Of Landscape and Society

Radek Krolczyk

The Disappearance of the Fireflies

In her installation SOMA, Luisa Eugeni shows film footage of a barren and unruly landscape. At the start, we are presented with a network of electrically lit dots. It is like the civilizational reconstruction of a species that has fallen victim to civilization itself—fireflies. This is a clear nod to Pier Paolo Pasolini's process “the disappearance of the fireflies”, a term he coined in 1975: in his Articolo delle lucciole, he noted that in the years after the end of fascism there were still fireflies in the rural areas of northern Italy, but that these were soon wiped out by industrial development. 1 Pasolini separates the postwar years into a time before and a time after the disappearance of the fireflies, a time of hope barely recorded, then already destroyed. The fascists changed their names and kept their posts; the partisans were honored symbolically, but disarmed in reality. The war altered the playing field, but it lived on nevertheless, because "’Postwar’ means nothing." 2 The disappearance of the fireflies thus describes much more than a mere ecological change in the landscape. According to Pasolini, the parallel disappearances of the spontaneity of will and action and the buzzing of the luminous insects resulted in the disappearance of the peculiarities of the landscapes and their people. The Enlightenment needs a counter-Enlightenment to preserve self-reflection and avoid becoming totality. The great light of the Enlightenment could well use the small, wild lights of the fireflies as an antithetical retort. Consumerism, according to Pasolini, makes the whole world commensurable and dull. What had established itself was a regime containing a power vacuum, instead of a center of power: a kind of governance in which the concrete ruling figures have not only lost their power, but which no longer needs such figures at all. The power to rule has not disappeared, but has become all the more automatic. Without visible rulership, there is no effective overthrow of rulership. All sublimation is now superfluous, all scarcity abolished, but so too is every spontaneous need. "Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune." 3 Fascism was thus defeated in favor of an only further-reaching domination. The landscapes in Pasolini's films show the dilemma of the Enlightenment as the impetus of progressive history. In Luisa Eugeni's films, this is evident today—that is, 50 years later. The landscapes are of course still there, albeit matured, but also further furrowed by the progression of history. 

Ruins of Myths, Ruins of Global Periphery 

When Odysseus passes the Islands of the Sirens on his perilous voyage, he is tied to the mast while his oarsmen have plugged their ears with wax. Thus, master and servant are kept from their submission to the singing by different means, for all are bound to their duties. 4 In Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's work on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Greek saga is central because it is situated precisely between myth and enlightenment. The world from which Odysseus emerges and conquers over the course of his voyages is nonetheless mythical. In Pasolini's cinematic work, the tension between myth and enlightenment is often central. He explored his present based on the framework of mythical, ancient narratives. In 1969, he produced his film Medea, in which he tells the tragic love story of the priestess Medea, who comes from a mythical society in the Caucasus, and Jason, heir to the Greek throne. Medea betrays her people by stealing the Golden Fleece they had revered and then fleeing with Jason to Corinth. In her rational, new world, Medea finally perishes. Pasolini shot his film in desolate locations, far from the economic, political and cultural centers of the 1960s. He placed the life of the Colchians, characterized by cultic sacrificial rituals, in the volcanic cavern landscape of central Anatolia, the Corinthian civilization on the outskirts of Aleppo. In both cases, the rugged landscapes with their strange structures are integral to the broader narratives. The society of the Colchians, still entirely devoted to animistic myth, navigates sand hills in caves which man has been burrowing into the volcanic mountains since the Bronze Age. In contrast, the heart of Pasolini's Corinthians is a citadel built around 3000 BC. The washed-up, raw residential landscape of the Colchians thus transitions into the well-constructed, stable monolith of the Corinthians in a social-evolutionary manner. 

Accordingly, the figures and their bodies interact differently with these societies: The Colchians' caves welcome the Greek Jason, while the Corinthian fortress banishes and dismisses Medea. However, the Corinthian king Creon and his daughter Creusa also fall to their self-imposed deaths from the angular battlements of their fortress, their bodies repelled by the fortress defenses. A similar trend is visible regarding the artifacts of the two societies. While the Colchians wear elaborate costumes and masks that harmonize with their landscape, Creon's head is framed by gleaming metal that again resembles his fortress. Both landscapes and their buildings were scouted by Pasolini and chosen for his film, but not built specifically for it. Only some of the interior scenes were shot in the Roman Cinecittà. 5 Pasolini's story of Medea is set in the global periphery. It is set in places whose relative insignificance affords them their own pictorial power. Pasolini did not capture his scenes in an "untouched nature" but, on the contrary, in a landscape that has been sculpted by human cultures throughout history. This, however, has a fundamentally different character than the homogenization of the arts and entertainment industry. The very idiosyncrasies in Pasolini’s scenes seem to be what makes them their own. Parallel to this, it is precisely the close-ups of the faces of his performers that are to be considered. The fact that Pasolini preferred to work with amateurs from the peripheries does not lie so much in a businesslike penchant for the unconsumed, but rather the performers’ faces, which are not trained in the entertainment industry, are similar in their involuntariness to the unpredictable landscape, and in that same vein, they stretch, laughing, across the picture.

Ruins of Modernity, Ruins of the Urban Periphery

In 1962, Pasolini shot Mamma Roma in the Roman suburbs. Here he tells the story of a woman who wants to leave behind her past as a prostitute and moves with her adolescent son Ettore to the outskirts of the city into a new housing estate. The blocks of flats in which the mother has bought an apartment for herself and her son still seem devoid of history. Beyond the new development, however, stretches a wasteland where Ettore and other young people from the neighborhood kill time together. Scattered across this area, among tall grass and piles of earth, are the remains of a Roman viaduct. The young people move somewhat lost among the half-ruined columns and round arches, and at the same time these ruins are the only elements that give the picture a vertical structure. They are no longer intact, and yet they are the only thing that provides support. Located in the periphery of the seventh district, the historic area extends over almost 60 acres. Today it is listed as an historical monument under the name Parco degli Acquedotti. In the 1970s, homeless people illegally built tin shacks on the site, which were soon cleared by the police. The demolition of the ruins of a total of seven aqueducts and the development of the area were thwarted in the 1980s by a citizens' initiative. Since then, the area has been part of the Roman open-air museum Parco Regionale dell'Appia Antica. 

Pasolini's 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini (Big Birds, Little Birds) is also set in the Roman suburbs. The story of a man who wanders down a street with his oldest teenage son (one of 18 children) is told throughout several episodes. Their destination and goal remain unclear. They, too, have become homeless and disoriented in more ways than one. The two are accompanied by a talking raven that overwhelms them with moral speeches, leading them to kill and eat it. They walk along the edge of the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR), a neighborhood with numerous prestigious neoclassical buildings. The area was earmarked by Benito Mussolini for the 1942 World's Fair, but this failed to take place due to Italy's entry into war. Father and son can be seen walking over an partially-built freeway bridge intended to provide better access to the new quarter. In the background, we see the Basilica parrocchiale Santi Pietro e Paolo, which was also built at the end of the 1930s in Mussolini's neoclassical style. 

At the real locations of both films, we witness an intermediate time in which the old and the new seem ruined, whether their time is still ahead of them or already behind them. The characters remain as the actual ruins, searching for a place in the world and failing to do so, regardless of whether or not they are able to find themselves. For as long as they have not found their place, they are perhaps a little like the fireflies—moments of disturbance in a world turned hermetic. Pasolini's image of the fireflies is linguistically ambiguous, because the Italian word lucciola is also used colloquially to mean prostitute. In Pasolini's cosmos, prostitutes are part of a lumpenproletariat whose obvious damage constantly threatens ideal society by calling society itself into question.

The Stupid Animal on the Water

Now a brief look at a film that draws upon the idea of reconciliation of subject and object, that is, enlightenment and myth, from another experimental Italian filmmaker and painter. Gianfranco Baruchello shot his first short but seemingly endless film Il grado zero del paesaggio (Zero Degree Landscape), in 1963. A pale green, then violet surface, creases like a bedsheet. The folds dissect the image at different places at irregular intervals. Then the camera rises a little, revealing the horizon, and it becomes clear that this chaotic surface is the sea. Sunlight refracts on the moving surface of the water. The viewer sees fast-moving, glistening dots that seem to burn holes in the ground. Water doesn't burn, but maybe the Super 8 film does?! Or are these again merely fireflies that continued to exist in an environment completely oriented towards contemplation, because they, fortunately, had nothing else to do? Luisa Eugeni also organized her electric fireflies around such a shimmering and contemplative surface. The surface of the water is also part of a solution in Adorno: "Rien faire comme une bête, lying on the water and look peacefully into the heavens, ‘being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment’ might step in place of process, doing, fulfilling, and so truly deliver the promise of dialectical logic, of culminating in its origin."  6

1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “L’articolo delle lucciole,” in id., Scritti corsari (Milan 1975), pp. 156–164 [first published as “Il vuoto del potere in Italia,” in Corriere della Sera, February 1st, 1975]. English translation published in the blog Città Pasolini in 2016: http://cittapasolini.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-vacuum-of-power-il-vuoto-del-potere.html (last accessed February 7, 2021).
2. Wu Ming, 54, (London 2005), p. 1.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford 2002), p. XVIII.
4. cf. ibid., pp. 35–62.
5. Film studios on the outskirts of Rome.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, “Sur l’eau”, in: id., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, (London 2005), pp. 155–160, here p. 157.