The cinema as a lens

In this column, the cinema — that tide of giving and receiving, as the brilliant Swedish director I. Bergman calls it — will be our lens for various commentaries. This time we shall talk about The Family (La famiglia, 1987), by the director Ettore Scola. It has been said that this film sums up a great part of the Italian filmmaker’s work: from The Terrace it retains the historical description of a character’s life; from We All Loved Each Other So Much, the tragicomedy; from Le Bal, the continuity, within a single setting, of multiple destinies (structural drifts) that intersect; and from That Night in Varennes, what our compatriot Ricardo Aronovich said about light and the camera: that the mechanism alone is not what produces the effect on the viewer.

Scola, who began as a journalist and caricaturist, has always dazzled us as a historian of the social. He is a painter of solitude, of nostalgia, of the decadent and the sordid in context (Ugly, Dirty and Bad).

Making an invisible unit visible

The Family encompasses eighty years of the life of Carlo (Vittorio Gassman), who is shown to us and described to us in his lived situation. In our culture, which has enthroned the decontextualised individual, where this social organism is not perceived as such even by the supposed experts, the film we are concerned with makes the effort of rescuing this changing being, connected to others, in relation with others. Scola shows us the family routines so that we may appreciate that invisible unit, the family, in the only way it can be perceived: in movement, changing from one form to another. He also shows it as it is, kaleidoscopic, made up of different images, and as a sounding board for what happens to each of its members.

Individuals appear there as crystals, large or small, as figure or as ground, luminous or opaque, taking up various positions and taking part in the different forms (structures) assumed by this unit in movement.

The family appears as a ballet, in which everyone depends on the others and in which, without perceiving it, they trace out a choreography. The corridor of the vast dwelling in which several generations of a single family live together is what connects the different rooms; it is the space held in common between the different members. It is also, in time, what connects the different developmental moments of the family life cycle.

Structure as a skeleton

The cinema, like the theatre, the ballet or mime, represents the knowledge of a body. In the structure of this family, as in that of others, the relations between the parts of the system are constitutive. Structure refers to the way in which the parts are connected to one another and give rise to meanings that overflow situations. It is a line that unites, a movement that repeats itself, that delimits and articulates spaces, that defines relationships; it is a body within the body, it is the skeleton. It is a form that makes itself present at different moments of lived experience: it is neither the outline nor the frame, it is the internal design in dynamic relation.

In this story of an Italian family there is a logical progression, as in Greek tragedy, in which the members appear as prisoners of their history and of their structure.

The various subsystems of the family system — the three sisters who remained unmarried and quarrel among themselves, or the love triangle formed by Carlo and the two sisters Beatrice (Stefania Sandrelli) and Adriana (Fanny Ardant) — have defined boundaries and maintain themselves over time. The complementarities between the brothers Carlo (the strong one) and Giulio (the weak one) are recursive.

As the years go by, the organisation remains, the system endures: Carlo and Adriana come to quarrel for fifty years, and even when the third term of the subunit has just died, the distances are maintained. In a beautiful final dialogue, they acknowledge that Beatrice was the continuity of the family (morphostasis) and that they themselves were its leaps (morphogenesis).

The repetition, from generation to generation, of roles and of interpersonal interlockings, as well as of the many historical overdeterminations within a narrow setting, comes to an end when Carlo celebrates his eightieth birthday.

The family photograph of the opening is repeated: the family is the same. They have not been able to stop being constrained in their movements and their possibilities; therein lies the drama.