Browsing by Subject "Cinematography"

This dissertation investigates the relation between narrative forms, in both literature and cinema, and historical moments of deep crises of the social order: the interregnum between Fascism and First Republic in Italy; the decolonization process in Algeria seen from metropolitan France; and the worker and student struggles of the Sixties and the Seventies. The goal of my analysis is to show how a traumatic reality can fracture the ideological discourse dominant in a specific historical moment, leaving a mark on the structural and formal (rhetorical) construction of the work of art. My analysis begins with Naples immediately after World War II, by focusing on the works of Curzio Malaparte and Anna Maria Ortese. I then move to Paris in the aftermath of the Algerian War, to analyze the early films of Éric Rohmer, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, and Agnès Varda. My investigation proceeds by examining workers’ struggles in Northern Italy in Vogliamo tutto by Nanni Balestrini and ends in Bologna during the years of the ’77 revolt, where Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s early work dramatizes the communal existence of the student-worker movement. My method is based on a formal analysis of devices of disruption of the mimetic flow: anomalous use of pronouns, fragmentation, tension between verb tenses, and disconnections of the point of view. All are features through which the historical moment, I argue, is inscribed in the reading-viewing experience.

My dissertation contends that Éric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette – three filmmakers associated with the Nouvelle Vague – conceived and staged wandering in order to change cinema, to probe deeper into its potential as a medium of feeling and thought. As they honed their aesthetics, Godard, Rohmer and Rivette charged their oeuvres with what I have qualified as crucial wandering forms. The wandering in their films quickly diverged from direct movement on screen and became progressively more complex and abstract. I thus investigate wandering as a form of expression in cinema, one that allows us to reconsider the work of each filmmaker. The choice of this trio is crucial to analyzing certain subtleties in their oeuvres that require more investigation. The forms I have conceived reveal conceptual affinities between the seemingly disparate ideas operating and evolving amongst their cinemas. My dissertation therefore offers novel opportunities to reconfigure the Nouvelle Vague by disentangling essential aesthetic, political and historical threads that link the work of the three filmmakers beyond the early 1960s, when the movement often is said to have ended. By defining new formal categories, I propose that their films contain a latent prolongation of the Nouvelle Vague’s wandering core.