Movies As Education: Books and Selves

La Notte (English: The Night) is a 1961 Italian drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Monica Vitti (with Umberto Eco, the novelist, appearing in a cameo).

Filmed on location in Milan, the film depicts a day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their deteriorating relationship.

In 1961, La Notte received the Golden Bear (at the Berlin International Film Festival, the first for an Italian film) and the David di Donatello Award for Best Director.

La Notte is the central film of a trilogy, beginning with L’Avventura (1960) and ending with L’Eclisse (1962).

The movie follows Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni), a distinguished writer, and his beautiful wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) as they visit their dying friend Tommaso Garani (Bernhard Wicki) who is hospitalized in Milan. Giovanni’s new book, La stagione (The Season), has just been published, and Tommaso praises his friend’s work.

La Notte reflects the director’s intuition that “you are what you read,” and books create a kind of thread through the story.

The dying, hospitalized patient has recently published an article on the famous philosophical writer Theodor Adorno. At the party the couple drifts into, the works of the AustrianJewish writer, Hermann Broch, are mentioned. Essentially, in a depressing glitzy world of lost and semi-lost souls, reading and books constitute a kind of emotional life raft or direction-finding compass, at least potentially. Antonioni frequently uses this motif.

We find this kind of reading and books-centered view of people interpreting their (bewildering) worlds in the works of the French thinker Charles Péguy (who died in battle during World War I in 1914):

“The Jew,” he declares in a passage that has become famous, “is a man who has always read, the Protestant has read for three hundred years, the Catholic for only two generations.”

(quoted in Consciousness and Society, H. Stuart Hughes, Vintage Books, paperback, 1958, page 355)

Charles Péguy is also central to Louis Malle’s classic French film Au revoir les enfants (English: “Goodbye, Children”).

If we “zoom out” and look for a meta-intelligent lesson, we can say that reading, writing, and arithmetic, the three basics mentioned in the phrase we all know, are very deeply entwined with who we are. Stories explain us to ourselves, and stories involve books and reading in our “Gutenberg world.”

The replacement of these by various (post-Gutenberg) screens and games may or may not be thought of as a variant since they constitute a kind of “pseudo-participation” and not participation based on perusal.

Essay 72: Rise and Fall of Families: Education in Literature

There’s an “enchanting” way to get into world literature and that is to see the connecting theme of the rise and fall of families: Dream of the Red Chamber from the eighteenth century is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of Chinese fiction and details the slow decline and fall of the Chia family.

A Chinese metaphor is introduced in the course of the novel: a family could be like a dead bug or insect still somehow clinging to a wall without having fallen down yet…this is supposed to give the reader an image of the Chia family as it wanes.

In the great The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington, the Ambersons rise and fall from 1873 (when the financial crisis thrust them upwards whether through dumb luck or shrewdness) to their disintegration over the next decades when the “magnificence” has evaporated completely.

This motif of family decline underlies the Japanese classic The Makioka Sisters of Tanizaki (died in 1965).

Tanizaki writes:

“Meanwhile the family fortunes were declining. There was no doubt, then, that Itani was being kind when when she urged Sachiko to ‘forget the past.’

“The best days for the Makiokas had lasted perhaps into the mid-twenties. Their prosperity lived now only in the mind of the Osakan who knew the old days well.

“Indeed, even in the mid-twenties, extravagance and bad management were having their effect on the family business. The first of a series of crises had overtaken them then.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Seidensticker translation, Vintage Books, 1985, page 8)

Whereas history is often centered on the rise and fall of empires, eras, periods, world orders, literature is often centered on the rise and fall of families, sometimes mostly off on their own, sometimes laid low by historical events and contingencies that overwhelmed or blindsided the family.