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It was Alain J. J. Cohen who hailed the advent of ‘the hyper-spectator,’ a new breed of empowered and informed viewer begotten by recent advances in technology (Hollywood Spectatorship, 152). And if ever a director was amenable to hyper-spectation, it’s Federico Fellini: his films’ tendency to be loose, uneven and overlong is mitigated by being allowed to skip (to) scenes; the evanescent poses, glances and tableaux, the fleeting compositional brilliancies with which his oeuvre’s littered, can be arrested, enlarged and savoured flickerlessly with the remote; the facility to watch at 2x or 4x the speed affords you fresh perspectives on the visual rhythms of his cinema and it’s handy that anecdotal context for Nico’s cropping up in ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) is readily Googlable.
I have to confess to only having watched Fellini’s ‘Casanova’ - which follows Donald Sutherland, resembling nothing so much as a periwigged Iggy Pop, through a succession of tragicomic scenes emphasising Casanova’s spiritual bankruptcy, lecherousness and intellectual mediocrity – no more than a handful of times. It contains, however, certain scenes and images to which I’ve returned again and again, exploiting the easy navigability of the DVD to re-view Sutherland guiding a skiff across a sea composed of rippling bin bags or carrying his elderly mother piggyback through an empty opera house. I want to argue that watching ‘Casanova' in this way throws into relief certain crucial aspects of Fellini’s attitude to cinema and to narrative structure, affording valuable insights into both his films’ moral tenor and the kinds of pleasure that they provide.
Some obvious objections to the discontinuous, whim-led mode of viewing I have described suggest themselves. As David Lynch’s notorious antipathy to dividing his works into chapters for their DVD release affirms, movies are supposed to be consumed in their unbroken entirety, and the viewer is both failing to honour the filmmaker’s intentions and compromising their own viewing experience if they depart from the attitude of attentive passivity expected of them. Futility and repetition are central to ‘Casanova’ (which, in lieu of credible screen sex, has a non-nude Sutherland performing push-ups above his supine, clothed conquests) and by skipping scenes, or by switching off before seeing Casanova’s dissipated and decrepit final state, the cumulative effect of each scene and set-piece, the film’s slow accretion of portents and symbolic echoes, is lost. Moreover, the creation of an empathetic bond between viewers and characters, which Deleuze has argued is fundamental to Fellini’s cinema, is imperilled. Hyper-spectation introduces barriers between the viewer and the diegetic universe both figuratively and - in the shape of the toolbars, balloons and diagrammatic overlays that facilitate viewer information and interaction - literally. Arguably, such barriers help construct a distanced and detached viewing position for spectators, closer to the quasi-Marxist objectivity Deleuze identifies with Michelangelo Antonioni’s films than the sort of engaged empathy Fellini aims for (Cinema 2, 4-6).
And yet hyper-spectation doesn’t necessarily run counter to Fellini’s purposes. The notion of spectatorial agency remains as much a sales pitch as a reality, and in many respects the glaring gap between the fantasy of control and the frustration that the aspirant hyper-spectator experiences is very Felliniesque. ‘Casanova’s’ audio is one example: with as recognisable an Anglophone actor as Sutherland on screen, one might suppose that the dub would be the ‘real’ one – and yet it does not quite correspond to the action. Cycling through the audio options, however, it becomes obvious that none of the dubs can be thought of as the authentic or original one, that all are – to invoke Derrida - supplementary, tallying only imperfectly with the visuals. This sort of perceptual friction was an aspect of Fellini’s cinema before viewers were endowed with the facility to switch languages: his yen for heteroglot party scenes where gangs of debauched cosmopolites talk across, over and (occasionally) to each other and his enthusiasm for dubbing ensure as much. Even Italian viewers are – like the nomadic Casanova - occasionally made to feel alien in his films (in Satyricon Fellini directed some actors to gabble unintelligibly so as to convey to audiences the disorientation felt by the film’s protagonists) and this decentring effect is heightened rather than mitigated by the facility to switch between audio tracks and subtitle languages, a facility which only highlights the existence of other perspectives and communicative modes.
