The concept of power summarizes, starting from Aristotle and his famous definition in Metaphysics, the dynamics of being in Western thought. In the course of modernity and contemporary thought, the concept has been revised, then offering the cue for a series of reflections that bring into play – especially in the twentieth century – the line of bifurcation between power and potency, between politics and aesthetics. From the centrality of potentia in Spinoza's thought to the forms of mediation of power represented, for example, in Hegel's thought; from the transgressive dynamics of Nietzsche's Will to Power to the ambivalence of the German term Gewalt, at the same time power, law, power and violence. Cinema, during the twentieth century, has seen the power of images intertwined in various ways with the images of power: the experience of totalitarianism has also been possible starting from the images that have arisen in various ways inside or outside totalitarian structures. But it is among the images of power (of life, of desire, etc.), intertwined but irreducible to power, that cinema reveals its ability to position itself as a zone of resistance to power itself. It is the images of power, of the generative capacities connected to it, that assert themselves against power and its forms. Marco Bellocchio was one of the great names of the 20th century who was able to compose and contrast figures of power with images of power: family power (I pugni in tasca), psychiatric (Matti da slegare), military (Marcia trionfale), up to the last Vincere, where the contrast between male power and female power is the center of the entire film.
Seminar by the magazine Fata Morgana
Roberto De Gaetano was born in Rome in 1965. He is a full professor of Filmology at the University of Calabria. He has worked on cinema and philosophy (Il cinema secondo Gilles Deleuze, Roma 1996, Il visibile cinematografico, Roma 2002, Teorie del cinema in Italia, Soveria Mannelli 2005) and on the analysis of the forms of Italian cinema (l corpo e la maschera. Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Roma 1999, La sincope dell’identità. Il cinema di Nanni Moretti, Torino 2002). He has dedicated important studies to contemporary cinema, which have concerned the figures of time (Passaggi, Rome 1996), the event of love (Tra-Due, Cosenza 2008) and the relationship between forms of representation and the present world (L’immagine contemporanea, Venice 2010). He directs the four-monthly cinema magazine “Fata Morgana”.