Abstract
Chapter 8 is a study of Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943), a film universally recognised as a masterpiece and foundational work of Italian neorealism, which has inspired new realist film currents and independent productions around the globe. Accordingly, it has been scrutinised from a variety of angles by successive generations of scholars. Yet, as is the case with any masterpiece of this magnitude, the possibilities of novel approaches to it are inexhaustible. In this chapter, I revisit the crucial topic of realism in Ossessione through a perspective hitherto underexplored in scholarship on the film, namely the contribution of opera and music to its realist endeavour. Under this light, Ossessione changes into an accomplished example of the aspiration to the total artwork. This chapter segues from the previous part on Intermedial Passages by extending film's intermedial dialogues into the territory of opera, a medium, since Wagner, associated with the idea of 'total artwork'. 'Totality' here must, however, be dissociated from a Wagnerian absolutist endeavour as much as the totalitarianisms that led Europe into a world war in the 1940s. Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943) , the film in question here, was born, in the middle of the Second World War, as the first open rebellion against fascist propaganda, accomplished not least by bringing a then fashionable opera film genre down to the reality of life, or 'the reality of art', as Visconti's famously put it (1978: 84) . Ossessione is a universally recognised masterpiece and foundational work of Italian Neorealism, the most influential film movement of all times, which has inspired new realist film currents and independent productions around the entire world. Accordingly, it has been scrutinised from a variety of angles by successive generations of scholars. 1 Yet, as is the case with any masterpiece of this magnitude, the possibilities of novel approaches to it are inexhaustible. Indeed, a meticulously researched paper on Ossessione, by Lorenzo Fabbri (2019) , which reads its queer subplot as an implicit anti-fascist manifesto, has recently made the cover of the journal Screen. Original points on Ossessione are also made in the newly launched and highly erudite book, Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art, by Ivo Blom (2017) , which looks at Visconti's work through the lens of intermediality -or 'intervisuality', as the author defines it -focusing on film and painting. In this chapter, I shall revisit the crucial topic of realism in Ossessione through a perspective hitherto underexplored in scholarship on the film, namely the contribution of opera and music to its realist endeavour. As is well known, Visconti was an active opera and theatre director, occupations he maintained throughout his film-directing career and which had a profound effect on the way he directed actors and contributed to set and costume design as well as the general mise-en-scène of his films. However, probably because opera is perceived as a sophisticated, expensive and extremely artificial form of art and entertainment, attention to the operatic inflections of his oeuvre has hitherto been reserved to his ostensibly opulent films, focusing on aristocratic or royal dramas, such as Senso (1954) and Ludwig (1973) , made long after the dissolution of the neorealist project. To all appearances, Ossessione falls out of the operatic bracket given its focus on the poor and partially illiterate echelons of the Italian population, composed of tramps, peddlers, innkeepers and prostitutes, with emphasis on physical, rather than intellectual, phenomena, such as dirt, hunger, sex, sweat and vomit. However, opera is not only played in the film's diegesis, but is a key element of its plot. From its very beginning, the film assails the spectator's senses with Giuseppe Rosati's loud, menacing nondiegetic orchestral music, played out here in the manner of an opera overture, over the tracking shot of a dirt road, as seen through the windscreen of a fast-moving truck. Strings and wind instruments swirl up then cascade down repeatedly, ending with banging drums and screeching horns that anticipate the double deaths on the road ensuing from the adulterous love story that follows. Such onomatopoeic and symbolic musical motifs, rife in the opera genre, transition smoothly into the intradiegetic opera and other musical pieces played in the next 1 biblioVisconti in three volumes (2001) (2002) (2003) (2004) (2005) (2006) (2007) (2008) (2009) compiles thousands of publications on Visconti and his films. Blom (2017: 25 n61 ) also lists an extensive number of publications on Visconti in several European languages. scenes as a means to describe the main characters. The first of them is the Andante aria, 'Di Provenza il mar il suol', from La Traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, sung by the innkeeper, Giuseppe Bragana, before his on-camera appearance, whose lyrics -a father's plea for his son to come home -present a remarkable parallel to his own story in the film (a subject explored in the fourth section of this chapter). The other two protagonists are also linked to intradiegetic musical motifs, Bragana's wife Giovanna to a then popular song, Carlo Buti's 'Fiorin Fiorello', which she also sings off-camera before being revealed to the viewer, as a kind of siren song that entices the wandering tramp Gino Costa into her husband's inn and bed; and Gino's tune played out on his harmonica, in the manner of American western heroes. A legion of other symbolic and ominous tunes and sounds populate the audio track, culminating in the central scene of the opera contest, in which the protagonists' fate is sealed against the backdrop of popular opera arias delivered by a succession of amateur singers. Ascents and descents, sloping surfaces and rooftops suggesting falls and deaths are among the visual motifs borrowed from expressionist (and antirealist) cinema in Ossessione (among its multiple film and art references), starting with the very film title displayed diagonally across the frame and lavishly expanded on by a camera choreography that travels low to explore the characters' ragged footwear and high to enhance the universal reach of their feelings and plights. The film's rollercoaster opening tune presents a perfect match to these visual motifs, which are suggestive of danger as much as providers of a link between the characters' low social status and mythical -in this case Oedipal -drama. As Gramsci had once observed, a propos of Verdi, 'Italian artistic "democracy" had a musical, rather than literary, expression', creating a cultural vocabulary that circulated across all social classes, from aristocrats such as Visconti to roadside innkeepers as represented by Bragana in Ossessione. Gramsci (n/d: 54) goes on to say: scenes as a means to describe the main characters. The first of them is the Andante aria, ‘Di Provenza il mar il suol’, from La Traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, sung by the innkeeper, Giuseppe Bragana, before his on-camera appearance, whose lyrics – a father’s plea for his son to come home – present a remarkable parallel to his own story in the film (a subject explored in the fourth section of this chapter). The other two protagonists are also linked to intradiegetic musical motifs, Bragana’s wife Giovanna to a then popular song, Carlo Buti’s ‘Fiorin Fiorello’, which she also sings off-camera before being revealed to the viewer, as a kind of siren song that entices the wandering tramp Gino Costa into her husband’s inn and bed; and Gino’s tune played out on his harmonica, in the manner of American western heroes. A legion of other symbolic and ominous tunes and sounds populate the audio track, culminating in the central scene of the opera contest, in which the protagonists’ fate is sealed against the backdrop of popular opera arias delivered by a succession of amateur singers. Ascents and descents, sloping surfaces and rooftops suggesting falls and deaths are among the visual motifs borrowed from expressionist (and antirealist) cinema in Ossessione (among its multiple film and art references), starting with the very film title displayed diagonally across the frame and lavishly expanded on by a camera choreography that travels low to explore the characters’ ragged footwear and high to enhance the universal reach of their feelings and plights. The film’s rollercoaster opening tune presents a perfect match to these visual motifs, which are suggestive of danger as much as providers of a link between the characters’ low social status and mythical – in this case Oedipal – drama. As Gramsci had once observed, a propos of Verdi, ‘Italian artistic “democracy” had a musical, rather than literary, expression’, creating a cultural vocabulary that circulated across all social classes, from aristocrats such as Visconti to roadside innkeepers as represented by Bragana in Ossessione. Gramsci (n/d: 54) goes on to say: In Italy, music was able to an extent to replace, within popular culture, that artistic expression which, in other countries, was supplied by the popular novel, and […] the geniuses of music had a popularity that men of letters could not achieve.2 In Italy, music was able to an extent to replace, within popular culture, that artistic expression which, in other countries, was supplied by the popular novel, and […] the geniuses of music had a popularity that men of letters could not achieve. 