You are on page 1of 26


Ismail Xavier
a) The new status of allegory
Since the early seventies, when Walter Benjamin ideas on modernity gained
special attention in literary theory and film studies, the reevaluation of allegory - not only
as a language trope but above all as a key notion in the characterization of the crisis of
culture in modernity - has become a significant topic of research and cultural debates.
Contemporary theory has established an essential connection between allegory and the
vicissitudes of human experience in time. A sense of history as implying an uninterrupted
process of production, change and dissolution of meanings desauthorizes old conceptions
of signs and discoursive practices as able to produce universally valid and stable
interpretations that would have an organic and necessary connection with the ultimate
truths of life. Modern culture is haunted by the radical assumption of instability, and
condemned to explore what is implied in the acnowledgement that the meaning of signs specially of complex combination of signs - can be forgotten, displaced and twisted when
they, impelled by historical forces and power systems, have to face new cultural contexts.
This new awareness of instability only enhances an old perception of the problematic
character of signifying processes, a perception that nowadays is taking us away from the
lost paradise of transparent languages.
Allegory has come to the foreground, and one strong reason for its reawakening in
modern times is the fact that it has always been the signifying process mostly identified
with the presence of mediation, with the idea of a cultural artifact that requires specific
frames of reference to be read, something that remains at a distance from any sense we
may have of the natural. Moreover, allegory has acquired its proeminence in criticism
because the accumulation of historical experience related to cultural shocks, slavery,
repression and violence has shown its central role in the interaction of different cultural
systems. The conflict of interpretations concerning basic values and canonic texts is a
territory within which opposed traditions must confront or conciliate, struggle for their
purity and domination, or converge to create a new configuration of values and life style.
Allegories usually rise from controversies. In ancient times, it was the debate on
the legitimacy of mythic narratives in the Greek world that became a privileged occasion
for the develoment of alllegorical strategies of reading to account for a new conception of
the function of myths in culture and society. And it was through a particular kind of
allegorical reading of the Jewish Bible that the Fathers of the Christian Church set the
ground for the new religion and built its conception of history.1 Later, in its effort to
universal validity and domination, Christianity has submitted different kinds of symbolic
systems and religious artifacts to allegorical readings meant to inscribe the Other within
the Christian frame of reference. In similar ways, in different moments of a multifocal
historical process the dialectics of identity and alterity has instanciated a variety of reading
strategies by which new meanings were ascribed to old signifiers, and many cultural

See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representations of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1974), and Jean Ppin, Mythe et allgorie: les origines grecques et les contestations judochrtiennes (Paris, tudes Augustiniennes, 1976).

hegemonies were built over the ruins of defeated symbolic systems, in a process that
followed, although in complex ways, the material struggle and the will of winners2.
I say complex ways because not only particular cultural features but also overall
cultural systems can outlive the material defeat of their subjects, as we are used to say
about Greek culture at the times of the Roman Empire, and as we are learning to say about
the cultural features that came from Africa and have been showing all their strength in the
contemporary Americas, having outlived centuries of colonialism and slavery. Allegory is
not an one-way-street process. If Christians allegorized pagan culture, to submit it, the
Others could and effectively used similar strategies to give continuity to their own
traditions - under disguise when the times were too hard, as it happened in Brazil with the
African slaves who gave continuity to their religious traditions and rituals under the cover
of Catholic saints and images3.
Within this general process of change and confrontations, modern history, with all
its accelerated transformations, has shown how, in society, specific unifying principles that
provide, to a large group of individuals, the sense of sharing an identity depend on cultural
constructs - like the idea of nation, for instance. Together with the economic and
institutional support coming from a pratical level, nation is something that is produced by
narrations and other forms of representations, implying a particular blending of historical
ground and mythic accounts of past experiences4. We are all familiar with the typical
mobilization of allegorical narratives in which the lives of particular individuals are
presented as figuring the foundational moment or the destiny of a group, or in which the
recapitulation of the past is taken as a disguised discussion of present dilemmas5.
Novels from the nineteenth century6and films from our times, like Griffiths
Intolerance, John Fords The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Fritz Langs Metropolis,
Glauber Rochas Land in Anguish, Fassbinders The Marriage of Maria Braun, the
Taviani Brothers Good Morning Babylon, Manoel de Oliveiras Non: A V Glria de
Mandar - give us examples of intended national allegories. Dealing directly with present
issues and experiences, or connecting past and present in different ways, they show the
variety of allegorical strategies available for the filmmaker to thematize the position of his
or her country in human history. The representation of national destinies through an
encoded story-telling process is a recurrent fact in film history. Both First and Third World
films have offered us different versions of the so called overt allegory - when the
reference made to the national experience results from an intended process of encoding the
message. Moreover, the presence of national allegories in film history goes beyond the
examples of overtly intended encoding, as the observation of films teach us, and the

For allegorical strategies and projects of colonial and neo-colonial domination, see Ella Shohat and Robert
Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York, Routledge, 1994), specially the
chapter Tropes of Empire: 137-177.
See Robert Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism: a Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and
Culture (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997).
(London, Verso, 1983)., and Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London, Routledge, 1990).
Danton, made by Andrej Wajda in 198 , is a clear example of the use of the background provided by the
French Revolution to discuss present politics in Poland and Eastern Europe. The debate on Young Mr.
Lincoln launched by the critics of the Cahiers du cinma in the 1970s involved a dispute about the films
allegorical references to the 1930s political scene in the U.S.. For other examples, see Robert Burgoynes
Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

In the case of Latin American literature, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances
of Latin America (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993).

