Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine

INTRODUCTION

Time, Film, and the Ethical Vision of Emmanuel Levinas

TIME UNHINGED

At first, it could be argued that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was thinking primarily of himself when he wrote in 1947 that time had come unhinged. Clearly, this statement, in his first important philosophical work, Existence and Existents, reflects the trauma of his experience as a Jew, a French soldier, and a prisoner of the Nazis during World War II. Levinas writes, It is in times of misery and privation that the shadow of an ulterior finality which darkens the world is cast behind the object of desire. When one has to eat, drink and warm oneself in order not to die, when nourishment becomes fuel, as in certain kinds of hard labor, the world also seems to be at an end, turned upside down and absurd, needing to be renewed. Time becomes unhinged.¹

Levinas’s telling observation, as Tina Chanter says, was informed by his own imprisonment in a labor camp, and the death of many members of his Jewish family.² Perhaps his use of the pronoun one was Levinas’s attempt to inject some objectivity into his account of this highly personal and traumatic experience. Nevertheless, the intensely personal tone of his statement indicates reflection on his own time of utter despair. The general trauma that the world suffered during the war and the Holocaust undoubtedly was internalized in Levinas’s own thought and feelings and became a permanent part of his being, influencing all aspects of his experience.

A conscripted French soldier, Levinas was taken prisoner at the beginning of the war, in 1940. His status as a soldier in the West saved him from the death camps. While gentile friends in France hid his wife and daughter, most of the rest of his family in his native Lithuania died in the Holocaust. During this time of his imprisonment in Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel, situated between Bremen and Hannover, a number above the entrance, 1492, was filled with irony for him, not because of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in that year but because, more significant for many Jews, it was the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.³

Levinas recalls that the most humane occurrence during this long period of uncertainty about his own life and the future of his loved ones concerned a dog that has become somewhat legendary in modern philosophy, a stray dubbed Bobby by the Jewish prisoners. Bobby, according to Levinas, greeted the prisoners as men, jumping up and down and barking in delight when they appeared in the morning to go off into the forest to cut wood and when they returned to the prison at night, cold, hungry, and exhausted. In contrast, Levinas says, the German women and children, who observed the Jewish prisoners and invariably reminded the men of their own families, passed by and sometimes raised their eyes—stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. Bobby, Levinas says, had been given an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog, and was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany.⁴

Indeed, then, time became unhinged for Emmanuel Levinas during this period of his life and this era of unprecedented death and human misery. His life up until that point had already acquired a remarkable quality, showing signs of great brilliance in the young philosopher and perhaps even genius. An emigrant from Jewish Lithuania, he studied philosophy in Strasburg and then moved to Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. Levinas’s translation of Husserl’s work into French helped introduce phenomenology to the French, most particularly to Jean Paul Sartre, enabling Sartre to develop his own work on existentialism.

Levinas then turned to Martin Heidegger in Freiburg. Heidegger’s influence on Levinas lasted throughout the latter’s life, even in the face of his crushing disappointment over Heidegger’s allegiance in the early 1930s to Nazism. Engaged intellectually and emotionally with Heidegger’s work for his whole career, Levinas’s break with him over politics and race marked the advent of his persistent philosophical challenge to Heidegger’s thought by placing greater importance on ethics and the other than on the existential analytic of being and authenticity.

Accordingly, by the time of the war, Levinas, having been a French citizen for a decade and married to Raissa Levi, a childhood friend from Kovno, Lithuania, had become an important student of modern Continental philosophy with a promising future. So, for Levinas, calling time unhinged as a description of the ontic time of his lived experience of desperate loss during these years of imprisonment gains force for its understatement.

For Levinas, however, who wrote most of Existence and Existents during his imprisonment, the period of the unhinging of time inevitably extends beyond his own existential concerns. His time also refers to the condition of humanity and the Western mind. His idea of time unhinged resonates with Shakespearean overtones as developed, for example, in Jacques Derrida’s expatiation on Hamlet’s The time is out of joint: Oh cursed spite,/That ever I was borne to set it right (1.5.187–188). Hamlet’s Denmark of murder, divided identities and loyalties, lust, and abuse becomes a metaphor for the brutality of the modern state and condition.

