Cinema: mimicry and repetition

 

di Francesca Molfino

 

 

Mimicry:

a superficial resemblance of one organism to

another or to natural objects among which it lives that secures

it a selective advantage (as protection from predation).

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

 

 

 

1.

 

Having only a few minutes at my disposal, I have had to remove a number of passages from my exposition, and must therefore regrettably warn you that my address may appear somewhat categorical, and comprehension may not always be easy.

 

Reflecting on the changes the image of women has gone through in Italian cinema from the post-war years to the present day, and thus considering a very long chapter of cinema history, I have chosen not to dwell on the contents the various images of women offered, which I am sure will be far better analysed in the other contributions. What made a particular impression on me is the way cinema has influenced the working of our minds.

One hundred years of cinema have generated a way of thinking and acquiring knowledge that has come to prevail over the old attitude, which rested on the argument that representation and subjectivity are organized around lack and symbols.

Consequently, we cannot speak of a general trend toward the non-generalizable, against theory, but rather of a certain futility in constructing new theories.

 

 

As long ago as 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote in his famous study on The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction( in:  Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 1969,  Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Francoforte sul Meno, 1955)  that day by day the need becomes increasingly self-evident to take possession of the object from the closest possible distance: as image, or better effigy, in reproduction. Thus the repetition of a film may be seen to produce the urge to come close to the image, to merge into it. On the strength of its technological structure, therefore, cinema leads to deeper perception over the whole range of the sensibility. Moreover, the stream of associations of those watching the images is constantly interrupted or excited by their changes. As Benjamin concludes, a film has the effect of a physical shock. (Ibid, p. 44).

The rapid change of images shown on television is also being seen today (D. de Kerckhove (1991), Brainframes. Technology, mind and business, Bosch )&Keuning ,BSO/ORIGIN, Utrecht, Netherlands) as potentially damaging to articulate verbal expression.

Subjected to a spate of changing images, the spectator acts and reacts with heightened physiological excitation, which in turn leads to diminished comprehension. But this is not all. We tend to follow television with a sort of sensory-motor mimicry involving the entire body. We perform myriad cognitive operations that hardly begin to enter our awareness. The appeal of television and cinema might in fact be precisely this: thinking with the body.

 

 

2.

 

In Italian cinema before the Second World War the star system was generated around the figure of the Diva. Since then the system has represented or suggested models for male and female roles.

One possible reason for the birth of the diva in Italy is the attention attributed to sheer beauty, and the powerful appeal exerted by the country’s cultural tradition in the pictorial arts.

In Italy the only culture that has developed over the centuries while retaining a certain degree of independence from religious thought is not so much the secular as the aesthetic-artistic tradition, which originally took beauty as the earthly representation of the divine and eventually shook off the transcendental element, celebrating beauty for its own sake.

The first Dive of the cinema created a new expressive system: that of appearing, which took the place of being for the “cinema creatures” and was definitely not a manifestation of existence. Certain parts of the body, the face and various features of the clothing became the salient, expressive elements in the language of appearing.

 

3.

 

It was the “Italy of artistic beauty and real misery” that emerged from the Second World War, and Italian cinema successfully combined reality and general values through the expression of sentiments and primary elements: life and destruction, human dignity and poverty, love and motherhood.

The predominant image that Italian cinema returned to in the post-war period once again came fully within the Italian art tradition of painting and sculpture, which had assigned absolute centrality to the female-maternal body.

Actresses, and with them the ideal female model, were often sought through the Miss Italy contests, which guaranteed choice of the most supremely beautiful.

In the close but complicated and contrasting relations between sensuality –sexuality and maternity-earth, the female body was represented by the dive of those: Silvana Mangano, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida. The blending of sentiment and poverty, misery and its transfiguration through the extraordinary, the ideally beautiful and sensuality, was – if you will excuse the singular comparison – a reformulation of the poetics of Caravaggio, who incarnated divinity in the plebeian female figures of his paintings.

As Giovanna Grignaffini pointed out, in the immediate post-war period Italian cinema asserted its rebirth and recognizability with two landscapes: “the Italian landscape and the female landscape, both evoked in the name of their profound and manifest beauty ( G. Grignaffini,Il femminile nel cinema italiano. Racconti di rinascita, in G. P. Brunetta (editor ) Identitŕ italiana e identitŕ europea nel cinema italiano, Edizioni della Fondazione Agnelli, Turin, 1996, p. 362).

In the choice of actors, the main point was not so much the acting itself as the looks, and essentially the way the actor appeared, which was to be physically and temperamentally in perfect keeping with the psychological make-up of the character. The interior features of a character or actor became external, visible.

 

4.

 

Since the 1950s cinema has been dominated by the inroads and influence of Hollywood, or in other words of a film industry that invents reality rather than copying it.

European cinema also achieved wide circulation, and with it representations of life differing markedly from the traditional Italian lifestyle; thus we have the irreconcilable nature of individual existences, and the gulfs of incomprehension lying in the way between human relations. The most commercial films were full of women recounting their various fortunes and fates, emancipation and social and cultural uprooting.

