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The Screen in the Mirror: Thematic and Textual Reflexivity in Italian Cinema

The Concept of Reflexivity

The term reflexivity is used in multiple ways. According to Christian Metz (1991), one needs to distinguish between a reflexivity of theme and a reflexivity of text: in the first case, we are looking at films whose subject is the world of cinema; in the latter, of films that exhibit the mechanisms of enunciation of cinematic language (85–112). In the second case, Metz identifies a particular form of reflexive enunciation, the film‐within‐the‐film. This involves a primary film, which, through a process of doubling, contains one or more secondary films. These can be divided in two types: metacinematic doubling, or the dynamics of intertextuality between the first film and secondary films, and metafilmic doubling or the phenomenon of mise en abyme: the setting of a secondary film within the primary film, as expressed in numerous examples studied by the French semiologist, of which the most well‐known is Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963) by Federico Fellini (Metz 1968, 223–28; Metz 1991, 93–112).

Starting from the distinction between filmic fact and cinematic fact established by Gilbert Cohen‐Séat (1946) and continued by Metz (1968), Jacques Gerstenkorn (1987) differentiates cinematic reflexivity from filmic reflexivity. The former includes both reflexivity of theme and reflexivity of text; therefore, films that display both the devices and the world of cinema and those that exhibit the enunciation processes. The latter instead concerns the relationship of a text with itself and with other texts (7–10).

Besides the term reflexivity—employed in these different articulations—and the use of the expression mise en abyme (employed indiscriminately to refer to mirror effects in depiction and representation, as well as in the narrative), numerous other terms have developed and deployed in a confused and interchangeable manner: metacinema, metafilm, metalanguage, self‐referentiality, and self‐reflexivity.¹ In my opinion, the terms metacinema, metafilm, and self‐referentiality relate to reflexivity on the level of theme, while metalanguage and self‐reflexivity belong to the realm of textual reflexivity.

On the basis of these theoretical observations, presented here in a necessarily synthetic manner, I will attempt to delineate the subject of my analysis. I will consider films that represent the world of cinema in diverse aspects: production and set dynamics, technological apparatus, cinematic subjects (filmmaker, actor, scriptwriter, producer, technician, etc.), the genesis of a film work, and various aspects and mechanisms of reception (the audience, advertising methods, the mythography of the cinematic spectacle).

I begin by working on thematic reflexivity. However, as we shall see, it will prove often to be closely linked to textual reflexivity, especially through the recurring use of a film‐within‐a‐film, a screen‐within‐a‐screen, images of mirrors, the display of the apparatus, and the dialectic actor/character. Films about cinema often tend to employ mechanisms of textual reflexivity, even when these are not their primary focus.

The recurrence of elements and forms from one work to another allows us to group films about cinema in a distinct genre (Gestenkorn Gerstenkorn, 1987, 197–98; Cerisuelo 2001, 93–97), which is extremely productive for an analysis of the medium through different social, cultural, and aesthetic phases of Italian cinema history. Indeed, as Casetti emphasizes (1990, 196–97), films about cinema can be approached from three perspectives: (1) as “theoretical objects,” able to unveil the idea and awareness that cinema has of itself as device and as language; (2) as “sociological objects” that illustrate how cinema sees itself and is seen in a specific society; and (3) as “symptomatic objects,” in the psychoanalytic sense, capable of revealing a sort of unconscious of cinema, with its contradictions and issues, both as device and as language. We can add a fourth perspective that allows us to consider films about cinema as direct documentary sources—even through the transfiguration of fiction—revealing the technologies and working processes of a period in history. In this case, they can provide useful archeological evidence of a specific technical phase of the medium that had direct repercussions at the expressive level.

Films about cinema therefore constitute a privileged magnifying glass through which to observe a constantly shifting cinematic identity: they allow a recounting, on the one hand, of the shifts of aesthetic regimes (primitive, classic, modern, postmodern) and, on the other, of the anthropological, cultural, and social dynamics of the historical context in which they originated and to which they refer.

Indeed, they encapsulate in an exemplary manner moments of transition and transformation: the transition from silent film to sound in the 1930s; the crisis of cinema as spectacle, as represented by the neorealist revolution in the postwar period; the emergence of the auteur in the 1960s and 1970s; the militant collective experiences between the end of 1960s and the beginning of 1970s; and the dispersion of cinematic identity in the wider media landscape from the 1980s onward.

The Postmodern Gaze

Although the tendency of cinema to look at itself in the mirror is as old as the medium itself, language reflexivity, combined with thematic reflexivity, imposed itself between the 1950s and the 1960s as a peculiar characteristic of so‐called modern cinema that displayed the processes of representation, in contrast to the transparency and illusionism of classical writing.² In the films of the French New Wave, language reflexivity was intimately bound up with cinephilia, which encouraged directors to experience the figures and films of the past as a revered canon. Cinema became a substitute for reality and, at the same time, a filter through which to examine the present. The Dreamers (2003) by Bernardo Bertolucci is exemplary evidence of the key role attributed to cinephilia by a generation of Italian directors and critics shaped by the French politique des auteurs.

Postmodern artistic practices accentuated the tendency, already rooted in modern cinema, toward thematic and linguistic reflexivity, elevating it to an aesthetic mark of contemporaneity and triggering a retrospective fascination with comparable phenomena from the past. Devices, such as the mirror, the double, the shadow, and the reflection, have always been present in films about cinema and metalinguistic films, beyond the different aesthetic regimes in which they were historically located.

