Approaching La Terra Trema with an expectation for the
film to exemplify Neorealism, it is not surprising that most scholars
find it seriously compromised. This is not entirely unreasonable-Visconti
himself stated that his goal for the film was to strengthen the
waning cause of Neorealism. However, in the experience of watching
the film, it seems Visconti employs a Neorealist format to suit
his own creative needs, much in the same way that he freely adapts
Verga's novel for the film. As in all of Visconti's work, the
issue is complicated. While realism may be the dominant, V's interest
in drama and formal qualities is also present. La Terra Trema
is not a thesis on Neorealism; it is a formal masterpiece.
The voice- over (VO) in the film is just one formal device that
scholars such as Nowell- Smith and Marcus see as a betrayal of
the film's program. The VO, by virtue of its being added late
in the production, is an easy target. It is generally described
as functioning as an explication of the dialogue, which is spoken
in Sicilian dialect. Under the rubric of Neorealism, V's choice
to use the natural dialect is lauded; the "expedient" of adding
VO to deliver meaning is criticized. This of course is complicated
by the fact that the "natural" dialect is anything but-it is actually
an older form of the language chosen by V for its lyric qualities
and evocation of the past.[1]
If we remove the film from the discourse of Neorealism, we see
that the dialogue, as a formal decision based on the sound of
the language, caused the gulf of understanding. Can we then accept
the VO as a practical solution rather than a problem in itself?
One must now examine whether the VO works as a solution to the
problem of understanding dialogue. I will argue that it is not
concentrated on this function at all. V might have added a very
minimal VO, a few words as introduction to each scene to clarify
the plot. This would have truly mutilated his film. The VO account
would have sat on top of the film as interruptions, crutches.
Instead he chose to wrap this minimal plot summary in what is
an aesthetic device-he adds a poetic dimension, he gives extraneous
information, he makes suggestions, asks questions, he plays with
time. He turns a crutch into another layer of meaning. It is an
avant- garde device, distancing the spectator from the diegetic
illusion, calling attention to the tension between socioeconomic
groups and individual protagonists, ancient and modern time. This
tension is the authorial statement.
I will anticipate my argument with an example: in one scene
the downfall of the Valastros is being made evident, while the
VO says "But Antoni still has the love of Nedda" The spoken word
simply is not clarifying the plot, but complicating our understanding.
The VO comments on a future that is past, using irony to underline
the loss. This is one scene in the sequence Sitney describes this
sequence as paratactic.[2] This seems a useful
formulation. The scenes' very construction, shifting from the
troubles of one family member to the next, with camera movement
as well as dissolves and cross- cutting, suggests that one event
does not follow the next, but occurs at the same level of time,
on an equivalent sheet of time. Shots of Cola's interaction with
the smugglers are interwoven with the arrival of the men from
the bank; Cola's leaving immediately precedes Grandpa's falling
ill; next follows a shot of Lucia's reaction to the loss. There
is then a cut to her leaning against a series of walls, from the
walls of the house they are doomed to lose, taking support outside
the home, moving further and further from the family. Finally
she is seen looking at the object clasped in her hand. We are
left to suppose this bauble marks her final fall, to the charms
of Don Salvatore. A dissolve then takes us to the scene of Antoni
and his drinking buddies, followed by another to Lucia and Mara
fighting about Lucia's reputation, and then a dissolve to Antoni
fighting with the young wholesaler about Antoni's behavior and
reputation. No one section seems to have its own argument; rather,
the argument seems to be the sum of the events. All grow from
the root of Antoni's one action, like the branches from one tree.
When trouble comes there is no stopping it, because the source
is further back, further than Antoni's action, really, all the
way back to the construction of the power system. One cannot back
up a step in time and reverse direction; the die has been cast.
