The Odd Man Out

There is a scene sketched out in front of us. On the right, a group of soldiers raise their rifles with a coordination that is not quite perfect. They are turning away from us, and it is hardly possible to pick out any expression on their averted faces. On the left, confronting the barrels of the upraised rifles, there is another group of people. The strong, yet oblique shaft of light, which lingers upon stray details of the soldiers' uniforms and equipment, falls full upon their faces and discloses them to be the victims of this bifurcated scene. It is, of course, the scene of a firing squad. But has the squad fired or not? Are we coincident with, or just very close to, an event which is being singled out as momentous? And what -kind of an event is it? Clearly, in one sense, we already know the answer to that last question, and we know it precisely because of what it communicated metonymically by the bare itemization of contributory details: soldiers, rifles, barrels and victims. It is an event which is momentous as much as it is also historical. This means that it invites us to accept it as a kind of outrider of a cavalcade which we have not yet become acquainted with. Artificially withdrawn, for the purpose of analysis, from the to which it belongs, it threatens to spring back, with a kind of magnetic force, to its context. Yet what is meant by narrative sequence or historical context in this case? Obviously this event, which represents an impossible moment of coincidence between the action of the executioners and the passion of the victims, is not a segment which could be readjusted like a transfer over the rugged contours of the real. It returns to and history, insofar as it is already (but not fully) narrativized; it possesses its own virtual power, its own capacity to irradiate -the within which it is replaced. I could have been talking about a number of images in this initial paragraph, and my perfunctory description has stopped just short of the point where you might have guessed that one of these, rather than another, is being discussed. The next move is to discuss the images in turn, or rather to discuss what will be revealed as a series of images, ranging through a wide variety of types of media -etching, lithograph, oil sketch, oil painting, and finally film. But it will not be forgotten that these images cannot be satisfactorily analyzed apart from the binding narratives to which they belong: existentially, insofar as they have been produced by particular artists working in specific circumstances

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Narrative · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

• (How) does film theory work

  Toby Miller•Continuum•1992

  Add to list

• Something Is Happening

  Open Access•Richard Shiff•Art History•2005

  Add to list