At the same time, double meaning and paradox imbue the notions of disjointed and unhinged time. For Derrida and Levinas unhinged time engenders disorder, but it also becomes the condition of possibility for the relationship of time to ethics and the other. Derrida even wonders if this disjuncture of time becomes necessary for the good? He also asks, Is not disjuncture the very possibility of the other?⁵ For Derrida, then, disjuncture and disadjustment open the opportunity for the relation to the other. Time, indeed, relates to alterity or radical otherness. For Levinas also the introduction of time and the other, as in the title of another of his important early works, entails ethical encounter and the responsibility to the other.⁶ Time establishes difference and distance to sever the circular solidity of sameness that can suffocate ethical responsibility in the enclosure of nontranscendent immanent being.

Derrida’s discussion of Hamlet’s disjointed time informs Levinas’s meaning for unhinged time as part of Levinas’s developing philosophy of time and ethics, which was in its formative stage in 1947. Derrida associates Hamlet’s disjointed time with a conception he shared with Levinas of, in Derrida’s words, the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other (Specters of Marx, 26), a basic implication of Levinas’s unhinged time in Existence and Existents. Derrida’s phrase infinite asymmetry captures Levinas’s idea throughout his ethical philosophy of the inequality of the ethical relationship that imposes infinite responsibility on the individual for the other. Thus, the philosopher Simon Critchley says that for Levinas the relation to the other is asymmetrical. That is, the subject relates itself to something that exceeds its relational capacity.⁷

Levinas’s body of work on time and ethics would be described by many contemporary philosophers as changing the landscape of modern Continental philosophy by making ethics first in philosophy, even before being and ontology and before the Western hegemony of knowledge as power. Levinas rethinks time to propose the primacy of ethics. Levinas’s time unhinged, therefore, dramatically encapsulates a lifetime of work. Such time puts ethics first by dividing subjectivity with the imperative to act on the ethical priority of the infinite ethical demand of the other. This division of time and the subject for Levinas makes ethics possible in the first place. Ethics means breaking from the self for the other. The break makes ethics an infinite striving in the transcendent relationship to the other. Transcendence opens the time of the other for the ethical relationship. Levinas writes, There is no model of transcendence outside of ethics. He challenges the temporal reduction of the human being to existence without ethical transcendence beyond inherent immanent being. He continues: The sole manner by which an otherwise than being could signify is in the relationship with the neighbor—which the human sciences reduce to being.⁸

Thus, Levinas resists obeisance to a linear time that reduces the other to the same and entraps the self and the other in a temporality of fixed beginnings, middles, and endings. He questions a temporal paradigm that generates a Chaplinesque modern times of assembly line morals, ethical uniformity, and social and political regimentation. Instead, Levinas, like Derrida, searches for the transcendent in immanent being that reaches beyond solipsistic subjectivity by placing ethical priority on the relationship to the other.

Levinas’s work on time and ethics proposes breaking out of a closed circle of endless, repetitive representation. A temporality of disruption challenges the exclusive representation of time and reality by the spatial structuring of public clock time. For Levinas diachronic time, by which he means a time of disruption, counters the synchronic simultaneity of abstract clock time to place ethical responsibility for the other in an ethical dimension of a preoriginary time with an infinite future. Levinas’s insight into time, therefore, presents an opportunity for regeneration. Rethinking time in terms of Levinasian ethical transcendence for the other can make time performative, a creative temporal event in itself. Levinasian thought itself, however, requires some redemption. Most important, it must answer for its position on the feminine. It also must rethink the relationship of ethics to aesthetics and politics.

In spite of such shortcomings it remains remarkable that after all Levinas suffered, his ethical philosophy works to justify, on modern philosophical grounds, the argument that humans are more than disposable bodies and meat. People are more than they appear to be, and life means more than can be seen, known, or understood. Levinas worked assiduously to keep his philosophy distinct from his Talmudic study and separate from any idea of God. Even so, a sense of spiritual transcendence, in the form of his argument for the ethical priority and the humanity of the other, certainly signals an inescapable connection between his philosophy and his religious faith.

