“André Bazin said that Cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that accords with our desires.” This is the famous quotation heard in the “spoken” opening credits of Il disprezzo by Jean-Luc Godard. The line keeps coming back to those who have loved the film, as it does to those who go on loving cinema tout court. In Bazin’s line, complex, ambivalent, not immediately comprehensible, lies the mark of a powerful and seductive way of understanding cinema; a thought that ran through the second half of the twentieth century and that shaped generations of cinephiles, enthusiasts and directors.
Cinema creates a world, a world that accords with our desires. In what sense? Perhaps in the darkness of the movie theatre (which is a deliberately “bygone” image: how many films do we still see in a theatre?) we, spectators, have always witnessed the creation of a world that exists only in our – at once private and public – relation with the screen, with the images that flow across the screen. In this sense, then, the gaze of cinema “teaches us to desire”, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, that is, it offers us the possibility of desiring another world, a world set against reality. Or perhaps, again, cinema allows us to detach ourselves from the world and to enjoy, for the duration of the film (its real duration, but also its persistence in our memory), another world, a world different and desirable, opposed to the raw reality that marks our lives. Two forms, two images of desire.
These are not the same thing. On the one hand, desire is a destabilising force, a movement that hopes for or promises a possible world; on the other, the world unfolded by cinema is a refuge-world, a space in which the dream is circumscribed within the theatre, within the space-time of the film. In this case the images are a refuge, an island within which desire can be channelled, lived without risk. On the one hand, cinema as the promise of a world; on the other, cinema as a hallucinated simulation of the world. A double image of desire, then, a double valence of cinema that has accompanied its development in modernity.
These are some of the reflections that accompany the viewing of Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese. The island/prison/asylum in which FBI agent Leonardo Di Caprio investigates the mysterious disappearance of a patient is, in fact, an extraordinary (and desperate) image of cinema, of its ghosts, of its visions, which at once entrap and free the gaze. Shutter Island is a film of ghosts, of visions, of hallucinations. Within the island Di Caprio lives out his double life: the dreamed one (perhaps) of an FBI agent at the centre of a secret plot unfolding on the island, where experiments are carried out on the minds of individuals, and the real one (perhaps) of a former FBI agent who, in order to escape the raw reality of having killed his wife, invents the very plot he has been charged with investigating.
A ghost story, not the first, nor the last. And yet here the ghosts seem to evoke precisely that double valence of cinema – but perhaps every ghost story does – of which we spoke at the outset.

When Di Caprio, at the end of the film, setting out towards the final experiment, declares to his partner (or to his doctor): “Better to die a hero than to live as a monster”, he has made a choice: to live the last moments of his life immersed in illusion, amid the ghosts that present him with a world that accords with his desires. Terrible reality cannot be borne by the gaze, by the mind of the protagonist: he prefers to live by playing out his own character to the very end, immersing himself entirely in the (cinematic) reality that allows him to survive. But the power (and the condemnation) of cinema are here shut within the inaccessible borders (from which there is no escape) of the island, the cinematic place par excellence. The island is at once the place where one flees an unbearable horror (war, the absolute brutality of “real” violence) and where one lives shut up within one’s own hallucination. The vital movement of cinema is by now reduced to a pale memory; the world of images, to the minimal function of survival, as has been said: cinema seems to have lost its liberating function; its space is precisely that of the island, without connection to the outside, to the world, to reality.
The space of the images, of the desired world, is that of the inaccessible island. But it can also be, in a film strongly bound to Scorsese’s (false) thriller – such as Nucingen Haus by Raúl Ruiz – an isolated villa in Chilean Patagonia, where a French couple come to live and discover that they are not alone. Once they arrive, the two spouses find that the house is inhabited by others, strange presences that appear and disappear without warning: ghosts, precisely, the living dead, apparitions, vampires. In the house, beyond whose threshold one must speak only French, and within which every faith is forbidden, only the ghosts live (or survive). Freely inspired by a tale of Balzac’s, Nucingen Haus is in truth a film that refers directly to The Turn of the Screw, perhaps the definitive text on ghosts in Western literature (the film’s protagonist is called William Henry James III, and takes refuge in Chile after winning the villa at gambling, with the secret wish that he might there at last finish his novel…). Here too the ghosts – or perhaps it would be better to say the spectres, the presences at once real and immaterial of cinema – are shut within the space of the villa and appear in the passages opened up by Ruiz’s sinuous and elegant camera movements, behind a door, beyond a window, through a mirror. In the villa one can even marry a ghost – as William Henry James will do in the end – and so satisfy the desire to live beside a beautiful image but, as Bastien, the master of the house, reminds us: “to be beautiful, like being ill, is a feature of the house”. The image here is not only a beautiful and ethereal body but also a sick body, fragile, condemned to repetition, to abrupt movement or to spasm.