examples given in my text will make evident. There are overt and unconscious
allegories, and even a
preliminary consideration of this question shows how the intervention of a competent
reader is decisive in the process. To assert an allegorical dimension in a text, one has to be
able to perceive homologies in specific directions, and national allegories require the
perception of private lives as representing public destinies.
This question of the readers capacity to grasp the collective and political
dimensions that are not on the surface of the story-telling process has been at the center of
a recent polemics involving allegory in contemporary fiction. According to Fredric
Jameson, this kind of perception has been inhibited by the dominant logic of postmodern
culture, specially when one thinks of literary production and its audience7. For him, the
separation of the private and the public spheres has produced, in First World countries, a
kind of literary fiction less concerned with politics, one that circulates in a cultural context
where readers, on their part, are not concerned with national questions. In contrast, he calls
our attention to what he considers a primacy of national allegories in Third World
literatures. Jamesons contentions about national allegories rework the question of the
competent reader, stressing the intimate connection they have with specific reading
practices, and giving particular emphasis on the role of social structures that can allow for
and even encourage allegorical interpretation while others can inhibit it. His controversial
step is his assumption of a clear divide separating two dominant modes of literary
production and interpretation, each closely corresponding to a certain stage of social and
economic development. His suggestive discussion of the connection between reading
practices and society ends up resulting in a schematic view of Third World societies and
culture, and the idea of national allegory as something Thirdworldish has revealed itself
equally reductive in its image of underdeveloped countries, fact that provoked negative
reactions in critics, specially from Third World countries8.
My purpose here is not to give a full account of this controversy involving
Jameson and his contenders; I only take it as another evidence of how critics cannot
discuss allegory without dealing both with the structure of texts and their reception within
specific cultural and social contexts. The dynamics of expression (production) and
interpretation (consumption) is usually complex, even in those cases in which producer and
reader share the same references and are able to close the circle of encoding and decoding
without much noise in their communication. Jamesons article made allegory come
again to the center at a time literary criticism had already made familiar the distinctions
between the overt and the unconscious allegory or, speaking in more general terms,
between the authors understanding of his/her own text and what the readers make out of it.
In its own way, the consideration of allegory always leads us back to some of the major
questions derived from the more complex nature of interpretation within the literary (and
art) system implicated in a modern culture already inflected by the debates involving the
intentional fallacy W.K. Wimsatt) and the death of the author (Michel Foucault).
The interesting debates derived from Jamesons polemic text are part of a more
general discussion that has taken place not only in the English speaking world but also in
other linguistic contexts, usually involving the dispute about the political efficiency and/or
the aesthetic legitimacy of allegorical strategies when they are used to raise social
questions, or involving the dispute about the particular affinities between the modern idea

See Fredric Jameson, Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, in Social Text 15
(Fall 1986): 65-88.
See Aijaz Ahmad, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, Social Text 17 (Summer
1987): 3-25.

of nation and the allegorical mode. In my presentation of the notion of allegory, I take
Walter Benjamins ideas and the recent debates on allegory and politics as major
references for my understanding of the status of allegory today, but I cannot stick either to
Benjamins formulations or to the contemporary controversies. Although central today,
Benjamins notion is far from being the exclusive formulation of the problem, and one has
to trace the history of allegory to provide the framework for a clearer understanding of his
original contentions, and for a better account of the current debates as well. The discussion
of allegory started a long time ago and, as Angus Fletcher pointed out, allegory is a protean
notion that changes its definition and value according to the cultural context9. One has to
deal with that multiplicity.
Different conceptions of the allegorical process can be found in our times
depending on the specific location of a text within the cultural process (one should add
but not depending exclusively on the geographical location of a text, as a Third World or
a First World art work). Allegory, in its modern form, has taken part in the construction of
high modernism with its reflexive stance, in the making of complex works endowed with a
sharp consciouness of language; on the other hand, allegory, in its more traditional forms,
takes part in the everyday routines of mass media production, particularly in the works
inscribed in the tradition of popular genres - horror films, science-fiction, melodrama,
western, film noir, musical comedies.
Keeping in mind all these instances of the practice of allegorical expression and
interpretation, I will present here a brief discussion of some structural aspects of allegory
as a mode of discourse, introducing historical information that helps us to understand its
mechanism and its most common motivations within the cultural process. In other words,
how allegories function and what kind of demand most allegories try to answer. Something
will be said here about the internal logic of the allegorical way of producing meaning - the
relationship between signifier and signified - but I will not be engaged in a technical
debate on the synchretic semiotics of image-and-sound.
It is well established in history how allegory can circulate through written texts,
pictorial images, icons, and practically all kinds of discourses, from art works to
advertising slogans and political speeches. In the twentieth century, cinema is part of the
texture of our culture. It can assert values and produce meaning in a variety of ways, and
allegory is implied both in experimental films more related to non-narrative modes of
structuring imagery and in more conventional film genres. When conveyed by a narrative
film, allegory is not simply produced by a story-telling process involving agents and
actions, but also results from visual compositions that, in many cases, set a clear dialogue
with particular iconographical traditions, ancient and modern. According to the particular
editing strategy addopted, a filmmaker can privilege the horizontal, narratological,
succession of shots to create specific space-time structures of action, or can privilege the
vertical relationships created by the interaction of image and sound, or created by the
intertextual connections between the pictorial composition presented by the film and
cultural codes that come from painting and photography. Therefore, reading allegory in
films is always a multifocused cultural gesture, and it requires the capacity to explore what
it is suggested both by the horizontal sucession of shots and by the vertical effects of visual
compositions or cultural codes imbedded on its sound-track.
I begin with a description of diffferent kinds of allegory, presented in connection
with the historical context in which they first took place. Then I refer to different examples
of the allegorical process in cinema.

See Angus Fletcher, Allegory : the Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1970).