Ethics cannot be reduced to clock time and calendar time and remain, for Levinas, ethics. In God and Philosophy he says, Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise and better than being, the very possibility of the beyond.⁹ But ethics as a way of seeing and thinking, for him, overcomes death—death as annihilation, death as existential angst and fear, death as betrayal of the neighbor—and promises regeneration through access to the very possibility of the beyond in the relationship with the other. As Slavoj Žižek says, "For Levinas, ethics is not about life, but about something more than life."¹⁰ Ethics in this light—the light of time and the other, the light of responsibility and transcendence—becomes for Levinas another word for the meaning of love in its promise of commitments greater than the self and the same and even life itself.¹¹

THE CINEMA OF REDEMPTION: A NEW ETHICS OF FILM

Levinas’s unhinged time includes the time of ethical challenge in what I call the cinema of redemption, a multinational body of films that enacts the struggle to achieve ethical transcendence by subordinating the self to the greater responsibility for the other, primarily as delineated in Levinas’s ethical philosophy. I introduce this term, the cinema of redemption, to apply a Levinasian lens to the examination of the quest in film for a redeeming ethical experience that centers on the priority of the other. The journey transforms what Levinas, in Substitution, terms the ontological adventure (Emmanuel Levinas, 86) of immediate, immanent experience into the ethical adventure of the relationship to the other person (Levinas, Time and the Other, 33). The films in the cinema of redemption dramatize the struggle for this transformation from being to ethics. They articulate a crisis of the change from ontological identity to ethical subjectivity.

The originality of this approach to film derives from its commitment to the ethical philosophy of Levinas and to the feminine engagement with and renewal of that philosophy. Levinasian thought and the feminine proffer a new means for examining a broad body of films, as well as the human experience on which these films are based. Levinasian thought provides a conceptual apparatus and governing theory of ethics and experience for structuring the elements of the cinema of redemption.

Along with the language of absolute, asymmetrical ethical priority, time plays a crucial role in the cinema of redemption, often presenting an alternative temporal dimension to challenge ethical relationships. Time becomes part of the very artistic structure of these films to present the ethical argument. This drama of time and ethics in the cinema of redemption occurs in very different films, ranging from classic American films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and On the Waterfront (1954) to the Italian classic L’avventura (1960).

All the films in the cinema of redemption share in the search for redemption, but the nature of that search and its relationship to ethical transcendence and time vary. Ethical ambiguities and temporal disjuncture in the search for redemption pervade these films. While many classic American films focus on the ethical crisis of a time of transcendence, other films accentuate the tension between the desire for redemption and forms of radical immanence as manifested in wide-ranging aspects of modern life. For these other films—European films, American films, and other national cinemas—redemption becomes the object of troubled desire, a complex conflict between a yearning for transcendence and the enclosure of embedded immanence.

Occupying a foundational place in the cinema of redemption, some classic American films enact Levinas’s project to make responsibility for the other the greatest priority in human relationships: Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Searchers (1956), Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and The Hustler (1961), Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, and John Huston’s The Misfits (1961).

Faith in individual and national regeneration through transcendent, messianic time tends to drive classic American films of redemption. In contrast, other films in this cinema encounter perdurable obstacles in the struggle for redemption. In these films ethical transcendence through Levinas’s priority of the transcendent humanity of the face of the other becomes stymied.¹² The search for belief continues in such films but often without the climactic sense of closure that usually occurs in the American classics. An ethical morass that for Levinas often defines much of modernity impedes transcendence in the relationship of responsibility for the other. A litany of doubts—such as disappointment, alienation, and nihilism—pervades these films of frustrated transcendence. For these films the impulse toward ethical transcendence frequently encounters what Critchley terms a condition of radically immanent subjectivity or radical immanentism, a countermovement of immanent experiential forces that influences events along with transcendent forces of belief and action.¹³ Films of such frustrated transcendence include Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura and The Passenger (1975), Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959), Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956), and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961). Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980); Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), Mystic River (2003), and Million Dollar Baby (2004) also fit this pattern, among many other films from the United States and other countries.