The island, the villa. Enclosed places and yet extraordinarily mobile within, rich in hidden rooms, in dark and inaccessible parts, in open spaces that are nonetheless always surrounded by borders, walls, moats. In both films the images do live, yes, but at the cost of the immobility to which they are constrained. Spatial and temporal immobility (in Nucingen Haus the clocks are stopped and always show different hours. In Shutter Island we shall never know how long Di Caprio has really been on the island), the immobility of images.
In Ruiz, as in Scorsese, there runs a powerful nostalgia for cinema (which, paradoxically, has always been one of cinema’s mechanisms of creation), whose images, whose bodies now seem constrained, precisely, to a hallucinatory life, condemned endlessly to satisfy, in a purely pathological sense, the double valence of desire that gave rise to the very fascination of cinema more than a century ago. The ghost-images seem no longer to promise any possible world, seem no longer able to paint another world. Faced with the proliferation of synthetic bodies, of cliché-images, which consign cinema to an endless repetition of artificial forms, to a disappearance of the bodies that constituted its force, these two filmmakers too, in their own way, recount the end of cinema, or rather the end of a possible cinema, of a cinema of the possible, in order to rebuild, slowly and with effort, a space within which those images might still live, even if as hallucinations or as ghosts, as deliriums or as vampires.
The enclosed place, then, the villa, the island, to which we might add the ship – how can one not think of Fellini’s E la nave va? – are these the last images of a vanished world, or one in the course of vanishing? Perhaps it is precisely the opposite. At bottom this has always been the task of cinema: to announce its own end, whether before the tragedies of the twentieth century (as Jean-Luc Godard does in his Histoire(s) du cinéma), whether by virtue of the extreme degree of cinephilia that leads to the destruction of images (as Tarantino does in Bastardi senza gloria), or whether thanks to the utopian and titanic attempt to restore the force of cinematic storytelling through the conscious use of the new digital technologies (as Cameron does with Avatar).
But these extreme places of cinema have always been here with us, spectators of images, and they never cease to remind, to evoke. The very obsession of cinema is to stage ghosts, and it belongs, if one thinks about it, to the cinema of the Max Ophüls of Lola Montés, to the whole cinema of De Oliveira, to the cinema of the Ford of L’uomo che uccise Liberty Valance and to that of the Antonioni of Il mistero di Oberwald, to the interiors of Ozu and the medieval castles of Kurosawa, to the beaches of Barnet (In riva al mare più azzurro) or of Renoir (La donna sulla spiaggia), and again to so many names, places and films that have made and go on making the history of cinema. The nostalgia of Ruiz or of Scorsese is thus no different from that which has always run through the images of the great creators of cinema throughout the entire history of the seventh art.
The island and the villa are (and always will be) places of cinema, as are the circus, the theatre, the desert, the sea, the mountain. They are places of cinema because they are places of the world, of that world which, as Bazin never tires of repeating, “accords with our desires.”

Daniele Dottorini teaches Fundamentals of Cinema at the University of Calabria. His publications include: Filmare dall’abisso. Il cinema di James Cameron, (Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2013), Jean Renoir. L’inquietudine del reale, (Ente dello spettacolo, Roma 2007), David Lynch. Il cinema del sentire, (Le Mani Editore, Recco, Genova, 2004).