The Tender Lives of Vitti/Vittoria

In this final chapter, the Italian actress Monica Vitti is read as the generous form of life par excellance in three of Antonioni’s most important films: L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse. The generosity she evinces is registered in the way that Antonioni shows her repeatedly grasping and releasing objects such that a distinction between possession as grasping and non-possession as release emerges. That same distinction appears later as a strategy that Vitti adopts in playfully evading her capture by Antonioni’s apparatus.

Playful Falls in a Milieu of Contagion

Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero is the subject of this chapter, in which the relation of the generous form of life to play is analysed in a milieu of ingratitude and mythic violence. The central figure of the film, the boy Edmund, is read as a limit case of the generous form of life in a context of massive envy. Here parricide and suicide become the only possibilities when gratitude has been reduced to year zero. The chapter includes a reading of Melanie Klein’s Gratitude and Envy and ends with a reflection on how the film turns gratitude inside out; in lieu of good and bad objects, there is law and guilt.

Conclusion: Attention, Not Autopsy

This brief chapter summarizes the book’s argument as essentially the following: in a number of films from Italy, a drama is played out between the camera’s power to make visible forms of life and those filmed who are able to play with the cinematic apparatus as if it were a transitional object. By noting the creative tension between the generous mancus without hands and the apparatus, the book makes an argument for a creative and attentive spectatorship able and willing to forego mastery.

“Dead Weight”: Visconti and Forms of Life

In this chapter, the first of three dedicated to films from post–World War II Italy, Luchino Visconti’s The Earth Trembles becomes the locus for a reflection on the relation among gesture, generosity, and landscape. The visual weight of the Cyclops Islands as destiny in the film’s frame is noted along with the difference in how members of the Valastri family touch and hold objects, especially the women of the household. An affinity between how objects are held on screen and how the spectator is urged to hold what she sees on screen is discussed, along with the importance of the long shot in Visconti’s aesthetic realism as a mode of creating attention.

Freeing the Apparatus

The second chapter is an attempt to read the cinematic apparatus as offering an affirmative response to biopower and mythic violence through the interplay of the visible and invisible. Beginning with a number of classic readings of the cinematic apparatus from Bazin, Heath, and Mulvey, among others, the possibility is explored that the cinematic apparatus can on occasion create generous forms of life that are able to give without requiring the mastery of what appears on screen. A techne of giving is found in the practice of generous attention, or what is referred to creative spectatorship.

Forms of Life in a Milieu of Biopower

This chapter, the most philosophical of the book, sketches the relation of biopower to fear and violence through a reading of mythic violence as it emerges in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Reading Adorno as well as Benjamin against himself, the chapter seeks to find in generosity and gratitude a response to biopower’s dependence on and use of fatedness. In place of the negative, tragic biopolitics that characterizes neoliberalism, a more affirmative perspective is proposed that forgoes mastery and holding in favor of non-possession and generosity.