デザインの形而上学 : デ・キリコ、キアロスタミ、小津安二郎におけるオブジェの感覚

De Chirico, Kiarostami, and Ozu come from different cultural and artistic backgrounds, work in different contexts, and adopt different media (painting for De Chirico, cinema for the other two). Yet, a subtle thread links them together in the name of a common poetics. The three of them conceive their artistic artifacts as an occasion to discover an alternative dimension of reality, in which sibylline meanings can be revealed. A central feature in this discourse of visual revelation is the way in which it represents objects. De Chirico, Kiarostami, and Ozu all transform things within their texts into a sort of metaphysical device, able to grant spectators access to the “secret” depths of reality. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of some of the most famous paintings of De Chirico, as well as of some of the most significant movies of Kiarostami and Ozu, the semiotic characteristics of such “metaphysical design” can be pinpointed, described, and interpreted. Two of them, in particular, stand out: in De Chirico as in Kiarostami as in Ozu, objects are placed in a visual setting that, on the one hand, tends to bestow a rectilinear, orthogonal aspect to the gestalt of reality and, on the other hand, is articulated by a superposition of both planes and grids. When the three artists place objects within this abstract visual scaffolding, the perceptual effect that emerges from it invites beholders to dismantle the visual and conceptual habits through which the objects are usually perceived, so that they can acquire their typical uncanny and revelatory aura. In the three artists, moreover, this effect is further emphasized by the choice of shadows that, unnaturally shaped, farther confer an aura of metaphysical detachment to the object that they emanate from. Semiotics can describe the meaning effect of these visual arrangements, while cultural semiotics can offer hypotheses about the deep origins of such similarity: perhaps, the way in which the three authors poetically organize the visual discourse surrounding objects ultimately stems from three civilizations (the Italian, the Iranian, and the Japanese one) in which the narrative relation between subject and object, central in the “civilizations of prose” is not as fundamental as the non-narrative relation among objects, central in the “civilizations of poetry”. The article substantiates this claim by providing an unprecedented interpretation of the famous “vase” in one of the most discussed sequences of the history of cinema, the one in Ozu’s Late Spring (晩春 [Banshun]) (1949). The semiotic analysis points out that the sequence cannot be correctly interpreted without taking into account, besides the famous vase, a second mysterious object that Ozu simultaneously shows and conceals in the sequence itself. It is only through taking into account the poetic relations that one of Ozu’s famous pillow-shots establishes between these two objects that the ultimate metaphysical message of the sequence, and more in general of the movie, can be grasped.