b) Allegorical intention and interpretation

Classic tradition lends us a notion of allegory - ethimologically allos(other) +
agoreuein (to speak in a public place) - as a kind of utterance in which someone says one
thing meaning another, makes manifest something to allude to something other. This
definition is too generic, identifying allegory among other figures of speech that Ancient
Rhetorics systematized; it does not help us that much in our contemporary discussion. The
only essential thing implied by this generic notion is the idea of a gap between the spirit
(meaning) and the letter (words), the sense that a certain utterance points to a concealed or
disguised meaning beyond its apparent content. One finds here the acknowledgement of
language as a non transparent instance of meaning, a place of conventions and
contextualized processes that mediate the connection between words (or images) and lived
experience. Nevertheless, that shortened definition does not say anything about the
structure of allegorical speeches, or texts, or images. We keep asking what, within the text,
signalizes those other meanings, or where the marks of the allegorical intention can be
found by the reader.
When we look for these signs or marks, we imply that we can clearly discriminate
allegory from what is not, and we assume that the allegorical interpretation on the readers
part corresponds to an allegorical intention at the source of the message. This does not
usually occur. The answer to my first question about the marks of the allegorical discourse
would be simple if one could conceive allegory as an intrinsic property of a text or image.
But the nature of language is such that sometimes there is no sign of an allegorical
intention that can be fingered by whoever reads a text or looks at an image. Polissemy,
ambiguity and the well known debates that involve the legitimate reading of many texts
from our cultural tradition make it clear how that chain involving intention-utteranceinterpretation is complex and creates effects that are not controlled by the sender of any
message whatever the texts structure. We live within history, and experience all kinds of
cultural interactions; the conditions under which we carry on the practice of reading
change in space and time.
The dynamics provided by the very nature of allegory undoubtedly allows for,
under specific conditions, an identification of encoding processes by which a poet creates
allegorical effects using deliberalely certain techniques reasonably detected by a trained
reader who shares his/her cultural background. But this hypothesis corresponds to very
particular cases; it is not the rule of allegory in history. In the theory of allegory, these
questions have been raised since the beginning, either in Greece or in the Jewish tradition,
and they were seen as intimately connected with the basic sources of allegorical practice.
The Middle Ages established a tradition of underlining the difference between allegorical
expression (the so called allegory of the poets) and allegorical interpretation (the so
called allegory of the theologians). At that point, the difference between allegory as a
writers performance and allegory as a readers performance was stated to acknowledge
the distinction between an utterance produced by an identifiable historical subject endowed
with specific talents and methods that would give concrete form to an intention, and
utterances found in canonical and traditional texts within the culture, texts that had been
produced in a remote past and had come from non clearly identifiable sources, requiring
specific ans debatable techniques of reading.
Allegorical expression meant the particular rhetorical strategies set, among others,
by Greek and Latin poets who encoded their verses and were ablr to perform a relatively
controlled construction of disguised meanings, indirect language. Here allegory is a secular

practice, a poetic mode of representation among others. Allegorical interpretation meant

specific strategies of reading set around the fifth century AC by the philosophers who
understood that the corpus of Greek mythology could not be accepted as a literal truth or a
constellation of narratives that referred to real facts from the past, but should be read as a
body of disguised messages conveying ancient wisdom and the basic values of Greek
culture. This new understanding - the separation of the spirit from the letter - was a
symptom of a crisis in the cultural status of mythology. The old narratives were not seen
any longer as accounts of true facts or the real behavior of the gods. They were just the
product of a story telling practice whose value lied on the understanding of myths as
conveyors of a conceptual knowledge made sensible by the narrative. This crisis affecting
the status of ancient narratives implied a dialectics of devaluation (the myths are pure
fiction) and recuperation (as fiction they, however, carry the decisive lessons about the
essential truths of the culture, although only after competent interpretation).
Taking visible stories and deeds as figures that stand for concepts, the
philosophers inaugurated a technique of reading that implied that agents in narratives can
be seen as Personifications. They are bodily equivalents for abstract thought. The myth of
Saturn eating his sons can be read as an allegory for the concept of Time. If Saturn is Time,
Apolo is the Sun, Athens is the intellect, and Neptune is the deification of water, to
mention some examples of what Jean Ppin calls the physical allegorism of the Stoics. But
Ppin also tells us how allegory, when viewed by other philosophical schools, could have
an ethical dimension, as it happened when Tantalus was taken as the allegory of greed,
Achilles as the personification of friendship, and Sysifo as a peculiar personification of
ambition, always failing in his attempt to stay at the top10.
From Ancient Greece on, we have seen this kind of reading being performed in
many different cultural contexts and based on many different conceptual frameworks.
What is common is the idea that a story (conveyed by a speech, or a written text or a film)
or an image (a pictorial composition, like Caravaggios portrait of Fame, or the emblems of
the Renaissance and Baroque cultures) has a concept, an idea or a moral that it embodies.
Other examples of pedagogical narratives that feature Personifications can be taken from
the medieval tradition, like the battles of Virtues against Vices, of which Psychomachia,
the narrative poem written by Prudentius, is a well known example. In terms of film, D.W.
Griffiths The White Rose, made in 1923, is a good example of a reworking of the
principles of Psychomachia adjusted to a modern story of sin and repentance. In this
connection, one can also mention La Fontaines fables, or the modern practice of
melodramas with their central conflict of Good and Evil. In modern times, the atmosphere
created by the industrial revolution and accelerated technical developments in Europe have
engendered allegories dealing with the dangerous powers put at mans disposal by
scientific progress, featuring a personification like the Frankenstein. Other fears coming
out of the labirynths of urban life in the twentieth century found expression in a gallery of
geniuses of crime seen as the perverse embodiment of privileged intellect. Fritz Langs
Mabuse is a good example of this personification of the shadowy side of modern
technology and urban development, a kind of inauguration of the series of conspiracy
theory films that Hollywood cinema has been reworking along the century, with a gradual
intensification of the abstract, invisible and relatively autonomous intelligence systems. In
this connection, Fredric Jameson pointed out how the compression of space and time
produced by postmodernity, together with the concentration of the world power in a few
imperial nations that can act in a global scale, gave a new impulse to what he calls

See Ppin, op.cit., p.145.

conspiratorial texts, too schematic allegories in which totality features as conspiracy,