The past 30 years have certainly seen an extension of the metacinematic attitude, as understood by Metz, with particular attention to intertextual and intermedia dynamics, and to the processes of citation, remakes, and parody. Metacinema seems to coincide with postmodern modes of expression and refers to the perception of a state of crisis and the loss of cinema’s central role within the wider media environment. Many of the films about cinema and television produced in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s were imbued with nostalgia for a lost golden age and employ sepulchral symbolism related to death. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) by Giuseppe Tornatore, Splendor (1988) by Ettore Scola, Ladri di saponette (Icicle Thieves, 1989) by Maurizio Nichetti, and Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1985) and Intervista (1988) by Federico Fellini all stage the memory of the past in sharp contrast to the savage and totalitarian hegemony of the medium of television.³ However, already by the mid‐1970s, a comedy such as C'eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974) by Ettore Scola attributed to the cinematic icons of the postwar period (Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves, 1948] by De Sica) and of the 1960s (La dolce vita [La Dolce Vita, 1960] by Fellini) the function of symbolizing the end of an age of hope and idealistic visions of the future, bringing together cinematic, historical, and existential experience.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the two key elements at the center of the reflection were the loss of the traditional audience—turned into alienated television addicts—and an archive of cinematic images displayed as offerings in a mournful ceremony of revival and lament. On one hand, we have the demolished venue of Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, the progressive emptying of Splendor’s theaters, and the audience of mannequins in Nanni Moretti's Sogni d'oro (1981) and Marco Ferreri's Nitrato d'argento (Nitrate Base, 1996). On the other, we see true anthologies of cinematic excerpts and medleys of passions, faces, and myths salvaged from the archive of collective memory. In Nitrato d'argento, Ferreri condemns the decline of cinema as a social ritual and celebrates the excesses of an ancient age when the cinema represented a kind of secular temple: a welcoming space in which people of different ethnicities and classes could mix, a place dedicated to the meeting and contact of bodies. A Babel of languages and variegated humanity, the cinema of the past, for Ferreri, embodied the qualities of a gigantic collective happening, becoming the twentieth‐century equivalent of the ancient Dionysian mysteries.

In the digital and globalized age, the body of the spectator follows the dynamics of cinema’s relocation to new dimensions of experience (Casetti 2008, 23–40). The different forms of use run parallel to different forms of creation and to the processes of remediation, as understood by Bolter and Grusin (1999), that regulate the intertwining relationship between old and new.

The advent of the digital age carries with it, as well as the transformation of the antique set and postproduction rituals, important occasions for reflection on the meaning and nature of the image. In L'amore probabilmente (Probably Love, 2001), for instance, Giuseppe Bertolucci sees the opening up of novel experimental possibilities that in some ways seem to resurrect the Vertov‐inspired utopias of the man with the film camera.

While dismissing traditional devices, cinema builds new spaces and new bodies in which to live, like an organism in constant mutation and regeneration. The principal axes upon which the themes and problems of self‐referentiality move, however, remain the same. The figures most represented are still the actors and the audience. From the early 1960s, with Otto e mezzo, the figure of the director starts to penetrate the narrative as a protagonist. Fellini’s film, as has often been noted, is the manifesto of a reflexivity strongly anchored to the subjectivity of the auteur and the freedom of artistic performance, in tune with the new waves of the era. In Otto e mezzo, Fellini achieves a tight convergence of theme and language reflexivity that we encounter in other paradigmatic works of the 1960s, such as Pasolini's “La ricotta” episode of Ro.Go.Pa.G (1963) or in Michelangelo Antonioni who, more than anyone else, illustrated throughout his career the gaze of the photographer, the reporter, and the filmmaker. While the mythology of the auteur is violently satirized in Italian‐style comedies (consider, especially, the episode “Presa dalla vita” of I mostri [The Monsters, 1963] by Dino Risi), the “character‐director” becomes increasingly visible from the end of the 1960s to today. We find it not only in the films of the Taviani brothers and of Marco Bellocchio, but also in those of the new generation that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: Nanni Moretti, Mimmo Calopresti, Giuseppe Tornatore, Maurizio Nichetti, Carlo Mazzacurati, Daniele Ciprì, and Franco Maresco. Whether steeped in or definitively liberated from neorealist legacy and from the emphasis on the figure of the auteur so characteristic of the so‐called modern cinema, these filmmakers all measure themselves—exhibiting more or less pronounced autobiographical impulses— through screen alter egos to which they delegate the role of filter between the interior and exterior worlds, in order to express a subjective awareness and elaborate a critique of the social, political, and media reality in which they live.

If it is true that, in the past 30 years, cinematic and filmic reflexivity, as described by Gerstenkorn (1987), has become increasingly broad and insistent—to the point that it almost amounts to a manner of thinking and operating—it is equally true that it predates postmodern representation and has, over time, articulated traits that continue to repeat themselves in a contemporary context.

My analysis chooses to focus on the period between the 1930s and the 1950s in the belief that the time following this has been sufficiently studied already. This time frame allows me to clarify the most prominent traits of the film‐about‐cinema “genre” and to reflect on certain “anachronistic” characteristics, in the sense proposed by Georges Didi‐Huberman (2000), that recur throughout time, before and beyond their postmodern celebration.

This limited analytical context does not allow for a comprehensive account of all the works produced (let alone, the fleeting references to cinema in works dedicated to other themes).⁴ I will therefore restrict my consideration to just a few emblematic cases.

