Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Roger Scruton

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Roger Scruton

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Last annotated on March 14, 2017

pursued when we reason in favour of our aesthetic judgements. 5Read more at location 1237

Note: relativismo culturale: il bello nn esiste croce: Bellezza e bellezza l arte ha un contenuto (inseparabile dalla forma) e và capita rappresentare ed esprimersi: possedere un significayo farebbe penssre a una rappresentazione ma il significato dell opera è intraducibile. Croce: l arte è espressione intuitiva... poichè in essa l umano è imprescindibile. problemi: 1 l arte ha un significato e dire che l arte è un intuizione nulla ci dice del suo significato 2 l intentonally fallacy non sarebbe così evidente se l opera fosse davvero pura espressione esprimere come verbo intransitivo formalismo: si contraddice usando esso stesso un linguaggio metaforico nello spiegare l opera. capire l opera = capire la logica metaforica l arte si connette alla nostra esperienza emotiva + profonda (il qs senso è espressiva). la bellezza non è una proprietà dell oggetto ma una esperienza di connessione. l arte come ordine incipiente che ci predispone alla gratuita ricerca di senso arte e verità: ordine e ricrrca gratuita di significato... l arte ci conduce alle verità ultime arte x arte: l arte va giudicata solo con il criterio suo proprio... ma x quanto detto prima capiamo che l arte nn può essere moralmente neutrale... il tanto vituperato moralismo nell arte è innanzitutto un errore estetico Edit

5 Artistic BeautyRead more at location 1237

Note: 5@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ CONCEZIONE METAFORICA DELL ARTE Edit

Only in the course of the nineteenth century, and in the wake of Hegel’s posthumously published lectures on aesthetics, did the topic of art come to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics.Read more at location 1238

Note: ARTE E BELLEZZA NATURALE Edit

Art picked up the torch of beauty, ran with it for a while, and then dropped it in the pissoirs of Paris.Read more at location 1242

Note: ARTE SENZA BELLEZZA Edit

Joking apart A century ago Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the name ‘R. Mutt’,Read more at location 1243

Note: DUCHAMP ARTISTA FILOSOFO Edit

One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question ‘What is art?’Read more at location 1245

Note: COS È L ARTE? Edit

searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand,Read more at location 1249

Note: VALORI OGGETIVI Edit

The argument is eagerly embraced, because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that TV soaps are ‘as good as’ Shakespeare and Radiohead the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void. The argument therefore chimes with the fashionable forms of cultural relativism,Read more at location 1251

Note: IL PESO DELLA CULTURA Edit

There is a useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artefact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that ‘falls flat’. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke ‘in bad taste’. But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad.Read more at location 1255

Note: DUCHAMP RIPETUTO ALL INFINITO Edit

Art as a functional kind Works of art, like jokes, have a dominant function. They are objects of aesthetic interest.Read more at location 1262

Note: LA FUNZIONE DELL ARTE Edit

They may fulfil this function in a rewarding way, offering food for thought and spiritual uplift, winning for themselves a loyal public that returns to them to be consoled or inspired.Read more at location 1263

Note: ELEVAZIONE SPIRITUALE. CONSOLAZIONE O ISPIRAZIONE Edit

it really matters which kind of art you adhere to, which you include in your treasury of symbols and allusions, which you carry around in your heart.Read more at location 1267

Note: LA TUA ARTE Edit

Good taste is as important in aesthetics as it is in humour, and indeed taste is what it is all about.Read more at location 1268

Note: GUSTO Edit

When it comes to art, aesthetic judgement concerns what you ought and ought not to like, and (I shall argue) the ‘ought’ here, even if it is not exactly a moral imperative, has a moral weight.Read more at location 1269

Note: ARTE ED ETICA Edit

increasingly many teachers of the humanities agree with their incoming students, that there is no distinction between good and bad taste, but only between your taste and mine.Read more at location 1272

Note: RELATIVISMO. CATTIVO E BUON GUSTO Edit

Mao Ze Dong burst into laughter: it was at the circus, when a tight-rope walker fell from the high wire to her death.Read more at location 1274

Note: MAO SI DIVERTE Edit

Imagine a world in which people laughed only at others’ misfortunes.Read more at location 1275

Note: IL MONDO DI MAO Edit

It would be a degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found its endorsementRead more at location 1277

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Imagine now a world in which people showed an interest only in replica Brillo boxes, in signed urinals,Read more at location 1279

Note: IL MONDO DI DUCHAMP Edit

What would such a world have in common with that of Duccio, Giotto, Velazquez, or even Cézanne? Of course, there would be the fact of putting objects on display, and the fact of our looking at them through aesthetic spectacles. But it would be a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the transcendent, and in which mounds of rubbish cover the sites of our ideals. Art and entertainmentRead more at location 1281

Note: UN MONDO SENZA IDEALI SENZA TRASCENDENZA Edit

Art and entertainmentRead more at location 1285

Note: INTRATTENIMENTO Edit

Benedetto Croce pointed to a radical distinction, as he saw it, between art properly so-called, and the pseudo-art designed to entertain, arouse or amuse.Read more at location 1286

Note: LA DISTINZIONE DI CROCE Edit

When seeking entertainment, however, I am not interested in the cause but in the effect. Whatever has the right effect on me is right for me,Read more at location 1289

Note: CAUSA EFFETTO Edit

The point urged by Croce and Collingwood is exaggeratedRead more at location 1291

Note: ESAGERAZIONI CROCIANE Edit

Amusement is not opposed to aesthetic interest, since it is already a form of it.Read more at location 1293

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It is not surprising, therefore, if, from their exaggerated dismissal of entertainment art, Croce and Collingwood each derived aesthetic theories as implausible as any in the literature.Read more at location 1293

Note: CROCE E L IMPOSSIBILITÀ DELL ESTETICA Edit

The photographic image has to some extent deadened us to the contrast here.Read more at location 1296

Note: ARTE E FOTO Edit

Genuine art also entertains us;Read more at location 1300

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An exampleRead more at location 1302

Note: ESEMPIO Edit

There have been few directors as conscious as Ingmar Bergman, of the temptation posed by the camera, and the need to resist it.Read more at location 1304

Note: LA TENTAZIONE REALISTICA Edit

Bergman chose to make Wild Strawberries in black and white, even though colour had by then (1957) become the lingua franca.Read more at location 1308

Note: L IRREALISTICO BIANCO E NERO Edit

Wild Strawberries is one of many examples of true cinematic art, in which the techniques of the cinema serve a dramatic purpose,Read more at location 1322

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Wild Strawberries is one of many examples of true cinematic art,Read more at location 1322

Note: EFFETTO E SIGNIFICATO Edit

illustrates the distinction between aesthetic interest and mere effect: the first creating a distance that the second destroys.Read more at location 1324

Note: DISTANZA DRLL ARTE Edit

Fantasy and realityRead more at location 1327

Note: TITOLO Edit

StyleRead more at location 1356

Note: STILE Edit

their doing, not ours.Read more at location 1357

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ability to turn a shared repertoire in a personal direction, so that a single character is revealed in each of them. That is what we mean by style,Read more at location 1361

Note: CONTRADDISTONGUERSI Edit

Content and formRead more at location 1376

Note: FORMA E CONTENUTO Edit

Suppose you ask me what is the content of Van Gogh’s famous painting of the yellow chair.Read more at location 1381

Note: LA SEDIA DI VAN GOGH Edit

I might reply: it’s a chair, that’s all.Read more at location 1383

Note: FOTO? Edit

Wouldn’t a photograph of a chair do just as well?Read more at location 1384

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I am likely to argue that this painting is saying something special about this particular chair, and also about the world as seen through the image of this chair.Read more at location 1384

Note: QLCS DI SPECIALE? Edit

But couldn’t he have written that message on the bottom of the canvas? Why does he need a chair to communicate a thought like that? I am likely to respond that my words are only a gesture; that the real meaning of the painting is bound up with, inseparable from, the image—Read more at location 1387