The traditional narrative of redemption predates film, of course, not only by centuries but millennia, reaching back to foundational narratives and beliefs in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in ancient literature and mythology. Even these traditions, however, do not have exclusive possession of the theme of redemption. The importance to these historic cultures of spiritual and psychological redemption parallels the centrality of such forces of renewal in other cultures throughout the world and throughout history. One need go no further than the accessible work of Joseph Campbell to see the universality of the search for rebirth for the self and culture. Campbell ranges widely over cultures and history in his study of the quest for transformation on journeys of initiation. He moves from the rituals of the Navajo and other Native Americans to cultures of Asia and Africa.¹⁴

The search for renewal in the cinema of redemption differs, however, from the classic journey of adventure and initiation that provides the basic frame for the quest motif that Campbell delineates. In the cinema of redemption the ethical engagement with the other, rather than the triumph of the self, provides the great challenge of the journey toward redemption. In these films it is not dragons, demons, monsters, maidens in distress, natural obstacles, or supernatural wonders that constitute the greatest dangers to the completion of the quest. Rather, in the cinema of redemption the greatest obstacles come from the subject’s ethical encounter with the Levinasian other.

Like the broader redemption narrative itself, films from countries throughout the world exhibit the pattern of ethical struggle that Levinasian thought describes. Thus, directors such as Zhang Yimou, Abbas Kiarostami, and Akira Kurosawa and the cinemas of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America all contribute to the diversity of the cinema of redemption.¹⁵ A Levinasian ethical analytic of transcendence, alterity, and time has great relevance to many cultures and cinemas of the world. Given such a broad spectrum of possibilities, this book follows Levinas and his feminist interpreters in a Eurocentric concentration on the Western intellectual tradition. The roots of this tradition go back to Plato through Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, and many others. Thus, developing important connections in the cinema of redemption between this Western intellectual tradition and the thought and cultures of non-European countries remains outside the purview of this work yet needs to be done.

LEVINAS AND FILM

Although he often used the film term mise-en-scène to describe a philosophical point,¹⁶ Levinas referred tangentially to film itself in his writings, and little evidence exists of any special passion on his part for cinema, even though he was living, teaching, and writing in Paris during the heady days of the New Wave movement, when the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, among others, were revolutionizing our understanding of the medium. This film movement belonged intellectually and emotionally to the popular philosophy of the time: Sartrean existentialism. In addition, little mention was made of Levinas by scholars interested in establishing a connection between film and philosophy. Such neglect reflected how Levinas for years was oft en overlooked, not just by scholars in the special field of philosophy and film but by philosophy itself. Thus, Levinas went unmentioned in major works of the 1990s in the field of film and philosophy.¹⁷

With Levinas’s growing influence in continental philosophy, however, a dramatic rise has occurred during the past decade or more of academic interest in his ethical philosophy. This interest inevitably has directed attention to connections between Levinas and film. In 2007, for example, Sarah Cooper edited a special edition of Film-Philosophy entitled The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema, which included film scholars from several nations who wrote lengthy critical articles on Levinas and film on a variety of subjects, including representation, sexuality, time, and death. This volume followed Cooper’s Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary, an important work on Levinas’s ethical vision that focuses on the significance for film studies of the debate between phenomenology and ethics in Levinas as manifested in the difference between the physical face and the transcendent "visage."¹⁸ In addition, Brian K. Bergen-Aurand’s essay Regarding Anna: Levinas, Antonioni and the Ethics of Film Absence makes an important advance in Levinasian film studies with his focus on ethics, as opposed to Heideggerian ontology, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura.

Bergen-Aurand makes a crucial distinction between the traditional way of treating morality in film and the possible contribution that a Levinasian phenomenological perspective could make to representing ethics in film. He notes that film and ethics have been coupled infrequently and film and Levinas have been connected even less. He says, Traditional approaches to ethics and film have centered on mimesis and morality.¹⁹ Indeed, many works deal with the history of morality, sexuality, religion, and censorship in film.²⁰ Bergen-Aurand suggests such studies of morality tend to be concerned primarily with film language and ideological, political or religious representations (109) rather than the philosophical or phenomenological analysis of film.

