‘GHOSTS, SCARS AND GODS’: BRINGING THE ITALIAN SPECTATOR INTO VIEW

Abstract

In contention with the contradictions of poststructuralism, and as a kind of commentary to an article published contemporaneously by Roland Barthes in France, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote of political engagement, ‘‘‘Sospendere il senso’’: ecco una stupenda epigrafe per quella che potrebbe essere una nuova descrizione dell’impegno, del mandato dello scrittore’. For Barthes, the writer should construct meanings (‘construire des sens’), but leave them open (‘ne pas les remplir’), thus allowing the completion of the meaning (signifiO) to take place beyond the author. Restricting ourselves to cinema, rather than literature (though not coincidentally Pasolini writes this in his noted article, ‘La fine dell’avanguardia’, where he exposes the intrinsic capacity of film to reflect the real, thus transcending literature), this ‘epigraph’ offers a very provocative revision of how engagement works, categorically shifting the attention away from the writer (or at least her mandato). The significance of this suggestion is well illustrated by the return made to this part of the essay by scholars of impegno more recently: in Fragments of Impegno, Jennifer Burns quotes Pasolini directly, reading his work more explicitly in terms of the need to shift the functioning of impegno ‘from an author-centric towards a reader-centric paradigm’ (p. 35). Almost ten years later, the same point (this time in citation of Burns) is picked up by Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug in the volume Postmodern Impegno, once again calling directly for a greater authority for the reader (or, in our case, spectator). In relation to cinema d’impegno specifically, ‘sospendere il senso’ is no doubt a highly tense and problematic process, first and foremost because, for Pasolini and Barthes, it appears contradictorily to remain an authorial act (‘il mandato dell autore’). Moreover, this is a process which does not lend itself to any familiar historical logic: when the models of engagement that we know in the Italian case are the paternalistic auteur films of directors likeFrancescoRosi, it appearsuncomfortable, albeitnot impossible, toarticulate in any obvious terms how the spectator could ‘bring’ the engagement theoretically to just any text. In other words, films such as those of Rosi come with explicit political aims, and their signifiO is relatively well established, with little room for interpretative manoeuvre. The sheer volume of possible films that could be considered ‘impegnati’ when ‘sospendendo il senso’ would moreover become overwhelming, and perhaps insulting to our familiar genre of Political Cinema: suddenly La classe operaia va in paradise (Elio Petri, 1971) and Il caso Mattei (Francesco Rosi, 1972) could go hand in hand with, for instance, Ti amo in tutte le lingue del mondo (Leonardo Pieraccioni, 2005), an episode of Un medico in famiglia (1998–present), or the video for Meno male che Silvio c’O (2008). The Italianist, 34. 2, 265–267, June 2014