Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
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2 2010
J. Douglas Macready
University of Dallas
For Alexander García Düttmann the films of Luchino Visconti are what
Theodor W. Adorno described as apparitions - ‘heavenly vision[s]… that rise
[…] above human beings and [are] carried beyond their intentions and the
world of things’ (Adorno, 2004, p. 107). From his first viewing of Il
gattopardo in the 1970s until his lecture in 2004 titled ‘That Crazy Visconti,’
Düttmann has been mesmerized by the eccentric Italian director. Taking an
obvious lead from Henry Bacon’s Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and
Decay (1998) which argued that Visconti’s use of melodramatic realism
‘evoked reality in its flesh and blood,’ Düttmann has produced a penetrating
study of Visconti that is both philosophically sophisticated and aesthetically
engaging. In Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood Düttmann brings a
distinctive philosophical rigor and aesthetic precision together with a passion
for cinema into an engaging encounter between the thought of Adorno and
the films of Visconti.
In the first, longest and perhaps most important chapter of the book,
Düttmann lays the foundations for a unique dialogue between philosophy
and film. He begins the chapter with an enigmatic statement extracted from
Adorno's introduction to Negative Dialectics which he argues is the central
thought expressed in the films of Visconti. The statement is translated as
‘The place of utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality’
(1). The rest of the book is a sustained analysis of this statement as a means
Bibliography
Bacon, Henry (1998) Visconti: Explorations of Beauty & Decay. New York:
Cambridge University Press.