“If you look at a thing too directly, you don’t see it…you can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background.”(Slavoj Zizek, 2005).
There is a marvelous tension between foreground & background in Senso. If you look at the foreground, it is a sexual adventure, with a kind of desperate ending. But if you look at the background, you see historicized events of unification and national struggle.The film allows us to see the absurdity of Livia and Franz’s lives by placing them against the signs of social change. By framing and presenting these characters as fundamentally lost and flawed, Visconti allows us to see the background even more sharply.
Melancholia
The melancholia of Senso expresses a certain pessimism Visconti felt towards the social and political bleakness of post World War II Italy. Viconti’s melancholic anti-heroes “need not be particularly for the bourgeois revolution, so long as [they are] not against it (Kristeva 2002, 47–50). “To stand outside society and its chaining relationships is the impulse of the typical Viscontian hero . . .”(Nicholls, 2006; 13).
Franz’s desire in Senso is to avoid the duty of the army, his nation, even his lovers. His character is of particular interest to Visconti because he represents a melancholia brought about by the dissolution of grand narratives after World War II. Referencing Visconti’s The Leopard, Mark Nicholls writes:
“This idea of the Romantic General, the popular hero of the Left, is also subject to constant re-definition throughout the film. In fact, each of Fabrizio’s key encounters with characters who represent the movements and moments of Risorgimento politics seems to modify this picture of Garibaldi, lurking behind the text. It is this mythological face of Garibaldi in the film, weathering so many changes, appropriations and opportunistic transformations, which centers and signifies the melancholy crisis facing Fabrizio. (Nicholls, 2006; 101).
Death to modernism
This dissolution of romantic modernist narratives of the ‘hero’ is also a central motif in Senso. Franz represents a new “root-less” personality, explaining to Livia that he is no longer “an officer or a gentleman. I’m a deserter and a drunk,” and later, “I’m not your romantic hero.”
For Franz, the world can no longer be classed through binaries which oppose high from low, aristocracy from the lower classes. Bacon describes the depiction of the loneliness of “people caged in the ideals of the past” as a central motif in Visconti’s films. When Livia confronts Franz in his apartment, he belittles her position as a “real lady” encouraging the prostitute to follow the antiquated codes of hospitality which seem absurd in the situation of war and chaos. Franz calls Livia a ‘tramp’ and destroys any perceived difference between her and the prostitute, Clara. In his Risorgimento films Visconti creates conflict between ‘modernist’ & ‘postmodernist’ characters. In the beginning of the novel from which the film was adapted, Livia states:
“They say the sum of philosophy consists of knowing oneself: i have studied myself with such apprehension for so many years, hour by hour, minute by minute, that i believe i know myself through and through and can consider myself to be a perfect lady philosopher.”(quoted in Bacon, 1998; 64).
This totalizing drive of Livia mirrors Visconti’s later construction of the Prince Don Fabrizio Salina in The Leopard. Fabrizo’s identity is ‘set in stone’ and his desire to fully know the world is shown through the observatory props, which enable a totalizing view of one’s place in time and space. Into the worlds of these modernist characters come individuals who are in states of becoming rather than being: in Senso Franz is the prime example, in The Leopard, Tancredi. These figures represent the dissolution of distinct identities that coincided with the end of WWII. They are opportunistic, shallow and lack loyalty.
Characterization is challenged by Visconti in Senso, a film which sustains “distance between character and spectator through the film.” (Rocchio, 199; 135). The detached and analytical spectatorship is developed through a predominance of long/medium shots, high camera angles, and a lack of exposition and explanation of character motives – such techniques distance the viewer and encourage a critical reading of Livia and Franz. The death of his cinematographer during the filming of Senso creates a nice visual inconsistency that echoes the state of Franz and Livia’s identities.
In Senso the fragmented nature of identity is established early, perhaps most emphatically in the scene where Franz and Livia walk the streets after the performance. Franz picks up a fragment of a mirror from the ground, and stares at his reflection, commenting: “I always look when i pass a mirror. It’s to affirm that i exist.”Lacan’s Mirror Stage
His desire to locate himself as an entity relates to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the Mirror stage: the stage an infant passes through when becoming a subject. According to Lacan, the moment when an infant sees his reflection for the first time is an essential stage in identity formation – this is the moment at which the infant sees for the first time himself not as simply an attachment to his/her mother, a breast, etc, but as a complete, single entity.
This phase produces the ‘ideal-i’ or the self image which the subject always attempts to re-create in himself. Franz’s constant desire to “keep looking” expresses the loss of identity popularized by postmodern theorists – a breakdown in the mirror stage. Franz is ultimately unknowable and confusing to Livia, because his identity is in broken into fragments like the mirror he picks up and later discards. He cannot locate himself, and perhaps this is why he creates the false identity of the lover, the seducer, the hero, the soldier. Franz explains that his generation adopts the signifiers of identity: “Our generation are children,” and he continue, “we like wearing uniforms.”
His distrust of the signifiers of identity is a common theme in Visconti’s Risorgimento films; similarly in The Leopard, Fabrizio makes snide comments about Tancredi’s adoption of different uniforms as the political tides change. To modernist romantics like Fabrizio and Livia, one’s identity and uniform should not change – yet the melancholic admits his identity as a construction – Franz laments to Livia – “your idea of me is a pure invention”
Senso suggests that personalities and wars are constructed in similar ways to opera – and to extrapolate from this point – that the concept of unification as being driven by the people was a romantic, idealistic notion. The excellent line “This is the kind of war that suits the Italians: showers of confetti to the sound of mandolins” hints that nationhood, identity and community are ‘operatic’ constructions, they are ‘imagined communities’. Visconti’s melancholic protagonists in Senso & The Leopard end up adopting the ideologies and gestures of melodrama that they are opposed to. As Bacon writes:
“Livia says she like opera, ‘but not when it takes place outside of the stage, or when people behave like the heroes of melodrama, without thinking of the consequences.’ It sounds as if she is criticizing Franz…but as the story progresses, it turns out that she might as well have been talking about herself.”(Bacon, 1998; 73).
“The question is no longer, how can thoughts, feelings and personal experiences hold sway in the sphere of political power. The question now, after Hiroshima and the Final Solution, is: how can they be denied? How can there be anything else?”(Nicholls, 2006; 106).
Visconti chooses a technique and genre that prioritizes such questions of a break down in identity, putting melancholic characters in conflict with the totalizing narratives of history and unification.
Bibliography:
Bacon, H, The Risorgimento films, in Visconti: Explorations of beauty & decay, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon, Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
Nicholls, Mark; Visconti’s Il gattopardo: Melancholia and the Radical Sensibility, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23/02/97, 2006
Nowell Smith, G, Senso in Luchino Visconti, BFI, London, 1967
Rocchio, V, Senso: Degenerate Melodrama, in Cinema of Anxiety: a Psychoanalysis of italian neo-realism, University of Texas Press, 1999
Filmography:
Visconti, Luchino, Senso, 119m, Technicolor, 1954
Visconti, Luchino, Il Gattopardo, 187m, Technicolor, 1963
Fiennes, Sophie, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, (written by Slavoj Zizek) 150mins, Color, 2006
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