HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Mapping Inner Space

Film theorist Bruno explores the relationship between mind and eye

By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff

Giuliana Bruno, professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Photo by Jane Reed.

The art of film is only about a hundred years old, and film theory is even younger. Because the discipline is in its early stages of development, there is perhaps more opportunity for bold, original thinkers to make their influence felt, to take a fresh look at the subject and influence debate in ways that will be felt by generations to come.

One film theorist whose work has already exerted a major impact and whose influence shows signs increasing in years to come is Giuliana Bruno, promoted to the position of full professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) last January.

In 1993, Bruno made a decisive mark in the world of film theory and criticism with her book Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton University Press). The book, which resurrects the nearly forgotten work of one of the few female masters of the early cinema, won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award for the best book in film studies published in English.

Bruno, who grew up in Naples, the city where Notari lived and worked, wrote the book originally in English, then translated it into Italian. That version won the Umberto Barbaro-Filmcritica prize, Italy's most important national award honoring the year's best book in visual studies.

The prize committee cited Bruno's work "for the unique ability to link film studies to the larger context of culture and the imaginary; for the exquisitely written portrait of an entire historical epoch, largely repressed; for the way in which it elaborates a 'living archaeology' around the figure of a great auteur, giving back a voice to the silence of female marginality; and finally for the originality and pertinence of the iconographic apparatus."

The prize committee's glowing praise is echoed by Bruno's Harvard colleagues:

"Giuliana Bruno is a marvelous and glittering addition to the faculty," says Christopher Killip, chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. "She's the outstanding film scholar of her generation, and we're thrilled that she's been able to get tenure at Harvard."

John Stilgoe, the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Development, calls Bruno "a genuine interdisciplinary scholar whose work reaches from film and other kinetic imagery all the way across the spectrum to geography and at right angles to women's studies and beyond that to government. She is also a spectacularly successful teacher and a wonderful person. I'm delighted to have her as a colleague."

Certainly Bruno appears to be a scholar who has already made an extremely favorable impression within her discipline. But hearing her speak about her latest book, nearly finished after five years of research and writing, one would hardly take her for someone inclined to rest on her laurels.

The book, Atlas of the Flesh: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, will be published by Verso of London and New York. As its title implies, the book goes beyond film criticism to explore other scholarly domains.

"Film studies," Bruno explains, "is the offspring of literary theory, and it has traditionally been housed in departments of literature. Later on, it was influenced by psychoanalysis and later still by feminist theory and cultural studies, but the bond with literary studies remained strong. I believe that while that bond has been very productive, its usefulness is coming to an end."

Bruno's book argues that the most productive framework for analyzing film today is not literary studies with its emphasis on language, but rather the study of art and architecture with their emphasis on space.

"The literary connection has obscured the visual," Bruno says. "Film is one of the spatio-visual arts. It is related to art and architecture in that it is the first art form to document in motion the way we perceive and inhabit space. That geographic aspect of film has played little part in the development of film theory. I believe that it is time to explore it."

In the book, Bruno maps the way narrative space is 'fashioned' and mobilized. She discusses the ways in which architects, cartographers, and artists have explored the theme of space, including personal space, emotional space, and the space of one's own body. Her discussion begins with a once-popular but now little-known 17th-century French novel by Madeleine de Scudéry called Clélie, which contains an actual map of emotional states, charting geographical features such as the "lake of indifference" and the "river of inclination." Bruno uses the map as a way of showing how movement through physical space is connected, in the work of a wide variety of artists, with movement through interior space.

Her discussion moves on to the pre-filmic architectonics of travel, and particularly picturesque aesthetics, including the arrangement of space by architects who seek to connect movement through space with a sensate interior voyage. In later chapters, Bruno shifts her attention to her own country, examining the ways that Italy has been portrayed by travel writers, "view painters," mapmakers, and by filmmakers, including Roberto Rossellini in his filmVoyage to Italy, starring Ingrid Bergman.

Bruno's new book is an ambitious work, not just in terms of the influence she hopes it will have on her field, but in sheer size. When published, it will comprise 500 to 600 pages of text and 100 illustrations. But Bruno's ambitions go even beyond the book to something she hopes the book will help her build at Harvard.

What Bruno envisions is a center for visual and spatial studies, encompassing not only the study of film, but art, architecture, and the humanities as well.

"I have been looking at film studies as a site where a lot of disciplines can come together, and I believe that VES is a good place for that to happen. The book needs to be out there to provide a foundation on which such a site can develop."

The author of numerous articles and reviews, Bruno has lectured around the world in several languages and has served as an adviser on several film productions. She began teaching at Harvard in 1990 and since 1994 has been the Gordon W. Gahan Associate Professor in VES.

After receiving her undergraduate degree from the Istituto Universitaro Orientale in Naples, Bruno came to New York on a Fulbright Fellowship and earned her master's and doctoral degrees in Cinema Studies from New York University. Her dissertation adviser was Annette Michelson, a scholar of film and the arts, and co-founder of the influential journal October.