A Classic Spectacle of Modernity

In the 1930s, cinema promoted itself as the principal medium of modernity. In Stella del cinema (1931) by Mario Almirante, the Cines production house shows the conversion of its studios to sound and exhibits the technological achievements taking place across the Atlantic, posing as the Italian version of Hollywood. The film is really both a celebration and an apology: the plot boils down to a simple device to reveal cinema at work. As in certain celebrated American films of the 1920s and 1930s, entry to the studios signified entry to a land of marvels where ordinary people are transformed into stars and where everything is shiny and mechanical, projected toward the future. In Stella del cinema, we find the key textual features shared by the majority of films about cinema throughout the 1930s and later.

Cinema as Comedy

With the exception of the melodrama La signora di tutti (1934), directed in Italy by the non‐Italian, Max Ophüls, films about cinema from 1930 to 1943 can be dubbed “romantic comedy,” as they were by critics of the time. They are particularly well suited to a narrative arc covering emancipation, upward mobility, and triumph—both personal and within society as a whole—that takes place at work or in the home, or both. Within this genre is a strand of films about singers, of great popular appeal at the time. The central characters of La voce senza volto (1939) by Gennaro Righelli, Fuga a due voci (1943) by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, and Silenzio si gira! (1943) by Carlo Campogalliani are played by famous baritones or tenors, allowing the films to feature well‐known songs and melodies that helped both launch the films and root them in collective memory.

Fuga a due voci and Silenzio si gira! also offer valid reflections on the nature of comedy. While the war rages in Europe, the formula of Fuga a due voci is stated explicitly, without polemical intent, by the character of the producer: a baritone, a beautiful woman, a few humorous expedients, a great deal of singing, “no trash,” and luxury. The critique of the artificiality and conventionality of Italian comedies, linked to the “hunger for reality” manifested in militant revues such as Cinema at the time, is disarmed in Fuga a due voci by the introduction of a “real‐life” story from the streets—in fact narrated by the protagonist. The baritone Gino Bechi recalls his past through flashbacks (which become the film‐in‐the‐making), showing the audience his trajectory and the dynamics of his success. A remarkable session of live scriptwriting, which the producer orchestrates in his hunt for a spectacular and cathartic plot conclusion, shows us the real‐life characters (from the flashback or the film‐within‐the‐film) entering the scene as Pirandellian characters in search of a role that respects the canons of comedy and gives the audience satisfaction. The ending will be unexpected and wonderful: the female protagonist will fulfill the romantic dreams of all the spectators, literally within the screen, immersing herself in luminous celluloid streams, touching the ghosts of desire. Recalling the life‐screen dialectic, propounded by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Zakovannaya filmoi/Shackled By Film, 1918) and Buster Keaton (Sherlock Junior, 1924), Bragaglia restores and enhances the law of cinema as dream factory, together with the comforting function of comedy, founded on the audience’s processes of identification and projection.

The ending of Silenzio si gira! is also an extraordinary celebration of cinematic illusion and of its power to comfort. In a delirium of scenery and dance recalling American musicals, the screen shows a series of mise en abymes that focus on the emblematic figure of a large round mirror on which are superimposed images of the film‐within‐the‐film: the faces of the best‐known Italian actors, the record of the song “Cinema” (a leitmotiv that exalts the mythographic power of cinema), even a film camera. In this game of mirrors, the concluding sequence could be equated with the crystal‐image theorized by Deleuze (1985): a multifaceted image that produces an exchange circuit between the virtual and the actual, that is based on the intertwining of multiple levels of reality and fiction. In this case, we are speaking of an image, based on vertiginous and continuous transformation, that enacts an apotheosis not only of Italian cinema but all cinema—or, rather, of a scintillating idea of cinema that is about to end in the midst of the ruins of war, while neorealism is impatiently knocking at the door.

The Cinema at Work in Terms of Professional Figures/Roles

Producers, technicians, filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors, and actresses are shown in action. Often, there is an intermingling between fictional and real characters in the plot. Performers appear in the flesh under their real names, alongside fictional characters. During the 1930s, the figure of the director–auteur did not appear; in fact, it was almost inconceivable. The filmmaker was portrayed as a simple artisan at the service of the producer. It was the latter who took on an almost hegemonic role, establishing himself as the true arbiter of the film. However, the director was represented not as a frustrated talent, but as an entirely conscious mechanism in a machine whose workings were not challenged. The only criticism of the strictly commercial configuration of cinema came from the actors in Silenzio si gira!: their theater training brings them to contest violently the supremacy of the beauty of the body over the art of acting. The conflict between mere physical performance and the performer’s artistry/humanity is explored through two recurring situations: on one hand, the dialectic between beautiful legs and face, made explicit in Due milioni per un sorriso (Carlo Borghesio and Mario Soldati, 1939); on the other, the contrast between face and voice, a topos that made its appearance in Stella del cinema and became extreme in the films about singers. The divo or diva displays a seductive physicality that is in contrast to the acting or singing ability of the unknown personality dubbing him or her on set. In La voce senza volto this division becomes the driving idea of the plot, in which a voiceless tenor steals the star role from a factory worker with great singing talent.

