10.13125/2039-6597/5153
Con l'intensificarsi della crisi ecologica, la contrapposizione tra naturale e artificiale si fa&nbsp; sempre più tenue. Per questo la questione del simulacro, così come era stata posta da Baudrillard e dal dibattito postmoderno, viene ora riaperta e risignificata. Nei due film italiani Bella e perduta (2015) e Lazzaro felice (2018), l'impossibilità di stabilire una distinzione tra natura e cultura, tra virtuale e reale, tra umano e non umano trova espressione in forma cinematografica. In questi film, lo scontro non si situa più tra realtà e iperrealtà ma in una dialettica fantasmatica che riscopre il valore del corpo biologico inserendolo in una rete di relazioni storiche, sociali e tecnologiche. Partendo dall'elemento organico, i due film scompaginano le frontiere epistemologiche e cognitive della modernità intervenendo sul supporto filmico, sullo statuto ontologico dei personaggi e sulla scelta del genere narrativo.
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Between
Alice Rohrwacher
Analogue Film, Ghostly Ontologies and the Fairy-tale in <em>Bella e perduta</em> and <em>Lazzaro felice</em>
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Analogue Film, Ghostly Ontologies and the Fairy-tale in <em>Bella e perduta</em> and <em>Lazzaro felice</em>
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12
                 Analogue film,
     ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale
      in Bella e perduta and Lazzaro felice

                             Lucia della Fontana

Abstract
      As the ecological crisis intensifies, the blurring of boundaries between
the natural and the artificial is becoming increasingly obvious. Therefore,
the question of the simulacrum, as it was posed by Baudrillard and the
postmodern debate, is now being re-opened and signified. In the two Italian
films Bella e perduta [Lost and Beautiful] (2015) and Lazzaro felice [Happy as
Lazzaro] (2018), the impossibility of establishing a distinction between nature
and culture, virtual and real, human and non-human finds expression in a
cinematographic form. In these films, the clash is no longer located between
reality and hyperreality but in a phantasmatic dialectic that rediscovers the
value of the biological body by placing it in a network of historical, social
and technological relations. Starting from the organic element, the two
films unsettle the epistemological and cognitive frontiers of modernity by
addressing the filmic support, the ontological status of the characters and the
choice of narrative genre.

Keywords
    Italian cinema; Pietro Marcello; Alice Rohrwacher; Donna Haraway;
Ecocriticism; Posthumanism; Environmental Humanities




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5153
Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale




       Analogue film, ghostly ontologies
       and the fairy-tale in Bella e perduta
                and Lazzaro felice

                                  Lucia della Fontana

      For Jean Baudrillard, in the early 1980s, the advent of the information
age marked the end of reality and the emergence of hyperreality. Instead of
mimetic simulation models such as the map, the double, the mirror or the
concept, the digital revolution led to the proliferation of simulacra: copies
for which there is no original, devoid of any referentiality and able to repli-
cate themselves endlessly like cancer cells, generating a real without origin
or reality – more precisely: the hyperreal. In this regard, Baudrillard gave
the example of the genetic code where: «the real is produced from minia-
turized cells, matrices and memory banks, models of control – and it can be
reproduced an indefinite number of times from these» (Baudrillard 1994: 2).
      These considerations are symptomatic of the «border war» that was
being fought during that time between the polarities of organic and in-
organic, reality and fiction (Haraway 1991a: 150). In the 1980s, Donna
Haraway took up Baudrillard’s thinking and further destabilized these
categories. Haraway showed that the opposition between the living and
the machine reflects a stale opposition between nature and culture. At the
same time, in contrast to the French thinker’s resigned attitude, Haraway
was looking for a way out of the «hell of the same» produced by the prolif-
eration of codes in advanced capitalism (Gane 2006: 149).
      In order to learn to live in such a «nightmare» (Gane 2006: 150), Har-
away introduced the hybrid figure of the cyborg: «a cybernetic organism, a
hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a crea-
ture of fiction» (Haraway 1991a: 149). By redrawing the frontiers of self and
other, Haraway undermined the relationship between living and inanimate:

         Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings
      encapsulated by skin? [...] These machine/organism relationships
      are obsolete, unnecessary. […] Machines can be prosthetic devices,
      intimate components, friendly selves. (Ibid.: 178)