So time becomes the subject of the film, and the VO navigates,
even formulates the dialectic of temporalities that categorize
the film as well as Visconti's body of work. Though a few scholars
look more carefully at the language and tonality, most critics
emphasize the production circumstances that required the VO addition
and see the VO as a problematic device, therefore missing its
importance in the texture of the film. Marcus claims "Visconti's
own much maligned aestheticism can be seen as a way of inscribing
Verga's elegiac perspective into the film,"[3] as a way of excusing
Visconti for "sabotaging the film's realism"[4]
Nowell- Smith's analysis of the film as an opera due to its incomprehensibility
is flawed. In this way he splits the film in two, praising how
"the pictorial style.matched to the dialogue to form an audiovisual
whole,"[5] while dismissing the VO as mere
clarification, a clarification that, in this case, does "violence"
to the project of the film.[6]
Bacon gets closer to the issue at hand, remarking upon the use
of the VO to create the pseudo- iterative sense of narrative,
and understanding the VO as both "aesthetic and analytic."[7] Sitney also seems
to understand the aesthetic force of the VO, noting the rhetorical
devices which "indicate an affinity between the VO and the world
of those in the film."[8] The VO's use of proverbs and free
indirect discourse, which is a novelists' technique of imparting
to the reader the thoughts of his characters, indicates an intimacy
we can feel with the characters. Sitney attributes these devices
to V's attempt to bridge the distance that the VO brings; an unsuccessful
attempt, for Sitney, because V's use of archaic language structures
and free indirect discourse "calls attention to the very gap it
would cover."[9]
Through Micciche, Sitney uses the VO again to criticize V; the
VO creates an inevitable distance between V and his story, the
story and the audience, that Sitney sees as symptomatic of V's
problematic position as the Red Duke. The distance is pointing
to the problem of an aristocrat telling the story of the economically
challenged South.
Politics are indeed at issue. As Sitney remarks, the use of
Italian, the language of the state, to make clear the Sicilian,
the southern language of the poor fisherman, is by necessity a
political comment. There are competing authorities: the authority
of the privileged text, written in Italian with a Sicilian inflection;
the authority of the dialogue, a Neorealist authority but tempered
by the aesthetic choice of V. The VO, with its inherent authoritative
quality, is in Italian, the language of the state.[10]
But more importantly, the language navigates two senses of time,
which are in themselves political alternatives. The pseudoiterative
VO, the repetition, the proverbs, even the choice of Antonio Pietrangeli,
a native of Sicily, to deliver part of the VO, all stand for the
old time, the time of cyclicality, of tradition. In contrast is
a Marxist/Gramscian time, which tries to assert its viability
within the film, though ultimately failing. In this way the language
choices can be seen as being a measure of time, not of distance.
The VO is artful, in the sense of being beautiful for its own
sake, but also in the sense of being an absolute in the fabric
of the text that is weaved of time. The VO, rather than
simple plot function, adds to the play of two temporalities, complicates
the issue of time, in its creative process makes time the material
of film.
Life in the village of Acitrezza is characterized by an orality
and tonality as well as a cyclical sense of time. Both are manifestations
of an old fashioned ways of living, marked by men calling out
to each other, bells, the repetition of stories and expressions.
Walter Benjamin's essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
examines the connection between orality and pastness.[11] In oral cultures
narrative is conveyed by repetition, and thus memory becomes essential.
This he compares with modernity, the information age, where timelessness
is not a supreme value, and memory is replaced with speed of access.
Sound is thus linked with time-the sound of the film makes prominent
the old time of the fishermen of Acitrezza. Music is essential
to the development of characters-the sergeant's whistle, the singing
of the builder in the scenes between Mara and her beloved. The
family tells jokes and plays music at the social gathering which
is the salting of the anchovies. In one shot of the paratactic
sequence the camera lingers long after the main characters exit
the shot. Left in the center of the composition is a boy blowing
a horn. Like the ringing of the bells, this sound announces the
destruction of the Valastros, indicating nothing except an atmosphere
of something being proclaimed. The VO has a particular sound,
a sound that creates part of its affect as a formal element. It
has a rhythmic, metered quality. The delivery of the VO is expressive-it
is playful when discussing Antoni's early courtship with Nedda;
it becomes quiet when it must deliver the news of the Valastros'
defeat. It stops to create room for the characters' dialogue.
The VO's delivery works on the level of the sound of the film,
becoming a part of the condition of an earlier period, while positing
some possibilities of a future tense. It is clear when looking
at V's work and writings that the formal qualities of this way
of living appealed strong to him. At the same time V's politics
inspired him to make a statement of beliefs on the inherent problems
with the capitalist system. This is the nature of the film's tension,
which is worked out in the VO. In the Southern question Visconti
finds a place where political meets formal, sound and image.
The VO's even metered rhythm adds to the sense of the inevitable
rise and fall of each day, similar to the rhythm of the bells,
of the dialogue. The film's rhythm is also created by the play
of silence and noise, as scenes move from Mara's quiet remark
about the bitter sea to the loudness of the men at sea and at
the wholesaler. Similarly, the noise of the bells announcing the
storm is followed by the scene of the women on the rocks, silent
but for the sound of the sea.
When you live off the land, daylight determines your work. The
sea announces the time, the state of sky above sea, and VO tells
the time over these shots. The film opens with a strong sense
of time as structure. Both the VO and image track alert us to
the time of day, and each scene clearly relates in time to the
one that precedes and follows it. Toward the center of the film,
this time is lost. Night no longer dissolves to dawn, to midday,
to twilight; instead there are ellipses that cover broad, vague
distances of time. Sound collapses these gaps of continuity, as
overlapping of the sound of bells, the sea links the scenes together.
As Bacon remarks, the VO creates a sense of cyclical time, equivalent
to Genette's iterative, through phrases like "as always" "every
night."[12] Similarly Verga's novel uses iterative structure,
verbal dissolves, repetition to create a sense of time as a force
of nature to those who live off the land in Sicily. But, as Bacon
notices, it is a pseudo- iterative.[13] Activities that occur every
day are replaced by events that are "unlikely to occur repeatedly,"
though may represent a certain type of occurrence. This relates
to Lukacs representative characters, which function much in the
same way. They seem at first general descriptions of a type of
person at a time and place; individual characteristics then round
out the portrayal while continuing the task of representing.
The VO seems to call attention to the fact that V is playing
with the tension both of iterative to pseudoiterative and representative
to individual characters (the two sets each moving from general
to particular). The very first VO gives a heavy sense of iterative
time "from the grandfather, to father, to sons" Almost immediately,
the cycle of time is complicated. "The women," as a group, as
always the women of Acitrezza, are represented in image as one
woman, Lucia. In the VO one family is named, the Valastros, and
the specific fate of their father shifts the film from social
commentary into a narrative register. Before, there was a father
who was killed, now there is a family without a father. In the
future, we will see the effect of this occurrence. Lucia then
has a line of dialogue, and becomes a particular character in
the story; the VO repeats what she says-for clarity, but also
to put her words in past tense, a sort of repetition that splits
time. Repetition reinstates the cycle. The VO speaks of "all damages,
every night" and "the men."
Again there is a gap-the VO describes Don Salvatore as watching
"the girls" pass by- but only Lucia is on the image track. (Similarly,
we will be told by the VO later that "The women" turn to neighbors
for help, and we see just Mara in storm. The VO plays with our
natural inclination to unite the image and sound track.[14])
Don Salvatore represents an intrusion of a new type of time.
He is an employee of the state, and a foreigner to the village.
He knows the mainland, and even suggests that Lucia belongs in
the city. The VO remarks that he has time on his hands.
Through his influence, Lucia's character is inscribed with the
possibility of breaking the cycle. She is a "modern" woman, asserting
her right to do as she pleases, understanding (however naively)
the value of her sexuality, and unable to reengage with the family
cycle due to her poor reputation. In contrast, Lucia's fairy tale
is the age- old story of a prince coming to rescue an unfortunate
wretch. The language of her story is repetitive: the prince goes
"on and on" to find her, then takes her "far far away." This is
the old story "once upon a time," not the capitalist fairy tale
of pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps. Instead it inscribes
old values of male/female relations.
There is then a major shift in the scene that selects Antoni
as the protagonist in the drama. The VO mainly, and especially
in the first part of the film, privileges Antoni's thoughts and
emotions. Frequently the VO has access to Antoni's thoughts before
he expresses them through dialogue; sometimes the VO shares thoughts
Antoni never expresses. When Antoni's thoughts are expressed through
the VO, they are not dramatized in intensity through facial expression
and dialogue, or are dramatized later. A few striking moments
the VO seems to suggest thoughts, ways of seeing the world to
Antoni. "If the young men were to go to the wholesalers, perhaps
things would be different," the VO says, as if working through
Antoni's thought process, one which we only get hints at through
other characters' remarks of Antoni's foul mood. The dialogue
places the idea for the young men to go to the wholesalers in
the context of a conversation happening between the men, young
and old. While the dialogue centers on Antoni, other characters
have a significant role in formulating this revolutionary idea.
Slightly later, in a scene between Antoni, his mother, and Cola,
Antoni hides his agitation from his mother and from us, visually.
The only manifestation outside the VO is his refusal to eat what
his mother has offered. Though we are privy to the information
the VO has given us, the dramatic intensity of the scene is still
enhanced by Antoni's bottling of his emotions, only to be released
in an outburst which seems an epiphany of understanding. Suddenly
it comes to him; the law is not an absolute ideal, but a tool
of power within the hands of those who oppress. They can let him
out of jail on their whim, because they need him. He has learned
civil disobedience and his power as a laborer within the system.
