Michael asked:
>1. What is "the dialectic?"
>2. How do you show it in a movie?
and Doug answered:
> I took a silent cinema course in college in which
the prof, Standish Lawder, talked about Eisenstein's
view that the relationship of successive scenes in a
movie should be dialectical. It's been a long time since
I saw an Eisenstein product, but I guess that's how.
To amplify: Visconti does achieve the dialect through editing (his constant editor was Ruggerio Mastroniani, Marcello's brother), but he also achieves it narratively and within individual sequences and even shots.
Visconti's characters are always firmly rooted in a historical moment and reacting to that moment. As in Ozu, the historical moment is not only recorded, but shown in motion -- changing, alive (as opposed to most movies, especially Hollywood movies, which are not grounded in any sense of history). That sense of people interacting with history, changing it and being changed by it, is (to me) the dialectic (or at least part of it).
Just as Godard's films often seem set on the day he filmed them, Visconti work feels not so much as a recreation, but as a recording of events on a particular in the past where he happened to be present with his camera.
As I viewer, I do not get the sense from Visconti of him manipulating characters/events in oder to manipulate the audience in turn (lesser directors such as Hitchcock, Capra, Spielberg resort to these methods). Rather Visconti uses camerawork and editing to reveal the historical moment to which audience members can then respond to in their own way -- a mini-dialectic if you will.
The dialectic gets even more complicated when one of his films is an adaptation of another text, such as Death in Venice, The Stranger or The Leopard.
For me, he is one of the few directors to make movies at the highest level of their potential.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister