Abstract

This dissertation researches the relationship between time, vision and subject formation as it emerges in five post-war Italian films: Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up and The Passenger , Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem , Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter , and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex . The center around which these texts revolve is the image of the crime scene---the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated. Uniquely influenced by both Neorealism and the tradition of film noir , they present us with a crime to be "seen," not once and for all but over and over again, in the folds of the landscape as well as on the faces of people and things. It is my contention that, by dilating or contracting the detective story to its extreme limits, these films articulate forms of time which radically defy any clear-cut distinction between past, present and future, confronting us with a temporality which cannot be calculated, determined with certainty, but only made visible. The investigator who looks back at the crime scene to discover the truth comes to occupy a position of passivity with respect to the object of his quest---he searches, and is found; he looks, and is seen. Yet, the picture of the past by which he is suddenly confronted is anything but external to him. 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 search