Our post-doctoral fellow, Marco Grosoli, will be present at the Global Bertolucci conference, on March 5-6, at the University of Cambridge.
His presentation is titled "Global Mobility as Veil of Maya. On Histoire d’eaux".
Histoire d’eaux (2002) enacts the Indian parable recounted in Prima della rivoluzione (1964). An old Hindu asks a young man (an immigrant from Indian subcontinent just landed near Latina) to fetch a glass of water; he obeys, but while he’s away he meets a woman and marries her; after many years he encounters again the same old Hindu: “what took you so long?”.
In his paper, Marco Grosoli argues that Histoire d’eaux is the companion piece of L’assedio (1998), another later Bertolucci film narrativizing migration to re-incorporate in an Italian context the global dimension explored by his previous “Eastern trilogy”. That trilogy dialectically overcame orientalist exoticism by pushing it to its utmost extreme, abolishing by way of exacerbation the very distinction between (Western) self and (non-Western) other. L’assedio built upon that abolishment by emphasizing the confinement of the two protagonists (one Western and one not) in the same building; however, this spatial framework was also temporalized and sexualized (western character = old male; non western = young female) in ways that possibly betrayed some lingering orientalist exoticism, incompletely overcome.
Histoire d’eaux amends precisely that temporalization (time’s deceptiveness is obviously the point of the plot’s Indian parable) and sexualization. The non-western protagonist is now a young man very literally embodying hetero-normative “male gaze”; yet the film subtly undermines this position by establishing several symmetries between him and his wife, de facto placing them side by side non-hierarchically (similarly, their wedding consists in two ceremonies, one Indian/subcontinental and one Italian coexisting in the same hall).
By interweaving several speculative identities (male/female, self/other, West/non-West – and, crucially, life/death) the film fully brings forth the commentary on globalization that in L’assedio was only inconsistently sketched, namely: temporal frameworks (e.g., typically, teleologica narratives of development) can be easily misleading when it comes to an essentially spatial phenomenon like globalization.
The full program of Global Bertolucci is available here.