involving complex networks of high tech systems and a sinister bureaucratic
Apart from this less obvious allegorical turn fostered by the sense of labirynth one
feels in contemporary society, one can refer to other kinds of more traditional film genres
in which a character-oriented classic narrative produces a set of industrialized
personifications - one can call them stereotypes. Here, simplified views of social problems,
or reductive explanations of the forces acting upon reality, place on certain characters
shoulders the burden of representation, either of an entire class, or an ethnic group or a
nationality. The specific physical, psychological and moral features of a single character
are very often taken as belonging to a class (a worker and his/her personal qualilties
becoming the Worker), or a gender (a particular woman becoming the Woman) or an
ethnic identity (the African, the Latino, and so on). Stereotype, undoubtedly, has an
allegorical dimension and, one must say, of the worst kind, since it corresponds to those
cases in which a general idea (preconceived idea) is illustrated by a given particular
simulation worked out to fit peoples prejudices against the Other. In fact, stereotype and a
variety of readings oriented by prejudice are among the best examples of interpretations
that result from a point of view located at a distance from the targeted subject. They
symptomatically uncover some of the readers predicaments that are usually projected
upon who or what is under observation (be it a class, an ethnic group, a gender or an entire
nation). Here we find a case in which the reader and his/her cultural bias - that is to say, the
pole of interpretation - is the major instance responsible for the allegory.
Social groups can be seen as embodying moral values like Good and Evil. And
certain historical scenes or faces can be seen as emblems ( one could say allegories) of
Reason, like those analyzed by Jean Starobinsky in The Emblems of Reason, book that
focuses on the iconography related to the eighteenth century Enlightment and the French
Revolution12. Many national allegories are based on Personifications, either when a single
character is taken as standing for the nation -- like Maria Braun, Alexander Nevsky, -- or
when the very idea of the nation comes from familial associations condensed in
expressions like Mother Russia or Mother India. And one can add to the allegorical realm
all kinds of readings addressed to natural phenomena as expressing the action of cosmic
entities understood as subjetivities, gods or godesses. This very common, and sometimes
unconscious, process of Personification is very frequently identified with allegory per se
(as the example of fables featuring animals suggests), but allegory, as a mode of
representation, is more complex than this single mechanism, despite this latters position as
the most popular instance of the allegorical process, frequently found in mass media
Personification can emerge from a narrative or from a single image, and its
detection in the texture of a message isnt obvious or always planned by the source of the
message; even this most canonical process of allegory involves different degrees of
ambiguity involving the multiple relationship between expression and interpretation, these
two poles of the allegorical experience that only present a term to term correspondence in
restricted pedagogic fables based on well acknowledged similarities.
The most interesting instances of allegory are those derived from the sense that
the surface of the text either gives unsatisfactory answers to the readers indagations or
remain too enigmatic, giving room for the recognition of the opacity of language and

Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington,
University of Indiana Press, 1992).
See Jean Starobinsky,

turning the search for a concealed meaning a kind of imperative. Apart from mythical
narratives, we are all familiar with fragmentary utterances, apparently interrupted
messages, suggestive juxtapositions of images that would remain enigmatic or seen as
completely illogical if our reading would only consider what is literally there on the
surface. The prestige of allegorical exegesis comes from its presenting itself as solving a
difficult problem, as illuminating decisive aspects of the text that are at the root of
The performance of this kind of reading depends heavily on a capacity to perceive
analogies, correspondences that, in modern times, are not easily inserted in culturally
acknowledged lines of causation. Fact that makes some authors propose allegory as a mode
of expression and interpretation more akin to a pre-modern mentality - either from the
Middle Ages or Renaissance - due to the fact that those periods were more attentive to the
analogies that are frequently at the core of allegory. This hypothesis of an elective affinity
involving the sensibility for allegory and specific historical times can be true, but it would
be a mistake to understand the historical changes that fostered modernization as an
evolution from magic to rational though , correlate to the passage from allegory to realism.
The disenchantment of the world - implied in the development of scientific thought and
the overall process of rationalization pointed out by Max Weber - does not mean the end of
allegory. Scientific theories - like psychoanalysis -- create their own system of reference
for the construction of allegories (and personifications) in order to solve enigmas and go
beyond the surface of gestures or words, as it is clearly expressed in formulae like Father
figure, Oedipus complex, or in the topology made of Ego, Id and Super-Ego.
In cases in which scientific theories provide systems of reference for allegorical
interpretations of fictional texts, the acts of reading, most likely, do not fulfill any
supposed allegorical intention. Those are normally instances of unconscious allegory
where the latter cannot be seen either as an intrinsic property of the text or as the product
of a writers intention. Here the allegory results from specific reading strategies that,
whatever their consistency in the face of the text (or fact) under scrutiny, depend heavily
upon the context of reading itself. In this sense, allegory becomes the very expression of
the historicity of human experience and values, even when there is, at its root, an impulse
to achieve a timeless truth. The history of allegory itself presents a key moment in which a
particular method of reading historical facts, or supposedly historical facts, tries to
conciliate the imperative of fixed truths with the acnowledgement that time is an
essential dimension of human experience. This method engendered a kind of allegorical
reading that had a clear impact in human history in the last 2000 years. I am referring to
the rise and consolidation of Christianity by means of an original performance of reading
addressed to the Jewish Bible in order to turn it into a set of narratives and specific
imagery bearing the signs , the prophecies, of the advent of Christ as the Messiah.
The Christian figural realism, to use the terms borrowed from Eric Auerbach,
states that two historical facts, widely separated in time, illuminate each other and show a
specific connection that confirms the idea of a design in history, Gods Design. The first
fact prefigures the second, which is announced by it, fulfilling the prophecy already
stated in it. Moses prefigures Christ, since his act of leading his people to salvation from
slavery in Egypt is an anticipation of the act of Christ who, through his sacrifice, saves all
humankind. Another form to refer to this allegorical operation is typology, or the
vertical relationship established by the type and anti-type, complementary figures that
occur in different moments of history but are the reiterated signs of the unfolding of a
teleological process in time. What is essential in this Christian conception of allegory is its
temporal dimension. We go from a historical fact to another, in contrast with the

