de moi par l’autre qui me trouve, me découvre, m’institue ou me constitue ? A me venir de lui, l’invention de l’autre alors lui reviendrait ’‘ ; ‘‘ L’autre c’est bien ce qui ne s’invente pas, et c’est donc la seule invention au monde, la seule invention du monde, la nôtre, mais celle qui nous invente. Car l’autre est toujours une autre origine du monde et nous sommes à inventer. Et l’être du nous, et l’être même. Au-delà de l’être (...) ’‘ ; La deconstruction dont je parle n’invente et n’affirme, elle ne laisse venir l’autre que dans la mésure où performative, elle ne l’est pas seulement mais continue à perturber les conditions du performatif et de ce qui le distingue paisiblement du constatif ’‘. 16
See Barthes in Obvie et obtus (1982) about the obtuse meaning in cinema.
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the stand-still ; the passive and the active ; the cinematographic and the other (be it the spectator) the same and the different , the continuous iteration of the same and the different. The movement instituted by this unattainable quest is realised in Fellini’s films through the repetition of the same motifs recontextualised each time differently. The quest of the film is to attain the monumental image - to recuperate the absence that founds the cinematographic act. Each new iteration of a motif or image is a new context and a new contextualisation. The meaning of the element is differed by its integration in new contexts and meaning is consequently deferred each time. The film itself, by a continuous internal intertextuality the repetition of a set of motifs -, creates a sentiment of immobilism. The element is no more transparent, it just quotes an immobile and absent ur-sign (originary), the cinematographic sign becomes an archaeology. The immobile is unattainable and continuously differed. Cinematographic meaning is founded by an absent immobile object. Each time this absence of movement is to be attained the very fact of its grasping creates a new shifting context, a continuous internal movement. Thus the film is created in the gap between the statuary and music.
Conclusion The object of the quest is disseminated in an endless chain of quotations, its iconic manifestations : the object and the sign are in a equivocal position. The film makes a ‘‘ mise-
en-scène ’‘ of a spectacle that makes what the film itself makes : a production of signs and figural spaces that reflect themselves in a auto-recursive way - that is a an allegory (De Man 1979:115-6, Leitch 1983:183-5). Fellini ’s film is an allegory in the sense of being a textual space of reinscription of a chain of figures, quotations that re write the idea of the continuous displacement of the content of an absent originary figure17 : i.e. the re-writing, the figural actualisation that substitutes this absence : the cinematographic text. 17
Metanarrative films as E la nave va, 8 1/2 and The Interview represent the genesis of the sign that produces in its turn the absence of the object designated and, at the same time, makes it present. This gesture is paradoxical and illustrates the aporias of self-reference. Fellinian film translates the history of the sign that annihilates the object and transforms it into a second order entity and, at the same time, it is the history of this transformation. If we identify the history represented with the concept of « artisticity », i.e. an originary included in the domain of art, then we will conclude that the originary is an indefinite figural. The initial object of reference is substituted with a figural discourse that is accessible. As other originary figures: the feminine principle, the clown, the mythlogical figure, the artistic sign, in its turn, is a figure already made by cultural tradition. In The Clowns the originary figure of the clown is instantiated in the scenario of the burial and revival; in Casanova the feminine principle is transcribed as the Pygmalion - Don Juan narrative ; in 8 ½ the film is manifested as the figure or the descent into hell ; in E la nave va the feminine genesic principle is the narrative of the journey et the mechanics of the sign and in Ginger and Fred the actor is the quotation of the cinematographic androgyne couple : Ginger and Fred. For the carnivalesque tradition the world relativity is conceived as a conceptualization of the self-recursive figure. The ambiguous visual figure - where an element can be perceived as figure or as background - is evident in Escher’s drawings, but is present also in the medieval fascination for the double figures (Baltrusaitis 1988). It represents, for Jung, is the subject matter of the alchemical text and of the psychic mechanism. Writing or making films is, in this case, operating in the depth of a palimpsest and where the artist manifests itself as ambiguity, irony or equivocal position (Hartmann 1981:14). What remains out of
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Bibliography Baltrusaitis Jurgis. 1988. Reveils et prodiges. Paris : Flammarion St. Genneviève Barthes Roland. 1982. L'obvie et l'obtus. Essais critiques III. Seuil Colonna Francesco. 1994. Le Songe de Poliphile. Paris : Imprimerie Nationale 2 vol Culler Jonathan. 1982. On Deconstructon. Theory and Criticism in the Seventies. Ithaca NY Cornell University Press De Man Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading. Yale University Derrida Jacques. 1987. Psyché. Paris : Galilée Hartmann Geoffrey. 1981. Saving the Text. The John Hopkins University Press Leitch Vincent B.. 1983. Deconstructive Criticism. An Advanced Introduction. Columbia University Press Renevey Monica. 1977. Le grand livre du cirque. Edito Service S.A.. Genève (2 vol.) (Préface par Federico Fellini) Searle John. 1983. Intentionality; Cambridge University Press Wind Edgar. 1992. Mystères paiens de la renaissance. Paris: Gallimard
the process of creation is only the quotation. Words, images, signs that constitute the text are just the remnants or the ruins of an entity otherwise untouchable: « a symbol the can be defined as a trace, what remains, a stubborn surplus able to motivate and be motivated by the text » (Hartman 1981:15).
