But with live TV, natural events do not inscribe themselves in any formal scheme that has already foreseen them; rather, they require that such a scheme be developed along with them, simultaneously, at once determining them and determined by them. Even in instances where his work demands the least artistic commitment, a TV director is involved in a creative experience whose very peculiarity is in itself an artistic phenomenon of great interest. Similarly, the aesthetic value of his product, however rough and ephemeral, opens up a number of stimulating perspectives for a phenomenological study of improvisation.
Freedom of Events and Determinism of Habit
With the above descriptive analysis of the psychological and formal structures that characterize the phenomenon of live TV, we can now speculate about the future of the medium, and about the artistic possibilities that this kind of televisual narrative could have beyond its normal uses. Similarly, we can explore the obvious analogy between this kind of creative process, which avails itself of the contributions of chance and the autonomous decisions of an interpreter (the director that follows, albeit with a certain amount of freedom, the theme «whatishappeningherenow»), and that phenomenon typical of contemporary art which in earlier chapters I defined as the «open work.»
Clarifying the second issue may well clarify the first. Live TV certainly establishes a relationship between life, in the most amorphous openness of its myriad possibilities, and plot, the story the director concocts by organizing along a univocal and unidirectional thread, even though on the spur of the moment, the events he has chosen chronologically.
I have already dwelt on the importance of the narrative montage, and have tried to define its structure with the help of Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of plot par excellence which enables one to describe the traditional structures of both the play and the novel, or, at least of the novel that is conventionally recognized as «well constructed.»»
But the notion of plot is only one element in Aristotle’s poetics. Modern criticism has clearly shown that plot is merely an exterior arrangement of facts whose function is that of expressing the deeper sense of the tragic (and narrative) fact: the action.12
Oedipus investigates the causes of the plague and, upon discovering that he has murdered his father and married his mother, blinds himself: this is the plot of Oedipus Rex. But the tragic action lies at a yet deeper level, where the complex relationship between deed and guilt unfolds according to immutable laws, steeped in existential anguish. The plot is absolutely univocal, but the action is fraught with ambiguity, open to a thousand possible interpretations. Similarly, the plot of Hamlet can be exhaustively and correctly described by any high school student, but its action has been and continues to be responsible for rivers of ink, because it is unitary but not univocal.
The contemporary novel has long tried to dissolve the plot (here understood as a sequence of univocal connections necessary to the final denouement), to construct pseudoadventures based on «stupid» and inessential facts. Everything that happens to Leopold Bloom, Mrs. Dalloway, and RobbeGrillet’s characters is both «stupid» and inessential.
And yet, looked at from a different narrative standpoint, all their experiences appear quite essential to the expression of the action, to the psychological, symbolic, or allegorical development that implies a certain vision of the world. This vision, this implicit discourse that can be understood in a number of ways and that results in a variety of different and complementary solutions, is what we call the «openness» of a narrative work: the rejection of a plot signifies recognition that the world is a web of possibilities and that the work of art must reproduce this physiognomy.
Whereas theater and the novel have long been progressing in this direction (I am thinking of works such as those by lonesco, Beckett, and Adamov, and The Connection, by Gelber), cinema, another art based on plot, has been shying away from it.
Its reluctance to follow this trend was probably determined by various factors, primarily its social role. While other arts were experimenting with «open» structures, cinema felt obliged to keep in touch with the broader public and provide it with the traditional dramas our culture legitimately demands. At this point I would like to add, parenthetically, that it would be wrong to believe that a poetics of the open work is the only possible contemporary poetics; I do not mean even to imply this. For, in fact, the open work is only one expression, probably the most interesting, of a culture whose innumerable demands can be satisfied in many different ways—for instance, by using traditional structures in a more modern fashion. A movie as fundamentally Aristotelian as Stagecoach is a perfectly valid example of contemporary narrative.
And yet there have been a few movies that have definitely broken away from the traditional structures of plot to depict a series of events totally devoid of conventional dramatic connections— stories in which nothing happens, or, rather, where things happen not by narrative necessity but, at least in appearance, by chance. I am thinking particularly of movies such as L’Avventura and La Norte, both by Antonioni.
The importance of these movies resides not only in the fact that they were both experimental works, but also in the fact that they were both accepted by the public—with a great deal of criticism and vituperation, yet nevertheless accepted as debatable but possible visions of the world.
It can hardly be a coincidence that this new narrative mode was offered to a public that had already become used to the new logic of live TV—that is to a kind of narration which, despite an appearance of causality and coherence, relies primarily on the mere sequence of events, and in which the narrative, even though it might have a thread, is constantly spilling beyond its margins, into the inessential, the tangential, the gloss, where for a very long time nothing may happen, and the camera remains focused on the curve of a road waiting for the sudden appearance of the first runner, or, weary, wanders to the facades of the surrounding houses or the expectant faces of the spectators, for no other reason than that this is the way things go, and there is nothing else to do but wait.
L’Avventura often lapses into the long, blank spells of live TV; as do the night revels in La None, or the heroine’s interminable walk amid boys setting off fireworks.
All this seems to suggest that, indeed, live TV may well deserve to be included—both as a source and as a contemporary phenomenon—in any study concerning the openness of narrative structures and the possibility of reproducing life in all its multiplicity, in its casual unfolding beside and beyond any preestablished plot.
At this point, however, we must avoid a possible misunderstanding: life in its immediacy is not «openness» but chance. In order to turn this chance into a cluster of possibilities, it is first necessary to provide it with some organization. In other words, it is necessary to choose the elements of a constellation among which we will then—and only then—draw a network of connections.
The openness of L’Avventura is the result of a montage that has deliberately replaced pure chance with «willed» chance. If it lacks a plot it is because the director wanted to provoke a feeling of suspension, of indeterminateness, in his audience—because he wanted to frustrate their «romantic» expectations and plunge them into a fic Lion (in itself already a filtered life) that would force them to find their way amid all sorts of intellectual and moral dilemmas. In other words, openness presumes the lasting and accurate organization of afield of stimuli.
Of course, it is quite possible that a live broadcast may be able to seize, out of a variety of facts, the very ones that lend themselves to an open organization. But at this point two essential factors come into play: the nature of the medium and its social purpose—in other words, its syntax and its audience. It is precisely because of the chance nature of its material that, in order to keep some control, live TV resorts to the most traditional and dependable forms of organization, the most Aristotelian ones, determined by the laws of causality and necessity which, in the end, are none other than the laws of verisimilitude.
At one particular point in L’Avventura, Antonioni creates a tense situation: on a scorching hot afternoon, a man overturns an inkstand onto a freshly finished drawing by a young architect. The tension demands to be resolved. A similar situation, in a western, would culminate in a rousing fight that would psychologically justify both the offender and the offended, and motivate their actions. But in L’Avventura nothing happens; the tension is constantly on the point of being resolved by a fight, which, however, never occurs, for both deeds and emotions are eventually absorbed into the physical and psychological weariness that dominates the entire situation.
Such a radical indeterminateness can result only from a «decantation» of the dramatic action. The violation of the most natural (i.e., plausible) expectations is here so deliberate and intentional that it must be the fruit of very rigorous calculation: if everything seems so casual, it is precisely because nothing is.
This effect would be impossible to achieve during the live broadcast of a baseball game, where all the tensions and crises accumulated in the course of one or more innings have to be resolved in the temporary finality of a home run, or an RBI, whatever the case may be (and, failing this, a near home run, with the ball landing