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     Katherine Hayles, some ten years after A Cyborg Manifesto, also insist-
ed on the ineffectiveness of a paradigm that continually moves from one
pole to the other in view of a final salvation. In a 1999 article, Hayles wrote:
«when the virtual is opposed to the natural, the emphasis falls on the re-
demptive potential of the natural world, which puts us back inside the
paradoxes instead of giving us leverage to work through them» (Hayles
1999b: 677).
     In an increasingly interconnected society, Hayles and Haraway were
not just about weaving new ties with machines; their intention was not to
devalue the importance of the natural world in order to rehabilitate the
virtual one, often denigrated as the most radical expression of modernity’s
alienation from nature. On the contrary, they wanted to uncover the link
between apparent numerical dematerialization and the ecological crisis,
showing for example the substratum of increasing exploitation and vul-
nerability of the digital revolution’s workers, in America and overseas
(Haraway 1991a: 154).
     For Hayles, and equally for Haraway, the virtual was not an escape
route from environmental degradation – as is the case for those who sug-
gest abandoning the overheated earth and colonizing Mars (Grinspoon
2004) – but an opportunity to rethink the very concept of nature, too often
constrained in a nature/culture polarity that they both rejected.
     Since 2000, the urgency to become aware of the environmental impact
of our computerized societies has become more and more acute and has
engendered a turn in the Western philosophical and aesthetic landscape
(Descola 2005, Morton 2007, Latour 2015)1. While in A Cyborg Manifesto in
1985 Haraway stated without hesitation: «The cyborg is our ontology; it
gives us our politics», in 2003 the philosopher made a decisive shift from
the cyborg – which she still does not repudiate – towards companion spe-
cies (2003). Haraway then focuses on another discriminating boundary,
that which exists between humans and animals:

           In the past, I wrote about cyborgs, a kind of companion-species
        congeries of organisms and information machines emergent from
        the Cold War. […] Emergent over the time of “species being” (in the
        philosopher’s idiom) for both participants, humans as companion


    1
       In Face à Gaïa Bruno Latour refers to a «new climate regime», a new ecolog-
ical paradigm capable of «turn[ing] away for good from the notions of “Modern”
and “modernity”» (Latour, 2015: 11, 154). [all translations are my own, unless
indicated otherwise]


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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



          species suggest distinct histories and lives compared with cyborgs. The
          term companion species refers to the old co-constitutive link between
          dogs and people, where dogs have been actors and not just recipients of
          action. […] Further, companion species designates webbed bio-social-
          technical apparatuses of humans, animals, artifacts, and institutions
          in which particular ways of being emerge and are sustained. Or not.
          (Haraway 2008: 133-134)

      Haraway joins forces with certain streams of post-humanism (Hayles
1999a), with animal studies (Hearne 2016), material feminism (Alaimo
2008) and material ecocriticism (Iovino - Oppermann 2014), in the attempt
to rethink the human place in the modern world2. This is not a matter of
hoping for a post-biological future in which humans freed from their bod-
ies can download their consciousness onto a computer, become immortal
and surpass humanness (Kurzweil 2009). Rather, as Hayles puts it, it is to
«reconceptualize the human in ways that take better account of embodi-
ment, situated action, and interconnections with other entities» (2001: 146).
Underlining our dependence to other species, Haraway points out that
only ten per cent of the cells in our bodies contain a human genome. The
remainder are made up of the genomes of bacteria, fungi etc. These consid-
erations allow her to show the porosity of our bodily boundaries, proving
that «we have never been human» but also that «to be one is always to
become with many» (Haraway 2008: 3-4).
      Given the ecological crisis and the rise of a hybrid phenomenon such
as anthropogenic climate change, the blurring of boundaries between the
natural and the artificial is becoming increasingly obvious (Descola 2005,
Morton 2007, Latour 2015)3. Therefore, the question of the simulacrum, as
it was posed by Baudrillard and the postmodern debate, is now being re-
opened and signified.
      In the two Italian films Bella e perduta [Lost and Beautiful] (2015) by
Pietro Marcello and Lazzaro felice [Happy as Lazzaro] (2018) by Alice Rohr-
wacher, the impossibility of establishing a distinction between nature and
culture, between virtual and real, between human and non-human finds
expression in a cinematographic form.


      2
       The notions of “modern” and “modernity” are related to theoretical inves-
tigations by Bruno Latour, especially in Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991).
     3
       This blurring of the boundaries between natural and artificial is also il-
lustrated by a scientific phenomenon like the Anthropocene (Steffen 2011,
Chakrabarty 2009).


