"Standing outside of society and its interlocking relationships is the quintessential Visconti heroic impulse."
Benjamin once coined the term "left-wing melancholy" to refer to those who are actively conformist. In Prince Sarina, there is a strong and critical emotion of a melancholic man, and the more withdrawn it is, the more it is associated with a denial of a death-craving fanaticism, the more radical it is with criticism and the more it is directed towards the political mainstream. trivial and useless. Melancholy represents an effective state of rebellion against a regime that attempts to close the mind, limit freedom, and force people to endure losses, while melancholy people are unwilling to give up personal losses, within the scope of the individual's unconsciousness, within the context of political entities. In the lonely personal space outside, there is a resistance in the sense of existence.
When Chevally endorsed Sarina's "dignified and liberal attitude during the May crisis" and went on to offer him a Senate seat, we saw how desperately these groups were included. The tragedy of the melancholic is that he just needs to do nothing to be accepted and welcomed by the social group. But Sarina declined the invitation. This somber gesture of resignation is indicative of his activism. This attitude of refusal to cooperate is the only viable space for resistance in an environment of pervasive corruption, the melancholic retreating into a solitary space of contemplation and death. As in Sartre's "loneliness of the individual who no longer has anything in common with any collective", this is a state of freedom, individuality, and a state of "revealing the truth." It is in this spirit that Sartre rejected the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature like a panther, just as Sarina rejected a seat in the Senate.
The main characteristics of male depression as proposed by Mark Nicholls:
"1. The melancholic has a sense of separation from a corrupt and conservative group; 2. He experiences the trauma of the loss; 3. He shows a refusal to let go of mourning this loss, which leads to the construction of a crypt or fantasy scene , and the adoration of this loss; 4. He manifests an ultimate desire to conform to the group, brought about by a public manifestation of self-sacrifice or abandonment; 5. He operates through melancholia , benefits from the consolidation of personal authority and power. The application of all five male desire structures relies on manic resolution of melancholic crises, which leads to male characters in films such as The Age of Innocence (1993), The Same The Streamers (1970) and Vertigo (1958), finally aligning with the tribal structure they controlled."
Throughout the film, Sarina's solitude and contemplation are disrupted. In fact, at the beginning of the film, dead Bourbon soldiers are found in the garden, which disrupts the mechanical chanting process, starting this pattern of interruptions.
In the scene after Angelica and her father arrive, we see Prince Sarina brooding, the loneliness, observation, and depth of feeling that those around him lack. While using close-ups to highlight Sarina's musings and his subtle facial expressions, Visconti also used long shots to place Sarina in the background of the crowd, who would cluck like monkeys up the chandelier. Laughing girls knew nothing about his thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, Sarina felt the dynamism and excitement of the youth, it was a victory for the youth, a victory for Tancredi and Angelica, and it was easy for Sarina to recognize its beauty and grace (like ending when he danced with Angelica); on the other hand, there is a high level of irony in his appreciative reaction to the scene, seeing the old class compromise on the crudest elements of the new order . His own culpability, as reflected in the mirror, is obvious. The scene evokes the Prince's Proustian musings on glamour, the past, guilt, regret.
Roberto's presence and his interactions with Prince Sarina indicate their friendship and shared values and feelings, indicating the general melancholy and brooding of the nobility of the old society, by contrast, Sedara put most of the misunderstandings Time was spent guessing palace prices and how to get cheap palaces.
As Salina withdraws from the ball, before the painting "The Death of the Righteous," his notions of loneliness and contemplation intensify. The water he drinks is pure and simple, in stark contrast to the complexity, excess, and socio-political complexity that is happening around him. He held the glass like the Holy Grail at the Holy Communion, and greedily drank the water of rejuvenation, bringing himself great relief.
Thinking about death. For Tancred and Angelica, death, as Sarina pointed out, was a terrible idea; but for the Prince, as a personal relief, as the end of the worst atrocities of the class he represented, Death is something worth embracing. His agreement to dance the waltz with Angelica is his "dignified attitude" to the reality of the new world, a highly conscious gesture of desire and a gesture of resignation—a great sacrifice for the melancholic. The Prince accepted the death relief of his class and also ensured that the end he longed for was coming.
Sarina's melancholy is an Aristotelian melancholy, a balance between desire-driven and debilitating. Melancholy is seen as an extreme state, an unusualness that reveals the true nature of existence. Melancholy is by no means passive, it is a state on the threshold of creativity and beauty. Through a deep sense of beauty and a strong critique of hypocrisy, melancholy can be seen as a mode of being, a way to gain freedom and creativity through thinking. As Proust says, Prince Sarina evokes the idea that "thought comes to us as the successor of sorrow."
Death is a central concept in Sarina's melancholy. The melancholic superego was Freud's driving force for death. In the death drive, the melancholic finds not only a way to become one with his grief, but also the extent to which his bondage is certain, the "fragility of the signifier, the instability of life" evidence of. It's as if the gloomy and depressed person is saying, "No, we're not interested in your society, your activities, or your language. We're different from that; we don't exist; we're dead."
About resistance. Sarina's revolt is not political, but existential, and his thoughts, actions and creativity in the experience of loneliness are all acts of revolt. "Revolt highlights the economic, psychological and spiritual contradictions that exist and that these contradictions are permanent: they are insoluble. When one realizes that the contradictions of thought and society cannot be resolved, then resistance and its risks become the This is the nature of Sarina’s revolt, the activism of his sensibility, the revolt of the mind, thriving on unresolved contradictions and striving for sustain yourself. The revolt of the "individual microcosm", in the melancholic mode of thinking, is a fundamental public act in the struggle for freedom and human happiness (Kristeva 2002).
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