Freccero on Blow-Up : Toward a Macro-Vision of Italian Film

Abstract

Freccero on Blow-Up:Toward a Macro-Vision of Italian Film Millicent Marcus (bio) I can pin-point the exact moment of my conversion to Italian cinema studies. It happened in Spring 1970 when Freccero delivered the lecture that would form the basis of his ground-breaking essay "Blow-Up: From the Word to the Image." Though I could never have begun to fathom the career-defining effects of this lecture at the time, on some level I sensed that radically new scholarly prospects were opening before me. First and foremost I was struck by Freccero's daring critical leap, across centuries, cultural registers, and disciplines, from Dante to Antonioni, from the rarefied reaches of the 14th century Italian poetics to the mass media representation of mod London in the late 1960's, or more broadly, from the "Word" to the "Image" of his article's subtitle. That my professor of Dante studies, who had led me through the winding pathways of medieval philosophy, theology and literature, to arrive at a reading of the Commedia as a summa of Western thought and as a touchstone for all subsequent Italian cultural evolution, would subject a contemporary film to his most rigorous and learned scrutiny—this struck me with the force of revelation. But to take the full measure of Freccero's break-through achievement, we must "historicize" the entrance of cinema studies into the Academy. On the threshold of the 1970's, film was unthinkable as course material within the Liberal Arts curriculum, which consigned such study to vocationally tainted Schools of Communications. But by bringing his most sophisticated and learned critical techniques to bear on [End Page S224] Antonioni's work, Freccero elevated the film to the highest level of textual seriousness. And he did so by showing precisely how the filmmaker himself, within Blow-Up, makes explicit the passage from high to mass cultural pursuits, from censorious to complicit use of the media, in short, from "Word" to "Image." I began this paper by invoking the metaphor of conversion to explain my disciplinary turn in the aftermath of the lecture on Blow-Up, and I'd like to develop that metaphor, given its centrality to Freccero's own scholarly quest. If conversion is literally a "turning around," in my case it was also a "turning away"—away from the moralizing association of the movie screen with the back wall of Plato's cave, the place of mystification and illusion that keeps its occupants in a state of untruth. Freccero's analysis broke down the either-or distinction between film and literary text, between cinema as a shadowy simulacrum of the material world, and the written word as a step toward enlightenment. In making Blow-Up the focus of his most impassioned interpretive scrutiny, Freccero gave his benediction to the film medium as the venue for working through the anxiety that has always accompanied the mimetic arts, from Plato on, with their power to seduce us away from the path to true knowledge. Cinema is ideally equipped to bring that anxiety to a head thanks to its technologically-driven claim to reproduce the "real." But self-conscious filmmakers build into their art an awareness of the equivocal powers of illusionism that the technology puts at their disposal. Bertolucci does so at the end of The Conformist, literally enacting the myth of Plato's cave as an allegory for the mechanisms of filmic projection. I'd like to show you a clip from the film's enigmatic final frames, which include all of the ingredients of Plato's scenario, but positioned in such a way as to confound any easy reading of the analogy it suggests. Everything is there: the grotto in the coliseum façade; the fire; the prison bars; the shadowy object of desire; someone who looks. When Marcello turns his gaze into the camera our own location within the cave of cinema is exposed. Film may be a mere exercise in illusionism, Bertolucci is saying, but it also has the power to unmask and to examine its status as lie. Antonioni will do this in Blow Up, by challenging the basis of the cinema's truth claims, as...