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     In these films, however, the clash is no longer located between reality
and hyperreality but in a phantasmatic dialectic that rediscovers the value
of the biological body by placing it in a network of historical, social and
technological relations. Starting from the organic element, the two films
destabilize the epistemological and cognitive frontiers of modernity by ad-
dressing the filmic support, the ontological status of the characters and the
choice of narrative genre.
     After focusing on the oscillation between the organic component of
analogue and digital film, the following analysis will then question the
ontological status of the characters, liminal between the human and the
bestial, ending with a discussion of how a hybrid type of narrative between
documentary and fairy-tale results in a form of ecological engagement.

                         Analogue digital loop
      Bella e perduta gives voice to Sarchiapone, a young buffalo living in
the “Land of Fires”, the area between Naples and Caserta where people
are exposed to wildfires because of the illegal disposal of toxic waste by
the Camorra. Lazzaro felice, for his part, tells the story of Lazzaro: a sim-
ple-minded peasant who, after resurrecting from death, is projected from
countryside to a fast-changing Italy.
      To tell the adventures of Sarchiapone and Lazzaro, both films are shot
on film, mainly substandard, and in the case of Pietro Marcello’s film also
expired. In an interview, Marcello admits:

        I shot on expired film which gave me the possibility of working with
     celluloid and therefore with an alchemical product that I could not
     control. I know it’s a paradox for me, belonging to a digital generation.
     (Cerofolini 2016)

      Although they were born respectively in 1976 and 1982 and started
out by shooting in digital, Pietro Marcello and Alice Rohrwacher have cho-
sen to return to film, more specifically to the Super 16mm small format
(Zonta, 2017: 74-92, 184-193). The choice of Super 16mm is generally dic-
tated by a budget issue – it is more expensive to shoot in analogue, but
less expensive if you choose the small format – but it is above all a way of
reintroducing the organic element into the film process. While digital does
allow for greater manipulation of the image, film, and in particular expired
film, gives birth to an alchemical process of development that is not quite
predictable. In order to capture the image, digital technology employs


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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



electronic sensors that turn it into an electrical signal. The electrical signal
is then digitalized and converted into a series of bits that are backed up on
a digital storage medium. In the analogical case, light chemically modifies
the body of the light-sensitive film: in contrast with digital, which records
and shows everything, film conveys less information, has more grey areas
and uncertainty in the image. On this subject, Hélène Louvart, the cinema-
tographer of Lazzaro felice, notes:

         Only the Super 16 fits Alice’s form and desire for cinema. We think
      that it is a medium that contributes something organic and artisanal
      and that corresponds to a different way of seeing the world. The
      Super 16’s rendering gives off a form of poetry, of “febrility” in the
      image, and we like the sensation of always being a bit surprised by the
      rendering of the images. (Barbier 2018)

     The decision to shoot on film obviously has aesthetic implications, and
indeed many critics have praised the nostalgic effect of the «sepia tinge»
of Lazzaro felice (Mumford 2018) or the «delicate, watercolor-like greens
and blues» of Bella e perduta (Scott 2016). But apart from the aesthetic com-
ponent, the analogue technique has a profound effect on the film-making
progress, in particular on the timing of the film. In fact, digital is usually
preferred not only because of its lower costs and the possibility to alter
the image, but also because it allows long and continuous filming. In this
regard, Alice Rohrwacher states:

          For me, who was born in the digital era, film is a veritable discovery.
      It is something that enchanted me, of course it is not very cheap, but
      I will use it as long as I can. Besides, it is a tool that helps me to have
      limits, to know what I can’t do, so it’s an important medium for me.
      (Di Paola 2018)

     As it is a limited physical space, film constrains the director to think
before each scene and to constantly rupture the shooting time. As Piet-
ro Marcello considers: «Film time is different from digital time. You must
shoot less, the film ends sooner, then you must stop, change. Film has dif-
ferent times. It is the time of cinema» (Casazza 2015).
     In both films, analogue is also associated with a further aspect that
one can hardly refrain from describing as political: shooting on film is not
a nostalgic solution but an ethical stance. The materiality of film reflects the
contradictions and fragility of contemporary Italy, in particular social pre-



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cariousness and environmental degradation. Thus, Marcello infers: «there
has always been for me a strong link between landscapes and the chosen
medium, the film expires and so does the landscape» (ibidem).
     A contiguity is thus created between the body of the film and real
bodies, between technological flesh and social flesh. This contiguity can
be found in the loop that both films make between analogue and digital.
Indeed, in filmmaking practice, there is no fracture between digital and
analogue – the above-mentioned border war – but rather a cycle: images
recorded in analogue format are subsequently digitized for editing and
distribution. Even archive films are digitalized at the time of restoration.
Not to mention the enjoyment of films in cinemas and on our computer
screens. This oscillation between analogue and digital also reverberates on
the identity of the characters, resulting in a wavering between animality
and bestiality that defies any ontology of the self.