Note: XCHÈ VG NN HA SCRITTO IL SIGNIFICATO? Edit

cannot be translated completely into another idiom.Read more at location 1390

Note: TRADURRE L ARTE Edit

We want to say that works of art are meaningful—they are not just interesting forms in which we take an unexplained delight. They are acts of communication, which present us with a meaning; and this meaning must be understood.Read more at location 1392

Note: IL SIGNIFICATO ESISTE MA... Edit

We listen to abstract music, like the quartets of Bartók and Schoenberg, and perhaps say that we do not understand them.Read more at location 1394

Note: LA MUSICA CHE NN CAPIAMO Edit

Some works have changed the way we see the world—Goethe’s Faust, for example, Beethoven’s late quartets, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Vergil’s Aeneid, Michelangelo’s Moses, the Psalms of David and the Book of Job.Read more at location 1397

Note: VISIONE DEL MONDO Edit

Yet, when it comes to saying, of any particular work of art, just what its content might be, we find ourselves very soon reduced to silence.Read more at location 1400

Note: OLISMO E VAGHEZZA Edit

Thus we arrive at what has become a critical commonplace, which is the thesis of the inseparability of form and content.Read more at location 1402

Note: INSEPARABILITÀ Edit

particular version of this thesis in the realm of literary criticism goes by the name of the ‘heresy of paraphrase’—an expression due to the critic Cleanth Brooks.Read more at location 1403

Note: ERESIA DELLA PARAFRASI Edit

The heresy to which Brooks referred is that of thinking that the meaning of a poem can be contained in a paraphrase;Read more at location 1404

Note: SIGNIFICATO E PARAFRASI Edit

Brooks is pointing to several distinct features of poetry. First, there is the fact that a line of poetry can express several thoughts simultaneously, whereas a paraphrase will at best lay them out in succession. For instance, the line ‘bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’,Read more at location 1407

Note: SIMULTANEITÀ Edit

Secondly, there is the fact that poetry is ‘polysemous’, developing its meaning on several levels—the levels of image, of statement, of metaphor, of allegory and so on.Read more at location 1413

Note: POLISEMIA Edit

A paraphrase would have to spell out the levels of meaning separately;Read more at location 1416

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Thirdly meaning is lost in any paraphrase. You could paraphrase the first line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy as ‘To live or to die: that’s the choice’; or ‘to exist or not to exist; there’s the problem’. But Shakespeare wanted the verb ‘to be’, with all its metaphysical resonance, as touching the very mystery of the universe:Read more at location 1417

Note: PERDITA Edit

It is not just the meaning and association of words that count towards their sense in poetry. The sound too is important—and not just sound: sound as organized by syntax, and shaped as language. So, finally, there is the sheer untranslateability of the semantic atmosphere in poetry.Read more at location 1422

Note: SUONO SINTASSI E SIGNIFICATO Edit

For the most part you can say much about the meaning of a poem, a painting—even a work of music. But what you say will not explain the particular intensity of meaningRead more at location 1429

Note: I LIMITI DI UNA SPIEGAZIONE Edit

Representation and expressionRead more at location 1432

Note: TITOLO Edit

The distinction goes back to Croce and Collingwood, though it corresponds to thoughts that have been around for far longer.Read more at location 1433

Note: CROCE Edit

Representation can be judged to be more or less realistic—in other words, more or less in conformity with the generality of the things and situations described. It admits of translation and paraphrase;Read more at location 1437

Note: REALISMO Edit

Mantegna’s and Grünewald’s Crucifixions both represent the crucifixion of JesusRead more at location 1439

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An accurate representation may also be meaningless as a work of art—Read more at location 1440

Note: RAPPRESENTAZIONE Edit

All those features caused Croce to dismiss representation as inessential to the aesthetic enterprise.Read more at location 1441

Note: LA CONDANNA DI CROCE Edit

Expression and emotionRead more at location 1448

Note: TITOLO Edit

According to Croce, therefore, the burden of artistic meaning lies not with representation but with expression.Read more at location 1448

Note: L OPZIONE DI CROCE Edit

works of art express emotion, and that this is of value to us because it acquaints us with the human condition, and arouses our sympathies for experiences that we do not otherwise undergo.Read more at location 1451

Note: EMOZIONE UMANITÀ SIMPATIA Edit

Even when artists refer to the emotion that is allegedly conveyed by their work, we may not believe that their description is the correct one.Read more at location 1454

Note: INTENTIONAL FALLACY Edit

Beethoven prefaced the slow movement of Op. 132 with the description ‘Hymn of thanksgiving from the convalescent to the Godhead in the Lydian mode’. Suppose you respond by saying ‘To me it is just a serene expression of contentment,Read more at location 1455

Note: ESEMPIO Edit

Why is Beethoven any better placed than you, to put words to the feeling conveyed by his music? Maybe you, as critic, are better able to describe the emotional content of a piece of music than the composer. There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot’s response to Helen Gardner’s book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.Read more at location 1458

Note: SIGNIFICATO CRITICI&ARTISTI Edit

attempts to describe the emotional content of works of art seem to fall short of their target. The feeling does not have an independent life: it is there in the notes,Read more at location 1461

Note: OBIEZIONE ALLA CRITICA Edit

Expression does not deal in concepts but in intuitions—particular experiences, that are conveyed by communicating their uniqueness. Two works of art can represent the same thing; but they cannot express the same thing—for a work expresses an intuition only by presenting its individual character, the character that requires just these words, or just these images, if it is to be put across.Read more at location 1468

Note: RISPOSTA ALL OBIEZIONE Edit

it presents us with the unconceptualized uniqueness of its subject-matter.Read more at location 1472

Note: SPECIFICO DELL ARTE Edit

to say that a work of art expresses an intuition is like saying that it is identical with itself.Read more at location 1476

Note: L ARTIFICIO DELLA TEORIA CROCIANA. RAPPRESENTAZIONE INTUITIVA Edit

We are back with the old form and content problemRead more at location 1477

Add a note

There have been many attempts in recent years to revisit and reanimate the distinction between representation and expression,Read more at location 1478

Note: TEORIE RECENTI SULL ESPRESSIONE Edit

We have witnessed semantic, semiotic, cognitive and similar theories,Read more at location 1480

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None of these theories, in my view, has advanced the subject very far.Read more at location 1482

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Musical meaningRead more at location 1483

Note: TITOLO Edit

Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.Read more at location 1485

Note: BELLEZZA&SIGNIFICATO Edit

Consider Samuel Barber’s solemn Adagio for Strings—surely one of the most expressive pieces in the instrumental repertoire. How do we understand its expressive power? It is not telling a storyRead more at location 1486

Note: ADAGIO Edit

Adagio for Strings—surelyRead more at location 1486

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there are not two qualities here, the beauty and the expression, but one quality.Read more at location 1489

Note: FUSIONE DELLE QUALITÀ Edit

what is the difference between the one who understands the expression, and the one who does not?Read more at location 1490

Note: IL PROBLEMA Edit

there are two uses of the term ‘expression’: a transitive use, which invites the question ‘expression of what?’, and an intransitive use, which forbids that question.Read more at location 1491

Note: ESPRESSIONE TRANSITIVA Edit

Espressivo in a musical score is always understood intransitively.Read more at location 1493

Note: INTRANSITIVITÀ Edit

The question: ‘how can I play this expressively if you don’t tell me what it means?’Read more at location 1493

Note: PROBLEMA Edit

Performers show their understanding of an expressive work of music not by identifying some state of mind which it is ‘about’, but by playing with understanding.Read more at location 1494

Note: CAPIRE. NN SI SA COSA Edit

They must fit themselves into the groove of the work. This process of ‘fitting’ is mirrored too in the audience,Read more at location 1495

Note: FITTING Edit

Hence although Croce’s theory of art as intuition is far too stringent, it is pointing to a puzzle about beauty in art. Why are we so often tempted to speak of expression in this intransitive way? And why is expression a part of beauty?Read more at location 1497

Note: IL PUZZLE DI CROCE Edit

Musical formalismRead more at location 1501

Note: FORMALISMO Edit

Hanslick’s essay On the Musically Beautiful of 1854 was to become a pivotal document in the dispute between the followers of Brahms, for whom the art of music was essentially architectural, consisting in the elaboration of tonal structures, and the followers of Wagner, who had defended the view that music is a dramatic art, giving form and coherence to our states of mind.Read more at location 1501

Note: HANSLICK BRHAMS WAGNER Edit

music is an abstract art, incapable of presenting definite thoughts. Hence the assertion that a piece of music is expressive of some emotion becomes empty: nothing can be said in answer to the question ‘expressive of what?’Read more at location 1505

Note: LA POSIZIONE FORMALISTA Edit

Hanslick argued instead that music is understood as ‘forms moved through sound’.Read more at location 1507

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emotional associations are no more than that—associations, which have no claim to be the meaning of what we hear.Read more at location 1508

Note: INSENSATEZZA DELLE ASSOCIAZIONI Edit

Musical understanding is not a matter of lapsing into a self-centred reverie, prompted by the music, perhaps, but in no way controlled by it. Understanding consists in appreciating the various movements contained in the musical surface,Read more at location 1509

Note: CAPIRE LA MUSICA X UN FORMALISTA Edit

The pleasure that this causes is not unlike the pleasure of pattern in architecture,Read more at location 1511

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Hanslick’s theory is not really distinguished from that of the romantics whom he attacks. They agree that music moves, but add that, granted that metaphor, why not help yourself to another—namely, that music moves as the heart moves, when it is moved by feeling? In other words, beauty in music is not just a matter of form: it involves an emotional content.Read more at location 1518

Note: LA METAFORA CON CUI NEGARE LE METAFORE Edit

Form and content in architectureRead more at location 1521

Note: TITOLO Edit

there is a tradition in architectural thinking going back to Alberti’s Ten Books of Architecture (De re aedificatoria, 1452) which sees architectural beauty (concinnitas) as the appropriate fitting of part to part. This parallels the formalist approach advocated by Hanslick and is just as incomplete and just as unsustainable in architectural criticism as in the discussion of music.Read more at location 1523

Note: ARCHITETTURA FORMALISTA Edit

Ruskin saw in the forms and aspect of this church the theatrical insincerity of the Counter-ReformationRead more at location 1530

Note: CRITICA ARCHITETTONICA DI RUSKIN A S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE Edit

Geoffrey Scott, in his great work of criticism, The Architecture of Humanism (1914), responded with what he took to be a purely formal account of the church’s beauty and perfection:Read more at location 1531

Note: LA RISPOSTA Edit

Scott says nothing—or nothing clear—about the content of the church, not mentioning its ostensible invocation of the Virgin queen of the sea,Read more at location 1539

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On the other hand, when we look at the detail of Scott’s description, we see that it is a sequence of metaphors and similes: ‘their heaped and rolling form (two metaphors) is like that of a heavy substance (simile) … the great statues and pedestals … seem to arrest the outward movement (simile) … the essential simplicity and dignity of the baroque (metaphors) …’. This purely ‘formal’ description, in other words, is logically on a par with the most adventurous attempt to describe the meaning of the church, and could easily be pushed in that direction.Read more at location 1541

Note: LE CONTINUE METAFORE DEL FORMALISTA Edit

To point to these analogies and symbolic connections is as legitimate in the criticism of architecture as it is in the expressionist criticism of music. Browning produced a celebrated instance of such expressionist criticism,Read more at location 1550

Note: IL CRITICO ESPRESSIONISTA Edit

It seems odd to make a radical distinction between form and content, when the attempt to describe either involves the same recourse to metaphor,Read more at location 1557

Note: LA DISTINZIONE IMPOSSIBILE Edit

Meaning and metaphorRead more at location 1561

Note: TITOLO Edit

It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion.Read more at location 1561

Note: LA METAFORA CON L UOMO Edit

If we are to understand the nature of artistic meaning, therefore, we must first understand the logic of figurative language. Figurative uses of language aim not to describe things but to connect them, and the connection is forged in the feeling of the perceiver.Read more at location 1563

Note: IL LINGUAGGIO FIGURATO: LA CONNESSIONE TRA DUEONDI. ASTRAZIONE Edit

The connection may be made in many ways: through metaphor, metonymy, simile, personification or a transferred name.Read more at location 1565

Note: CONNESSIONE Edit

The connection between music and emotion is not established by conventions or a ‘theory of musical meaning’. It is established in the experience of playing and hearing.Read more at location 1574

Note: MUSICA COME TERMINE DI UN ANALOGIA DA CONNETTERE Edit

We understand expressive music by fitting it to other elements in our experience, drawing connections with human life, ‘matching’ the musicRead more at location 1575

Note: MUSICA E VITA CONNESSE. L ASTRAZIONE Edit

Thus we praise the Barber Adagio for Strings for its noble solemnity. The metaphor is not arbitrary, since it makes a connection with the moral life which explains why we feel at home with the piece, and elevated by it.Read more at location 1576

Note: ADAGIO DI BARBER: NOBILE SOLENNITÀ Edit

If this is a true indication of what the piece means, then it must be anchored in the structure and argument of the music.Read more at location 1578

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This suggests a different model of expression from the one presented by Croce and his followers. The Crocean model is of an inarticulate inner state (an ‘intuition’) becoming articulate and conscious through its artistic expression. The rival model is of an artist fitting things together so as to create links which resonate in the audience’s feelings.Read more at location 1588

Note: DIFFERENZA CON CROCE:NN INTUIZIONE VS LINKS (CONNESSIONI)... TRA LA RABBIA DELL ARTISTA E LA MIA NN C È DIFFERENZA. MA TRA L OPERA ARTISTICA E LA MIA RABBIA C È UNA CONNESSIONE ANALOGICA. L ASTRAZIONE CHE HANNO IN COMUNE È IL SIGNIFICATO DELL OPERA Edit

The question what is being expressed ceases to be relevant. What matters is whether this belongs (emotionally speaking) with that.Read more at location 1591

Note: OPERA COME METAFORA INTRANSITIVA. BELONGING O FITTING Edit

This does not mean that dissonance and conflict have no part in the artistic enterprise: of course they do.Read more at location 1594

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The value of artRead more at location 1598

Note: TITOLO Edit

Although beauty and meaning are connected in art, some of the most meaningful works of recent times have been downright ugly and even offensiveRead more at location 1600

Note: L AVVENTO DELLA BRUTTEZZA Edit

think of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Gunther Grass’s Tin Drum, Picasso’s Guernica. To call such works beautiful is in a way to diminish and even to trivialize what they are trying to say.Read more at location 1601

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Some insight is provided by the connection made by Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, between art and play.Read more at location 1604

Note: SCHILLER Edit

In play, elevated by art to the level of free contemplation, reason and sense are reconciled, and we are granted a vision of human life in its wholeness.Read more at location 1610

Note: LA VITA INTERA Edit

In appreciating art we are playing; the artist too is playing in creating it.Read more at location 1611

Note: GIOCO Edit

this ludic attitude is fulfilled by beauty, and by the kind of orderliness which retains our interest and prompts us to search for the deeper significance of the sensory world.Read more at location 1612

Note: SIGNIFICATO PROFONDO Edit

This ‘blessed rage for order’Read more at location 1615

Note: APOFENIA Edit

order and meaning on human life, through the experience of something delightful, is the underlying motive of art in all its forms. Art answers the riddle of existence: it tells us why we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of fittingness.Read more at location 1616

