Abstract EN:

Visconti stands foremost among the poets of disruption and duration. May philosophical or empirical patterns will enable us to bring out the images of time that shaped his rendering of personal or familial crises swept by the turmoils of history ? the pattern of dialectical time won't do : even his most linear, final or progressive films rely on seminal cycles and repetitions. As historical time casts asunder every attempt at homogeneity, the fictional reading or rewriting of history disrupts the unifying drive of totalization and accumulation. Visconti's reluctance to consider history as progress accounts for his reliance on the nietzschean semiotics of decadence tending towards a definition of values in terms of intensity. Even if nietzsche exerted little direct influence on visconti, nietzschean concepts do open new avenues in the reading of visconti's film- forms. Textual or figurative references to him are scarce. But the cultural filters implemented by visconti and his insistence on a total reversal of platonism hark back to his trinitarian vision of history : time and again, the ghost of history as our common disease is dispelled by the building of tranversal forms. Nietzsche's celebration of return, thematically developped in its negative version, reaches its apex in the aura of filmic fragments inwardly hallowed by a paradoxical vision of a time which is neither linear nor circular. That vision is centered on the tragic relief that comes at the end of the ordeal, when it is too late at last. Yet visconti's treatment of time cannot be accounted in perspectives. Direct access to it can be gained in terms of post-nietzschean modernity : the interplay of shams, the mythopoetic drive and the power of fragmentation led us to define time in visconti as an endless spiral whose ends he endeavours to pick film after film. Timelessness has to be untimely. Visconti's reevaluation of current aesthetic categories shadows our disquietude as dwellers in time.