A proposito di cinema, letteratura e contesto sociale

Abstract

Does a connection between the cinema and literature exist? And if so, who stands to benefit? It is a question which is still open and would appear to indicate a difficult marriage, if not an impossibile co-habitation, since every artistic production has its internal autonomy, incapable of transference to other fields. On the other hand, it can be assumed that human beings have the substantial possibility of a religious discourse firmly fixed in ultimate values, which do not allow for change without falling into heresy, and of a scientific discourse characterized, instead, by the possibility of self-correction. To these two can be added poetic discourse, which expresses universal meanings through intuition and does not allow for standardized methodological procedures lest one sinks into mannerism and mechanical repetition. It follows that it would appear to be wrong to contrast cinema with music, painting or literature: it is a question of peers as James Agee asserts in «Let Us Now Praise Famous Men». The cinema's characteristic, in the sense of absolute and qualifying originality, lies in the fact that a film is of necessity a time flow, so that the spectator links his existential time to that of the film. In order to understand the complex, two-way connection between cinema and narrative, one must recall the psychological novel, that Leon Edel dwelt on, between 1900 and 1950. This underlines how, as a result of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, the writer of psychological novels seeks to «create the illusion of a mental flow of thoughts and images and impressions», in which «mechanical time gives way to psychological time; thoughts are shown in their state of kinetic flow». To sum up, seeking to express an «evanescent and elusive thought» is nothing but a kind of realism.