15 years after his death, we want to pay homage to the figure of the unforgettable Francesco Bonardelli, who was an appreciated teacher, writer and journalist for the Gazzetta del Sud, by publishing one of his articles dedicated to the relationship between Cinema and Philosophy.
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«I was able to write about Cinema when philosophical problems pushed me to seek answers in Cinema, even if these answers put other problems back on the table»: this is Gilles Deleuze’s epigraph to a book by Umberto Curi on the dialectic between the cinematic message and the thought that underlies it; constituting its very essence as a privileged and autonomous form of entertainment, complete in itself but equally related to parallel contexts of expressiveness.
«I am convinced that we cannot truly “enjoy” a film if we deprive ourselves of that intense pleasure that comes from comparing it with what it “says” about some of the great issues that fascinate us», writes the scholar in the introduction. That precisely on this speculative autonomy of the most modern recognized art form, he then builds his critical-methodological findings aimed mainly at the systematic demonstration of the fundamental assumption. That is why Cinema – in all its specialized meanings and in all its consequential outcomes – does not serve at all to “distract” individuals, or to make them escape from problems; working, on the other hand, to arouse thought, and therefore put it in relation to acts, episodes, problems and their developments, equally reliable on the interchangeable levels of fantasy and reality. Therefore, no longer “philosophical” films, but reliable products on which to graft a reflection, concerning the thematization of relevant problems of becoming: the figure of the stranger, the love-death relationship, the duplicity of the human condition, the ambivalence of violence, the enigma of time. Basic questions, especially in the suspended years of the Millennium, which are not answers, but insights and therefore dynamics of thought can arouse at the level of critical fruition.
From “The Man on the Train”, “Spider”, “The Man Without a Past” for the section “The Stranger Who Lives There”, to “Unfaithful Love”, “First Love”, “The Human Stain”, “Million Dollar Baby” for “Eros and Thanatos”; from “Femme fatale”, “Catch me if you can”, “Master&Commander”, “The life I would like” for the “Icons of duplicity”, to “Good morning, night”, “The barbaric invasions”, “21 grams – The weight of the soul” and “The passion of Christ” for “Meditatio mortis”; from “Gangs of New York”, “Mystic River”, “Elephant”, “Collateral” for “Morphogenesis of violence”, to “The flower of evil”, “Chicago”, “A spoken film” for “Donate the time”. All films seen, told and therefore thought about, in a completely new vision of the relationship between Cinema and Philosophy. Revitalized after the de facto censorship, and the distrust of cinematography in general, arising from the lessons of the Frankfurt School, and after the limits put in place by the operational distrust, tangible in the persistence of the canons of Crusader-inspired aesthetics. In order not to determine rigid boundaries between the arts and, at the same time, reserves of theoretical-methodological application to their daily expression in the contexts of an increasingly varied, and therefore problematic, becoming.