                          Ghostly ontologies
      In the second half of the 1990s, Gabriele Salvatores’ cult cyberpunk film
Nirvana depicted a dystopian Northern Italy, populated by hybrid creatures,
cyborgs and strange figures huddled in the outskirts of a big city. Preceded
by films such as Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Strange Days (1995), Nirvana tells
the story of a programmer who tries to get back into his video game because,
as a result of a virus, one of his characters has become aware of his identity:
Solo – our character –, is thus trapped between reality and virtuality.
      Twenty years later, the characters of Bella e perduta and Lazzaro felice
are instead marked by a ghostly ontology situated at the frontier between
humanity and animality. As Bella e perduta starts, the dramatis personae are
listed as in a play. First comes Sarchiapone, the buffalo. Then Tommaso,
the shepherd who adopts Sarchiapone and who volunteers to look after the
abandoned palace of Carditello, left to the abuses of the mafia and turned it
into a landfill. In Third comes Pulcinella, the Campanian character of Com-
media dell’arte, who is also a psychopomp. Finally, the shepherd Gesuino,
who is the last owner of the buffalo.
      The initial purpose of the director was to create a documentary, a road
movie through Italy of which the “Land of fires” was only one stage. But the
sudden death of Tommaso, struck by a heart attack while filming, imposed
a radical rethinking of the movie (Storto 2020: 88). In order to honor Tom-
maso, his story expands into the whole film, and the documentary turns
into a fairy-tale. As a link is missing between the living buffalo and the dead



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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



shepherd, Marcello brings in the phantasmatic figure of Pulcinella.
      Pulcinella is a well-known mask from the Neapolitan folklore, derived
from the commedia dell’arte featuring a white dress, a sugarloaf hat and a
black half-mask exposing the mouth. Opportunistic and hungry, lazy and
insolent, the mask of Pulcinella embodies a surrender to bestial instincts.
According to some, the feminine ending of his name is a sign of the mask’s
hermaphroditism: the upper part – the nose, the hat, the hump – is male,
while the lower part – the pregnant belly, the buttocks, the breasts – is fe-
male (Gambardella 2018).
      However, the Pulcinella of the film is not the clown from the Italian
tradition. Rather, he is a trickster, a liminal figure who is in contact with
the afterlife. Neither divine nor earthly, neither alive nor dead, Pulcinella
is sent among mortals in order to grant Sarchiapone the gift of speech and
accompany him to a new master, the shepherd Gesuino, who is a shepherd
in real life. It is immediately clear that Sarchiapone and Pulcinella share a
common slavish fate. The buffalo serves men who, since they no longer
need his services, kill him. Pulcinella serves the unpredictable will of the
gods. Furthermore, they share a common nature. It is interesting to consid-
er that the character of Pulcinella may derive from the hybrid figure of the
satyr in ancient comedy4. Some make him grow out of a turkey egg, others
out of a hen’s egg (Agamben 2016: 47). His name is also animal-based:
according to some, it comes from «chick», perhaps because of Pulcinella’s
hooked nose and clucking voice (Croce 1899: 12). As Giorgio Agamben
notes:

             Pulcinella’s body is no longer, as in Western metaphysics, the animal
          presupposition of man. He breaks the false articulation between the
          merely living and the human, between the body and the logos. The
          anthropological machine of the West has jammed here. That is why
          his body – hilarious and, at the same time, deformed, neither properly
          human nor truly animal – is so difficult to define. (Agamben 2016: 123)

     Even Sarchiapone, the talking buffalo, disrupts the Western anthro-
pological machine. Endowed with voice at the request of Tommaso and
through the intercession of Pulcinella, Sarchiapone narrates part of the film
through voiceover. At the beginning of Bella e perduta, after ten minutes in
which frames of interiors and landscapes flow before the camera to the


      4
           On the closeness between Pulcinella and ferality see Agamben 2016: 32-45.


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sound of Donizetti, Sarchiapone utters the first words of the film:

           As far as I am concerned, I would have liked to have been born on the
        moon or any other planet. Not that our planet isn’t good enough as long
        as you’re born with a big name or great luck. But that’s not my case.