A Critique of Divismo and of Film Versus Life

The star is usually portrayed as a spoilt, hysterical, and often talentless individual. Female characters appear particularly adapted to represent the imaginary trajectories of the female audience that identifies with the character on screen to the point of taking, physically, its place. In Dora Nelson (Soldati 1939), the titular diva wishes constantly to dream, like the audience of the film. She reduces life to a stage set and is the first to fall victim to this confusion between reality and representation. By contrast, her doppelganger, the seamstress Pierina, achieves her cinematic fantasy in life by realizing the fairy tale of romantic and social conquest. With the burning of the film at the end of Due milioni per un sorriso, it is shown that where there is life there is no need for cinema, which offers, instead, a “magical, omnipresent, wondrous image that flies like thought and sees as the eye,” able to fill an existential void—but by deceptively simulating and replacing life (Soldati 1985, 52–53).

The Juxtaposition of Cinema and Money, Art and Industry

The connections between cinema and economy are highlighted. In 24 ore in uno studio cinematografico (1985), Soldati (1985, 47–48) writes that cinema “is sometimes art, but it is always industry,” based on the equation time = money. It is, however, a very particular industry, which the author associates with the factories that served the great cathedrals. In Due milioni per un sorriso the world of cinema is presented as the field of opportunity for businessmen and frauds but, at the same time, a space of cultural and sentimental patronage. Mixing autobiography and ironic observations on the state of Italy’s cinematic economy, as well as comedic clichés, Soldati portays a magnate who, like Riccardo Gualino, founder of Lux (the film’s production company), becomes the promoter of a cinema of the ideal. With farcical tones, Due milioni per un sorriso presents the businessman as an ex‐migrant grown rich in the United States, employing the comic‐strip symbols of American wealth (the fur and the cigar). He is a powerful man who wants to buy dreams and breathe life, through cinema, into his emotional memory and into a patriarchal and rural Italy that no longer exists. The character of the director is a double of the businessman and, significantly and biographically, has the traits of a man of letters. Around him moves a carnival troupe of incompetents, cheats, and adventurers. Soldati reveals cinema to be a work of fraud, and mocks the notion of a miraculous technique that can replicate life, give substance to memory, and revive the past through illusion. Cinema is always an open‐eyed hallucination, a trick into which life enters by chance. In Due milioni per un sorriso the focus on fabrication, artifice, and simulation that typifies Soldati’s poetics goes hand in hand with a celebration of the miracle that cinema, almost involuntarily, can sometimes attain. In the ending, life enters the image in a paradoxical fashion, through the ignorance and error of the cameraman, as in The Cameraman (1928) by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton. The film camera becomes a unique witness of reality: a witness by mistake. A fragment of life slips inside its “divine and wonderful” eye (Soldati 1985, 54).

Photo displaying magical machinations by two men in the 1939 film Due milioni per un sorriso. — **Figure 30.1** Magical machinations: *Due milioni per un sorriso* (Carlo Borghesio and Mario Soldati, 1939). Screen grab.

The Juxtaposition and Interchangeability of Fiction and Reality

The mixing of documentary aspects and fictional motifs not only relates to the portrayal of real actors and their fictional counterparts but also to the deeper conceptual core of films about cinema. Unmasking the impression of reality, which is at the basis of the medium, entails rendering explicit the trick of verisimilitude. For instance, in Stella del cinema the protagonist mistakes the set for reality and reacts as the first audiences did to the Lumière brothers’ image of a speeding train. The celebration of the interchangeability of the world of fiction and of life reaches its peak in Soldati’s films that, instead of contrasting the two worlds (which he seems to achieve in endings that reestablish the laws of reality against those of spectacle), portray them as subject to similar forms of manipulation and imitation. In Dora Nelson the plane of existence, in fact, is organized as a recital, according to the same rules of cinematic fiction. Moreover, in Soldati’s film we find the peculiar character of the optician interpreted by the comic Campanini, which seems to represent the metaphor of the spectator constantly disoriented by the appearances of a cinema that toys with reality, and those of a life that toys with cinema. He is characterized as a specialist of impaired vision, constantly excluded from events and places, and only capable of glimpsing reflections and mistaking them for truth or, vice versa, mistaking real events for untruths.

The Theme of the Double

Figures of duplicity and doubling not only relate to the identity of the cinematic image, based on reproducing the semblance of reality, they can also be the driving force of plot and help define the nature of characters. All the protagonists in Dora Nelson play double roles, both in life and the cinema; they power a mechanism that works like Chinese boxes with a Lubitschian rhythm, where truth and lies are inextricably intertwined and what is revealed, though in tones of parody, is the game between seeming and being that is at the base of the ontological condition of the actor.

The doppelganger figures in almost every film and, besides referring to the processes of identification between actor and spectator, allows the substitution and mistaking of identity on which the narrative is structured. Fuga a due voci and Silenzio si gira! both employ the role of the thief, a real “identity thief.” In Silenzio si gira!, the divo’s double, who takes his place, represents the principle of reality—people’s healthy ethical beliefs in contrast to the artificial and empty masks of the celebrity, who only exists inside an image. By dealing with personality splits, often without much subtlety, the films usually attribute qualities of goodness and humanity to the doppelganger, compared to the cruel vainglory of the star. The conflict that ensues between doppelganger and star (male or female) is the conflict between life and cinema, and the dimensions of authenticity and falsity. The principle regulating the relationship between the original and its copy is overthrown, giving the latter the role of protecting the virtues of real life.

The Work of Cinema: That Is, the Tricks and Trade of the Film Set

The spectator is invited behind the scenes to watch how the magical gaze of cinema is constructed in order to glean its secrets. The workings of illusion and the rituals of the set are revealed: the camera in action, inside and outside the studio; the lighting system; and techniques of sound recording. The last, in particular, underpins certain plot developments: during breaks from filming, either the audio monitor room (that is to say, the sound engineer), or the sound recording truck (when shooting is happening outside) become the source of truths or lies with direct impact on the plot’s unfolding.

