Marco Grosoli is presenting at André Bazin: The Space of Myth, an international film conference at Yale MacMillan Center: "Locating Sentiment—CloseUps in Sunset Blvd and Gold of Naples"
Abstract I will analyze André Bazin’s writings on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Vittorio de Sica’s The Gold of Naples (1954). As regards the former, Bazin focuses particularly on the excerpt from Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly appearing in the film: the timelessness of Gloria Swanson’s beauty therein belies, says Bazin, the historicistic argument of Sunset Boulevard (a film he dislikes), introducing a certain kind of universalism for cinematic myth within a film playing out historicism against myth. As regards The Gold of Naples, it differs from Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille, says Bazin, because Pagnol’s cinema is only local, whereas The Gold of Naples is both local and universal in that it is tinged with Dostoevskian tragedy (as exemplified most notably by Silvana Mangano’s close-up at the end of her episode of this omnibus film, embodying moral values that are universal precisely because they are ambivalent and contradictory). Both reviews argue 1) that dramaturgical mastery is both films’ main asset as well as both of them’s main flaw (it is particularly significant that both reviews associate dramaturgical mastery with death); 2) that the meanings that both films’ dramaturgies tried so hard to express is ultimately overturned by those close-ups, both bearing a strong relationship with space (the stratification of Swanson’s ages; Naples).
February 14-15, HQ276
📸 Sunset Blvd. [1950], by Billy Wilder