connection between a narrative and a non-temporal abstraction found in the Greek

understanding of allegory. An entire set of relationships is opened by this allegorical
reading, beginning with the sense that the cosmic order provides human history with an
internal logic that leads the succession of apparent disconnected facts toward a specific
final term - the Telos. This conception will have many consequences in Western thought,
specially in the development of a historical consciousness that opposes itself to the circular
view of time in Classic culture. In modern fiction, it will be present in many novels and
films as a guiding principle presiding over the characters destiny, having particular
strength in works in which the set of determinations defining the unfolding of the plot
includes the idea of Providence, this hidden force that can save the heroes and help them to
punish the villains, assuring the triumph of Justice at the end. Canonical melodramas from
the nineteenth century popular theater and from industrial cinema, specially from the silent
period of cinema, follow this guiding principle. Usually, the exaggerated appeal to
coincidence in the overall design toward salvation is one of the typical marks of
Providential fictions that, even when exposing a tapestry of realistic presentation of facts,
make evident their allegorical overtone in the way they shape the characters final destiny.
Considering the Christian allegory in its primary formulation by the Fathers of
the Church, we can see it as a modality of allegorical interpretation addressed to given
texts produced in a remote past under unknown circumstances by unknown authors, texts
that are endowed with a sacred dimension within the culture. Allegorical interpretations
addressed to remote or sacred texts, wharever their content and context, usually satisfy a
demand for identity and continuity in time, revealing an impulse to heal the gap between
the present and a disappearing past which, without interpretation, would be otherwise
irretrievable and foreclosed13.
The examples commented on so far suggest how, whatever its method, the process
of allegorical reading involved, in the past, an operation of unveiling the concealed truth, a
sense that meaning had an origin in the past and the work of interpretation corresponded to
a removal of the layers set by time, providing the conditions for the revelation of naked
truths. Nowadays, different kinds of reading can be performed without the old concerns for
the degree of consciousness or intention experienced by the supposed subject who is taken
as the source of the message. In our cultural process readers are not searching for
intended or conscious meanings, but for those things that the interpreter can say at the
occasion of his or her encounter with the text, encounter that, on the other hand, cannot be
seen as a dual (reader plus text) relationship, isolated from all kinds of contextual
influences. If today, the text is seen as acquiring different and sometimes unexpected
meanings regardless the intentions of the author, the dominant reading practices tend to
inscribe it within a network of intertextual connections that also form part in the
interpretation. The very nature of this process foster allegorical strategies that refer the
given text (or narrative) to a Master Code or Narrative taken as a key reference. In this
sense, it is curious to see various scientific or para-scientific theories replace the Bible as
the Great Code that readers take as the guide for interpretation. As pointed out above,
different conceptual systems - psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, Marxist social
theory, physics or biology - can be the reference mobilized by the reader to interpret some
passages or an entire text that can become an allegory of class struggle, or an allegory of
the formation of the subject, or an allegory of language itself when allegory is set in
motion by deconstrutionist readings.


Joel Fineman, The Structure of Allegorical Desire, October (Spring 1980): p.49.

Once stated that allegory is not necessarily an intrinsic property of a text, one can
ask whether or not this makes any formal analysis addressed to the structure of texts
useless for the discrimination between allegory and non allegory. Given this question, one
might simply state that the structure of the text is neutral, non relevant for allegory - but
this would be a bad answer. One would better acknowledge the importance of form and
syntax with the condition that, instead of speaking of a text with an allegorical structure
as opposed to texts with no allegorical structure, one should propose the distinction
between texts which , by their structure, most likely will be submitted to a kind of
allegorical reading, and texts which, by their structure, will not present a strong invitation
to a further decipherment which might occur anyway. In this sense, the more enigmatic a
text the bigger its chance to provoke allegorical interpretations. Texts that give us a sense
of incompleteness or fragmentation (the sense that something is lacking) are more akin to
the allegorical reading than texts which seem clear and satisfactory in a first reading. This
line of answer is what is implied in Angus Fletchers discussion of allegory. On the one
hand he makes the connection between an invitation to allegorical readings and
incompleteness, opacity; on the other, he states that typically naturalist narratives, like
those found in classical cinema, with a clear, amusing and easy-reading story-plot, are also
entitled to allegorization. In other words, there are structures that lend themselves to a
secondary reading more convincingly than others, but any text can be submitted to what
Northrop Fry calls alegorises, such a move from narrative and images to ideas and
concepts, because after all this is the canonical task of critics.
c) the dialectics of fragmentation and totalization
Angus Fletcher comments on the discontinuous nature of allegorical imagery.
While discussing the analytic frame of mind into which allegory forces its reader, he
reminds us that any fragmentary utterance takes on the appearance of a coded message
needing to be deciphered14. His contention implies a connection between allegory and
incompleteness that goes beyond the modern configuration of the process, reminding us of
the theological disputes derived from the lacunas perceived in sacred texts. The traditional
conception of allegory as a text to be deciphered impplied the idea of an a priori
concealed meaning, conception that turned the production and reception of allegory into
a circular movement composed of two complementary impulses, one of concealing the
truth beneath the surface, the other of making the truth emerge again. It is this circular
movement that is posited by Jean Ppin in his understanding of the dynamics of allegorical
expression and interpretation already pointed out here. Ppins analysis is more concerned
with theology. realm in which the fragmentary utterance is seen as something akin to an
intentional disguise, necessary for the safeguarding of truth. Sacred texts present
various degrees of concealment in order not to be understood by the uninitiated, or their
allegorical dimension is seen as fulfilling a pedagogical function, since the disguising
surface is understood as a stimulus to the reader, increasing the pleasure of revelation after
the efforts of decoding.
The encoding of messages, understood as a deliberate concealment, can present
similar operational schemes regardless the motivation behind the allegorical strategy.
Apart from theological reasons, more pragmatic and less metaphysical reasons are very
often behind the production of disguise, like when we need to avoid or overcome
censorship in a specific political conjuncture. Throughout history, powers (religious or

Fletcher, op.cit,, p. 37.

secular) protected their interest appealing to censorship of texts and images, and allegory
has been a frequently used weapon against authoritarian rules on different levels of human
Considering art works in modern times, critics are suspicious toward calculated
allegories when they result in too obvious didactic fables from which the reader can easily
draw a conventional moral lesson. And their objection to allegory becomes stronger when
disguise and opacity are seen just as a matter of rethorics, not having any special challenge
or any hard question at stake. Apart from those occasions in which there is a clear political
reason giving strength to this kind of allegory as a form of resistance to oppression, the
effect of the encoded message becomes weaker, specially when there is nothing else than
an obvious intention of embelishment. Away from the political arena and its immediate
challenges, the rethorics implied in pedagogical allegory faces the danger of reducing art to
a schematic although elegant illustration of known ideas, a piece addressed to our senses
but more engaged in the communication of worn out ideas or a given abstract theory. As
illustration, allegory would be an exploration of terrains already mapped, a confirmation of
establisehd meanings. This is what the romantics saw the neoclassical allegory doing, with
its subordination to conventional thought.
In defence of their own creative process, the romantics gave privilege to the
symbol, a form of expression that would offer a particular experience for which there is no
theoretical system. For them the symbol epitomizes an organic movement toward
expression. Through the irredutible experience of the art work, one could have access to a
truth which could never be grasped using other channels. In opposition to allegory as they
conceived it, the symbol corresponded to a fresh and genuine intuition about experience.
Untranslatable into concepts, the symbol has its own value and original meaning, resulting
from a process that provides a direct expression of human experience in a revealing text,
object or image. As Goethe says, in the allegory we go from the general concept to the
particular configuration presented to the senses, while in the symbol we go from the
particular (sensible) to the universal idea without the help of established conventions. This
distinction can be seen as a reductive definition of allegory, conceived to fit the romantic
strategy of defence against classicism; however, in its own terms, it had a enormous
ressonance in the aesthetic debate since its formulation in the late eighteenth century. Just
to remember one example, I can refer to Georg Lukcs who grounded his aesthetic theory
in the distinction between symbol and allegory placed by the Romantics, and criticized the
fragmentation of modern art. This, in its incapacity for totalizing, would be a new version
of the allegorical enterprise that appeals to transcendent principles to talk about social
experience. In opposition, Realism, as a form of representation, would be akin to the
symbol (as conceived by the romantics) in its power to grasp the historical movement of
society in its immanence, providing an organic and illuminating expression of totality.
Given this formulation, it was not an accident that Lukcs, when he wrote Problems of
realism in the 1950s, turned a polemical dialogue with Benjamins The Origin of the
Baroque Tragic Drama (1916) a central issue in his book15. On the one hand, he
acknowledged Benjamins acute characterization of the baroque (and its affinities with
modern art); on the other, he made clear his disagreement with the philosophers position,
taking the applicability of the notion of allegory to modern texts as all the more reason to
question them.
In our century, the Lukcs vs.Benjamin confrontatoin has been one of the key
chapters of the debate on modern art, and on allegory as well. And its point of departure 15

