Modern Italy, 2017 Vol. 22, No. 2, 105–122, doi:10.1017/mit.2017.19 Cinema’s poetics of history Noa Steimatsky* Department of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA (Received 2 September 2016; final version accepted 28 February 2017) In the movie theatre, history risks drowning in sensory response, in pleasure, or in shock. Yet the cinema can also contribute to a special knowledge of history. Cutting across genres and modes of filmmaking, exploring the effects of duration, gesture, movement, mise-en-scène, framing and editing, recognising affective connotations and the intricacy of figural-poetic devices, this article weighs the impact of the senses and the imagination vis-à-vis the cinema’s historical task. In transforming the narrative past tenses of both fiction and history into the present tense of film viewing, the cinema may be said to loosen the critical grip of writing (history’s ‘proper medium’), to destabilise legibility and interpretation, to interfere with the retrospective, synthetic work of history. But this variability, the inherent ‘impurity’, even promiscuity of the medium also invests cinematic experience with a vitality and urgency: it implicates us in what we see, it animates our response, which is at once aesthetic and ethical. Keywords: poetics of cinema; image and imagination; temporality and history; Sergei Eisenstein’s October; Giorni di Gloria; William Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives; Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere For Moshe Elhanati, genuine historian and friend Introduction In the oceans of cinematic time and movement, in the whirl of contingent detail and the expres- sivity of bodies and gestures captured by the movie camera – does history risk drowning in sensory response, in ritualistic absorption, in pleasure, or in shock? Yet there are also ways in which the cinema as a medium, as an experience, and indeed as an art – beyond quantifiable information and even beyond its historiographical power to analyse, hypothesise, and narrate – can contribute to a special knowledge of history. While history lends itself primarily to expository and narrative forms, one recognises, as well, the intricate relations and connotations, affective resonances and inescapable ambiguities of historical experience and memory, personal or com- munal. These are perhaps best articulated through the cinema’s figural-poetic devices, which speak to the senses and to the imagination. I weave here the notion of the ‘poetic’ with the cinema’s appeal to the imagination. It is also bound up with the affective resonance of images, and is achieved particularly well through the expressivity of bodies in movement, and through the experience of temporality in the present tense of film viewing. It would encompass all those compositional elements, the forms and figures of articulation, which forge our perception *Email: steimatsky@berkeley.edu © 2017 Association for the Study of Modern Italy use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.19 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 23 May 2017 at 06:05:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of