Note: PERCHÈ? Edit

logic which connects the end of things with their beginning, as they are connected in Paradise Lost, in Phèdre and in Der Ring des Nibelungen.Read more at location 1618

Note: CONNETTERE Edit

Beauty and truthRead more at location 1621

Note: TITOLO Edit

Keats’s vision of the Grecian urn, with its message that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all | Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’,Read more at location 1622

Note: KEATS Edit

Our favourite works of art seem to guide us to the truth of the human conditionRead more at location 1624

Note: CONDIZIONE UMANA Edit

We know what it is to love and be rejected, and thereafter to wander in the world infected by a bleak passivity. This experience, in all its messiness and arbitrariness, is one that most of us must undergo. But when Schubert, in Die Winterreise, explores it in song, finding exquisite melodies to illuminate one after another the many secret corners of a desolated heart, we are granted an insight of another order.Read more at location 1626

Note: UN ESEMPIO Edit

Beauty reaches to the underlying truth of a human experience, by showing it under the aspect of necessity. I find this point difficult to express.Read more at location 1632

Note: NECESSITÀ Edit

under the aspect of necessity.Read more at location 1632

Add a note

To refer to a truth contained in a work of art is always to risk the corrosive effect of the question: what truth?Read more at location 1634

Note: COS È LA VERITÀ? VERITÀ E NECESSITÀ Edit

The insight that art provides is available only in the form in which it is presented: it resides in an immediate experience whose consoling power is that it removes the arbitrariness from the human condition—as the arbitrariness of suffering is overcome in tragedy, and the arbitrariness of rejection in Schubert’s song-cycle.Read more at location 1635

Note: ARBITRARIETÀ E CONDIZIONE UMANA. DARE SENSO Edit

we can make comparative judgements. And these help to flesh out the idea of a truth beyond the work, to which the work is pointing.Read more at location 1639

Note: GIUDIZI COMPARATIVI Edit

For example we can ask whether that which is captured by Schubert is captured also by Mahler in his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. And the answer is surely ‘no’:Read more at location 1640

Note: ESEMPIO Edit

Art and moralityRead more at location 1645

Note: TITOLO Edit

During the nineteenth century there arose the movement of ‘art for art’s sake’: l’art pour l’art. The words are those of Théophile Gautier, who believed that if art is to be valued for its own sakeRead more at location 1646

Note: ARTE X L ARTE Edit

autonomy of the aestheticRead more at location 1649

Add a note

It is certainly a failing in a work of art that it should be more concerned to convey a message than to delight its audience. Works of propaganda, such as the socialist realist sculptures of the Soviet period or (their equivalent in prose) Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, sacrifice aestheticRead more at location 1650

Note: LA VERITÀ DELL AUTONOMIA Edit

On the other hand, part of what we object to in such works is their untruthful quality.Read more at location 1653

Note: PROPAGANDA E PROP DEL FALSO? Edit

Art is not morally neutral, but has its own way of making and justifying moral claims.Read more at location 1666

Note: NN NEUTRALITÀ DELL ARTE Edit

By eliciting sympathy where the world withholds it an artist may, like Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, oppose the bonds of a too constrictive moral order.Read more at location 1667

Note: ES ANNA KARENINA Edit

Many of the aesthetic faults incurred by art are moral faults—sentimentality, insincerity, self-righteousness, moralizing itself.Read more at location 1669

Note: ERRORI ARTISTICI ED ERRORI ETICI Edit

6 Taste and OrderRead more at location 1672

Note: 6@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbour.Read more at location 1672

Note: CATTIVO GUSTO Edit

You like Bach, she likes U2; you like Leonardo, he likes Mucha; she likes Jane Austen, you like Danielle Steele. Each of you exists in his own enclosed aesthetic world,Read more at location 1674

Add a note

The common pursuitRead more at location 1676

Note: TITOLO Edit

If it is so offensive to look down on another’s taste, it is, as the democrat recognizes, because taste is intimately bound up with our personal life and moral identity.Read more at location 1677

Note: GUSTO IDENTITÀ E PERSONALITÀ Edit

This we discover as soon as we take into account the public impact of private tastes. Your neighbour fills her garden with kitsch mermaids and Disneyland gnomes, polluting the view from your window; she designs her house in a ludicrous Costa Brava style, in loud primary colours that utterly ruin the tranquil atmosphere of the street, and so on. Now her taste has ceased to be a private matterRead more at location 1680

Note: GLI GNOMI DEL VICINO Edit

Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community—of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile. That is one of the reasons why we have planning laws—which, in the great days of Western civilization, have been extremely strict,Read more at location 1689

Note: COMUNITÀ E BELLEZZA Edit

Think of clothes, interior décor, and bodily ornaments: here too we can be put on edge, excluded or included, made to feel inside or outside the implied community,Read more at location 1694

Add a note

Many of the clothes we wear have the character of uniforms, designed to express and confirm our inoffensive membershipRead more at location 1696

Note: VESTITI E COMUNITÀ Edit

We begin to see why concepts like decorum and propriety are integral to the sense of beauty: but they are concepts that range equally across the aesthetic and the moral spheres.Read more at location 1701

Note: DECORO E APPROPRIATEZZA Edit

However, there are also private arts like music and literature. Why are we so concerned that our children should learn to like the things that we regard as beautiful?Read more at location 1702

Note: ARTI PRIVATE... MA FINO AD UN CERTO PUNTO Edit

Why do we worry when children are drawn to literature that is, in our eyes, ugly, stupefying, sentimental or obscene?Read more at location 1703

Note: LA QUESTIONE EDUCATIVA Edit

Plato believed that the various modes of music are connected with specific moral characteristicsRead more at location 1704

Note: PLATO Edit

Subjectivity and reasonsRead more at location 1708

Note: TITOLO Edit

You like Brahms, say, and I detest him. So you invite me to listen to your favourite pieces, and after a while they ‘work on me’. Maybe I am influenced by my friendship for you, and make a special effort on your behalf.Read more at location 1710

Note: PERCHÈ CERTE OPERE SI AFFERMANO? L INFLUSSO DEI TERZI Edit

A change of taste is not a ‘change of mind’, in the way that a change of belief or even of moral posture is a change of mind.Read more at location 1714

Note: CAMBIO DI GUSTO Edit

justify the child’s graduation from burgers to broccoli. Greens are far more healthy, maybe part of a superior lifestyle, maybe even a spiritual improvement, as the Vegans argue.Read more at location 1716

Note: DALLE PATATINE AI BROCCOLI Edit

As our discussion proceeds, unfolding the two rival interpretations of the painting, as pure impression and as social comment, the aspect of the picture will perhaps shift from one to the other—so that the painting seems to contain a lesson, reminding us that we can to some extent choose how the new world of industry should be seen.Read more at location 1738

Note: LA DIALETTICA DELL OPERA. PRENDERE CAMPO Edit

We can find simpler, and logically more transparent, cases of this kind of change in aspect—like the celebrated duck-rabbit discussed by Wittgenstein.Read more at location 1742

Note: ANATRA/CONIGLIO Edit

On the contrary, in every perspective picture there are choices to make, concerning what size to attribute to which figure, and what distance to see between the various grounds.Read more at location 1745

Note: SCEGLIERE Edit

The poetry is not a means to its meaning, as though a translation would do just as well. I want you to experience the poem differently, and my critical argument is aimed precisely at a change in your perception.Read more at location 1753

Note: ACRITICA: PROPORRE UN ESPERIENZA Edit

In every case we recognize that there is such a thing as reasoning, which has a changed perception as its goal.Read more at location 1755

Note: RAGIONE ALL OPERA Edit

is the Grand Canyon breathtaking or corny? Is Bambi moving or kitsch? Is Madame Bovary tragic or cruel? Is The Magic Flute childish or sublime? These are real questions, and hotly disputed too. But to argue them is to present an experience and to present it as appropriate or right.Read more at location 1758

