9) Palermo – Bolognini

There are only so many strategies for filming and talking about cities, I guess, so it’s not too surprising that Mauro Bolognini’s profile of Palermo for 12 REGISTI A 12 CITTA’ repeats a few tropes, notably the opera music and helicopter shots we’ve just heard and seen in Francesco Rosi’s episode. However, these are joined by a voice-over which does what I’d been wishing the earlier narrations had done — it brings a poetic sensibility, or at least an emotional approach, to the recitation of facts —

There’s immediately a refreshing sense that our response to the voice-over man’s musings will not be “Right, uh-huh, okay,” but “What? Oh? Really?” We are stirred out of our passive tourist consumption of information. I use the Royal Pauline We here, and I must stop myself.

Helicopter shots are a little hard to edit, since they don’t have natural starts and finishes. Some of Bolognini’s cuts are a little ragged. The best thing you can do is keep the momentum of one shot going in the next — this little movie, like Antonioni’s installment, kind of resembles MARIENBAD in the way it does this — and I note that Alain Resnais made his masterpiece off the back of short documentaries like this one which often profiled particular locations. So it’s easyish to cut from one chopper view to another, but how do you get out of that cycle? Assuming you don’t want the whole film to be whirlybird stuff.

“The bell tower of Martorana, the Saracen domes, reminds us of the great conquests of a forgotten Sicily.” Now Bolognini’s narration is using the “we” too. An easy and manipulative trap to fall into. In the talk of torture chambers and the auto-da-fe, the VO does seem to echo Resnais’ conjuring of past horrors with unoccupied location shots in NIGHT AND FOG.

Some of the Steadicam glides through colonnades here are extremely beautiful. The Steadicam is a bit like the helicopter except you can bring it to a halt, so long as you cut away fast before it starts floating up and down…

Unlike his predecessors, Bolognini references the cinema in his VO — the locations have found their way into Visconti’s THE LEOPARD, and have thus acquired an additional, shadow existence, a narrative significance unintended by their architects. Fellini said he was often surprised that the Trevi Fountain continued to exist after fulfilling its role in LA DOLCE VITA. He expected it to be torn down like his other sets at Cinecitta.

Like Rosi, Bolognini gets some nifty effects from juxtaposing art and life, showing how the city’s activities, which inspired the work of painters from the renaissance to the twentieth century’s Renato Guttuso (who had just died back in 1987), are still going on today, with the soundtrack of market cries blending art and life together.

But Bolognini, like Antonioni, seems happier in the past (and avoiding the football), so the thread he follows takes him back to magnificent architecture.

State Dependent Memory

Interesting YouTube content. The video isn’t top quality, but underneath it are some interesting musings about CITY LIGHTS’ drunken millionaire character:

“In the film, Charlie Chaplin befriends a millionaire and goes out for a night on the town. The only catch, the millionaire is drunk when meeting Chaplin. The next day, the millionaire has sobered up and when he sees Chaplin, he doesn’t recognize him. Later that same day, the millionaire becomes drunk yet again and when he runs into Chaplin, he remembers him and invites him to a party. This movie illustrates state-dependent memory while under the effect of alcohol.”

Everyone “gets” what’s happening with this gag. Chaplin seems to extrapolate the idea of the blackout drunk in a new direction, one that’s intuitively understandable even if it’s outside most of our experience:

“Because the millionaire is in an altered state during his first meeting with Charlie Chaplin, he cannot remember who he is once he has sobered up. However, upon getting drunk again, the millionaire can recognize Chaplin.”

A good many of us have experienced getting so drunk we couldn’t remember what we did. Or is that just me? Anyway, not since I was a lot younger. The idea of recovering some of our memory next time we’re drunk seems sort of like movie logic, the way a second blow on the head is supposed to restore memory (I think that one is very likely a myth, and possibly a dangerous one if anyone ever took it seriously, which I doubt they did).

“A study completed by Weissenborn and Duka (2000) gives evidence for state-dependent memory and alcohol concerning semantic memory. The results suggest that when the participant was in the same state for encoding and retrieval and the items are remembered semantically, the number of items recalled was higher than when the encoding and retrieval contexts were different.”

It might be that, just as seeing somebody you know slightly outside of their usual context can give us difficulty in recollecting who they are and how we know them, seeing someone we know from a drunken binge outside of that state can make them seem unfamiliar, whereas they’ll be jogged back into our recall if we see them again while we’re plastered. Instead of of the setting providing a useful context, it’s the mindset that helps us out.

“A summary of studies by Donald Goodwin (1995), actually discusses the movie City Lights. Goodwin mentions that he was inspired by the movie to study state-dependent memory.”

I love this. I’m reminded that the Steady State Theory, hypothesizing that the universe has always existed and that the Big Bang is a recurring phenomenon, was partly inspired by a viewing of DEAD OF NIGHT. Are there any other movies that have inspired scientific theories?

“He mentions that there is little in the literature on state-dependent memory, but he believes that it is a true phenomenon, and that Chaplin likely based his depiction of the behavior on personal experience with his drinking buddies.”

I note that Chaplin, the son of an alcoholic father, seems to have had an inbuilt aversion to getting drunk, but that Hollywood in the teens and twenties would certainly have given him plenty of unfettered access to the hi-jinks of the dipsomaniac set. However, I think his portrayal or invention of state-dependent memory is just as likely the creation of his keen narrative mind, extending the situation of the blackout drunk forward in time so as to create a useful running gag. Indeed, after Charlie has been baffled by the millionaire’s schizoid attitude a couple of times, the audience can anticipate the condition recurring and creating more problems for Charlie, so it’s terrific for suspense.

Worth throwing in another useful phrase, “jamais vu,” a favourite of the late Ken Campbell. Deja vu, as we all know, is when we get a sense of familiarity from somewhere we know we’ve never been before. Jamais vu is when we walk into our own home and don’t recognise it.

Thanks to YouTuber ElielAndel for the thoughts.

Twice as Twice as Gay

Thanks to H. Barta again.