The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana CavaniPrinceton University Press, 2000 M01 30 - 308 pages In this, the first comprehensive book on Liliana Cavani, Gaetana Marrone redraws the map of postwar Italian cinema to make room for this extraordinary filmmaker, whose representations of transgressive eroticism, spiritual questing, and psychological extremes test the limits of the medium, pushing it into uncharted areas of discovery. Cavani's film The Night Porter (1974) created a sensation in the United States and Europe. But in many ways her critically renowned endeavors--which also include Francesco di Assisi, Galileo, I cannibali, Beyond Good and Evil, The Berlin Affair, and several operas and documentaries--remain enigmatic to audiences. Here Marrone presents Cavani's work as a cinema of ideas, showing how it takes pleasure in the telling of a story and ultimately revolts against all binding ideological and commercial codes. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
THE LABYRINTH COGNITION AND TRAGIC IMAGINATION | 15 |
Francesco di Assisi The Medieval Chronicle and the Establishing of Physical Reality | 17 |
Realism against Illusion The Ceremonial Divestiture of Power in Galileo | 37 |
Metaphors of Revolt The Dialogic Silence in I cannibali | 57 |
THE TRANSGRESSIVE GAZE STYLE AS TENSION | 79 |
Toward a Negative Mythopoeia Spectacle Memory and Representation in The Night Porter | 81 |
Staging the Gaze Beyond Good and Evil | 116 |
Theatricality and Reflexivity in The Berlin Affair | 140 |