2 ssessione, with its array of humble opera and music lovers, singers and players, provides eloquent illustration of this cultural phenomenon. Richard Dyer (2006: 28) states, quite rightly, that: 'The typical subject of neo-realism cannot speak for themselves: music is needed to speak for them'. However, he is wrong to conclude: 'But that music will not be their music'. At least in the case of Ossessione, and in line with Gramsci's thought, the opera that informs the melodramatic non-diegetic score is also the utmost expression of the dispossessed and the working classes. In fact, opera lies at the very genesis of the film. Just before engaging with an (unauthorised) adaptation, in collaboration with a host of legendary neorealist and literary personalities, 3 of James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice into what was initially known as Palude (or Marshes) and then Ossessione, Visconti had contributed to the directing, designing and editing of Tosca (also known in English as The Story of Tosca, Carl Koch and Jean Renoir, 1941), a film adapted from the play La Tosca, by Victorien Sardou, and its opera version Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini on a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Moreover, as Blom (2017b: 150) reminds us, in the 1930s, in fascist Italy, it was fashionable to make films with opera singers or adapting operas to the screen. This combines with an artist who himself claimed, according to his biographer Laurence Schifano, to have been born under the sign of opera, and of Verdi in particular: I was born 2 November 1906, at eight o'clock in the evening. Years later, I was told that an hour later the curtain went up at La Scala on the umpteenth première of La Traviata. (Visconti apud Schifano 1990 : 40) Schifano (1990: 40-41) goes on to explain: Visconti […] knew that the brilliant 1906-7 season began not with La Traviata but with Carmen, under the direction of the fiery Arturo Toscanini. But by tampering slightly with historical fact he used Verdi's radiant influence to illuminate his own life, made it a part of his personal mythology. The pride of place given to La Traviata in Visconti's very first film as a director testifies to his life-long devotion to Verdi, which would resurface in his later works, notably in The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963) , in the form of 3 The 'official' collaborators on Ossessione's screenplay are: Mario Alicata, Antonio Pietrangeli, Gianni Puccini, Giuseppe de Santis and Luchino Visconti. However, biblioVisconti (2009: 263) cites a host of other confirmed and non-confirmed collaborators, including Alberto Moravia, Mario Puccini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Sergio Grieco, demonstrating the team work prevailing in those days of fight for liberation. the hitherto unpublished 'Valzer Brillante', by Verdi, discovered by Visconti and played out in an adaptation by Nino Rota for the famous ball dance between Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. Visconti's own career as an opera director climaxed with the staging of La Traviata at La Scala, in Milan, in 1955, starring the world's most celebrated diva, Maria Callas, as Violetta Valéry, and Giuseppe di Stefano as Alfredo Germont. Despite all evidence, however, the structuring presence of opera and music in Ossessione continues to be either overlooked or misinterpreted as a satirical device. Fabbri (2019: 19) , for example, explains away the use of opera in the film as a means of ridiculing Bragana and his love of Verdi, 'an author who, with his tales of lost homelands, is crucial to the development of Italian nationalism'. Blom's first serious analysis of the hitherto little seen and underestimated film Tosca perceptively locates procedures of narrative suspense which Visconti would expand on in Ossessione, some of them concerning sound, but stops short of noticing the operatic links between the two films. Nowell-Smith (2011: 25) is almost alone in acknowledging the influence of opera and theatre in Ossessione's mise en scène, though in a rather unfavourable light: the hitherto unpublished ‘Valzer Brillante’, by Verdi, discovered by Visconti and played out in an adaptation by Nino Rota for the famous ball dance between Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. Visconti’s own career as an opera director climaxed with the staging of La Traviata at La Scala, in Milan, in 1955, starring the world’s most celebrated diva, Maria Callas, as Violetta Valéry, and Giuseppe di Stefano as Alfredo Germont. Despite all evidence, however, the structuring presence of opera and music in Ossessione continues to be either overlooked or misinterpreted as a satirical device. Fabbri (2019: 19), for example, explains away the use of opera in the film as a means of ridiculing Bragana and his love of Verdi, ‘an author who, with his tales of lost homelands, is crucial to the development of Italian nationalism’. Blom’s first serious analysis of the hitherto little seen and underestimated film Tosca perceptively locates procedures of