The processes most frequently explored are the techniques of rear projection and playback. They symbolize the manipulation of reality and the tricks by which verisimilitude is achieved, but mostly with no critical, deconstructing intent. Their sole purpose is to reveal the inner workings of an extraordinary toy and, by including the audience in the circle of adepts, like adherents to a sect, they make the spectators more interested and the act of spectatorship more engaged.

Knowledge of the film set’s dynamics makes the public aware that magic in the cinema is founded on intensive labor: the endless snaps of the clapperboard, the continuous activity during shooting, and the hours upon hours spent in make‐up to build the body of the star.

Film‐within‐a‐Film and Forms of the Mise en Abyme

The existence of secondary films within the primary film is expressed in four key ways:

The secondary film is shown as if it were actually the primary film. The tracking of the camera (usually on a dolly or crane) or some discrepancy in dialogue reveals to the audience, with a studied delay, that it has been watching a film‐within‐a‐film. This device, which aims to trick and surprise, often occurs at the start of the plot, but sometimes at other moments as well.
The secondary film is shown in its working dynamics as a film set.
The secondary film is projected in a cinema theater. Sometimes, it bears little relation to the film we have seen being shot. In La stella del cinema, for instance, the film‐within‐the‐film, entitled “Venere 1980,” is completely disassociated from the more realistic and stereotypical scenes the audience witnessed earlier in the narrative. “Venere 1980” is revealed as a bizarre, avant‐garde production mixing surrealist and expressionist touches with Méliès‐style presentation. In the finale, the characters appear in a tableau vivant, typical of the earliest silent films, echoing Botticelli’s celebrated Birth of Venus.

Photo of a man holding a camera depicting the dissociation of the film‐within‐the‐film: Stella del cinema. — **Figure 30.2** The dissociation of the film‐within‐the‐film: *Stella del cinema* (Mario Almirante, 1931). Screen grab.

The secondary film is identifiable, according to Metz’s specifications (1968), through the context of flashback. In Fuga a due voci, the secondary film, represented by the protagonist’s flashback, ceaselessly intertwines with the primary film until they merge. The words “The End” that appear on the screen of the projected secondary film also signal the end of the film that contains it.

The dynamics of film projection make explicit the form of mise en abyme, since the film‐within‐the‐film reveals itself, at least initially, as a screen‐within‐a‐screen, a rectangle within another rectangle.

Intermediality

Cinema is presented as the apex of a multimedia system linked to technological and urban modernization. It includes radio, publishing, advertising, and every sort of mechanical apparatus, not to mention older arts such as theater that, on the one hand, are able to defend the motives of art against those of commerce, but, on the other, are incapable of embodying the rhythms and tensions of urban life.

Cinema’s Modern Conscience

After World War II, relations between appearance and being, the shiny illusion of image and the opaque substance of everyday life, lost the playful logic of the 1930s and early 1940s and adopted a more somber tone in which the irreconcilability of the imaginary and the real predominated. The assumption of a new morality led filmmakers to denounce the gulf that separates screen from life, just as neorealism was urging a rapprochement, to the point of almost making them identical. The autopsy that some directors claimed to be carrying out on the social body was extended to the cinematic canon, its workings and influence. As Cesare Zavattini (1954, 6) observed, the neorealist ethic became the “conscience of cinema.” The filter that postwar cinema adopted to reflect on itself and its role was often the mediating figure of the actor.

In Bellissima (1951) Visconti criticized the systems of neorealist recruitment that he himself had employed in La terra trema (1948) and that he continued to employ in the film in question. This time, he did so for the purpose of exposing the false mythology of the “actor from the street” and its destructive power, especially when the theme of childhood was in the limelight, as was often the case in postwar films.

In this regard, Bellissima was “one of the first and most aware killing acts against neorealism” (Micciché 1990, 208–209). One character’s crisis of conscience, that of Maddalena Cecconi, represents the collapse of a certain ideal of cinema—in fact the end of a glorious period when cinematic images were believed to be a way to transform reality.

Visconti’s discourse accommodated a multiplicity of media instruments and spaces of spectacle, concentrating on cinema as a system and device capable of triggering a wider sociocultural transformation. The film begins in a radio studio where a film contest for 6–8‐year‐old girls is being advertised. The scene is accompanied by Rai Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Donizetti’s “Elisir d’amore,” a melody that will recur throughout the narrative. In particular, the theme of the charlatan will ironically mark the character of the filmmaker, interpreted in the narrative by the most representative icon of 1930s, auteur‐style cinema, Alessandro Blasetti. The words “Don’t yell and shout” introduce a clamorous crowd that wanders an empty Cinecittà, its buildings no more than gloomy, ghostly ruins. Inside the studios, where the contest takes place as a parade of sketches both comic and pathetic, the little girls put on a show degraded by the ambitions and myths of their mothers, looking like pretelevision victims of a miserable dream of glory. The media’s power penetrates even the homes of the working class: in the yard of the housing block where the protagonists live (Maddalena, the mother; Spartaco, the father; and the daughter, Maria—acted by Anna Magnani, the nonprofessional Gastone Renzelli, and Tina Apicella), is a stage where dance rehearsals and plays take place, and a screen that shows images of Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) on summer nights. The mother gazes in ecstasy at the herds and rivers of the American western; experiencing beauty and the elsewhere, she conceives a desire to build for her daughter an identity different from her own, suffocated as it is by the crude materialism of a husband who dismisses her aspirations with an abrupt “It’s all fairy‐tales.” These are the same illusions that, in a lesser, more vulgar format, feed the tabloids to which Maddalena is in thrall. During the Hawks screening, she holds a fotoromanzo in her hands. Maddalena is surrounded by images that inflame her imagination. A circus tent is the backdrop of her final, painful, realization—as Burt Lancaster’s dubbed voice is heard from the yard where the open‐air screen stands—of her desolate return to family reality.

