The Art of Writing with Light: The Photographic Presence in Italian Film, 1948-1978

This dissertation offers a cultural analysis of still photography. Both my mode of analysis and my topic of inquiry have largely been marginalized in North American Italian Studies as a result of the medium's perceived ties to technology rather than to art. In the specific case of Italian film studies, this perception has led to a strictly formal analysis of the relationship between photography and cinema, at the expense of its narrative and reflexive meanings which will be the focus of this dissertation. Through the deep interdisciplinary interpretation of select films from the perspective of photography conceived of as 1) an instrument of writing and 2) an instrument of perception, the dissertation reveals the many ways in which the logic and language of photography inscribe and illuminate meaning within an individual film providing, at the same time, a means of reflecting on the poetics of a film's maker. In highlighting photography's narrative and reflexive functions in individual films, The Art of Writing with Light ultimately demonstrates how photography offers a unique perspective from which to reflect on the cinema of Italy.;The first chapter "Neorealism's Not So Heavenly Gaze: Photography as Icon in Roberto Rossellini's "La macchina ammazzacatti" is an exploration of how, through the moral education of the film's main protagonist, Rossellini's attempts to distance his work from the interpretive strategies of cinematic realism, which he believed marred the reception of his films. In its stead, he enacts a film practice whose mode of reading is based not on the documentation of reality, but on the artistic representation of truth. Such a filmmaking approach---recuperating the poetics of Paisa ---interprets reality through the filter of the imagination, and enables the camera to perceive what neorealist aesthetics ultimately masks.;The second chapter "Plotting the Odetta Theorem and Corollary: Photography as Medusa in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema" analyzes the role of photography in Pasolini's allegorical film which explores the loss of the sacred in modernity through the figure of a mysterious stranger who arrives and departs the home of the film's protagonists. Image discourses---in the form of the graphic sign, paintings, religious icons and photography---play an integral role in such an exploration, mediating our perceptions of the characters, their encounters with the visitor, and finally how the individual family members come to terms with the house guest's departure. This chapter is specifically concerned with the mediating role photography, exploring how and why the medium facilitates our knowledge of the character with which it is associated, the unfolding of her sexual encounter with the visitor, and ultimately precipitates, upon his departure, her fall into catatonia. Embedded in such a discussion are also the ways in which photography functions as an instrument of critique with which Pasolini contests mimetic filmmaking practices. With the help of montage, the director articulates a theory of cinematic reading and writing which runs counter to the interpretive strategies he believes to be responsible for the homogenization of society taking place in the Italy of his time.;The third chapter is titled "Living Pictures and Shifting Frames: Photography as Tableau (Vivant) in Ettore Scola's Una giornata Particolare." The chapter investigates how the photographs found in the apartments of the film's protagonists serve as both a site of character development as well as one of reflection in which the viewer can explore Ettore Scola's filmmaking approach. In particular, it calls the viewer to attend to the types of stories he chooses to tell and how he goes about telling them, a mode of filmmaking which can be understood in terms of the tableau vivant. A theatrical and photographic genre tied to visuality and vocality, the tableau vivant is a unique mode with which to investigate how, in Una giornata particolare, Scola enacts in his desire to reframe the historic gaze and provide a voice for its newly visible subjects---one which is often in conflict with those more commonly heard.;The dissertation closes with an epilogue titled "The Art of Writing with Light: Photography as Lantern in Lalla Romano's La penumbra che abbiamo attraversato" which explores the applicability of the photographic approach to the textual analysis of literature through a reading of Romano's 1964 fictionalized memoir. Although scholars have noted the photographic presence in La penombra they have, for the most part, restricted its role to that of the document and the proverbial memento mori. The multidimensional role that the medium plays within the novel's poetics and stylistics is thus rendered flat. A close analysis of the novel, however, reveals that photography is no mere meditation on death or monument of memory. Rather, it is also an instrument of perception and representation that illuminates and inscribes the protagonist's voyage through memory, giving it intelligibility and ultimately fashioning its very emplotment..