22 LTOMAGMDEINOSTROSECOLO <strong>AIC</strong> considered to be the superior "genre". Narration and expression in painting, as is common knowledge, were based on an established set of rules, conventions and techniques which constituted an important part of the public's culture, as well as that of the artist. While the representation of space was governed by the theory of perspective, which although a convention was based on scientific principles, the representation of time and movement was based on empirical judgment and expedients which were used to portray, or at least suggest, action in relation to time. Various techniques were used in the construction of the pictorical "story" and the rendering of both emotion and the actual "event" in western art: for example, a continuum of images in a space/time sequence, inherited from the Late Roman period; the cycles of events depicted in sequence in separate panels, as in the predelle or certain frescoes; the simultaneous representation of different moments and episodes in one composition, with the action taking place at various depths and the main characters appearing in different poses. From the Renaissance on, these narrative techniques were fundamentally modified by the unification of time, action and space, a theory which derived from Aristotle's teachings. Thus, it became a rule to communicate the most significant moment of a particular event; or rather to represent that infinitesimal part of the present which, more than any other part, could condense the significance of the entire event in a single image which would enable an observer to reconstruct the moments prior to it and those which followed, and thus appreciate the entire event. The "chosen" moment had to be supported and communicated by the general composition of the painting and the placing of the various elements in space according to the laws relating to perspective and time; the attitudes and movement of the figures were considered to be of fundamental importance. Innumerable suggestions were put forward in the many books on art theory written during the period, all concerned with the elaboration and communication of rules, techniques and precepts thet would improve painting in general: books on proportional theories and anatomical studies, books that adopted a phibsophical or mathematical approach, books which expounded on conceptualization on typification, or which set down all the technical devices for creating apparent movement, either of an individual figure or within the scene itself. It is also significant that Diderot comments on the above in the Encyclopédie, within the general critical review of the type of culture and art promoted by the illuminists. In the section devoted to Dimension, he puts forward, for the first time, the theory that "duration could be considered as a fourth dimension"; in the section devoted to Composition, he emphasizes the need for action to be unified, and underlines the importance of the characters' emotions communicating time. The painter, he writes, has a single, indivisible, moment in which to communicate movement within the composition, the different action that is taking place, the chiaroscuros, and the gestures and expressions of the characters. In fact, it was through the emotions that fleetingly transform the faces of the characters, and their different degrees of intensity, that the sense of time pervading a painting was fundamentally communicated, precisely because they were transitory, and composite, and could evoke a moment in the present in which a face still bears the traces of an emotion just experienced, or pre-announces one that is imminent: "Sometimes, tears continue to run down a person's face as it is just beginning to radiate joy. A gifted painter is able to capture the change of emotion in a person's face, the transition of their soul from one state of being to another, and the result is a masterpiece". The expression of emotion, or the impulses of the soul, had been an object of formal study for some time. In 1696, Le Brun, the painter and academic, has published his Conference sur l'expression des passions, which enjoyed a very wide readership. It elaborated a method for depicting the entire range of emotions that pass across a person's face: tranquility, attentiveness, admiration, amazement, desire, love, hope, fear, temerity, joy, laughter, pain, horror, terror, fury, jealousy, desperation, anger etc. which, according to principles already established by Descartes (Traité sul le passions de l'ime), originated in the pineal gland located at the centre of the brain. Correlating psychological experience and physical reaction or, more specifically, internal impukes and the actions they provoked, Le Brun depicted a series of faces on which the complete range of emotions was "illustrated" through the various positions, and consequent expressions, of the main features: eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, with the intent of providing painters with a comprehensive repertoire of emotional "models" to be used in their compositions. What he did, in reality, was to express the infinite nuances of emotion in a series of variations on the theme, which were unique and, therefore, unrepeatable, yet based on a model that remained constant; the method was decidedly academic, but also constituted a species of analysis of the possibilities of expression in painting, and of the depicting psychological states, the mysterious world of the emotions, with form and colour. Apart from its rather didactic attitude, Le Bran's methods was not only viewed by his colleagues as an ufr "aid" to figurative representation, but also as an Adriane's thread with which to orient themselves in the labyrinth of emotions that were in a constant state of flux or change. Then, Diderot took up the main idea behind this way of portraying movement and time in painting, exploring its "limits" as regards expression: having extended his way of viewing paintings to the theatre, made him more demanding and curious, perhaps because of his unconscious desire to perceive more keenly, to experience emotions more deeply, to witness a more