Constantly oscillating between melodrama and comedy, Maddalena expresses a restless femininity that looks to celluloid dreams as a way of overcoming the subordinate condition to which she is relegated by the working‐class values embodied by her husband, the custodian of family respectability, and its gender and power hierarchies. Her ultimate return to the family order can be interpreted as a resurfacing of populism by the aristocratic Visconti who, having directly and indirectly criticized the working class by presenting it in grotesque parody, reaffirms it as a positive site.

Photo displaying the neorealist mythology of the “actor from the street” being called into question by the figure of the child in the 1951 film Bellissima. — **Figure 30.3** The neorealist mythology of the “actor from the street” is called into question by the figure of the child in *Bellissima* (Luchino Visconti, 1951). Screen grab.

To Magnani, as icon of the neorealist, working‐class instinct, and possessed of an explosive mixture of professionalism and improvisation, the director entrusts the task of questioning the mysteries of acting: “After all, what is acting? Uh? Now, if I believed I were someone else … if I pretended to be someone else … I would be acting.” To act means to simulate an otherness, to take on a reflected appearance, like the one the mirror displays when Magnani talks to herself. The neorealist illusion of phenomenologically transporting one’s unaltered image to the screen is deconstructed; cinema reveals an image of forged identity that is filtered through the actor’s mask and the director’s mediating gaze. In Bellissima, Visconti's signature processes of language reflexivity, already tested in La terra trema, impact the film’s central theme, clarifying it through a multiplicity of formal constructions. The apartment’s open windows function as screens on which life can be watched as it “passes by.” The frequent use of mise en abyme in the framing of shots makes the cinematic apparatus and its illusions evident, amplified by the recurrence throughout the film of mirrors that underline the motif of reflection and split identity. Through these aesthetic choices, Visconti reintroduces the sense of the circularity of life and fiction, the constant and inevitable plunge of life into representation that he negated at an ethical and ideological level, separating cinema and existence into two antithetical dimensions. So, in Bellissima, the working‐class reality that he contrasted, as the realm of truth, with the cinematic machine (a realm of the false), displays the same artificial characteristics of acting and simulation as the screen images.

By contrast, Antonioni’s gaze is unburdened by any moral or ideological imperative. After producing the short film L'amorosa menzogna (Lies of Love, 1949) and writing the concept for Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952)—both devoted to the world of the fotoromanzo perceived as a kind of cinema writ small that constructs the heroes of the moment—Antonioni turned his attention in La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camilias, 1953) to the machinery of spectacle.

The basis of La signora senza camelie is the notion of a mirroring, more than oppositional, relationship between cinema and life—both involved in the same dynamic of identity forgery and destruction. The protagonist, Clara Manni, is an actress who is discovered working as a sales assistant in a clothing shop, exactly like Lucia Bosé who plays her, and who got into film by first appearing in beauty pageants. Antonioni depicts her as a depersonalized individual forced to adapt, in life and in cinema, to female stereotypes constructed by the masculine imagination that brings together cinematic and social images. Dispossessed of her personality as a woman and an actress, Clara no longer recognizes herself in the roles she acts on screen or adopts in private life; she is always coping with the duplicity of being and seeming, divided between the will to be alive, flesh‐and‐blood, and the realization that she is only a simulacrum, a forgery of herself. Antonioni expresses this schism through a thick web of figures and stylistic flourishes: the woman compares herself to her onscreen double, which gives back a false reflection; she is viewed through the mediation of diaphragms, partitions, filters, and mirrors that separate her from direct contact with objects, imprisoning her in vision at one remove, the vision of a vision. Even her home imitates a film set. Wherever she is and wherever she goes, Clara is screened by a veil of fiction that she can no longer escape. The ending sanctions her surrender to a double inauthenticity, a double prostitution: cinema’s demand not to act, but to exhibit her body, as youthful and vulnerable as possible; and the demands of a private life that compels her to perform the canonical role of the mistress. In both cases, the woman concedes, painfully and in full conscience, to a system of commercialization that regulates social relations, as well as cinema’s industrial machinery.

Antonioni (1964, xii) not only denounces the neorealist myth of the actor from the street but also questions the “great ability to lie” that ontologically characterizes cinematic representation, beyond any pretense of mimetic adherence to a reality already demystified as a realm of forgery. The falsity of cinema only multiplies that of life: not as a mirror, but as a systemic extension, or rather an irradiation that emerges from the same origin that equates the fates of existence and representation in the dimension of inauthenticity.

Photo of a man with his left arm placed at the back of a woman, with silhouette of a man as background, from the 1953 film La signora senza camelie. — **Figure 30.4** Cinema and/as life and vice versa: *La signora senza camelie* (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953). Screen grab.