Note: L ESPERIENZA GIUSTA Edit

The search for objectivityRead more at location 1761

Note: OGGETTIVITÀ DI GIUDIZIO Edit

there is a kind of reasoning that has aesthetic judgement as its goal, and that this judgement is bound up with the experience of the one who makes it.Read more at location 1762

Note: RIASSUNTO DERLLA TESI Edit

You might still question whether this kind of reasoning is objective,Read more at location 1763

Add a note

Indeed, there are important considerations to the contrary. First, taste is rooted in a broader cultural context,Read more at location 1764

Note: RELATIVISMO CULTURALE Edit

significant differences between the forms of human life, and the satisfactions that people take in them.Read more at location 1766

Add a note

Consider the ragas of Indian classical music: these belong to a longstanding tradition of listening and performance, and this tradition is dependent on the discipline associated with religious rituals and a devout way of life.Read more at location 1767

Note: RAGA E RELIGIONE Edit

Secondly, as noted in Chapter 1, there is no deductive relation between premises and conclusion when the conclusion is a judgement of taste.Read more at location 1771

Note: NIENTE LOGICA Edit

Finally, we must recognize that any attempt to lay down objective standards threatens the very enterprise that it purports to judge.Read more at location 1773

Note: STERILITÀ DEGLI STANDARD Edit

Rules and precepts are there to be transcended,Read more at location 1774

Add a note

How might we respond to such arguments? First, it is important to recognize that cultural variation does not imply the absence of cross-cultural universals.Read more at location 1777

Note: UNIVERSALI Edit

Symmetry and order; proportion; closure; convention; harmony, and also novelty and excitement: all these seem to have a permanent hold on the human psyche.Read more at location 1779

Add a note

The early medievals regarded the fourth as harmonious, the third as dissonant: for us, if anything, it is the other way round.Read more at location 1781

Note: GRECI E MEDIOEVO Edit

Harmonia for the Greeks consisted in the relation between successive sounds in a melody, and not the consonance of simultaneous notes.Read more at location 1782

Add a note

Objectivity and universalityRead more at location 1784

Note: TITOLO Edit

in the matter of aesthetic judgement, objectivity and universality come apart.Read more at location 1785

Note: DISTINGUERE Edit

In science and morality, the search for objectivity is the search for universally valid results—results that must be accepted by every rational being. In the judgement of beauty the search for objectivity is for valid and heightened forms of human experience—Read more at location 1785

Note: OGGETTIVITÀ IN SCIENZA E IN ESTETICA Edit

forms in which human life can flower according to its inner needRead more at location 1787

Add a note

Criticism is not aiming to show that you must like Hamlet, for example: it is aiming to expose the vision of human life which the play contains, and the forms of belonging which it endorses, and to persuade you of their value.Read more at location 1788

Note: RUOLO DELLA CRITICA Edit

It is not claiming that this vision of human life is universally available.Read more at location 1790

Note: LA NN UNIVERSALITÀ DELL OGGETTIVITÀ ARTISTICA Edit

This does not mean that no cross-cultural comparisons can be made: it is certainly possible to compare a play like Hamlet with a puppet play by Chikamatsu,Read more at location 1791

Note: COMPARAZIONE Edit

Rules and originalityRead more at location 1797

Note: TITOLO Edit

There may be rules of taste, but they do not guarantee beauty, and the beauty of a work of art may reside precisely in the act of transgressing them.Read more at location 1798

Note: REGOLE DEL BELLO Edit

Bach’s Forty-Eight illustrate all the rules of fugal composition: but they do so by obeying them creatively, by showing how they can be used as a platform from which to rise to a higher realm of freedom.Read more at location 1799

Note: BACH Edit

Merely obeying them would be a recipe for dullness,Read more at location 1800

Add a note

Eighteenth-century thinkers, who wished to take natural beauty as their paradigm of the object of taste, were therefore quick to adopt Burke’s contrast between the sublime and the beautiful.Read more at location 1808

Note: REGOLE DEL 700 Edit

So too in art, we might usefully distinguish those works that please us on account of the order, harmony, and rule-governed perfection which they display, like the fugues of Bach, the Holy Virgins of Bellini, or the lyrics of Verlaine, and those which, on the contrary, please us by challenging and disturbing our routines,Read more at location 1809

Note: ORDINE E TRASGRESSIONE Edit

like King Lear or Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.Read more at location 1812

Add a note

But as soon as we make this distinction we realize that, even in the most orderly and rule-governed work, there is no way of fixing a ‘standard of taste’ by appeal to the rules. It is not the rules, but the use of them, that appeals in a Bach fugue or a Bellini Virgin.Read more at location 1813

Note: NN LA REGOLA MA IL SUO USO CREATIVO Edit

pointed out that obedience to the rules is neither necessary nor sufficient for beauty.Read more at location 1815

Add a note

The standard of tasteRead more at location 1817

Note: TITOLO Edit

Hume tried to shift the focus of the discussion, arguing roughly as follows: taste is a form of preference, and this preference is the premise, not the conclusion of the judgement of beauty.Read more at location 1819

Note: HUME: GUSTO COME PREMESSA Edit

To fix the standard, therefore, we must discover the reliable judge, the one whose taste and discriminations are the best guideRead more at location 1820

Note: CERCA LA GUIDA Edit

There is a potential circle here: beauty is what the reliable critic discerns, and the reliable critic is the one who discerns beauty.Read more at location 1821

Note: CIRCOLARITÀ Edit

The standard, if it exists, does not lie in the qualities of the object but in the sentiments of the judge. So, Hume suggests, let us get away from the fruitless discussion of beauty, and simply concentrate on the qualities we admire,Read more at location 1824

Note: GUARDA ALLA QUALITÀ UMANA Edit

However, this opens us to another kind of scepticism: why should it be those qualities that we admire?Read more at location 1826

Note: QUALI QUALITÀ? Edit

it seemed natural, in the Scotland of Hume’s day, to admire delicacy and discernment, it seems less natural today, when facetiousness and ignorance, so unfairly left out by the austere sages of the Enlightenment, are demanding, and receiving, their share of attention.Read more at location 1827

Add a note

For Hume’s argument suggests that the judgement of taste reflects the character of the one who makes it, and character matters. The characteristics of the good critic, as Hume envisaged them, point to virtues which, in Hume’s thinking, are vital to the good conduct of life, and not just to the discrimination of aestheticRead more at location 1829

Note: IL CARATTRE Edit

In the last analysis there is as much objectivity in our judgements of beauty as there is in our judgements of virtue and vice.Read more at location 1832

Note: OGGETTIVITÀ HUMEANA Edit

Beauty is therefore as firmly rooted in the scheme of things as goodness.Read more at location 1833

Note: IL LEGAME CON LA VIRTÙ Edit

Such, at least, is my belief,Read more at location 1834

Add a note

7 Art and ErōsRead more at location 1836

Note: 7@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

lady drawsRead more at location 1849

Add a note

8 The Flight from BeautyRead more at location 2027

Note: 8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us. 9Read more at location 2352

Note: cos è la bellezza? non una proprietà ben definita ma un' esprienza di ricerca. di ricerca di significato, in particolare. un esperienza dove la ragione gioca un ruolo decisivo. il significato da ricercare ha una natura spirituale Edit

The reader will have noticed that I have not said what beauty is. I have implicitly rejected the neo-Platonist view of beauty,Read more at location 2353

Add a note

I have not discussed the tradition of thinking, which again goes back to Plotinus and the neo-Platonists, which sees beauty as a kind of organic wholeness, as in the definition given by Alberti:Read more at location 2356

Add a note

I have likewise said nothing about the view, popularized in the eighteenth century by Francis Hutcheson, that beauty ‘consists in’ unity in variety.Read more at location 2359

Add a note

Any attempt to prove the point as a generalization inevitably makes the terms ‘unity’ and ‘variety’ so vague as to cover everything from my garden (a mess, but bounded) to the most hideous communicationsRead more at location 2363

Add a note

In my view all such definitions start from the wrong end of the subject, which is not about ‘things in the world’ but about a particular experience of them, and about the pursuit of meaningRead more at location 2367

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everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded.Read more at location 2370

Add a note

The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it

L'imperialismo culturale di Hollywood

Molti lo temono, molti lo auspicano, tutti lo constatano: è l’imperialismo di Hollywood nel mondo del cinema.