More fundamentally, hyper-spectation can be said to suit Fellini because it puts viewers in touch with their own decadence. Discussing Fellini’s relation to decadence, Deleuze insists ‘Fellini’s visions are inseparable from an ‘empathy,’ a subjective sympathy (embrace even that decadence which means that one loves only in dreams or in recollection, sympathize with those kinds of love, be an accomplice to decadence, and even provoke it, in order to save something, perhaps, as far as is possible...)’ (Cinema 2, 6). It is worth remembering that the word ‘decadence’ denotes not only a condition of decline and decomposition or a state of moral lassitude but also an attitude to structure: decadence is when organs refuse to submit to their position in an organism, rejecting hierarchy and proportion, becoming grotesquely swollen. As a consequence, seaminesses and imperfections – invisible or ignorable from a more totalised view – become apparent (the monster in Carpenter’s ‘’The Thing’ (1982) is par excellence decadent: ‘every part of you bastards is a whole. Every piece of you is self-sufficient, an animal unto itself.’). Fellini’s fascination with the ravishing image, the fleeting moment and the grotesque spectacle, his focus on perversions and idiosyncrasies of taste and his approach to narrative structure all mark him out as decadent, and ‘Casanova’ abounds with decadent and otherwise aberrant bodies. There’s the hunchback with an abnormally long tongue, the woman who conceives of her own arse as a separate, sentient troublemaker, the Slavic giantess attended by dwarves and, perhaps most importantly, there’s the voyeur who, invisible but for his eye, watches ‘Casanova’ perform from a peephole, initiating the film’s exploration of the dynamics of performance, spectatorship, fantasy and voyeurism. Fellini, then, is both decadent and fascinated by decadence (his own, his culture’s and that of others and other cultures) and this makes his cinema especially amenable to hyper-spectation, an essentially decadent mode of viewing.
What I am calling decadent viewing entails perversely exorbitant attention being paid to certain, subjectively selected elements of a visual text to the exclusion or marginalisation of others. Technology has made this sort of viewing more prevalent. The well-worn rationale for doing nude scenes, rehearsed by many Hollywood actresses, is that the plot or the character’s emotional state necessitates or legitimises nudity that would otherwise be exploitative or gratuitous. Besides perpetuating the fetishisation of the female body by suggesting bona fide artistic film has earned the actor’s concession to bare her flesh, this argument has been rendered increasingly nonsensical by technologies of hyper-spectation; excerpted nude scenes can now be uploaded to rapid share for the perusal of viewers who’d never in a million years sit through the relevant film in its entirety. Decontextualized, stripped of causes and consequences, such scenes become an occasion for decadent, uncomplicatedly libidinal pleasure. The capability to navigate from a menu to the scene where Casanova walks into the maw of a preserved whale or to zoom into Tina Aumont’s smirking face also facilitates a sort of decadent viewing pleasure. Watching ‘Casanova’ on DVD could be said to put you in touch with your own decadence, promoting empathy with the antihero by inviting you to recognise the tastes and compulsions you are acting on when you choose to rewatch this scene rather than that, to pause on a particular frozen body or to skip an unappealing scene. Casanova’s pursuit of sexual pleasure above all else (including love) ultimately leads him astray, and viewers who - approaching the movie in the same capricious, pleasure-seeking spirit – treat ‘Casanova’ as a reservoir of sensory pleasures rather than a moral fable might initially fail to see this. However, the eventual ennui such an approach begets means the same message is conveyed: solipsism, narcissism and blinkered devotion to base pleasure can only be indulged in for so long before one’s viewpoint becomes permanently warped.