narrative suspense which Visconti would expand on in Ossessione, some of them concerning sound, but stops short of noticing the operatic links between the two films. Nowell-Smith (2011: 25) is almost alone in acknowledging the influence of opera and theatre in Ossessione’s mise en scène, though in a rather unfavourable light: The first striking thing about this formal [narrative] articulation is how simple it is, and how conventional. The form is that traditional to classical theatre and opera, a series of scenes involving two or at most three people at a time. This formal articulation reflects (or determines: the two are inseparable) the structure and development of the relations between characters, who form a series of couples. He goes on to explain this set up as the awkward beginning of a ‘far tighter construction’ in Visconti’s later films, ‘which respects much more the com plexity of social bonds’ (25). Taking advantage of this gap in Viscontian scholarship, my argument here will be that opera, and the use of music in general, in Ossessione, is perhaps where realism is most profoundly at play, a realism derived from the ‘reality of art’, to use Visconti’s expression in his 1943 manifesto ‘Anthropomorphic Cinema’ (1978: 84). I will start with a reflection on how Ossessione’s reputed realism withdraws itself from the poetics of the everyday life championed by neorealist writers such Cesare Zavattini and realist cinema’s foremost theorist, André Bazin. Instead I will propose a possible location of the Real in the film’s mythic structure, which resonates with Verdi’s own realist turn in the mid-nineteenth century, as represented by La Traviata, which brought French realism back to Italy in the form of 206 REALIST CINEMA AS WORLD CINEMA verismo, an artistic school inflected by both social realism and mythical symbolism. I will then investigate the genesis of Visconti’s particular brand of realism in light of both his relation with Jean Renoir’s poetic realism and the official, patriotic realism of his time, as evidenced in the film Tosca. The following section will study the way in which opera modulates from an overt mode in Tosca to a covert mode in Ossessione, thanks to its entwining with the diegesis and combination with realist cinematic procedures, such as the long take and the long shot, as evidenced in the central scene of the opera contest. I shall conclude by summarising the film’s drive towards a total work of art as an attempt at a hybrid, all-encompassing kind of realism, reflecting human longings and ambitions beyond the characters’ social class. The first striking thing about this formal [narrative] articulation is how simple it is, and how conventional. The form is that traditional to classical theatre and opera, a series of scenes involving two or at most three people at a time. This formal articulation reflects (or determines: the two are inseparable) the structure and development of the relations between characters, who form a series of couples. He goes on to explain this set up as the awkward beginning of a 'far tighter construction' in Visconti's later films, 'which respects much more the complexity of social bonds' (25). Taking advantage of this gap in Viscontian scholarship, my argument here will be that opera, and the use of music in general, in Ossessione, is perhaps where realism is most profoundly at play, a realism derived from the 'reality of art', to use Visconti's expression in his 1943 manifesto 'Anthropomorphic Cinema' (1978: 84) . I will start with a reflection on how Ossessione's reputed realism withdraws itself from the poetics of the everyday life championed by neorealist writers such Cesare Zavattini and realist cinema's foremost theorist, André Bazin. Instead I will propose a possible location of the Real in the film's mythic structure, which resonates with Verdi's own realist turn in the mid-nineteenth century, as represented by La Traviata, which brought French realism back to Italy in the form of verismo, an artistic school inflected by both social realism and mythical symbolism. I will then investigate the genesis of Visconti's particular brand of realism in light of both his relation with Jean Renoir's poetic realism and the official, patriotic realism of his time, as evidenced in the film Tosca. The following section will study the way in which opera modulates from an overt mode in Tosca to a covert mode in Ossessione, thanks to its entwining with the diegesis and combination with realist cinematic procedures, such as the long take and the long shot, as evidenced in the central scene of the opera contest. I shall conclude by summarising the film's drive towards a total work of art as an attempt at a hybrid, all-encompassing kind of realism, reflecting human longings and ambitions beyond the characters' social class.
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