Eco on film

Abstract

Let me only subreptitiously add that I do not believe it is possible to understand the social relevance and the aesthetics functioning of a movie without focusing it from a semiotic point of view. But…qui l'ho detto e qui lo nego, in this precise moment I say this and in this precise moment I deny to have said it. (Umberto Eco, “on the Contribution of Film to Semiotics,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies , 2, 1(1977): 1–14) In Eco's History of Beauty – an excursus on aesthetic ideals of the beautiful, the sublime, and the marvellous from antiquity to the present – the author begins in the last chapter to discuss contemporary media as distinguished respectively by beauty of “provocation” and beauty of “consumption” (Umberto Eco (ed.), History of Beauty . trans. Alstair mcEwen New york: Rizzoli, 2004, pp. 413–18). whereas the former category is associated with avant-garde artists such as Picasso, beauty of consumption belongs to the mass media and finds its privileged habitat in the cinema. Pictures of classic movie stars from Rita Hayworth and Anita Ekberg, flamboyantly featured in stills from Gilda and La Dolce Vita , to James Dean and marcello mastroianni, are displayed to underscore the “totally democratic” quality of film, offering “a model of Beauty” for everyone, whether they identify with the “svelte Audrey Hepburn” or the “blue-collar charm of Robert De Niro” (pp. 420–5). It is, however, not merely through the star system that the cinema invites the audience to participate in its aesthetic and communicative practices.