Beyond considering the linguistic nature of cinema, Antonioni reflects on its commercial system, professional figures, and shooting and screening rituals, giving the audience a critical view, filtered by irony, of Italian film production at the time. This begins with the title, La signora senza camelie, which is intended both to reference and distance itself from the melodrama and romantic‐erotic genre that was successful at the time. Italian cinema was showing its most commercial side: producers humiliated art by judging the work purely in business terms, manipulating it, as shown in the film, in the shooting, editing, and dubbing processes. In contrast to the passionate discussion of left‐wing critics, neorealism already appeared to have become a term without meaning. The all‐important word is spoken in only one of the film’s sequences, in the midst of the jostling preparation for shooting in a private apartment, where the cinematic work is defined as “something disgusting.” The weeping of Clara Manni's body double, who comes from the world of the fotoromanzo, is a prelude to one of the darkest scenes in the picture: in a ghostly Cinecittà, the names of the extras are called out in a manner that Alan Bergala (1992, 34–35) suggests recalls the concentration camps. Through the crowd of aspiring extras, assembled like deportees waiting for a verdict, Antonioni portrays the dramatic pit into which fall the dreams of all those deluded into believing they could reach the screen through neorealism; a world of the outclassed and defeated, like the one Valerio Zurlini described a year earlier in the documentary, Il mercato delle facce (1952).

The frustration of the extras is reflected in that of Clara Manni. After realizing the existence of a “high” and a “low” cinema, and the need to earn a license to act by studying long and hard, she surrenders in the face of the inanity of her struggle against the roles forced on her by the cinematic and social systems.

The disrobed odalisques of “The Slave of the Pyramids,” the film to which Clara submits herself in the finale of La signora senza camelie, are echoed by the Valkyries of the contemporaneous Il viale della speranza (1953) by Dino Risi, in which extras submit to another gloomy protocol of naming and registration. Framed by a beginning and ending in documentary style, with a voiceover that connects the narration to the real sociological issues addressed in the story, the film recounts the adventures of three young women newly arrived in Rome looking for success in the cinema. Risi’s title, as farcical as Antononi’s, paraphrases a work certainly less known than Dumas’ novel, but more similar in theme and use of the medium to the subject treated: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Making films about cinema was not an Italian prerogative; the phenomenon had an international reach. From Le silence est d'or (Man About Town, 1947) by René Clair to Vesna (Spring, 1947) by Grigori Aleksandrov; from Singin' in the Rain (1952) by Stanley Donen to The Barefoot Contessa (1953) by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; from A Star Is Born (1954) by George Cukor to The Big Knife (1955) by Robert Aldrich; we are gifted with a bouquet of titles dedicated to the world of cinema and related types of spectacle: theater, cabaret, circus, song, and radio.

Risi’s Il viale della speranza was a road that led to the Italian Hollywood, revived from the ashes of war: a carnivalesque Cinecittà, following consolidated habits of representation, in which the dreams of aspiring starlets run against an incessant process of comic reduction. Mounting a perfectly timed piece of work, Risi spreads his cynicism about cinema by representing it as an underworld of misfits ruled by the imperative of making ends meet, filled with eccentric personalities and miserable destinies. From between the lines emerges a deep, existential sadness, though constantly redeemed by laughter, by the masks of a comedy that never slips into tragedy even when it touches upon tragic material, and which in the final moments provides an ending that is happy, or at least worthwhile. All three girls find their way, in love and cinema, money, or a return to the authentic emotions of their birthplaces.

In 1953, Siamo donne (We, the Women, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, et al.) was released, a paradigmatic piece of work along the lines of Zavattini’s conception of celebrity and the actor. The first of the film’s five episodes is titled “4 attrici, 1 speranza” (directed by Alfredo Guarini). The protagonists, Anna Amendola and Emma Daniele, are real, aspiring actresses in the cinematic competition announced for Siamo donne. It looks like pure reportage but, in fact, a more complex and subtle dramatic technique has been set in motion. Amendola and Danieli are not “caught in the act” in the manner conceived by Zavattini and Dziga Vertov, but they play themselves according to a prearranged script, celebrating the coincidence of actor and character.

The gap still present between the images of fiction and reality can be overcome, Zavattini (1963, 149) asserts, but only if the concept of cinema itself is radically altered: when the last residues of fiction that he believes characterize neorealist films, are shed, and when cinematic practice is understood as direct intervention in the world being filmed through the methods of the inquest, diary, and autobiographical confession. That is to say, the actor, the filmmaker, and the spectator must all be understood in a completely new way. In the reflexive and evidence‐based cinema espoused by Zavattini, there should no longer be professional roles, but only participation in fact‐finding rituals demanding a direct, existential investment. The abolition of the actor and screenplay entails the invention of new forms, which Zavattini defines as “untied,” totally independent from traditional structures of fiction and documentary.

In Siamo donne, the modes of the diary and the confession inform the ensuing four episodes, in which Alida Valli (directed by Gianni Franciolini), Ingrid Bergman (directed by Rossellini), Isa Miranda (directed by Luigi Zampa), and Anna Magnani (directed by Visconti) represent their double identities as divas and as women, laying down the glittering mantle of stardom to reveal themselves in person and intimately.

To the sanctity of the diva, who is born and fades in a world of pretense, Zavattini contrasts that of the individual, presented in her own name and surname, in her unique existentialist reality. But the intention, clear in the project, is undermined by the inevitability of simulation and artifice. Once transposed to the cinematic image, even the most direct reality is reassimilated by the totalitarian laws of spectacle, and its innate cannibalism. The sanctity of being cannot escape the embrace of fiction, or the preestablished narrative.