perfect representation of the visual language used in painting and theatre and, more specifically, of their individual capacities as art to reflect upon reality and stimulate fantasy. The rest we know, at least for the most part: it is the story of the machine age, and man's invention of techniques for creating art in which space and time, sound and movement, art and science, reality and fantasy whirled in an ever-increasing spiral, until the potential of a new means of expression, the cinema, w r> discovered; until the most sophisticated technologies and the most mind-blowing special effects were invented, which are responsible for propagating the cinema myth, known as the "Great Illusion", today. In the space of a few decades, the images have become increasingly more "real" and "fantastic" through all the researching and experience that was gained and the methods that were evolved one after the other and which derived from both painting (transparencies, dioramas, panoramas) and also projection techniques, which resulted in a vast number of optical and mechanical inventions and phsysicochemical discoveries (from the time of Plateau through to Uchatius, Reynaud through to Marey, Esatman through to Edison and Lumière). Perhaps it would be possible to explore the cinema's complex evolution by examining it in relation to painting and the models it provided over the centuries; models not merely in the inspirational or iconographic sense, but more as methods which could be applied to the techniques created for communicating the image, and the establishing of attitudes towards it (both as regards its creation and viewing), and which were already deeply ingrained. In fact, in the cinema, at least for a certain period, formal expression, elaborated at length by painting and sculpture, played a major role in its evolution, along with the various contributions made by science and technology. One notices that the movements and expressions of the actors in silent films were always exaggerated to compensate for the lack of dialogue; a technique similar — apart from the movement — to that used in the paintings viewed by Diderot, and also the plays he watched. Neither is it difficult to detect in the silent film sequences, a typification of the emotions similar to that worked out by Le Bran, and then incorporated into painting technique (whereas using the different positions of the facial features to communicate different expressions, is a technique that has been adopted and devepoed by the animation artists). While art, from the avant-garde movement onwards, ran into increasing difficulties, the cinema, with the advent of sound and various other technologies, has grown out of its rather primitive fascination with recounting stories through gesture and expression, and developed the capacity to communicate, or suggest, the most sophisticated expressions of reality, fiction and fantasy — something completely unknown before. And finally, today, with the arrival of electonically — created images and the ever-increasing "commercialization" of television, we have moved way beyond those methods used in creating and perceiving the image that were not only part of cinema tradition, but also its identity. Special effects assail the senses — and the fantasy — to an extent they never have before, adventuring in a new, post-modem imagination, which they have also helped to create, dominated by a vast gamut of "effects" that are increasingly more mind-blowing, and which are moving away from the traditional mimetic techniques, like a space probe out the Earth's orbit. If painting could declare through F. Zuccaro, at the beginning of the 16th Century: "The invisible is the "object" 1 see before me" and if the cinema, as Cocteau observed, permits its audience "to dream the same dream", the electronic image is establishing itself in a heretofore unheard of realm of the imagination, permitting the viewer to perceive neither the invisible nor the dream, but nonexistence (or that which exists in the darkest recesses on the "collective unconscious"), creating and truly "legalizing" the wildest myths, which act aggressively and disturbingly on the banality of our daily lives. Between monsters, demons and sci-fi, a new repertoire of masks and grotesque expression is being built-up, phantasmagoria are, paradoxically, created and "consumed", in which words, are becoming — once again — superfluous, governed by the logic of stupefaction and sensation rather than communication. Perhaps, with all these new technologies, the image is going through a second childhood (it is no coincidence that films which are one big special effect are inevitably directed at children); a difficult second childhood, with its many contradictions, its ingenuous and stupefying attitude and, above all, its being unaware of the fragility of itsidentity. Meanwhile, the adventure continues, and the potential of the electronic image has yet to be discovered — and exploited!
<strong>AIC</strong> ; » t®' ' WM mm i L'IMMAGINE DFI. NOSTRO SECOLO Bill • §gig * • WÈmm, : ••••• . • S S ! m t ! D'improvviso è alto sulle macerie il limpido stupore dell'immensità. E l'uomo curvato sull'acqua sorpresa dal sole si rinviene un'ombra. Cullata e piano franta Qiuseppe Ungaretti mm-- MÉSI Silt9Illiik ilfll: lapis -
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AIC COLLEGIO DEI PROBIVIRI Armando
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IVO GRIPPO Via Tuscolana 1055, 0017
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AIC GIUSEPPE MODICA Quantunque il l
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AIC ARMANDO NANNUZZI
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AIC TONINO MACCOPP1 SANDRO D'EVA Fo
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AIC CESARE ALLIONE Me stato chiesto
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AIC ROBERTO D'ETTORRE PIAZZOLI Non
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AIC maggior collaboratore del regis
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AIC recommended me to Federico Fell
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AIC Si ringraziano G. Franco Borgio