See Georg Lukacs, Realism in Our Time (New York, Harper, 1964), and see Walter Benjamin,The Origin
of the German Tragic Drama (Loondon, NLB, 1977).

Benjamins dissertation written in 1916 - was a seminal book for the aesthetic thought of
the twentieth century. It combined, in a single movement, various critiques - of the symbol
as conceived by the romantics, of the Christian teleology of history, of the secular version
of this latter embodied by the bourgeois notion of progress, and of the reformist social
democratic theories also based on a teleological view of history.
From Benjamins reflexion on the baroque disenchantment and from his
melancholic view of history as catastrophe, it emerges a peculiar theory of allegory, now
taken as the main expression of the temporal dimension humans experience when seen as
separated from God and condemned to natural decay. Christian ( and Hegelian) teleology
took that temporal dimension as the gradual unfolding of a destiny of salvation in whose
path every pain had a meaning; but Benjamin states that the sense of progress in history
can only be experienced by those who win and dominate others, and in consequence can
take time as the continuous and gradual expansion of the same positive principles. In
opposition to what he characterizes as the winners view, his theory of history is grounded
on the notion of disaster, time as a force of corrosion, destruction. Instead of a
manifestation of embodied Spirit in its path toward self-consciousness and totalization,
history is a realm of suffering and permanent conflict, not a purely logical chain of
constructive events, but a pilling up of violence without a specific direction. There is no
teleology, but only a collection of discontinuous, efemerous, configurations of culture. On
the surface of our planet, time crystallizes itself in ruins that give a fragmentary and
devitalized testimony of past experiences; in the realm of thought allegories do the same,
crystalizing in fragmentary utterances the action of time on culture, emphasizing what
remains incomplete. Allegory does not take our own time or the future as a fulfillment; it
rather reminds us of our own status in the future, we whose traces are bound to be a
fragment among others within a collection of cultural fossils available for allegorical
readings performed at a distance. The allegorist of the future, on his/her part, will perhaps
have a chance to `communicate with our own present depending on specific analogies,
like those existing between modernity and the baroque seveteenth century, both haunted by
a deep sense of crisis, alienation from God or from History taken as a meaningful process.
For Benjamin this is why allegory refuses to provide humanity with an aesthetic
redemption of the world in perfect forms, or beautiful totalities that celebrate an illusory
sense of unity and harmony, but tend to interact with the background of social fractures
and violence that form history, specially when observed from the point of view of the
defeated. For him, the praising of the symbol as the beautiful form that offers an immediate
intuition of Truth is a kind of mythic regression, the residue of Adams legend in Paradise
- harmony between man and his environment - or simply the optimistic rationalization of
the winners.
With his notion of mythical regression applied to more conventional art forms
(like those more frequent in mass media), Benjamin introduces a more politicized version
of the same attack that modernist thought has launched toward the notion of symbol, now
seen as a residue of the age of innocence in its assumption of an organic continuity, close
identification of language and experience, signifier and signified. Modernity has put into
question this transparency, underlining a kind of ineviteble discontinuity between
experience and its expression, between past and present, humankind and nature. An acute
sense of language as bearing a degree of opacity consolidates the sense that interpretation
is always a problematic task, and the modern sensibility, to avoid what it considers past
illusions, has to deal with a multi-levelled gap implied in any reading process: that between
what is given to the senses and its meaning, that between a past which must be read and a
present which must read the past, and that between the first text and a second substitute