       The anthropomorphism that enables Sarchiapone to speak is not the
convention of animal fables but a challenge to our representative patterns5.
It introduces us to a mode of knowing that is not an epistemology of ob-
jectification where «to know is to desubjectify», but rather where, as in
the Amerindian shamanism studied by Viveiros de Castro, «to know is to
personify, to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the
one whom should be known» (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 60).
      Sarchiapone is a real buffalo, a calf that dies because he is no longer
in the production chain – he is not even needed for reproduction because
the cows are artificially inseminated – and a creature of fantasy. Through
his body of meat and his gentle voice, provided by actor Elio Germano,
Sarchiapone denounces the unfairness of denying animals any subjectivity
or agency. At the end of the film, led to the slaughterhouse, he reclaims the
dignity of his animal nature:

           Despite everything, I am proud to be a buffalo. In a world that
        denies we have a soul, being a buffalo is an art. Men have such a
        ridiculous belief, being the only ones to have a soul in this immense
        universe. But I’m sure that there, on other planets, where I’ll go, they
        think differently about us.

     Sarchiapone’s bodily reality is further emphasized by the fact that Pi-
etro Marcello alternates anthropomorphic sequences in which close-ups of
the buffalo’s face and eyes are accompanied by Elio Germano’s voice-over
and subjective scenes in which we literally see through the buffalo’s stand-
point, thus feeling as if we were being led to the slaughterhouse ourselves.
     In Lazzaro felice, the liminal character between humanity and animal-


    5
       Taking up Latour, we could say that this is an «anti-anthropocentric an-
thropomorphism». In fact, Latour proposes employing personification to «use
anthropomorphism against anthropocentrism», because «treating the other as if
he or she were a person, inventing a “promising equivocation”, actually commits
us to being interested in him or her, to thinking of “us” in terms of interaction»
(Hache - Latour 2009: 157).


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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



ity is embodied by Lazzaro. Lazzaro is a mild-tempered young peasant,
always wonder-struck, smiling and willing to serve. In his role as protag-
onist, Lazzaro acts as a link between the two parts of the film. The first is
set in The Inviolata natural park, in central Italy, where fifty peasants live
in a fictional country estate cultivating tobacco. Cut off from the world in
the aftermath of a flood, the peasants ignore that sharecropping has been
abolished and work as serfs for a Marquise.
      The second part takes place some years later, on the outskirts of a big
city which is also fictional. After discovering the Marquise’s deception, the
peasants have moved to the city and transformed themselves from serfs to
suburban underclass (Garcia 2018: 42). Lazzaro’s death and resurrection
mark the break between the first and the second part of the film.
      Until then, despite the fabulous character of Lazzaro and the anachro-
nistic slavery of sharecroppers, we follow the story in a linear and almost
documentary fashion, but when Lazzaro falls into an escarpment and dies,
the voice-over of Antonia, a young peasant, suspends time to tell the story
of Saint Francis and the wolf:

         Let me tell you a story, the story of a wolf. A very old wolf had
      become decrepit. He could no longer hunt wild animals. So he was
      excluded from the pack and the old wolf came to the houses to steal
      cattle, chickens, sheep. […] Word spread that a saint could talk to
      animals, who understood him and obeyed him. […] The saint set out
      to find [the wolf]. At one point the saint falls to the ground exhausted
      in the snow, that is where the wolf finds him.

     The wolf, the narrator tells us, could eat the saint but spares him be-
cause he smells like a good man. At that very moment, a wolf appears on
the scene. He licks the corpse of Lazzaro until the latter gets up and walks.
The association with the wolf makes clear Lazarus’ closeness to the animal
world. Being a simple man, his naivety is in fact traditionally associated
with animality and idiocy.
     At the same time, the film plays with explicit religious references:
the name of Lazzaro, the encounter with the wolf, the ecstatic idiocy of
the ‘pure madman’, the meekness of the scapegoat, the hagiography of
the saint, non-violence and resurrection (Fanara 2020: 243-4, Garcia 2018:
41‑42). On this matter, Rohrwacher notes:

        My film is somewhat religious, but in a pre-religious sense, in the
      prehistoric sense of the word. Being a sort of story of a saint, close to



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     Saint Francis, Lazzaro felice is a spiritual film, but it is made of concrete
     realities, of sweat, of bodies, of places, of smells, of labours of an
     archaic but not so distant world. (Di Paola 2018)

      Hovering between sanctity and animality, Lazzaro is ultimately an elu-
sive character. He suffers the abuses of power and does not respond to in-
sults, but neither does he judge nor take a stand against the arrogance of the
Marquise and finally sides with her son. Thus, deciphering Lazzaro beyond
this threshold of innocence and idiocy proves impossible (Garcia 2018: 43).
Through the character of Lazzaro, Rohrwacher intends indeed to celebrate:

        something that keeps reappearing and is always the same. It is
     incredible and intact. It is something we experience when we are very
     young […]. It is when we have no expectations or don’t know what is
     ugly or beautiful. We just look. (Ibid.: 42)