FILM AND A NEW TEMPORAL REGIME: THE SEARCHERS AND LA DOLCE VITA

Time, according to Levinas—ethical time—is a required element in the artistic construction of both the argument and the search for ethical transcendence in the cinema of redemption.²¹ The Levinasian insistence on linking time and ethics to transcendence and infinity can transform ethical discussion in the film frame. The insinuation within filmic space of a relationship to a temporal dimension of infinite ethical responsibility creates a new mise-en-scène of ethics out of the ordinary design of the film scene. Also, the work of Paul Ricoeur and David Wood, who usually do not directly address film, and Gilles Deleuze and David Rodowick provides concepts and instruments that can help navigate the place of time in a Levinasian discourse on time and ethics in film.²² They all seek a new time. Accordingly, Levinasian ethics suggests a potential for film that goes beyond the classic understanding of the ontology of the cinematic image to a transcendent ethical dimension in the relationship to the other.²³ As Levinas says, Time is not the limitation of being but its relationship with infinity (God, Death, and Time, 19).²⁴

Examples abound of how time can operate in film to compel a vision of an ethical regime beyond being. Thus, much has been written about the opening scene of John Ford’s The Searchers, with its shot from inside the entrance of a house on the Texas frontier. The camera is well behind Martha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan) as she opens the door to look out on the endless, open southwestern landscape. In retrospect we realize that Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), Martha’s brother-in-law, approaches on horse back in the distance. The scene immediately conveys the mystery of Ethan’s appearance from an unknown time and place, as well as the uncertainty of his ultimate purpose. While the deeply sexual and psychological implications of the shot have received considerable critical debate, the shot also dramatizes ethical tension and the encounter with the ethical in the context of a new temporal dimension.²⁵ With all of the meanings of this visual moment of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation, shelter and estrangement, family and other, the shot resonates with ethical positioning and intrusion.

Ford’s objective camera position from inside the house behind Martha contrasts with Martha’s intense look from the doorway and the porch as Ethan comes ever closer. This contrast of shots suggests the construction of her subjective position. This unusual interior camera position gets repeated with a shot toward the end of the film from inside a cave when Ethan picks up and retrieves Debbie Edwards (Natalie Wood) and from inside the house again at the very end as Ethan stands outside alone, framed by the doorway. In the opening scene the pattern of shots projects a visual drama of the construction of the subject through time in the subject’s relationship with the other.

Thus, the introduction of John Wayne’s Ethan as the other in the long shot insinuates time, ethics, and the infinite into the scene, transforming the moment. The camera moves from the interior foyer of the frontier home and crosses the threshold to the outside with Martha. As Martha looks off into the distance toward Ethan, the scene suggests a transformation of time from the linearity of the progressive moments of physical movement through space to the potential of the infinite ethical relationship to the other. Martha’s encounter with Ethan as the other vivifies subjectivity, time, and ethics.

This opening sequence of shots dramatizes Levinas’s words in part 1 of Time and the Other: time is not the achievement of an isolated and lone subject, but … it is the very relationship of the subject with the Other (39). Ethan’s arrival entails what David Ross Fryer describes as the intervention of the other. Fryer writes, Prior to the other, the self is not yet actualized, and not yet a subject.²⁶

Kelly Oliver encapsulates the relationship of time, the subject, and the other to the Levinasian ethical project in a way that also helps describe the power of the opening moments of The Searchers. She says, Only the relation with the other engenders time; and only where there is infinity is there time. Oliver develops her point by smartly playing on the crucial Levinasian argument that the relationship with the other inescapably means a face-to-face encounter with the humanity of the other that propels the relationship into the realm of infinite time and, for Levinas, infinite responsibility: The relation between time and infinity is necessary not only in the simple sense that we cannot think of not-A without thinking of A or visa versa. Rather, it is the encounter with infinity through the face-to-face relationship that makes time possible. This encounter opens the subject onto itself and separates the subject from the world in a way that makes the counting necessary to time possible. The face-to-face relationship enables subjectivity, and there is no linear time without the subject.²⁷ Accordingly, the opening scene of The Searchers visually dramatizes a complex interaction of subjectivity, time, and the other as described by Oliver and Levinas to suggest a transcendent temporal and ethical dimension.

Equally important, the opening shot of interior space in The Searchers also visualizes a crucial theme in Levinas and his feminist interpreters of the woman as the embodiment of home. The scene articulates the role of the feminine as place, dwelling, and the condition of the ethical. This theme becomes a crisis of the feminine for Levinas but an opportunity for rethinking embodiment and the feminine for feminist writers. Significantly, at the end of The Searchers Ethan takes Debbie home but cannot enter there himself.