To better understand what hyper-spectation foregrounds about Fellini’s attitude to narrative structure, it is helpful to consider his films’ relation to pornography. Even at his bawdiest, Fellini cannot be called pornographic. And yet the loose structure of his films, his lack of interest in inducing suspension of disbelief, his frequent portrayals of sex and his casting of non-actors, amateurs and, in some cases, porn veterans (‘Casanova’ features one Chesty Morgan) on the basis of their looks all link him to porn. So too does his representation of bodies, his habit of lingering on particular physical characteristics: as Zizek has written, pornography involves the ‘change of the body into a desubjectivized universe of partial objects... a multitude of ‘organs without a body’’ (Plague of Fantasies 180). And while Fellini foregrounds a greater variety of bodily parts than the few key glands and orifices central to porn, the same principle applies.
Like Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Broken Flowers’ (2005) – another picaresque tale with a narrative that could be said to advance without ever progressing – ‘Casanova’ episodically charts the journey of a man looking to fit a meaningful story to his life. In their attitude to plot, these films transvalue pornographic modes: in porn, too, plot is reduced to a series of similar scenarios, all of which resolve the same way. The couplings might become more intricate or grander in scale but there is seldom any real reason for them to follow a particular sequence, or (bar personal proclivities) any reason to watch one rather than another. But while, in what Steven Marcus has called ‘Pornotopia’, any situation can and will develop into a sexual encounter (in which everybody is not only willing but able to engage - not only no qualms or moral scruples but no impotence or disease) ‘Casanova’ introduces such distinctly dystopian ingredients as asymmetric passion, loss, ageing, deformity, weariness and jealousy into the mix. Casanova pursues sex with an increasingly grim inevitability, and often successfully, but it is sex as mechanical as the clockwork song of the metal rooster which accompanies him on his travels.
If Fellini rejects the blithe utopianism of porn, he nevertheless borrows its structure (or, rather, its comparative structurelessness) in order to mount a challenge to the presumption that lived experience is tidily narratable. Deleuze reports that Fellini, in contrast to most mainstream cinema practitioners, no more thought a life could be narrativized than that a film shoot should be exhaustively pre-planned: the ‘harsh law of cinema – a minute of image which costs a day of collective work’ dictates that filming should be minutely scheduled and budgeted. Fellini’s ‘rejoinder’ is to keep shooting until the coffers run dry, to assert ‘‘‘when there is no money left, the film will be finished’’’ (Cinema 2 75). Fellini heeds Georges Battaille’s warning that art, in order to be ‘sacred,’ had to reject ‘project’ – everything that is pragmatic, all prior schematisation and prudence – in favour of ‘expenditure without reserve.’ His methodology means that fictions of purpose, progress and meaning are sidelined in favour of jolts of self-sufficient shock, disgust, and rapture. As such, films like ‘Casanova’ are able both to articulate and to exorcise fears of waste, of the arbitrary.
To posit Fellini as prophetically anticipating our culture’s decadent viewing practices would, of course, be to succumb to the very narrative impulse I’m claiming he questions, to grant his corpus the purpose and coherence his protagonists vainly seek to confer on their own lives and endeavours. But ‘Casanova’, by charting a course between pornographic fantasy and the (more plausible but ultimately no less deceptive) fallacies of traditional film narrative, manages to suggest the possibilities (intriguing and alarming both) that new technologies may hold for filmic storytelling.
Country: italy
Budget: £
Length: 164mins
Filmography
‘Broken Flowers’, 2005, Jim Jarmusch, Focus Features
‘Il Casanova di Fellini’, 1976, Federico Fellini, inD
‘La Dolce Vita’, 1960, Federico Fellini, Riama Films
‘Fellini - Satyricon’ 1969, Federico Fellini, United Artists
‘The Thing’, 1982, John Carpenter, Universal Pictures
Bibliography
Alain J.J. Cohen, ‘Virtual Hollywood and the Genealogy of its Hyper-Spectator’ in ‘Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences’, ed. Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes, BFI, 2008
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Cinema 2: The Time Image’, Continuum Impacts, 2005
Slavoj Zizek, ‘Plague of Fantasies’, Verso, 1997
Pub/2009
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'What? (Che?)', 1972, directed by Roman Polanski
'Irreversible', 2002, directed by Gaspar Noe