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suspended meaning. It never wraps up. It is a veil that folds and unfolds as if ad
infinitum. The film is an experimental rhapsody. Words connoting the sartorial
domain are the film’s most powerful metaphors. “Veil,” or velo in Italian, brings
with it a doubleness of vision contained in the terms velare (to hide) and rivelare
(to uncover, reveal). This doubleness is also at play in representation (both cinematic
and non-cinematic) and in the definitions of borders. Nietzsche in his Gay
Science had already used the trope of the veil to undermine a philosophy of truth
through the mediation of woman. He draws attention not to what hides beneath
the surface, but to the truth of that surface. Here the sartorial and the cinematic
converge. Both of them, in one way or another, “veil” the face of reality. But the
face, as landscape, changes; it has hidden corners, areas of darkness and light,
wrinkles and folds. Once again, the cinematic converges with the sartorial and
with philosophy. The veil is not a static surface or canvas on which to paint, and
neither is a woman. Both move, fold and unfold.
In Oxilia’s film, the veil and the way it moves in cinematic
space and on the body is, in fact, a mise en abyme of the
will to live beyond the imprisonment of one’s own body
and moral constraints. Alba’s movements and dances are
fuelled by desire. This renders her character very modern
and unsettling. The veil, for its part, has a long history
in literature, fashion and visual culture. With specific
reference to Italy, the veil’s original significance as a sign
of modesty and chastity was radically transformed by women’s social practices in
public spaces during the 16th century when it took on the contours of an entirely
different symbol—that of sin and seduction. Departing from what it once stood for,
the veil has become a symbolic site of struggle between two opposing forces: modesty
and seduction—an interplay that is also at the core of fashion. 2
If in Italian culture the veil has epitomised the transformation
from the sacred to the secular, in Oxilia’s film the veil marks the transformation
of the old Alba into a new, sensual femme fatale and leads her to her
final dance, during which she becomes a priestess of love and beauty. Nevertheless,
in Rapsodia a contrasting trajectory is at work through the ambiguity of the
veil. Alba’s sensuality is eventually transfigured into a diaphanous and chaste
presence as she wears her Delpho gown, designed by Mariano Fortuny, with its
hundreds of pleats caressing her body which is also completely enveloped by the
veil. This transfiguration comes from Alba having committed the crime of desiring
the impossible, of halting the progression of time to regain youth and beauty
through her pact with the devil.
These multiple meanings criss-cross Oxilia’s film,
becoming even more complicated in light of the cultural and artistic contexts
to which the costuming in Rapsodia alludes. Although the dynamic of the veil
maintains its ambiguity, it has a
number of distinct features that
touch upon the trope of the femme
fatale, her reinscription within the
context of the Faustian legend, the
sensorial and emotional dimension
of cinema, and how time is spatialized
within. One of the most powerful
incarnations of the feminine
as a threat, the femme fatale is, as
Mary Ann Doane writes, “a potential
epistemological trauma.” 3 It is
not by chance that figures such
as Salomé (a trope of dangerous
femininity), linked to a persistent
Orientalism, are omnipresent in
the culture of Decadentism, Art
Nouveau, and Symbolism, during
times of wide-reaching transformations
in urban space, science and
technology, and industrialization, as well as in definitions of gender roles. Structurally,
however, the veil in Oxilia’s film embodies the fluid and slippery passage
from one act to another, from one transformation to another, punctuating the
sense of duration, interruption and suspension with its diaphanous fragility. The
veil is also a fragile screen that keeps porous the borders of what is inside and
outside, conscious and subconscious, private and public.
When Alba transforms herself before the devil’s and our
eyes, her wrinkles disappear. She unfolds into a new
fold, taking her from the interior of her dark castle to
the exterior of the garden and the feast of light therein.
Here we see many youths dancing and enjoying themselves.
This sequence stands in sharp contrast to the
somberness and darkness of the first part of Rapsodia. Alba emerges into the
garden wearing a Poiret-style dress accessorized with a veil. The dance the young
women perform here has a fresh and light feeling. From this moment onwards the
light voile or chiffon fabric remains ever present through Alba’s transformations,
only differently draped. Each one of her transformations, and their attempts to
defeat the passage of time and death, is announced by a new dress and masquerade.
One of the most dramatic moments of the film comes at a costume ball for
which when Alba dresses as Salomé. It is here, at one of the most conventional
and fashionable gatherings of the time where high society ladies showed off their
fancy dresses, that Sergio, one of Alba’s two aspiring lovers, commits suicide.
Alba, left alone in her Castle of Illusion, gazing at her reflection in a mirror, notes
the reappearance of a wrinkle. Another fold. And another series of transformations
where the veil and her dresses now gradually lose any allusion to sexuality
and exoticism. We now see her wearing an unfitted monastic tunic that is stiff
and sober in contrast with the lightness of the veil she wears during her walk in