The VO's relationship to this character has significance in
revealing something about the levels of authority in the film.
Antoni is a character adapted from Verga, rescripted by Visconti,
portrayed by a non- professional actor, chosen by V, directed
as far as scenario by V, but allowed to speak in his own words
and language. Thus the dialogue is V speaking through Antoni through
the fisherman's own voice. Versus the VO which is V speaking through
V through the VO technique.
As Antoni takes his friends to the sea to speak in private about
the possibility of working for themselves, the owners speculate
that they are going to sober up. Their drunkenness would indicate
an unwillingness to look toward the future. Alcohol is made of
rotten fruit and grain; it is in essence decay, decadence. But
Antoni is thinking of the future, and again the VO is in the future
register, this time by posing a question "But where to find the
money to become independent." The VO repeats Cola's phrase, the
main theme of the film, but puts it in past tense, back into the
cycle. The VO then privileges the owners-but in past tense-and
the initiative quality of the VO is quickly contained as the VO
repeats Grandpa's proverb. This moment is essential. The proverb
is a symbol of the past register, but is spoken in present tense
by the VO, predicting the future the future of the Valastros as
inscribed in pastness. At the end of the scene and delivered quietly,
this bit of prescience is hidden away to be almost missed by the
viewer, swept away in the tide of anticipation of a possible linear
time, a bright future in the plans of the Valastros.
"When, in Trezza, the bells ring, the hearts sink of those who
have men at sea." Again orality and cyclicality collapse. With
the bells the film returns to a cyclical temporality, to social
description of the life of the village, away from the narrative
of the Valastros, right at the moment of the most dramatic scene
of Valastros' misadventure. The sequence opens with a long pan
shows the village from above, then moves in to a shot showing
the boy ringing the bell. V could have made dramatic the fate
of the Valastros; instead he holds the shot at a distance, and
thus brings the discourse back to the socioeconomic dimension.
Rather than this one family, all the people of this village are
contained by the limitations of this old style of living.
In the next major transition, the VO repeats Grandpa's dialogue,
then wonders "perhaps Antoni and his brothers have not already
realized the extent of their misfortune." The phrasing suggests
the future and uses the past tense. This initiates the paratactic
sequence, the segment that makes most palpable the tension of
two temporalities. Filled with questions, suggestion, proverbs,
irony, the mirror exchange, it is a concentration of extranarrative
devices, which emphasize the contradiction as these results of
cause/effect narrative linear story are reabsorbed into a cyclical
schema. The one thing after another structure is a kind of narrative
collapse-a process of falling back into the other time register.
Qualifying the proffered solution of selling the anchovies,
the VO wonders "To whom, if not the wholesalers?" The future is
in question; their future is an act of trying to dig out of an
inevitable pastness. The repetition of the worm and stone proverb
underlines the VO's power as a containing force of the old order.
Next the VO asks the question about the stranger "who hasn't
been seen before," "what is his promise?" This rhetorical
gesture is unusual for VO, whose customary role is to give information,
not to request it. Later the VO asks who would want Lucia, due
to her soiled reputation. The questions could be revealing the
VO's authority of omniscience, by telling us the questions located
only within the characters' consciousness, in the official Italian
language and Voice of God tradition, representing the authority
of the elders, of tradition. It also might raise doubt upon the
authority of the VO, by seeking information which it lacks. That
the technique can slip between the two readings indicated the
complexity of V's message, and the tensions within the film.
Especially significant is the scene between Cola and Antoni
in front of the mirror as they discuss the future. Deleuze notes
the power of the mirror in relation to time in "The Crystal Image,"
a chapter from his book Cinema 2: The Time Image. Citing
such texts as Welles' Lady from Shanghai and Citizen
Kane as well as the works of Max Ophuls, he compares the splitting
of the filmic image into two with the constant split into present
and past that is the essential crystal of time. The filmic image
and mirror image coexist in an equality of flat imageness, there
is a tension between their authority.
V uses mirrors consistently throughout his work, having his
characters share the screen with their own or others' reflections.
In La Terra Trema the pivotal scene as Cola and Antoni
discuss options for the future is enacted in front of a mirror.
The scene first centers around Antoni, with his monologue about
the troubles of the family and finding work; Cola handles Antoni's
photograph, referring to Antoni's time away as a sailor, a time
that developed his progressive ideas. Antoni appears as Cola's
reflection in the mirror, making a statement about the relation
of the brothers as the same, as kin, with similar situations and
options for the future. Antoni is distorted in the warped mirror.
His power is fading. The scene shifts, there is a cut to a reverse
shot, and Cola is in the foreground, and shown in reflection,
his face dramatically marked with shadows. Cola then centers the
scene, as he fantasizes about leaving the village for opportunities
on the mainland. The transition is complete as a pan makes the
transition from a two- shot of the brothers in the mirror to a
two- shot of them outside. We see Antoni's face in close- up over
Cola's shoulder-he is defeated, crying, his face lowered as he
rejects this solution, saying "our struggle is here." Finally
Antoni walks out of the shot, we see his back, a figure of resignation.
Antoni moves into the past and Cola into the future, to the mainland,
his story to be continued thematically in Rocco and His Brothers.
The VO enhances this emphasis of the passing of a guard-it makes
a parallel shift. It begins by repeating Antoni's dialogue, which
is, despite Antoni's progressive thinking, a backward looking
statement, calling for a maintenance on some level of the way
things are. "If you're born in Trezza, you stay in Trezza." Both
by the repetition and the content of the statement, the VO focuses
on Antoni but reveals his repression within the cycle. But after
the next cut the VO privileges Cola's thoughts-the past has fallen
away as the present takes its place. The VO tells us Cola "yearns"
for the city. Cola looks forward to a solution outside the cycle,
however qualified by its illegality.
The fall continues with Grandpa's physical illness, followed
by the scene of Antoni carousing with his drunken friends, the
completion of his fall. This scene is a counterpart to the earlier
drinking scene, when all things were possible. Antoni drowns his
past mistakes, his disappointment, in drink. Again, drunkenness
is mired in pastness-drunks live on old memories, productivity
is no longer a goal-the future is disavowed, because the only
future is the hopelessness of a hangover. The play of musicality
structures the scene-Antoni's friend's harmonica opens the scene,
stopping with the whistling of the sergeant, only to begin again
when the threat is gone. The cycle is also made physical in the
movement of actors across the screen space. As the music resumes,
the men begin to dance: two circling through the filmic space
in an embrace, the others crossing the space from left to right
in an arced progression, leisurely looping before the camera.
The VO, again offering solutions, can only suggest avoidance
of the sergeant, who might arrest Antoni, this time not for civil
disobedience but for drunk and disorderly conduct. The VO's remark
"Even if its unusual for him to be out at this hour," is not so
much clarifying the plot as planting a suggestion of this as unusual,
so that by the cut to the scene of Lucia coming home late we can
come to a likely conclusion. The extra subtitles added in the
2002 DVD release, like VO's that were never spoken, spell out
this relation, and remove the subtlety and ambiguity of the carefully
constructed scene. Similarly in the scene of Cola and the mysterious
stranger, the false VO eliminates the speculation by giving an
easy answer.
It is not surprising that reviewers found the film depressing,
and a betrayal of V's political project. The scene of promise,
the look to the future, is equally qualified. The young girl speaks
with Antoni as the boat being is repaired. She girl is looking
to the future, but Antoni cannot let go of the past. The girl
tells Antoni that they are fixing his boat; Antoni's thoughts
(as revealed by the VO) are on the past, the positions that his
family used to hold on the boat. The girl says "if I could help
you I would," a statement which is entirely in the future. The
repeats this, then paraphrases Antoni's coming to consciousness
statement: "Now if they'd only learn to be good to each other
and unite for their common good." Now if they could unite-this
is the vision for future. Finding this one statement is the goal
of the film, made dramatic by Antoni look into the camera. But
still there is the repetition, and the truth of Antoni's failure.
The boat is no longer his, the power of the capitalist owners
is a force so strong as not to be overcome in the film, though
it is possible that the two unmade sections of the film, meant
to be progressively more optimistic, could have done so.
There are several scenes in the film that seem to have a temporal
significance in the image track, outside the realm of the VO.
