Ecstasy, Choreography and Re-Enactment
Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Filming States of Trance and Spirit Possession in Postwar Southern Italy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2163490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michaela Schäuble (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 33-55 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0894-9468 • E-ISSN: 1545-5920 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/08949468.2019.1568112 |
| OpenAlex | W2755006122 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
States of trance and spirit possession have inspired the modernist imagination perhaps more than anything else, as they typically exceed the limits of visual representation. This article investigates different approaches to coping with these challenges, focusing on the works of a group of Italian documentary filmmakers, including Luigi di Gianni, Cecilia Mangini, and Gianfranco Mingozzi, who used a novel set of audiovisual techniques to explore ecstatic religious expressions in southern Italy in the postwar years. I look into the processes through which trance and possession rituals (e.g. Apulian tarantism) themselves have inspired and initiated innovations in audiovisual documentation by means of combining—or blurring the boundaries between—ethnographic and experimental modes of cinematic practice. Through highly stylized image/sound compositions including high-contrast lighting, wood-cut like silhouettes, montage, abstract sound effects and poetic, partly fictionalized commentary, as well as by consciously making use of re-enactments and staged encounters, these films contest both the realist-observational narrative and the focus on individuals otherwise prevalent in ethnographic filmmaking. Reading the Italian films against the backdrop of the earlier and contemporaneous, yet much better-known trance films of Maya Deren and Jean Rouch, the article argues that their antirealist audiovisual aesthetic fabricates a social aesthetic that raises sensitivity to human experience and fosters a radically humanist stance
Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Improvisation · Literature · Narrative · Politics · Possession (linguistics · Sociology · Trance · Visual arts · Anthropology · Cinema and Media Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture
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The Adventure of the Real
Italy's Margins
"Il documentario etnografico "demartiniano
Dada and Surrealist Film
The Camera and Man
Of Mimicry and White Man
Of Mimicry and Man
On Reading Deren's Notebook
Seeing the Invisible
Crisis of presence and religious reintegration
Other-Hegemony in de Martino
The crisis of presence in Italian Pentecostal conversion
The Post-colonialism of Ernesto De Martino
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |