In the shadow of the screen: notes on cinema, homoeroticism and literature 1945-1980

Abstract

My contribution proposes to re-read the link between the dark of the cinema and the expression of the homoerotic desire, the writing of the shadows and phantoms that became flesh in the space of the cinema only. In Pasolini’s Amado mio, the film lights up the desire; Gilda fires Caorle’s boys; a wild and unstoppable eroticism goes around the outdoor cinema and could be expressed over the body of the boys same.  At the cinema the viewer is a pretender, if he is homosexual. He pretend to like the actress so much while he loves to touch the closer man. In Piero Santi’s Ombre rosse, the author writes five moral tales about the cinema as a temple of darkness, reign of good and evil, a fascinating reality. Cinema is a discovering, fearing and desiring place. The protagonists are at the same time presents and absents; they keep moving and they change the stairs while joyfully and sad images flowing on the screen. 

But the cinema as an ideal place for desire and unspeakable pleasures undergoes a slowly but constantly process of changing. In spite of this, cinema, for at least two generation of men in the old Europe as in the the New world, was home, an escape from the oppressing reality, the guarantee of obscurity. Roland Barthes felling nostalgic about this world where it was possible to be at the same time at the cinema and somewhere else, lonely but in the other’s desire.