The scene just after Antoni has mortgaged the house is one such
example. A camera movement takes us from the street, and the remark
of a negative neighbor, sweeps past a neighbor in the window,
and onto the rooftop, settling on a composition that dramatically
foreshortens Antoni's reclining figure while displaying Grandpa
in the far background playing his instrument. The scene, while
functioning in the narrative to display the hostility the fellow
villagers feel toward Antoni's initiative, also has a feeling
of being outside time-the camera moves drowsily over the rooftops,
the music is a folksong looking back to earlier times. A proverb
describing neighbors as being like roof tiles is made visual in
the shot that links the families together despite Antoni's self-
separation. The visual composition and ostensive camera movement
reminds the viewer of the director creating this image. There
is a depth of space rather than time.
As another example, the storm that is the Valastros' undoing
is depicted in timeless imagery. The iconic collection of images
of the women waiting on the rocks has an eternal quality. There
is something about the image that extends its expression beyond
this specific narrative, to make a comment on women waiting, on
the nature of risk, the significance of fate. This quality is
partly created by V's use of long- shots to distance us from the
personal grief and thus the narrative. The first shot is at a
distance; we see their silhouettes as dark shapes, their backs
to us. V then pans to the sea and shows the fierce waves and empty
horizon. This shot, indeed all the shots in this sequence, are
held quite long with little movement. Though with each cut V moves
in closer to these women, showing their stoic faces, the impact
is never personal. The message of the image is that women wait.
In every culture, in all time periods, poor women wait anxiously
for their men to return from their dangerous tasks. The wives
of coalminers, fishermen, soldiers all powerlessly attend with
dread and resignation the playing out of fate's hand. The next
cuts move back out to show the way the black forms of the women
meld into the rocks, suggesting their groundedness in the village.
This is their earth (If you're born in Trezza you stay in Trezza).
Women, like the land, are ancient ties that men, regardless of
their revolutionary awakenings, cannot easily escape. The silence
of the women is a presence not an absence. The deafening sound
of the brutal crashing waves. The sea is a source of life and
a way to make a living, but is also a violent source of death.
This is an ancient truth of mankind.
The absence of VO in these important visual scenes serves to
underline my thesis: the VO is a formal technique meant to express
an authorial comment, an aural equivalent to camera movement and
imagery filled with connotations and suggestions. V makes a very
particular choice to use this formal technique in certain scenes,
just as he chooses to make points visually. One does not clarify
the other; rather both work on the same level to create meaning
within the text.
The final long take is a shot of Antoni at sea. It is day, he
returns to the cycle, we image that night will fall, then morning.
Antoni now has nothing; with him the cycle of time, will "start
again", as the VO points out for us. The future is "passing into
the hands of strangers." Antoni, despite his growth and attempts
to move into a modern temporality, reenters the cycle. V shows
Antoni going back to sea. The final line of the VO removes any
doubt: "bitter is the sea, and bitter is the sailor's death at
sea. Antoni fails to move into modernity. Even the movement of
the oars reinforces the cyclicality. The repetition of "mare"
and "amare" is extended now to include "marinaio muore in mare"-the
sailor's death at sea, the inevitable end of all life make more
bitter with the hope of progress.
The current trend of looking at a film from its own circumstances,
its own time, examining production records, knowing the history
of the VO, has advantages, important to understand the context
of the development. But also important to be able to let this
go-to see the text from a contemporary standpoint, as a viewer
experiencing the film as the text that it is. From this standpoint,
the VO is not a weakness, nor are the gorgeous images of the dark
figures of the Valastro women on the rocky seaside waiting for
their men. Instead, the problem seems to be the slowness of the
film, the realism that tends to dullness.
The VO, ostensive camera movement, timeless compositions, in
other words, V's style, are essential and are the strength of
the film, the pleasure in the film. A project to mount a defense
of the essential rightness of the VO in La Terra Trema
is not to assert V as an unequivocal genius. As entertainment,
as a fiction film, it fails. In Andrew Sarris review of the film[15], he seems torn-he even says he longs to defend
it, but truly finds it dull. Reviewers and scholars alike have
a hard time classifying it- this could be a problem of Neorealism.
Regardless of the question of realism, V's formal weaving, his
way of working with time-for this, not as an exemplar of Neorealism,
the film, and Visconti, should be remembered.
Bibliography
- Bacon, Henry. Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Benjamin, Walter. "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
- Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema: The Time- Image v. 2. Athlone:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 1989.
- Marcus, Millicent. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema
and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1993.
- Micciche, Lino. La Terra Trema di Luchino Visconti.
Torino, Italia: Association Philip Morris Progetto Cinema, 1996.
Nowell- Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti. London: British
Film Institute, 2003.
- Parigi, S. "Il Dualismo Linguistico." La Terra Trema di
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