text which renders apparently explicit the thought behind the surface. This gap is what, in
its own way, the tradition of theology - conceiving deity as the hidden God ackowledged as the starting point of the allegorical process; but it kept in mind that
totalization and the acces to Truth was in its horizon, provided that one could perform the
corrrect reading of signs and utter the right prophecies. Now the multi-levelled gap
acquires a different sense, coming to the foreground as the beginning and end of the
process.Instead of being attacked or reduced to its more pedagogical versions, allegory is
revalued by Benjamin and his followers, and taken as that privileged process that brings to
light the reiterated tension between the impulse to totalize and its inevitable
incompleteness. The necessary connection between allegory and fragmentation is seen in a
different perspective: the enigmatic surface does not derive from concealment of an
existing meaning; it is rather conceived as expressing the very nature of allegory as a
discourse whose texture is a privileged instance of the consciousness of language.
In this new theoretical framework, the romantic opposition symbol/allegory ,
which degrades allegorical expression as arbitrary, non-organic, mechanical, is inverted.
The idea of an unmediated experience of meaning embodied in the symbol is now seen as
an illusory attempt to forget the mediation of language, and allegory is redeemed as the
discourse which immerses itself into the depths which separate visual being from
This modern conception of the allegorical has derived from the on going
debate that involves different ideological positions within the realm of art criticism, since
the changes in the philosophy of art in this century owes much to artistic practices.
Modernist art elicited the perceptions and critical discourses adequate to its own processes,
and generated the categories adequate to describe it. The modern characterization of
allegory as a fragmented and incomplete discourse matches the view that posits modernist
art as an instance of discontinuity and opacity, incompleteness and ambiguity. The impact
of French Surrealism on Walter Benjamin is well known, and the effect of modern art on
the development of contemporary research concerning the baroque has been
acknowledged. Fletcher cites Surrealism and the work of Eisenstein as vivid examples of
the principle of allegorical juxtaposition, emphasizing their common anti-realist techniques
of isolation (the perfect delineation of contours, the relative autonomy of each image
forming part of the montage).
In terms of filmic structure, the issues of fragmentation, opacity, and discontinuity
arise within the context of the critique of illusionism. The rejection of the dominant codes
in classical narrative, based on spatio-temporal continuity, have been radical to diverse
degrees, bringing to film production a dialogue with modern art that had its special
moments in film history. In its first manifestation, modernism entered the filmic sphere
after World War I, when German Expressionism, the French avant-garde and Soviet
constructivism provided the best examples of a film practice that associated the critique of
illusionism with different, sometimes antithetical allegorical strategies. In Caligari (Robert
Wiene, 1919), new codes of mise-en-scne, scenery and lighting, all taken from the
German theater of the time, were central for the construction of that sense of strangement
coming from its allegorical space and its drama lived by enigmatic characters. And other
experiments made by filmmakers who dialogued with the historical avant-gardes (futurism,
cubism, surrealism) created a more intimate connection between film and the modern
allegorical strategies of space fragmentation, consolidating the montage principle in the
new medium. Surrealist films like Un Chien Andalou (1928), despite all the polemical

Benjamin, op.cit., p.165. Although apparently deconstructive , Benjamins formulation has a different
sense more connected to his concern for theological questions.

claims coming from Buuel in his refusal of any interpretation, has been one of those
instances in which the enigmatic sequence of images and discontinuous action elicited all
kinds of allegorical interpretations, starting with the most directly associated with its
internal logic - the psychoanalytical reading that searched for figures of desire in Bunuels
imagery. In another context of the 1920s, the montage principle typical of the modernist
prose set the groung for Eisensteins intellectual cinema that refused a more conventional
political pedagogy based on classical narrative, and proposed a rich variety of experiments
in film language that led the combination of images to a level of conceptualization rejected
by the Soviet bureaucracy and by film industries everywhere. Instead of a straighforward
narrative, Eisenstein wanted to give his spectators a chance to learn how to think
dialectically based on the way he presented and commented on historical facts. The
sucession of images should not follow a line of action within a continuous space-time, but
a line of conceptual thought concerning the facts evoked on the screen. As it happens in
other allegorical texts, commentary should prevail over narration, discontinuous
juxtaposition of images over continuous evolution of action and drama.
Eisensteins intellectual cinema, as a modernist text, faced a major challenge: to
conciliate its ruptures -- with conventional forms of perception, and with coventional forms
of historical narration as well -- and the pedagogical dimension of a cinema that had to
perform immediate political tasks. On the one hand, his film affirmed the principle of
fragmentation of space and time, giving room for enigmatic juxtapositions of images that
were features of modern allegory that he incorporated in his constructivist way; on the
other, the overall design of each film implied an ultimate move toward totalization, and
toward a clear diagnosis of recent political conflicts that demanded unequivocal imagery
able to express a teleology of history built to legitimize the 1917 Revolution. These were
tensions that made the peculiar drama of his cinema and his thought, as a filmmaker who
engaged very deeply in the purposefulness and the love for the concrete common to
marxism and constructivism, but carried an aesthetic sense not alien to the metaphysical
overtones common to the tradition of religious iconography and the nineteenth century
simbolist art.
Within the context of a narrative-dramatic cinema, the articulation of political
concerns and a modernist enterprise found again a privileged time of manifestation in the
1960s, when the atmosphere created by the politique des auteurs, and particular readings
of the phenomenology imbedded in Italian neorealism, produced a new relationship
between cinema and modern allegory, in the work of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and
Pier Paolo Pasolini. Godard, in particular, placed himself at the crossroad of the Bazinianlike phenomenological approach to images and the montage principle. And he reworked
the montage principle in terms of provocative pop effects created by the mixture of
materials and styles -- high and low, avant-garde and kitsch. Giving emphasis to voice over
commentary, written texts on the screen and documentary-like interviews, he created a new
relationship between the verbal and the visual in cinema, making ironic anti-illusionist
remarks interact with continuous narration or naturalist drama. Intertextuality, a taste for
quotations and some aggressions to conventional cinematic procedures made each of his
films a critical essay on cinema, a conceptual work that mebodied the views of the leftist
filmmaker convinced that a critical cinema (in social terms) could only start with a critique
of cinema itself (in aesthetic terms). Through this deconstructive dimension, Godards
work produced a variety of allegories of cinema, giving more emphasis to a disjunctive
vertical montage in which sound and image collide to produce those estrangementeffects that made the critics approach Godard to Brecht. The filmmaker indeed borrowed
some reflexive strategies from the German playwright, but Godard also searched for new