Chi studia la globalizzazione delle culture fa giocoforza del cinema un caso privilegiato, i costi dell’opera e le poderose economie di scala mettono la settima arte sempre a rischio di monopolio…

… In no other cultural area is America’s export prowess so strong. Movies are very expensive to make, and in a given year there are far fewer films released than books, CDs, or paintings. These conditions appear to favor dominant producers at the expense of niche markets…

Ma anche a rischio “concentrazione”…

… Moviemaking also is prone to geographic clustering. Many cultural innovations and breakthroughs are spatially concentrated. If a good Italian Renaissance painter was not born in Florence, Venice, or Rome, he usually found it worthwhile to move to one of those locales…

Ecco allora che si crea un epicentro da cui si detta legge al mondo (del cinema): Hollywood. Un caso di “imperialismo culturale” che vede gli americani nelle vesti dei padroni e i poveri europei in quella degli sfruttati…

… European movies, in particular, have failed to penetrate global markets and also have lost ground at home…

Vediamo meglio quali sono stati i mali che hanno ucciso – o azzoppato – il cinema europeo. Bè, sono tanti…

… television, excess subsidies, demographics, language, the size of the American market, and Hollywood’s more entrepreneurial environment….

Gli USA, poi, hanno un vantaggio evidente: il vasto mercato interno…

… The United States has at least one natural advantage in movie-making—it has the largest single home-market for cinema in dollar terms (although total attendance is higher in India)….

Ma non si tratta di un vantaggio decisivo, in fondo l’hanno sempre avuto, mentre le fette di mercato europee sono crollate solo in epoca relativamente recente…

… The United States, for instance, has been a large country for a long time, but only recently have European movies held such a low share of their home markets. In the mid-1960s, American films accounted for 35 percent of box office revenues in continental Europe; today the figure ranges between 80 to 90 percent…

Poi, a Hollywood ci si occupa solo di un certo tipo di cinema, non puo’ essere la causa di tutti i mali…

… Furthermore, only certain kinds of cinema cluster in Hollywood. In a typical year the Western European nations make more movies than America does. In numeric terms most of the world’s movies come from Asia, not from the United States… The Hollywood advantage is concentrated in one very particular kind of moviemaking: films that are entertaining, highly visible, and have broad global appeal…

Gli europei investono poco nei loro film poiché esportano poco. Ma perché, al contrario, Hollywood esporta tanto, al punto che la Francia ha deciso politiche protezionistiche?…

… As recently as 1985, French movies outgrossed the Hollywood product in their home market. Since that time, Hollywood’s ability to capture so much of French film revenue (often up to 80 percent) has come largely because French revenues have declined, not because Hollywood revenues have risen so much…

Gli anni ‘70 hanno segnato un punto di svolta…

… The turning point in this dynamic appears to have started in the 1970s. Before the 1970s, most national European cinemas still experienced a significant degree of export success, whatever problems the industry as a whole had…

Probabilmente, nella crisi del cinema europeo, la televisione ha giocato un ruolo preminente rispetto alla produzione a stelle e strisce. La cosa sè avvalorata dal timing…

… In Germany, 800 million movie tickets were bought in 1956, but only 180 million were bought in 1962. At the same time, the number of television sets rose from 700,000 to 7.2 million. In the U.K., cinematic attendance fell from 292 million in 1967 to 73 million in 1986. In France, movie attendance dropped from 450 million in 1956 to 122 million in 1988…

La crisi “da televisione” avrebbe fatto il vuoto e Hollywood ci si sarebbe infilata.

Hollywood sarebbe diventata più forte proprio quando l’Europa era più vulnerabile.

La crisi da TV aveva colto gli USA nel decennio precedente, ma Hollywood reagì alla grande rintuzzando l’attacco. Come?…

… Hollywood responded actively to this challenge. Starting as early as the 1950s, American moviemakers responded to television by making high-stakes, risky investments in marketing, glamour, and special effects. In the 1960s American directors found greater latitude to experiment with sex and violence; this trend was formalized with the abandonment of the Hays Code in 1966. By the 1970s, Hollywood movies had become significantly more exciting to mass audiences than they had been a decade before. Jaws and Star Wars were emblematic of this new era…

Anche la demografia contribuì ad affossare l’Europa. I vecchi non amano uscire la sera, nemmeno per andare al cine…

… In most countries, individuals older than thirty-five no longer go to movies in significant numbers, preferring instead to watch television. Moviegoing is the province of the young. Most European countries suffer twice here. First, they have older populations than does the United States. Second, the traditional “art house” styles of European film are better suited to old audiences than to young ones…

D’altronde, il modello di business era diverso: gli USA puntarono sul noleggio delle cassette, l’Europa sui diritti TV.  Ora, fare film per la TV rende il prodotto meno esportabile. La qualità degli effetti, per esempio, è scarsa visto che la TV non li valorizza…

… Glitzy special effects are rare. We find these same features in made-for-TV films in the United States. A few of these films are excellent (such as Steven Spielberg’s early Duel), but most are undistinguished and boring, despite the immense talent in Hollywood… The home video market, more prominent in the United States, is more competitive and demanding than television, and imposes greater discipline on the moviemaker…

Collegato al ruolo della TV è quello dei sussidi.

Le TV stesse, a cui spesso i cineasti vendono i loro film, sono possedute da governi, ovvero da soggetti poco inclini alle leggi del mercato. Clienti del genere sono più interessati a vincoli sui contenuti che a catturare pubblico…

… Typically the stations face domestic-content restrictions, must spend a certain percentage of revenue on domestic films, must operate a film production subsidiary, or they willfully overpay for films for political reasons. The end result is overpayment for broadcast rights—the most important subsidy that many European moviemakers receive. Audience levels are typically no more than one or two million at the television level, even in the larger countries such as France—too small to justify the sums paid to moviemakers for television rights on economic grounds….

Ma ci sono molte altre forme di sussidio, tutte parimenti perniciose…

… European films receive many other forms of subsidy. In France, for instance, direct subsidies are available from the national government, regional governments, European subsidy bodies (such as Eur-images) and coproduction subsidies through other national governments. Often French producers need only put up 15 percent of the budget of their films to receive subsidies. French producers also receive “Sofica” tax shelters (estimated worth of more than 5 percent of total budgets), automatic box office aid from the government (estimated at 7.7 percent of total budget), a discretionary subsidy called avance sur recettes, which takes the form of an interest-free loan (estimated at over 5 percent of total budget), and subsidies for the promotion of French films abroad…

Possiamo concludere che in Europa il 70% dei costi di un film viene sussidiato. Come si puo’ pretendere che un settore del genere esporti? Molti film vengono fatti per un pubblico ristretto, a volte ristretto ai colleghi del cineasta…

… Subsidies encourage producers to serve domestic demand and the wishes of politicians and cinematic bureaucrats, rather than produce movies for international export. Many films will be made, even when they have little chance of turning a profit in stand-alone terms…

La stessa formazione degli attori rispecchia questo stato di cose…

… The training of cinematic talent in the United States and Europe reflects these differences. American film schools are like business schools in many regards. European film schools have become more like humanities programs, emphasizing semiotics, critical theory, and contemporary left-wing philosophies…

Per far carriera in Europa le connessioni politiche contano almeno quanto il talento…

