Meeting Rudolf Arnheim
Storia di un incontro

September 30, 2007
Memorial Service for Rudolf Arnheim
Auditorium Matthaei Botanical Gardens - Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA)

A few words on Rudolf

This is the beginning of the letter I wrote to Rudolf in the summer of 2005 - while I was spending a period of research in the States, in the attempt to reconstruct the wide and deep (and partially hidden) contribution of Arnheim's film theory to the Italian cultural context of the Thirties. A few days later, I had the honour to meet him at Glacier Hills Community. I'd like to say that it was the most impressive and influential meeting of my life so far. I was attracted - and still I am today - by the same passionate way of detecting reality through the unrealistic way to represent it. He discovered that limitations on human perception gave the film-artist the chance to make visible the invisible and, at the same time, to connect the visible to a deeper invisible and spiritual state of things. As he wrote in one of his last articles,

«In the flow of coming and going [of images - even the cinematographic ones], [only the] significant images [of art] provide an indispensable counterweight. They offer a store of lasting meaning, without which we would be helplessly exposed to the flight of transitory happenings»[1].

With Rudolf Arnheim | August 18, 2005 | Glacier Hills Retirement Community, Ann Arbor, Michigan

On that day - even if Margaret [Arnheim's step-daughter] informed me about Rudi's tiredness and his difficulties in communicating -, my bag and my mind were full of ideas and topics to discuss. But the person I met was not a "sacred monster", the "classic theorist" Rudolf Arnheim. I met just a man. I found him very receptive and affable - he strongly liked to hear voices, see colours, leaf through a book, write, touch, peer at faces, speak - even in Italian! It was very hard to go back to the past - he often fixed his sharp gaze into the space of time, trying to remember something vanished yet, like in a "cerebral cinema" in which the "coming and going of images" is hard to stop. He once said:

«Memory does return in time, but the suspicion remains that in the end dying will consist in simply forgetting to live»[2].

When I left his room, he asked me to write him another letter, to come back to visit him again. The human value of that contact was inestimable. That's why I'm here today.

As a young film theory scholar who once met Rudolf Arnheim, I can attest how important his figure could and should still be for the young generations of students and scholars. Not only for the wide and still fertile legacy of his "visual thought" in many disciplines, but also - and above all - for his simple, humble and modest approach both to life and theory. As many memories of Rudolf's ancient Italian friends witness, his philosophy comes out from his way of life, rather than the other way round. He really approached the artistic and aesthetic phenomena with amazement, intensity and freedom, in spite of the dramatic events he had to bear the cost of. As you can read in a number of Rudolf's comments and letters, he has always kept a special memory of his life in Rome and Italy:

«I think of Italy as a home, where we spent the most beautiful years of our life. Those were the years when the deep humanity of the people and its creations taught us what it means to live with dignity»[3].

But today, we have to say that he was the teacher and Italy, ungratefully, was not able to protect his human teaching. In 1990 he wrote to one of his Italian friends:

«Immortality has always seemed unnatural to me. Thus, when I think of the little time left to the aged, I think, quite calmly, of a completed assignment, a closing door, but also of a kind of little treasure that remains available in the memory of those who need it»[4].

We are those who need that treasure and that memory.

Adriano D'Aloia

With Margaret Nettinga-Arnheim and Cor Nettinga | September 30, 2007 | Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor, Michigan

REFERENCES
[1] Rudolf Arnheim, The Coming and Going of Images, in «Leonardo», 33, 3, 2000: 167-168.
[2] Rudolf Arnheim, Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
[3] Rudolf Arnheim - Fedele D'Amico, Eppure, forse, domani. Carteggio 1938-1990, Milan: Archinto, 2000: 33.
[4] Ibidem: 183-184.