      In the second part of the film, the resurrection makes Lazzaro a rev-
enant. Neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, he escapes any
philosophy of the subject. His personality is ecstatic in the literal sense.
Often, he stops to look at the moon, the television or the void, coming out
of himself. This effect is also rendered on a filmic level by chaining togeth-
er close-ups of the actor’s face and wider shots, most often high up, of
the landscape in which Lazzaro is embedded, especially moonscapes. This
lack of identity unites him to Sarchiapone and Pulcinella. Their absence of
self, be it the inability to speak or to reason, questions our own conceptions
of humanity.
      Humanity, both films tell us, is not fixed once and for all, but a cate-
gory to be renegotiated continuously. Until the advent of modernity, an-
imals were regarded as having speech and intellectual faculties. Carolyn
Merchant’s famous essay, The Death of Nature, shows how the vision of
an organic, animated cosmos gradually crumbled from the 16th and 17th
centuries with the mechanistic revolution (Merchant 2003). The mechan-
ical and rationalist order that followed saw the Earth and its non-human
inhabitants as a machine, an inert and passive mass that science and tech-
nology could measure and exploit at will (Latour 2015: 67-8). This was also
the case with Cartesian animals, classified as res extensa and considered to
be completely void of sentience (Brentari 2016: 142).
      On the other hand, as Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret point out,
animals have often been used as figurants in representations of humans. The
great apes, for example, provided the «pre-rational, pre-cultural essence»


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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



that allowed humans to explain the origins of their species and their history
(Haraway 1991b: 11). Haraway shows, in fact, how animal societies have of-
ten served as a pretext, in Western history, for founding human oppression
of humans, racism, the naturalization of patriarchy and the physiological
distinction between sexual genders. According to Bertrand Russell:

             It seemed that animals always behave in a manner showing the
          rightness of the philosophy entertained by the man who observes
          them. [...] Throughout the reign of Queen Victoria all apes were
          virtuous monogamists, but during the dissolute twenties their morals
          underwent a disastrous deterioration. (Russell 2010: 200)

     Pulcinella, Sarchiapone and Lazzaro are not symbols detached from
the bodily aspect but figures in the sense that Haraway attributes to this
word: entities that are at once chimerical and biological, real and imagi-
nary, on and off the screen. In both films, the critique of anthropocentrism
and dominant models of subjectivation results in a ghostly ontology that
abolishes the precedence of any original, and where the simulacrum «har-
bors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model
and the reproduction» beyond any privileged point of view or hierarchy
(Haraway 1990: 258).

                   Between fairy-tale and documentary
     Bringing to the foreground «the unthinkable» of our societies, the en-
vironmental crisis is undermining our cultural narratives as well as our
representative and cognitive structures (Ghosh 2017). In order to deal with
the complexity of the Anthropocene and Climate Change, we must indeed
imagine other stories and listen to other voices (Tsing 2017).
     From the 2000s onwards, many writers and filmmakers have departed
from realism to embrace estranging devices which we normally associate
with fantasy, science-fiction or the fairy-tale6. But these phenomena are not
to be ascribed to a regressive desire, nor to the appreciation of a lost gold-

      6
       Amitav Ghosh, Carla Benedetti and Alexandre Gefen are among the first
to show how the ecological crisis calls for a destabilization of the «realist regime»
for the benefit of an expansion of the literary field which on the one hand re-
claims archaic genres such as the fairy tale and on the other resorts to genres that
are considered «unserious» or consumerist such as science fiction (Ghosh 2017;
Benedetti 2021; Gefen 2021).


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en age expressed in the pure forms of myth and fairy-tales. For Marcello
as for Rohrwacher, the fantastic disguise is not a nostalgic choice. As Val
Plumwood observes:

           Instrumental culture has prepared an exceptional place for speaking
        matter, as the exceptional context of the fairy-tale, or the irrational
        space of the eerie and haunted. (Plumwood 2007: 18)

     In the films, the cognitive estrangement conveyed by the fairy-tale – the
resurrection of Lazzaro following his encounter with the wolf, the talking
buffalo – prompts us to challenge our «instrumental» experiential frame-
work. Like the loop between analog and digital and the liminal figures of
the characters, the fairy-tale destabilizes our perception of reality to the
point of making us wonder whether these films are not, after all, realistic in
another way7. Thus, for Rohrwacher, «Lazzaro Felice is a film where there is
only reality. But sometimes reality is unbelievable» (Garcia 2018: 42).
     As we broaden our perception of reality, the dichotomy between fic-
tion and non-fiction proves pointless. And the same applies to the fairy-tale
label: «Dreams and fairy-tales, even if imaginary, should tell the truth»,
says Sarchiapone at the end of the film. As Luigi Storto considers:

           Bella e perduta is a fictional tale that on several occasions finds itself
        forced to open glimpses of factual reality, or more prosaically, of
        what we call “real life”, which as such is made up of afterthoughts,
        abrupt interruptions, but also of loss and mourning. The best term to
        explain this approach is perhaps “porosity”: Bella e perduta is a fairy-
        tale that allows itself to be permeated by the real, in a perfect example
        of mediation between reality and its restitution. (Storto 2020: 89)

      In both films, the fairy-tale is then mixed with the documentary in
portraying a ferocious system of exploitation8. Whether they are discuss-
ing intensive farming or feudal oppression about peasants, the underclass
or slaughterhouses, the films insist on representing the exploitation of man


    7
         Daniele Dottorini emphasised how, alongside a «cinema of the real», in
recent years a «cinema for the real» has emerged, characterized by a tensing up of
reality, a cinema that has to renegotiate its modes of expression precisely in order
to tell reality (Dottorini 2017).
     8
         Not surprisingly, both directors refer to Ermanno Olmi, who masterfully de-
picted rural life and never abandoned the documentary style during his film career.


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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



as inseparable from the exploitation of nature and animals.
      The Benjaminian desire to tell the stories of the vanquished, of those
that History with a capital H leaves aside, is reflected in the choice of
non-professional actors and in a documentary focus which leads Rohrwa-
cher to consult the archive and Marcello to include archive footage9.
      For instance, the inspiration for Lazzaro felice comes from a short article
the history teacher handed out to Rohrwacher’s class: it was «the story of a
dreadful marquise, denounced because, taking advantage of the isolation
of some of her properties, she had not told the peasants that sharecropping
was ended by law» (Di Paola 2018).
      Thus, in the film, the marquise explains that she exploits the share-
croppers because: «Human beings are like beasts. Freeing them means
making them aware of their own condition of slavery. I exploit them and
they exploit Lazzaro. It is a chain, and it cannot be stopped». This consid-
eration becomes inescapable in the second part of Lazzaro felice when, de-
spite the liberation from sharecropping, the former peasants discover that
exploitation has not ceased but has simply taken on new forms.
      Similarly, by displaying documentary clips of demonstrations against
the Camorra, but also of clashes between the Italian state and the citizens
of Campania over poor waste management and the siting of landfills, Bella
e perduta shows the contradictions of a landscape that, although it literally
hides the poisons of toxic waste, inspires pastoral idyll.
      It is no coincidence that Virgil’s bucolic poems were born here, and
that the “Land of fires” is also the famous Campania Felix, the beautiful and
fertile land that regularly produced three harvests a year (Zonta 2017: 86).
Through the spread of poisons and cancers, the landscape and people are
both brutalized by the violence of the Camorra.
      As Joan Martinez Alier has taught, it is not because a struggle does
not claim to be directly ecological that it is not ecological (Alier 2005). On
the contrary, like the inhabitants of the Amazon and so many other threat-
ened regions of the world, one can be part of an ecological struggle with-
out defining it as such.
      This analysis applies as much to the shepherds and citizens of
waste-besieged Campania as it does to the peasants and underclass of La-
zzaro felice. Both films therefore convey the idea that the violence we do to
others – nature, landscape, animals – is a self-destructive violence that we


      9
       To collect documents on the agrarian landscape and peasant life, Rohrwa-
cher visited the Sereni archive in Reggio Emilia (Zonta 2017: 188).


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also inflict on ourselves. It is a loop in which the violence inflicted comes
back to hit man in a retroactive cycle.
     Rather than offering the wonders of a lost world, the blend of fairy-tale
and documentary is then a way of unsettling fatalistic narratives which, in
the name of realism, condemn us to embrace ecological disaster (Ghosh
2017). The tale, instead of simply denouncing injustice, performs the oper-
ation which, according to Haraway and Stengers, is the key of ‘speculative
fabulation’: that of making relevant things that had until then been con-
sidered negligible, paving the way for the possible to come (Stengers 2006:
122)10. As Dottorini notes for Bella e perduta – but the same seems to apply
to Lazzaro felice:

        The narrative form literally invades the documentary gaze, not to
     deny it nor to give it a structure that comes from “outside”. But precisely
     to enter the play of image research. […] It is a cinematic tradition,
     we said. Yes, because it is not difficult to see, looking backwards,
     something that has long marked the history of our cinema. The ability
     to make storytelling both the engine and the image of a cinema that
     creates a short circuit between past and present. That is, which uses
     filmed images in the here and now […] to reveal their temporal charge
     and, above all, the power of storytelling. (Dottorini 2019: 287)

      By choosing to combine the two seemingly irreconcilable genres of
fairy-tale and documentary, the films set in motion a dialectic that is not
exclusive but «spectral», as Derrida puts it (De Baecque 2001; Blanco -
Peeren 2013). Both Bella e perduta and Lazzaro felice are in fact pervaded
by antithetical polarities, starting with the tension between extinction and
survival, city and country, myth and progress, past and present, bestiality
and humanity.
      This ghostliness particularly affects the narrative structure of the films.
The ghostly dimension of Bella e perduta, made manifest through the title
after Verdi’s Nabucco, where ‘lost’ refers to the homeland, is most evident
in the figure of the shepherd Tommaso, former master of Sarchiapone. In
fact, although at the beginning of the film the news informs us of Tomma-
so’s death, his ghost is always wandering around in the palace of Carditel-
lo, preventing us from placing ourselves precisely in the story, confusing
the distinctions between reality, hallucination and flashback.


    10
       On survival stories and speculative fabulation see Despret and Stengers
2011; Haraway 2016; Tsing 2017, 2021.


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Lucia della Fontana, Analogue film, ghostly ontologies and the fairy-tale



       The overlaps in presence and absence destabilize temporality in a par-
allel universe where all times coexist. This transtime in which past, present
and future are compounded, manifests itself in the layers that make up
the landscape. This can be seen in the sequence in which Gesuino digs and
descends underground to rob an ancient tomb.
       The deconstruction of temporal linearity also characterizes Lazzaro
felice: the resurrection of Lazzaro and his second life, in fact, result in an
overlapping of several sedimented temporal layers. As Rohrwacher notes
in an interview:

         The desire not to fix space-time boundaries also lies in my choice
      of narrative that goes on, as in my other films, through jumps in time.
      I would say that precise dates, rigid time coordinates do not interest
      me and I do not think they add anything to the story. I always try to
      make the spectator forget the passing of time, to transport him into a
      unique time, in which the present is past and the past is present […].
      In Lazzaro felice we almost invented an era. (Di Paola 2018)

        Thus, from one side of the film to the other, the sharecroppers of an
ahistorical past and the underclass of an unidentified city – Lazzaro felice was
shot in Milan, Turin and Civitavecchia – reach out to each other. Whether
it is the tobacco plantation or the bank where Lazzaro dies a second time
at the end of the film, the rural and urban landscapes form the backdrop to
the same scene of exploitation, in a loop. The fairy-tale pierces the loop to
open a breach to another story, another relationship with nature, no longer
simply one of domination and exploitation, but one of respect.
       In both films, the destabilization between time barriers thus becomes
a chance to recover the past but above all to unfold the possibilities of the
future. If there is a ghostly dimension in the films, it is therefore not that of
the simulacrum in Baudrillard’s sense, nor that of a post-organic post-hu-
man released from the body. Rather, it is an ontological tension, a rethink-
ing of the human starting from the dramatization of the biological element.
Between analogue and digital, between human and animal, between doc-
umentary and fairy tale, a dialectic emerges that undermines our cognitive
structures and implements the rethinking we need to «create hope even at
the bottom of the abyss» (Stengers 2009).




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                                        Filmography
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                                         The Author
      Lucia della Fontana

     Lucia della Fontana is an agrégé professor and a PhD researcher in Ital-
ian studies at Sorbonne Université. After a degree in European literatures
and cultures from the University of Bologna, she obtained a Master’s de-
gree in Comparative literature from Sorbonne Université. She is currently



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                                     Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



working on a thesis on contemporary Italian literature and climate change
entitled Défi climatique et urgence de l’engagement. Débat critique et création
romanesque dans la culture italienne des années 2000.

     Email: lucia.della_fontana@sorbonne-universite.fr



                                The Article
     Date sent: 31/03/2022
     Date accepted: 31/07/2022
     Date published: 30/11/2022



                        How to cite this article
     della Fontana, Lucia, “Analogue film, Ghostly Ontologies and the
Fairy-tale in Bella e perduta and Lazzaro felice”, Entering the Simulacra World,
Eds. A. Ghezzani - L. Giovannelli - F. Rossi - C. Savettieri, Between, XII.24
(2022): 203-223, www.betweenjournal.it




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