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The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film

Online ISBN:
9780804786775
Print ISBN:
9780804758024
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film

Published:
16 April 2008
Online ISBN:
9780804786775
Print ISBN:
9780804758024
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scene—the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated. By pushing the detective story to its extreme limits, they articulate forms of time that defy any clear-cut distinction between past, present, and future—presenting an uncertain temporality which can be made visible but not calculated, and challenging notions of visual mastery and social control. If the detective story proper begins with a death that has already taken place, the death which seems to count the most in these films is the one that is yet to occur—the investigator's own death. In a time of relentless anticipation, what appears in front of the investigator's eyes is not the past as it was, but the past as it will have been in relation to the time of his or her search.

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