… The European directors that survive tend to be established and to have longstanding political connections…

Non è così ovunque: il cinema di Hong Kong è gestito su basi commerciali, ha avuto molto successo e oggi puo’ permettersi anche produzioni con un contenuto artistico elevato…

… The Hong Kong film industry has experienced export success from the 1970s onward, mostly throughout Southeast Asia. At its peak it released more films per year than any Western country, and as an exporter it was second only to the United States. Furthermore, Hong Kong cinema arose in a market that was dominated by Hollywood up through the late 1960s… At first Hong Kong movies focused on the martial arts, but they subsequently branched out to include police movies, romance, comedy, horror, and ghost stories, among other genres. The best of these movies, such as John Woo’s The Killer, or Hardboiled, are acclaimed as high art… David Bordwell, in his recent Planet Hong Kong, claimed, “Since the 1970s it has been arguably the world’s most energetic, imaginative popular cinema.” Hong Kong movies are made on a commercial basis and have received no government assistance…

Anche quello indiano…

… By numerous measures, such as attendance or number of films released, the Indian movie industry is the largest and the most successful in the world. Indian movies are frequently criticized for their generic nature or sappy plots, but in terms of music, cinematography, and use of color, they are often quite beautiful and even pathbreaking compared to Western productions…

Difficile perorare la tesi dell’ “imperialismo culturale americano” quando solo l’ Europa vive un periodo di stanca…

… But by most common critical standards, cinematic creativity has risen in Taiwan, China, Iran, South Korea, the Philippines, Latin America, and many parts of Africa, among other locales. Even within Europe, the creative decline is restricted to a few of the larger nations, such as France and Italy. Danish cinema is more influential and more successful today than in times past, and arguably the same is true for Spanish cinema as well. Mexican and Argentinean film-makers are enjoying a resurgence…

***

Facciamo un po’ di storia e vediamo come il passaggio dal muto al sonoro cambiò le carte in tavola.

I costi fissi aumentarono e a soffrirne furono soprattutto le piccole produzioni…

… At the time of the transition, equipping the theaters with sound and making movies with sound were costly. To recoup these costs, theaters sought out high-quality, high-expenditure productions for large audiences. The small, cheap, quick film became less profitable, given the suddenly higher fixed costs of production and presentation… More generally, the higher the fixed costs of production, the greater the importance of drawing a large audience and the greater the importance of demand forecasting and marketing. Today costly special effects and expensive celebrity stars drive the push for blockbusters in similar fashion, and favor Hollywood production as well…

Inoltre, l’inglese si impose come lingua franca, il che rendeva necessarie traduzioni, doppiaggi e sottotitoli. Il dominio europeo all’epoca del muto cominciò a sfumare, e così le sue esportazioni…

… The talkies, by introducing issues of translation, boosted the dominant world language of English and thus benefited Hollywood… During the silent era, in contrast, European films enjoyed an even footing in the export market, as language was not an issue… Dubbed or subtitled movies have a difficult time in the United States to this day, whereas most other audiences accept them with few complaints. In Germany, the individuals who dub the German-language voices of prominent American actors and actresses can become celebrities in their own right, if their manner of speech is sufficiently memorable…

Non a caso in questo periodo fiorì il cinema inglese…

… The move to sound, and the rise of English as an export standard, provided a strong boost to the movie exports of Great Britain. While the U.K… James Bond movies… David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over River Kwai…

L’omogeneizzazione del linguaggio non è una caratteristica occidentale. Anche il mondo arabo ha mille dialetti, ma ad imporsi fu l’egiziano. Non parliamo poi della miriade di linguaggi parlati in India, si impose l’ hindi di Bombay…

… In essence, talkies made it easier for non-Hollywood producers to capture part of their home markets, but made it harder for them to export abroad…

Sta di fatto che l’esaltazione del linguaggio portò ad una certa localizzazione del prodotto: certe sfumature della lingua sono percepibili solo ai locali. In questa fase l’Europa non esporta ma consuma molti suoi prodotti.

Prendiamo il caso della Francia…

… French film production doubled between 1928 to 1938, and French movies commanded over half of their domestic market throughout the 1930s… In comparison, in 1925, at the height of the silent era, American exports accounted for 70 percent of the French market…

Un’ altra novità del sonoro fu l’introduzione della colonna sonora.

Anche qui: il pubblico ama la musica della sua terra. Per esempio, all’epoca del muto gli USA andavano forte in India, poi il prodotto locale si impose.

Facciamo l’esempio del cinema argentino…

… Music provided a similar protective role in Argentina, where hundreds of musical comedies were made in the early years of sound. The Argentinean Carlos Gardel, more of a tango singer than an actor, became the hottest Latin cinematic star of this era…

Ma perché gran parte del cinema si concentrò successivamente su Hollywood?

Facciamo un’analogia che fa comprendere meglio il fenomeno…

… There is more trade and mobility across the United States of America than across the disparate countries of Western Europe. This trade causes the economic profiles of the American states to diverge. In economic terms, the countries of Western Europe are more likely to resemble each other than are the American states. Most of the American states have no steel industry, no automobile industry, and no wheat industry…

Laddove la mobilità e il commercio sono facili, le concentrazioni si intensificano. In era di globalizzazione è normale che emergano centri come Hollywood.

Così come la concentrazione di noccioline si concentra in Georgia, la produzione di film si concentra ad Hollywood. Anche la Silicon Valley rappresenta un fenomeno simile.

… clustering eases the finding, lining up, and evaluating of the movie’s critical assets, such as stars, directors, and screenplays. These tasks are still done in Hollywood rather than in Vancouver or Sydney, regardless of where the movie is filmed…

Si noti che la realizzazione fisica dei film resta decentrata. Ad Hollywood si concentrano altre funzioni, soprattutto la valutazione sulla commerciabilità di un progetto…

… In Hollywood, studios scrutinize projects intensely and refuse to finance projects that do not have a good chance of commercial success… Hollywood is a cluster, in part, for the same reasons that New York and London are clustered banking centers. In both cases talents for large-scale project evaluation gravitate towards a single geographic area….When European directors want to make popular movies, they now go to Hollywood, as we have seen with Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Jean-Jacques Annaud, among many others…

Eventi esterni possono far slittare la concentrazione da un luogo all’altro. Nel caso del cinema fu la I guerra mondiale a traslare il fulcro da Parigi a Hollywood.

Ma concentrazione non significa monopolio. I distributori, per esempio, non vedono una prevalenza di americani…

… Yet all the primary distributors in Europe are owned by European media groups and regulated by European governments. When the Cineplex Odeon movie theater chain in the United States was Canadian-owned, and for a while jointly Canadian- and British-owned, it made little difference on the screen…

Altri accusano Hollywood di dumping: si guadagna sul mercato locale per invadere poi le altre nazioni con il proprio prodotto sotto-costo.

L’accusa non sta in piedi poiché una politica del genere potrebbe giustificare i bassi prezzi del noleggio, ma il fatto che laddove si proiettano film americani i cinema siano pieni, significa che piacciono… Qui non ci sono politiche di prezzo: chi va a vedere un film hollywoodiano non paga meno, anzi…

… If the critics are correct that Hollywood’s fundamental advantage is on the cost side for film rentals, we should observe relatively empty theaters for American films in Europe…

Insomma, c’è una reale rispondenza al gusto dei consumatori, non una diffusione basata su trucchi commerciali.

