Laura Rascaroli

The place of the heart: scaling spaces in Robert Guédiguian's cinema

Abstract Robert Guédiguian once described himself as a ‘district film-maker’, for the reason that most of his films are set and shot in the peripheral and proletarian area of Estaque, north of Marseilles. From his productive and geographical peripheral position, Guédiguian offers an interesting lens through which to look at questions of broad sociocultural interest, such as the demise of all-encompassing ideologies and the crisis of the Left; the development of a post-class and post-industrial society; the evolution of family and community; and the transformation of the urban fabric. In this article, I claim that Guédiguians main topic is the demise of ‘place’, as the locus of the development of feelings of belonging and identity. With the backdrop of the question of the ‘end of geography’—the irrelevance of place in the contemporary socio-economic and technological contexts—I examine Guédiguians spatial discourse through a scale that goes from the local to the global, considering all of his films, and paying special attention to À la place du cœur/Where the Heart Is (1998).

Remapping the Neorealist Nation: Il cammino della speranza and the Rhetorics of the Road to Realism

Abstract Based on the hypothesis that realism in narrative cinema is the result of a set of rhetorical strategies that operate at the indexical, representational, communicative and social levels, and at the same time merging a poststructuralist and a cultural studies methodology, this essay compares three post-war films which share the ambition of embracing the entire peninsula: Roberto Rossellinis Paisà (1946), Pietro Franciscis Natale al Campo 119 (1948) and Piero Germis Il cammino della speranza (1950). Arguing for postwar cinemas need to replace Fascist geopolitics with a novel mapping of the nation based on a realistic impulse, and proposing that road narratives promised the successful negotiation of realism and ideology, this article discusses the position of Il cammino della speranza in particular and examines its rhetorical strategies vis-à-vis those of Rossellinis canonical neorealism and of Franciscis popular cinema.

Performance in and of the Essay film: Jean-Luc Godard plays Jean-Luc Godard in Notre musique (2004)

Abstract The ‘essay film’ is an experimental, hybrid, self-reflexive form, which crosses generic boundaries and systematically employs the enunciators direct address to the audience. Open and unstable by nature, it articulates its rhetorical concerns in a performative manner, by integrating into the text the process of its own coming into being, and by allowing answers to emerge in the position of the embodied spectator. My argument is that performance holds a privileged role in Jean-Luc Godards essayistic cinema, and that it is, along with montage, the most evident site of the negotiation between film-maker and film, audience and film, film and meaning. A fascinating case study is provided by Notre musique/Our Music (2004), in which Godard plays himself. Communicative negotiation is, I argue, both Notre musiques subject matter and its textual strategy. It is through the variation in registers of acting performances that the films ethos of unreserved openness and instability is fully realised, and comes to fruition for its embodied spectator.

The space of a return. A topographic study of Alain Resnais' Providence

Abstract The prevalent interpretation of Providence (Resnais, 1977) reads the first, nocturnal part of the film as a Freudian dream, and the second, diurnal section as the awakening and the return to logical thought—and as an almost unnecessary appendix. I argue instead that the last sequences are as much part of the dream as the rest of the film, as evidenced by the finale, a scene whose baffling character has escaped all critics. My new reading leads to a reassessment of the importance of space in Resnaiss film, and to a shift in the focus from the protagonist Clive to his property ‘Providence’. This house, a small Victorian castle with beautiful gardens, is the space that contains all of the films locations, an orderly and respectable cosmos behind whose facade the chaos of the settings produced by the primary process is barely hidden. Despite its deceiving journeys in space, the film never leaves the house and constructs instead the circular trajectory of a return.