Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

208 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida
new-age transformation of consciousness vis-à-vis a still living, breathing
earth?
In the half century that separates Antonioni’s early photographic essay and
first documentary from these late Sicilian landscapes, the re-casting of the relation
between modernity (or late modernity) and its conditions of representation
in motion pictures has not been resolved. But its attendant anxieties have
perhaps been augmented by a still altering environment, as well as by the
progress of image technologies – the transfiguration of the very notion of reference
and reproduction, photographic and actual. A fundamental ambivalence
about this relationship is still at work in the most eloquent instances of fiction
and documentary, in cinematographic, digital, and virtual spaces. Antonioni
located his first arena for such an interrogation in his native landscape, bringing
into play there the profound tensions of Italian culture between the world
wars. But it was following the camera’s recording of hitherto unseen atrocities,
following the panorama of European and other landscapes leveled by more
than just a camera’s vertical outlook, that one came to realize how altered must
be the look upon the terrain, brought in all its devastation to its surviving beholders.
New Haven / Rome / New York 1999
The A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Award from Yale University allowed me to
complete research for this work in Roman film archives. I am grateful there to
Sergio Toffetti, Sra. Castagna, and staff at the Cineteca Nazionale and to Sr.
Guglielminetti and staff at the Istituto LUCE. Thanks also to Romy Golan for
Futurist clues, to John David Rhodes for feedback at an early phase, and to David
Jacobson and Richard Allen for critical remarks at later stages of this work.