Shutter Island (Paramount Pictures 2010) is a much-criticized and highly debated film. Scorsese, in fact, has been accused of distorting the facts and altering his historical sources. The depictions we see of the Holocaust are false, not based on visual documents, a mix of incompatible evidences and iconographies, an amalgam of irreconcilable data about history and ambiguous representations of the sublime. All is violence here, all is sublime: the stormy and desolate landscape, the rough wilderness of the nature, the ferocity of the war and the cruelty of the psychiatric detention and chirurgical practices, the ravaging illness of souls and bodies. The director has created a visual style and a sound design that vacillate between thriller and horror, drama and fantasy, while betraying by an indirect intermediality the medial transparency and the indexicality of the reconstruction and deceiving by an elusive figural force the ethical responsibility of interpretation. The viewer sees and believes in the inhuman images of the nature and of the concentration camp of Dachau which are, in reality, dialectical imaginings of another scene, upset by the work of figurability: in these images, constructed and displaced according to Scorsese’s the clinical and critical vision of Scorsese as a cinephile, the past and the repressed return in the present. In our present too. On the one hand, in fact, the viewer participates empathically in the mental images relived and suffered by the protagonist in his post-traumatic hallucinations; on the other hand, the viewer is prompted to recall the pictures quoted or paraphrased from the archives of the imagery of cinema and of the photojournalism of war–in which Pontecorvo, Resnais, Fuller, George Stevens and John Huston live side by side with the RKO horror films of Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson. For Scorsese, the images of the violence of war and of the horror of extermination cannot be linked to an origin or past that have definitively been concluded. They are more than recorded pictures or concrete evidences: they are clues and symptoms of a figural play. They come from a conflictual and endless descent of which cinema is the living and ambiguous memory; they are the open wounds of an original struggle and of a singular figural play between human and inhuman and of man–they still survive, here and now.

F comme figura, fiction, falsification. Des images de l’histoire et Shutter Island

Fimiani Filippo
Writing – Original Draft Preparation
2017-01-01

Abstract

Shutter Island (Paramount Pictures 2010) is a much-criticized and highly debated film. Scorsese, in fact, has been accused of distorting the facts and altering his historical sources. The depictions we see of the Holocaust are false, not based on visual documents, a mix of incompatible evidences and iconographies, an amalgam of irreconcilable data about history and ambiguous representations of the sublime. All is violence here, all is sublime: the stormy and desolate landscape, the rough wilderness of the nature, the ferocity of the war and the cruelty of the psychiatric detention and chirurgical practices, the ravaging illness of souls and bodies. The director has created a visual style and a sound design that vacillate between thriller and horror, drama and fantasy, while betraying by an indirect intermediality the medial transparency and the indexicality of the reconstruction and deceiving by an elusive figural force the ethical responsibility of interpretation. The viewer sees and believes in the inhuman images of the nature and of the concentration camp of Dachau which are, in reality, dialectical imaginings of another scene, upset by the work of figurability: in these images, constructed and displaced according to Scorsese’s the clinical and critical vision of Scorsese as a cinephile, the past and the repressed return in the present. In our present too. On the one hand, in fact, the viewer participates empathically in the mental images relived and suffered by the protagonist in his post-traumatic hallucinations; on the other hand, the viewer is prompted to recall the pictures quoted or paraphrased from the archives of the imagery of cinema and of the photojournalism of war–in which Pontecorvo, Resnais, Fuller, George Stevens and John Huston live side by side with the RKO horror films of Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson. For Scorsese, the images of the violence of war and of the horror of extermination cannot be linked to an origin or past that have definitively been concluded. They are more than recorded pictures or concrete evidences: they are clues and symptoms of a figural play. They come from a conflictual and endless descent of which cinema is the living and ambiguous memory; they are the open wounds of an original struggle and of a singular figural play between human and inhuman and of man–they still survive, here and now.
2017
978-606-16-0931-4
Shutter Island (Paramount Pictures 2010) est un long-métrage assez controversé de Martin Scorsese, accusé d’avoir déformé les faits et les sources concernant la libération du camp de Dachau et d’avoir réalisé un mélange indiscernable entre fictions et documents, évocations cinéphiliques et évidences historiques. Grâce à une intertextualité dissimulée et à une figuralité puissamment activée chez le spectateur à travers l’identification empathique avec le protagoniste et ses hallucinations, Scorsese rétorque la transparence indexicale du style documentaire et la responsabilité morale de l’interprétation de l’Holocauste, la guerre, l’aliénation mentale et la lobotomie. Face aux images sublimes de la nature en tempête, de la folie et de l’inhumain du camp de concentration, nous retrouvons en figure les images de notre actualité. Ces images de violence nous font signe vers l’histoire et l’imaginaire du cinéma et des arts visuels, et nous font voir autrement ce qui nous avons, également intolérable, sous nos yeux ici et maintenant.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11386/4703373
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