In Italy the last few decades have seen a proliferation of women protagonists, as indeed has the world cinema. Every imaginable case is represented: housewives who shake off the family ties and emancipated women who re-embrace them, nuns and restless adolescents, the politically committed, the elusive and the neurotic, etc., etc. Some actresses offer themselves to the public as new editions of the 1950’s Diva. The springs of that culture have long since run dry, and any attempt to resume the role of diva can only work in terms of “revival”.  Sabrina Ferilli is a striking example, combining as she does a buxom physique with authentic, common background, and thus immediately inviting comparison with Loren or Lollobrigida.

I do, however, believe that Italian culture retains a certain peculiarity, represented by the necessary and pervasive presence in every context of the “beautiful woman”, from the TV quizmaster’s comely assistant to the decidedly sexy star.

In the age of reproducible works of art beauty is a readily repeatable phenomenon, while at the same time enjoying general consensus, thus becoming a value in itself, devoid of any transcendent association. So it is that in Italy today bodily beauty, the repeatable element, has become the great stereotype – the self-myth.

In Italy the last few years have seen, in contrast to the American blockbusters, a series of unpretentious films based on real life in Italy and the problems of Italians, serving above all to bring audiences home from distant, impossible horizons, reorienting films in the Italian landscape and making for closer identification with the characters.

Italian films are not fighting back against Hollywood movies but offering a sort of side-dish, even helping boost American cinema since they keep the cinema system running from one film to another, providing increasingly individual models so that all tastes can be catered for. The fate of Italy is that of a culture that has become peripheral to the culture of America and Northern Europe but at the same time, given its simple and somewhat fragile substance, clearly reveals the significant points of the dominant culture. It is precisely this conspicuous role Italian cinema now attributes to a petty individualism, divorced from the common experience we can share – this unrestrained proliferation of characters and stories overriding a Babel of tongues – that suggest to me an irreversible change in our way of thinking. And this turnabout has come through the cinema and its system of mechanical reproduction and imitation.

 

5.

 

 

To imitate is, of course, to reproduce an image. But basically, for the subject it is entering into a function the exercise of which takes a hold on him (J. Lacan,  The Four Fundamental Concepts  of Psycho-Analysis, Penguin Books, 1979) .

 

In This sex which is not a sex  Irigaray  (1977) takes up Lacan’s references to mimicry and considers female mimesis as a strategy to “destroy” discursive functioning. For a woman, resorting to the mimetic expedient means re-discovering the place of her exploitation in the phallocentric discourse without letting herself be reduced to it just as it is.

It means re-submitting – but on the side of the “sensible”, of “matter” – to ideas, in particular about herself, formulated in/by a male logic, so that what should remain hidden “appears” by means of an effect of ludic repetition .

However, the mimetic process that Irigaray understood as an important element in the modern formulation of culture, more than making that which was hidden appear, has become a wide-ranging system for the acquisition of knowledge, in contrast to the rational-conceptual approach.

 

Given its sheer concreteness, the cinema system does not lend itself to abstraction. The substitute for abstraction is to be found in its reproducibility, or in other words in the possibility the many individual cinemagoers have of directly reliving and continuously perceiving realities rather than thinking of them or imagining them. Repetition and reproduction substitute generalisation, and are elements belonging to a cognitive system that is not only based on conceptualisation and imagination, but basically on perception and, we might add, familiarisation.

When reality can be represented in all its aspects, so that it can be experienced and shared in by a great many people, there is no longer any need to describe it, relate, narrate or fantasise about it, or condense it into symbols. Thus the symbolic becomes unnecessary; reality is directly there to take possession of us as, sinking into the dark of the movie theatre, the distinction between concrete and virtual reality disappears.

Perceiving and recognising visual stimuli is among the higher functions of the brain, richer and more complex than a simple sensory function. Nevertheless, there is always some truth in the idea that a film deprives the audience of individual imaginative activities such as are experienced by readers of novels.

 

6.

 

The primary core of identity is formed through sexual difference, which is associated with the perceptive, sensory system in the social sphere. 

The essence of femininity is most frequently attached to the natural body as an immediate indicator of sexual difference. But as the body is always a function of discourse, and an image or metonymy of the body is fundamental to psychic constructions, clothes are the signs of sexual difference.

In children’s accounts it is often the clothes that define sex more than the body, or at least serve as the fundamental system to distinguish one sex from the other.

The connection between image and sexual difference is obviously very close, and imitation becomes a necessary vehicle for the individual to take his or her part in the system of the two sexes. The mechanism can reach paradoxical levels: those who imitate most and best will be the most female and, ultimately (here I am thinking of transexualism) the actual endowment of sexual organs becomes irrelevant.

Freud’s dictum that one “becomes  woman” must now be modified: women construct themselves, and the process through which this is achieved is based more on imitation and mimesis than symbolic processing.

