Masterpieces or mediocre films. Savinio’s ambivalent taste in cinema

In 1981, Mario Verdone compiled a selection of Alberto Savinio’s writings on and about cinema under the quintessentially Savinian title Il sogno meccanico, which aptly encapsulates the simultaneously liberating and coercive nature of the relationship with the silver screen. Today, Giuseppe Balducci, in a volume published by Aragno, revisits some of the pieces from that booklet, bringing them together under another of Savinio’s own expressions: La vita indiretta. Balducci’s selection and arrangement bring into sharper relief certain characteristics of an interest that was intermittent yet enduring in Savinio, and which, with its typical anachronism during the era of neorealism, led him to explore subjects such as Dido, Apuleius and Mercury. The theme of cinema illustrates with particular clarity Savinio’s tendency towards ‘double thinking’—that is, the exploration of contradictory ideas through which alone, in the artist’s view, a modicum of truth can be attained. At times, this new twentieth-century medium is, for him, a revolutionary invention or mere extra-aesthetic entertainment; at others, it is art degraded in comparison to the plastic and static arts, or a ‘pre-Socratic’ form capable of unveiling the secrets of painting by setting it in motion. Here he praises its exceptional works; there, by contrast, he considers only mediocre films to be of value – that is, those modelled on the conventions that are the hallmark of a mature civilisation and an ‘indirect life’, or in other words, a ‘style’. At times Savinio appears fascinated by the expressive excess of German, Russian or American filmmakers, but he eventually returns to favouring the understated lightness characteristic of the French: art films from Central and Eastern Europe, in fact, end up presenting a sort of ‘reverse pompierism’, which is already coming under attack from the false specialism of cinephiles.

Like dreams and Surrealism, for Savinio cinema is, in short, both an extraordinary probe into the unconscious and a diabolical instrument, in that it accustoms us to lingering in the indistinct, without bringing its discoveries to the clarity of Metaphysical Art. Yet despite this ambivalence, the link with his own and de Chirico’s imagery is very strong: in his early theoretical articles from the early 1920s, he defines it as ‘mythology in action’, capable of ‘showing us our own contemporaries in a state of contemporary primitivism’, or rather ‘an exact image of the earth before the Flood’; and in his final piece, written on his deathbed, Savinio uses cinema to bid farewell to a human world destined to be lost in astronomical space. But when sound cinema took hold, his love of souplesse inspired him to admire, above all, the cinema of Paris, which ‘creates prose’ by pouring the national resources of theatre and the novel onto film. Thus the ‘gags en passant’ of René Clair—this Racine with a camera—are set against the ‘thoughtful humour’ of Charlot, who forces us to pay for his witticisms with a moralising pause. Significantly, as soon as they set foot in America, the French directors’ work deteriorates: it is like transplanting organisms designed for rooms on a human scale into a boundless prairie; or, to put it without metaphor, into the climate of that gigantism which, for Savinio, is the most dangerous enemy of intelligence.

Generally speaking, Europe confines itself to theorising or alluding, with aesthetic tact, to what countries still too young thoughtlessly translate into monstrous realities: communism in Russia, or that surrealism which in the US culminates in Disney’s frenzied Fantasia – ‘a meal consisting solely of saccharine sweets, washed down with rosolio’ – with a ‘nauseating’ effect. Yet Savinio is not exactly kind to the old continental Surrealists such as Cocteau either, despite the fact that his fiction, from Angelica to Angolino, shares with them a certain use of ‘frames’ and an obsession with the symbol of the eye. Even the most insignificant film, as Balducci rightly points out, becomes, in Savinio’s criticism, an opportunity to raise a general issue of aesthetics, ethics or civilisation. What is more: just as when he goes to the theatre, Savinio also makes some of his most surprising observations at the cinema by paying no less attention to the audience than to the actors. The context explains the text.