Lo stesso, poi, dovrebbe valere per altri media, come mai non è così?…

… Similar points apply to many media industries, such as when Canadians claim that America dump television shows or magazines at very low cost, since the producers are already making a profit in the U.S. market. But again, we typically do not observe American products preferred for their cheapness, we observe them preferred for their superiority in entertaining the audience…

Se a volte i prezzi fatti all’Europa sono bassi questo è perché molte TV europee sono concentrate nelle mani dei governi che, in condizioni di monopsonio, strappano prezzi bassi. E’ il monopsonio dei governi, non il monopolio di H. ad abbassare certe tariffe…

… Hollywood TV programs or movie rights have been sold cheaply in Europe, it is because European TV stations have held a strong bargaining position (a “monopsony,” in economic language)…. Without monopsony, the price of movie rights would be bid up to reflect the potential popularity of the movie…

Da notare che gli USA hanno molti più problemi ad esportare la loro televisione, nonostante che la produzione televisiva sia ingente…

… Note that America has had much less success in exporting its television programs than its movies, despite having the largest domestic television market in the world… Dallas was a failure in Brazil and Japan….

Come mai con la TV il dumping dovrebbe miracolosamente sparire? Forse non è il fattore essenziale per spiegare certi fenomeni.

C’è chi accusa Hollywood di esportare la cultura americana, e c’è poi chi l’accusa di creare una cultura artificiale e omologata. Due accuse in contraddizione tra loro…

… Some are unhappy with the global spread of the American ethos of commercialism and individualism. Other complaints focus on the strong global-market position of a relatively universal cultural product, rather than local products based on national or particularist inspirations…

Il fatto è che H. è cosmopolita, non sembra molto interessata alla cultura americana…

… Many of the leading Hollywood directors are non-Americans by birth, including Ridley Scott (British) and James Cameron (Canadian), who were among the hottest Hollywood directors circa 2001. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlie Chaplin, and Jim Carrey have been among the leading non-American U.S. stars. Most of the major studios are now foreign owned. A typical production will have Sony, a Japanese company…

I film di grande successo sono anche generici. Sono film di azione, evitano i dialoghi sottili. Si ricercano delle formule universali in grado di penetrare tutte le culture. Anche i film non americani di grande successo ci appaiono così…

… Non-American movies, when they pursue foreign markets, must strive for universality as well. The Jackie Chan Hong Kong movie Rumble in the Bronx was marketed in the United States with success… The most successful Canadian cultural export is the Harlequin romance novel… The Harlequin romance does not reflect a specifically Canadian perspective, whatever that designation might mean, but rather targets a broad circle of female readers…

I cosiddetti valori americani sono l’eroismo, l’individualismo e la romantica realizzazione di sé. Non sono poi così “americani” come si pensa. Il loro adattamento è abbastanza facile.

Un parallelo potrebbe essere fatto con il cibo che gli americani esportano (es. McDonald)…

… Consider food markets. Many Third World citizens like to eat at McDonald’s, not just because the food tastes good to them, but also because McDonald’s is a visible symbol of the West and the United States. When they walk through the doors of a McDonald’s, they are entering a different world. The McDonald’s corporation, knowing this, designs its Third World interiors to reflect the glamour of Western commerce, much as a shopping mall would. McDonald’s shapes its product to meet global demands, but builds on the American roots of the core concept…

Il prodotto finale è qualcosa di sintetico, non “americano doc”…

… American cinema, like American cuisine, has been a synthetic, polyglot product from the beginning. Hollywood was developed largely by foreigners—Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—and was geared towards entertaining American urban audiences, which were drawn from around the world… Hollywood’s global-market position is a Faustian bargain. Achieving global dominance requires a sacrifice of a culture’s initial perspective to the demands of world consumers. American culture is being exported, but for the most part it is not Amish quilts and Herman Melville…

Quando i riferimenti alla cultura americana sono più espliciti, il mercato internazionale risponde meno…

… Jurassic Park, a movie about dinosaurs, was a huge hit abroad, but Forrest Gump, which makes constant reference to American history and national culture, made most of its money at home…

***

Il commercio non spinge solo all’omologazione ma anche alla diversità, vuole prodotti sempre differenti in grado di saturare le nicchie.

Prendiamo i film a micro-budget di cui l’Europa va fiera: ebbene, gli Stati Uniti ne producono di più…

… “Microbudget” films are far more common in the United States than in Europe. A microbudget film is one made by a previously amateur director on a minuscule budget, typically less than $100,000. Among the best-known microfilms are Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, and The Blair Witch Project…

Un ruolo lo giocano anche le infrastrutture…

… A healthy commercial base is needed to support an infrastructure of theaters, production companies, film schools, and marketing institutions. Independent or innovative filmmakers benefit from this infrastructure just as the major studios do…

Cio’ che vende sostiene  indirettamente anche cio’ che vende meno.

Ma la fucina dei “ribelli” fa gola anche ai “venditori”…

… The major studios typically seek to buy out and “corrupt” the independent filmmakers, and in this sense the two cinematic worlds are always at war with each other. But in a larger sense they are complements… In addition to the Coen brothers and Spike Lee, Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, David Lynch, Sam Raimi, John Sayles, and Jim Jarmusch all first made their names with micro-budget films. The directors of The Blair Witch Project were courted for a Hollywood sequel, which earned them millions, despite its low quality…

Anche tra H. e la qualità europea c’è una reciproca attrazione…

… Notable European directors such as Godard, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Besson, and Pasolini found their start with microbudget films, but the overall commercial weakness of European cinema is making those kinds of opportunities harder to find and exploit… European movie-makers pursue different markets and produce different kinds of creativity…

E quando un film europeo ha molto successo, guarda caso, assomiglia al tipico film di H., evidentemente certe formule, molto semplicemente, piacciono…

… The non-Hollywood productions that have success abroad, such as Four Weddings and a Funeral or Like Water for Chocolate, often have many of the flaws that plague mainstream Hollywood releases: saccharine, cliched characters or an unrealistically happy ending. European pictures from the silent era, which had a greater chance of export success, were more like the American movies… The Hong Kong movie Dr. Lamb was a success in the Hong Kong market of the 1990s. The movie was explicitly patterned after Silence of the Lambs, a U.S. and global hit in 1992…

***

E nel futuro, cosa ci aspetta?

Oggi il cinema europeo sembra aver capito la lezione: meno sussidi e maggiore apertura al pubblico. I segni sono incoraggianti…

… In the short run, laissez-faire would likely lead to a greater Hollywood presence in European cinema. But in the long run, European moviemakers would be induced to make a more commercially appealing product, and not necessarily at the expense of artistic quality…

Competere con H è possibile visti anche i compensi stratosferici che H paga alle sue star, in questo senso è svantaggiata…

… Hollywood holds a potentially vulnerable market position, given how much it spends on celebrity salaries and marketing…

L’esempio italiano del dopo guerra spiega bene come produzioni relativamente piccole possano avere un successo internazionale…

… In 1973, Hollywood held only 23 percent of the Italian market, and large numbers of high-quality Italian movies were commercially viable. Hollywood had dominated the Italian market after the Second World War, but Italian movie-makers fought back, in part using the techniques they learned from studying Hollywood releases… These years show that the strong presence of Hollywood in world markets does not mean an end to European moviemaking…

La qualità non è inarrivabile in assenza di sussidi, anzi…

… Truffaut, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, and others were fundamentally money-making endeavors, aimed at the competitive marketplace, despite the involvement of government at various levels…

L’epoca d’oro del cinema francese si realizzò in assenza di sussidi…

… Going back earlier, the 1930s in particular were a “golden age” for French cinema; the best-known French films of this era include L’Atalante (Jean Vigo), Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné), La Chienne, The Grand Illusion, and The Rules of the Game (all by Jean Renoir)….

Ironia della sorte, in quel periodo gli americani accusavano i francesi di “imperialismo culturale” :-) …

… American filmmakers charged the French with cultural imperialism and asked Washington for trade protection. It was commonly charged that European movies encouraged lax morals and corrupted American culture. The French responded by noting the openness of their cinematic markets and asking America to compete on equal terms…

Ma il cinema contemporaneo oggi fiorisce soprattutto in Asia: si affida al mercato internazionale e mescola molto bene creatività e commercialità. Sempre la stessa ricetta.