A recurrent theme in psychoanalytic and philosophical theories is the unattainability of the other, of the event or concrete object, and at the same time the precariousness of the subjects, and their indistinctness in the face of the reality they describe. And the borderline between subject and object blurs over. Hollywood, for its part, goes on creating ever more reality, ever less fiction, and the reference models for the construction of sexual identity are the characters proposed by the cinema and other forms of exhibition.

In cinema, the biggest problem facing filmmakers in trying to construct character is how to render a character’s ‘inner life’.  As Leo Braudy says:

 

The basic  nature of character in film is omission – the omission of connective between appearances, of references to the actor’s existence in others worlds and selves except the one we see before us (…)  The visible body  is our only evidence for the invisible mind (quoted by : R. Dyer (1979) Stars, British Film Institute, p. 133)

 

Certain devices for expressing interiority have been developed: for example, the close-up, or the performance.

 

Performance is how the action/function is done, how the lines are said.

The signs of performance are facial expression; voice; gestures (principally of hand and arms, but also of any limb, e.g. neck, leg); body posture (how someone is standing or sitting); body movement (movement of the whole body, including how someone stands up or sits down, how they walk and run, etc.). ( R. Dyer(1979) ibid., p. 151)

 

Gesticulation and facial expressions are in fact far more common language than verbal utterance, and the cinema faces us with the ultimate in subjective and individual: the expression of the face, as something universally known and shared with repetition of the image. The outer alteration coming over the surface of the body, produced by emotions and thoughts, acquires value in itself as if it were the source and very life of interiority. Rufflings of consciousness occur in the skin, and can be read there. We do not cry because we suffer; we suffer because we cry.

 

7.

 

The psychologist, Thorndike (1898), was possibly the first to provide a clear definition of imitation as "learning to do an act from seeing it done".

From the cognitivist point of view, the ability to learn thorough imitation provides the opportunity to profit from knowledge of others and to acquire new skills much more quickly. However, it is no simple matter, but requires a sophisticated interplay between perceptual systems that recognize the demonstrated skill, and motor systems, onto which the recognized skill must be mapped. Recent demonstrations of imitation-specific neurons in primate premotor cortex have even lead to speculation that the development of imitation skills may have been a key milestone in the evolution of higher intelligence.

The exchange of skills, knowledge, and experience between natural agents cannot be achieved brain-to-brain; it is mediated via bodies, the environment, the verbal or non-verbal expression or body language of the `sender', which in turn has to be interpreted and integrated in the `recipient's' own understanding and behavioral repertoire. Social learning includes true imitation, but there are other kinds of social learning as well.

In true imitation something of the action is copied from actor to imitator, while in other forms of social learning nothing is copied. This is important because evolutionary processes depend on there being something that is copied or replicated.

 

8.

 

Finally, I should like to spend a few words on imitation as seen from the psychoanalytic point of view, since it casts particular light on the perceptive aspect and the acquisition of knowledge through the body that occurs with imitation.

The primary and earliest area of mental experience has to do with perception of reality through the body, while the second is associated with the gradual perceptive recognition of external stimuli.

The activity of the psycho-sensorial area develops according to a functional model – “imitate to be” – which is the psychic equivalent of the biological model of primitive perception (“imitate to perceive”) and leads to the hallucinatory image, fantasies of fusion through magical identity with the object and imitation, in the direction of being the object and thus no longer seeing it as something external and separate.(E. Gaddini(1977), Formazione del padre e scena primaria, in Scritti (1953-1985), Cortina editore, p. 328)

My reference here is to the theory of Eugenio Gaddini, who makes a distinction between imitation and introjection, attributing them initially to different systems of relating with reality which subsequently converge into the more general process of identification.

Primitive perception of the world is physically imitative. In the first weeks the child perceives by modifying its body in relation to the stimulus: in this way it is not the real stimulus that is perceived, but the modification occurring in the body. These body experiences are expressed physically, specifically activating that particular bodily function bringing about the sensations the body has experienced. The memory of those perceptions serves, for example, to restore the state of well-being experienced at the time.

Imitation can substitute the need to create a hallucinatory or fantastic image, as occurs in the development of imagination and thought through the analogical, metaphorical and symbolic system, where an image substitutes the gratifying but absent object.

Having a constant availability of real or realistic material to imitate, in the perceptive system past experience is substituted not with a fantasy but with a sensorial modification of the own body (concrete thought), or with an imitative gesture, or seeing oneself as similar to the object no longer present.

Imitation (being what one has perceived) belongs to the perceptive-sensorial area, and is made to serve as a means to magically be that which is perceived or represented. And that which is represented has, in the eye of the beholder, the value of “truth”.

Having images continuously before the eyes serves to reinforce the imitative system, and thus the possibility of being what is seen. Analogy is different from mimesis or imitation: the former being situated in the area of language, the latter in that of bodily sensitivity.

Thus we find a change in the direction of the relationship between body and signification process. In the language system it is from perceptions towards knowledge; in the system now being proposed by cinema (and technological science) the direction is from the mind towards the body, with a process that seems to attribute symbolization with a secondary and no longer essential role.