The Time of the Crime Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film [Hardcover]

The Time of the Crimeinterrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the sixties and seventies: Antonioni'sBlow-UpandThe Passenger, Bertolucci'sThe Spider's Stratagem, Cavani'sThe Night Porter, and Pasolini'sOedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scenethe 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 futurepresenting an uncertain temporality that 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 that seems to count the most in these films is the one that is yet to occurthe 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.

The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Filmis a critical tour de force: extraordinarily sharply observed, daring and rewarding in its methodological approach, and beautifully written. Torlasco has a gift for elucidating the visual and temporal emergence in film of the most abstract philosophical categories, which makes her book appealing on a pedagogical level as well. The Time of the Crimeexplores the undoing of the detective genre in the Italian art cinema of the sixties and seventies, using an approach that combines psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and aesthetics to redefine the task of film criticism.Domietta Torlasco is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. ...Torlasco reveals an impressive knowledge of film and theory anlS(