Female subjects were always at the heart of films in the early 1950s that sought to investigate the world of cinema, through the projections of the most avid, female cinemagoers and readers of romantic tabloids. Male subjects only appear as interlocutors, at times impeding their dreams, or as managers of the impenetrable commercial systems that women would like to enter. Even works not strictly dedicated to thematic reflexivity include in their plot lines the young woman who seeks to emancipate herself through cinema. Consider Luciana (Elvy Lissiak) in Domenica d'agosto (1950) by Luciano Emmer, who refuses to pay the producer’s heavy toll (erotic, naturally) and falls back into her poor and difficult existence. The protagonist (Sophia Loren) of La fortuna di essere donna (What a Woman!, 1955) by Alessandro Blasetti is, unusually, not a victim; she penetrates the ambit of paparazzi and cinema through a brazen awareness of her physical endowments and a powerful will to manage them herself. By contrast, Gina Lollobrigida in Miss Italia (Duilio Coletti, 1950) plays the role of the innocent beauty.

The intertwining of women’s literature and the screen was made explicit in the form of farce in a charming, little film by Steno, Piccola posta (1955). One of the many young women lost in Rome waits at Cinecittà’s gates, looking for a walk‐on role. She is overwhelmed by suicidal feelings and ready to break with marriage and love, in accordance with the consolidated rules of comedy and its conservative ideology, and her failed dream of becoming a screen star.

But now it is the 1950s, and neorealism’s death certificate has been signed more than once. The society of the spectacle has been invaded by television, where cinema and the tabloid press spread myths of social advancement and imaginary fulfillment. The world of Steno is dominated by forgery, disguise, and a constant discrepancy between a subject’s identity and its mask. The cult of Cinecittà is part of an increasingly widespread web of mass mythologies that includes, alongside the old tabloids, the first refrigerators, televisions, and motor vehicles.

The Archive of Dreams, Bodies, and Tales

Critical reflections of contemporary cinema in the early 1950s went hand in hand with a recollection of past films, as had already begun in the 1930s. In 1952, Luigi Comencini produced La valigia dei sogni, thus continuing a debate on cinephilia and the image archive that he had started in 1949 with his documentary, Il museo dei sogni, dedicated to Cineteca, Milan’s film library, and one of the first museums of cinema. The dreams, of course, are the films that protagonist Ettore Omeri stores in a suitcase to prevent them being destroyed in places that recall the iconography of the slaughterhouse and the concentration camp. While illustrating cinema’s perishable qualities, Comenicini organizes his film as a series of anthological fragments from the silent era, each projected in front of socially, culturally, and demographically varied audiences. The rite of reawakening memory exalts cinema’s mournful capacity to freeze, something Roland Barthes (1980, 143–47) noted of photography. In this case, what is put on display are the tastes and attitudes of a long‐vanished Italy, demonstrating the fragility of time and its corrosion, while fixing it for eternity.

Silent cinematic art is marked by continuous storytelling in the tradition of the oral poetry of Homer, from whom the protagonist takes his name. The merchant of dreams is simultaneously a ferryman of tales and a magician of myths. His task is to revive through speech the tangle of forgotten figures, lights, and shadows. We see him frenetically moving about a makeshift projection room, paper megaphone in his hand, in an endless game of mise en abyme in which the shots and reverse shots between him and the theater continually show screens within the screen. Comencini uses a common trick in films about cinema in the ending: after showing Omeri in prison, a scene appropriate to the plot’s logical evolution, he pulls back to reveal that we are actually in a film‐within‐a‐film on a sound stage. He plans his surprise with calculated restraint; now, finally, the audience can see cinema at work, having first seen the work of cinema.

If La valigia dei sogni has a passionate motive and an educational goal, Steno’s Cinema d'altri tempi (1953), though sharing the same cinephile origins, uses humor to portray cinema in the years before World War I, with a still‐improvised method of production and an eccentric collection of directors, speculators, and actresses. Steno mangles the names of real‐life characters and carnivalizes real events in history to recreate the cinema of the past in all its touching ingenuity, and its limited and primitive means. His ironic detachment halts a slide into nostalgia, while the use of color accentuates the element of expressive manipulation. The ending is a projection toward a future no less fantastic than the journey completed in the past. At the exit of a cinema in which the protagonists, now aged, have watched a 3D film, a poster announces: “After colour, after 3D, after Cinemascope, now CINEMANOSE, the olfactory cinema: Smell the experience.”

There is no need to wait long for ever more vertiginous technological changes to arrive, almost as a reaction or as a glance backward at time. Memory, the trace, and the archive are all closely linked to the nature of cinema, awakened each time by time and the disorientation of an unstoppable “progress” that, while seeming to delete the past, constantly reabsorbs it into its own textures.

In this sense, the protagonist of Dopo mezzanotte (After Midnight, 2004) by Davide Ferrario, set in Turin’s Museum of Cinema, is a distant relative of Comencini’s Omeri. On the same basis, Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003) by Ciprì and Maresco can be added to the same column as Steno’s Cinema d'altri tempi, since it grotesquely reconstructs the events and personalities of Sicily’s postwar cinema, using the past as a mask for the deformations of the present.

Inside the temple of cinematic images that Ferrario presents, the bodies, places, and tales are intertwined in an inexhaustible circling, mixing present and past, author and audience—the film that becomes life, and the life that becomes film. When cinema mirrors itself, it activates a collective circuit of reflections, beyond itself, that explore personal and social identities and the many dialectics in which they are engaged: continuity and change; the old and the new; loss and desire; and life that dies in images to, in turn, live again in memory.

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