Another famous concluding scene in a very different film of redemption, Fellini’s La dolce vita, also propounds an ethical dimension beyond being and conventional time. Fellini’s conception of Marcello Mastroianni’s sad character, Marcello Rubini, deals, however, with a moment of ethical encounter in a way that differs starkly from Ford’s treatment of Wayne’s character in The Searchers. In these films Ethan and Marcello each seek a form of redemption. By the end of The Searchers Ethan has fulfilled his journey and achieved a lonely, violent redemption. In contrast, Marcello, at the end of La dolce vita, faces frustration, doubt, and disappointment in his search for meaning, belief, and renewal.

In the concluding scene of La dolce vita a monster from the sea washes ashore to the amazement of giddy onlookers and exhausted partygoers, who stop to stare back at the dead fish’s single grotesque eye. Marcello looks and moves away from the single eye to look across a small inlet to a beautiful gesturing figure, the girl from Perugia, Paola (Valeria Ciangottini), who has been the embodiment in the film of innocence. Connection between them proves impossible, however, because Marcello cannot bring himself to respond seriously to her gestures. In effect, Marcello resists the potential she offers of transcendence through a relationship with the other. He dismisses the ethical potential of the encounter to a failure to hear and understand. In fact, he really fails to see and believe. In both scenes—Mastroianni’s in La dolce vita and Wayne’s in The Searchers—the directors tend to idealize the alterity of the feminine in ways that problematize relationships, a theme to be pursued throughout this work.

Still, as in the opening scene of The Searchers, no verbal or discursive argument of ethics or responsibility transpires in the concluding scene of La dolce vita. Both scenes resist reducing ethics to narrative and character development based on the conventional organization of movement and linearity. Instead, time in the relationship to the other suggests an ethical responsibility beyond finite being.

In effect, Paola gestures to Marcello to have him accept a temporality that challenges his ordinary existence. She invites him to cross over the inlet, a symbolic act that suggests a new spiritual, transcendent view of life. Seeming to come from nowhere, like the fish, her presence introduces the other into the scene, challenging Marcello to create a new subjectivity. Her appearance means Marcello should move from a linear temporality of death to one of transcendence that recognizes her face as the face of humanity that touches infinity. It is time for Marcello to appreciate his own place in the world and his irreplaceable, irreducible responsibility in it to the other.

The suggestion of the possibility of transcendence through Paola in this closing scene contrasts with the film art, as well as the belief system, that tends to define La dolce vita. Fellini’s long take and close-up of Paola, this lovely young woman from another time and place, constitutes a visual counter-movement to his usual organization of time and space in the film in terms of the movement-images of montage. The time of the film in this concluding scene compels consideration of a new time for a new life. Film art endorses Paola’s promise. This cohesion of visual art and spiritual vision makes Marcello’s rejection even more painful.

In her innocence, charm, and beauty Paola reaches out to Marcello with what Levinas calls the caress that exceeds the tangible immediacy of immanence and that aspires to transcendence.²⁸ Fellini’s long take of her effort signals the difference and significance of this special moment. As the face of the other, she introduces the possibility for Marcello of reinventing his own ethical subjectivity. But by turning away, Marcello rejects the visual proposition of her as the face of the other. He refuses the call from a time before linear time for him to acknowledge a transcendent responsibility beyond his own wishes. He walks away.

By leaving, Marcello takes the film with him. La dolce vita also leaves Paola behind for Marcello to resume his wasteful life without regeneration. A crucial significance of the film derives from its multilayered pessimism. The end of Marcello’s search for redemption and the end of the film coincide with the suggestion of the coming end of hopeful time. In The Searchers the time of Ethan as the lone, alienated prophetic figure of redemption endures, but Marcello continues on a path of despair until eventual annihilation. When Marcello dismisses Paola’s gesture of faith and love as irrelevant to the ethical condition of humanity, he dismisses all hope for his own transcendence.

FIGURE 1.1. Valeria Ciangottini, the girl from Perugia, beckons to Marcello Mastroianni in La dolce vita (1959).

ETHICS