Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human

Abstract

notes, “saw their own enlarged silhouettes projected, as in a shadow theater, on four large screens at ground level” (219) as they wandered around large columns wrapped in black fabric which the designer Sartogo called, with some apparent irony, “fasci.” It's impossible to forget that the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista was held in the same halls, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1932. Golan frames her subjects in a way that recalls—at points—the odd use of the second person singular found in some narrations: you weren’t there, but you are invoked, as indirect subjectivity. You are and you are not a character in a brief or ephemeral mini-drama. Groups of men converse, with wives and other women standing on the margins. Golan’s book does, I think, offer the reader the possibility to imagine a feminist counterhistory to what was, by all appearances, a rather masculine milieu. The fact is that while many of the works she engages with still exist today including within major museum collections, they are equally characterized by a momentariness that is not precisely “located” in the photographs Golan reproduces, but better “dislocated.” She devotes a great deal of time to a phenomenology of Pistoletto’s mirror works. The photographs of certain “characters” (art world personages, but also random visitors) in and around the works suggest possible plots and imaginary relations. Reading Flashback, Eclipse, I was reminded, strangely, of Vanni Santoni’s Personaggi precari (RGB Media, 2007, licensed by Creative Commons), which begins with a preface inviting readers to use its “precarious characters” in their own “plays, stories, short and long films, role playing games, animation, novels, cartoons, radio and film transmissions.” They are “available for major roles or as extras, with shortor long-term contracts” and can be employed “in completely arbitrary ways, even undergoing humiliation or death if they story requires it.” (Santoni 1). Naturally, though, you might also choose to read that book as a novel, from front to back, experiencing the tenuousness of the characters and the full stops that separate one from the next, as an existential condition. Of course, Golan paints a portrait of a world when the roots of “the precariat” are being sown. Her actors may not appear cynical or anxious about labor, the social safety net, or massive planetary disruption. They move about the spaces of an Italy emerging from the war and the subsequent economic boom looking simultaneously outward and inward. The book is punctuated with moments of unadulterated joy, but also melancholy as we measure our distance or proximity to the energy and experimentation of the 60s. It is rare to read such a generous aperture—one that grants the reader freedom to navigate her relation to a past that is moving ever further away. In this regard one might be tempted to call Golan’s style feminist. At any rate it embraces art and politics in all of their messy imbrication.