methods of reflexivity typical of the 1960s, period in which the atmosphere created by Pop
Art, and the challenges brought by the new stages of modernization, engendered a peculiar
taste for quotations, usually taken as a compromise between a critical and a sympathetic
view toward industrialized culture and kitsch. Given Godards style, with its mixture of
different materials -- film genres, high and low culture, narrative and conceptual discourse
-- one can see at work, although in different ways, that same tension found in Eisenstein.
His dialectics of fragmentation and totalization is again a way of dealing with a historical
time. Now the sense of fragmentation comes from the use of collage, mixtures of narrative
genres and materials, while the sense of totalization results from the series of ironical
allusions to French contradictions at the time of the consolidation of a consumer society in
Europe. Those allusions give shape to a general diagnosis of his time that emerges from the
collection of brief commentaries. In this sense, his cinema forms a kind parallel discourse
when examined in connection to Roland Barthess constellation of short essays on mass
media mithology17.
In the U.S., the emergence of an oppositional film culture that reworked the spirit
of the historical avant-garde from the 1920s established, from the late 1940s on, a new
context for allegorical works in the post-Benjaminian modern sense. An independent film
production, more decisively engaged in the development of cinema as an art form, started a
new dialogue with painters, sculptors and poets, as it had happened in the 1920s in works
by Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Luis Buuel and Serguei Eisenstein. A succession of
experiments -- that started with Maya Deren films and developed in a variety of directions
-- made cinema share the vicissitudes of high modernism in its last stages of development.
The American underground cinema, although multiple in style and concerns, has always
involved a gesture of interrogation addressed to cinema as an institution and an art form.18
d) National allegory
Allegory, when observed as an expression of modern sensibility, moves away
from its traditional image as conventional art concerned with pedagogical effects. It
becomes a sign of a new consciousness of history in which the appeal to analogies and to a
vivid memory of the past is now taken, not as the celebration of an identity connecting past
and present, but as an experience able to teach us that repetition is always an illusion, and
old facts, like old signs, lose their original meaning when looked from a new
Seen from our present experience, allegories make evident their vocation to express the
central role played by time in culture and in individual lives. For Paul de Man, they form a
kind of rhetoric of temporality, when the impulse to memorize and identify with a
previous moment (of history, of a personal life) ends up communicating the sense of crisis
and separation from the irretrievable past19.
This modern view that associates allegory with an acute consciousness of time is
most significant in aesthetic theory today, but there is more to say about the role played by
allegories in our century. First, there is the question of spatiality. The process of economic
expansion of globalized markets has been producing a compression of space and time that
affects everyone, and it becomes more difficult to have a sense of ones own experience

See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (

See David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1989).
See Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, edited by C. S.
Singleton (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969)

when one keeps looking att the real world on a local basis. Personal stories became deeply
connected with large scale social processes that are kept beyond individual perception,
establishing clear limits for a kind of narrative concerned with the linear development of a
life story in its continuity guaranteed by a circunscribed person-to-person interaction and a
stable invironment. The logic of lived experience has become more abstract, and modes of
representation based on juxtapositions, discontinuities and on the suggestion of large scale
and invisible networks seem to be more entitled to grasp the logic of a personal action and
its social destiny. Fredric Jameson has commented on these changes and proposed new
developments within the marxist tradition concerned with modes of representation that
should be able to grasp the social process in its totality, at a given moment of history. For
him, one needs to historicize the question of realism, acknowledging that the canonical
forms of realism engendered in the nineteeth century could not accomplish that same
illuminating function today; the social reality that they were able to account for was, in its
internal logic, quite different from present society, belonging to a different stage of
capitalist development. The new configuration of space and time, and the more abstract
nature of the social process in postmodern times turn that realist form unable to account for
totality, creating the demand for new art forms able to offer, nor perhaps a representation
in the classic sense, but a lucid cognitive mapping that help us to lively understand the
ways of society and our position within it. In his view, the challenges brought by
postmodernity foster a revision of the entire question of allegory, and of its dialectics of
fragmentation and (nowadays maybe impossible) totalization20.
One of the challenges brought by the contemporary scene is its effect of
destabilization of otherwise consolidated categories in the political and aesthetic spheres,
like that of nation, together with its correlates: national culture and national literature, art
or cinema. Nationalism had its most powerful moment in Europe and in the U.S. in the first
half of this century; from the post-World War II period to the earlys 1970s it became more
directly associated with Third World countries and their struggle for liberation21. Nation, as
a problematic although always a reworked category, has had its vicissitudes in recent
times, but national allegories have remained still present in our contemporary scene,
although in new forms that express how the new configurations of space, time, economic
exchange and political powers created a sense of crisis in this terrain. This is made evident
in films that try to reach encompassing views of contemporary experience, or of politics in
certain regions, through overt allegorical strategies. I can mention films like Underground
(199 ), by Emir Kusturika, Ulysses Dream, by Theo Angelopoulos, the Kieslovski trilogy
that refers to the three collors of the French flag (Blue, White and Red) as related to the
three emblematic values of the French Revolution (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), The Age
of the Earth (1980), by Glauber Rocha, and El Viaje (1991), by Fernando Solanas. The list
could also include inumerous national allegories made in Hollywood, from the Oliver
Stone films to Short Cuts (199 ), by George Altman, Wag the Dog and Primary Collors,
films that express a tense relationship to myths that, in the past, gave support for a certain
self-image of the United States. They present different points of views, more or less critical
of the status quo, but all reveal how a general perception of the nation is crucial for a
thematization not only of clearly political issues but also of private life styles.
The persistence of national allegory and its significant presence in our times
suggest its force within the realm of representation even when the golden years of the

For cognitive mapping see Fredric Jameson, Postmodern, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, Duke University Press, 1991): pp.51-52.
See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1990).

national question are gone. Recapitulating specific moments of film history in which
nationalism had a stronger hand in the shaping of filmic texts, I would like to explore, in
this section, the way in which narratives oriented by a teleological framework found in the
category of nation a privileged sphere within which they could operate and be extremely
effective. Looking back at film production in this century one can see how more
conventional modes of allegorical practice have been showing their strength when they
work in connection with the idea of nation that came to replace the religious doctrines in
the creation of reference-totalities and teleologies.
Specific trends of modernity since the late eighteenth century, nation and
nationalism, as forces shaping representation, motivated and, at the same time, were
produced by many narrations that became canonical texts within the allegorical tradition,
first in the literary realm, later in film. As the historians and political scientists have taught
us, nation is not a substance, or a natural way of subsuming a conglomerate of people
under the same category. Nation is a product of modern times, of market culture and
industrialization, a social construct able to create a sense of totalization, cohesive collective
entity that refers to heterogeneous groups belonging to a complex society at a time in
which the experience of an homogeneous community is out of reach.
When Benedict Anderson(1986) presented his notion of nation as an imagined
community he found a conceptualization of the national question in modern times that
made clearer how nation can be seen as a kind of substitute for religion and other unifying
principles related to the sense of a cosmic order. In opposition to the radical universality
of that eternal order, the nation, in a more determined historical scale, offers guiding
principles that create a sense of totality able to establish an horizon to coordinate certain
collective experiences in time, horizon that is clearly manifested in problematic
expressions like national destiny or national character. As I pointed out in the first
section of this text, nation is one of the instances that solicit personifications in fictional
narratives, and other allegorical strategies as well, confirming its affinities with the sense
of the Sacred, despite its secular roots in modern history. Some of the debates that I have
mentioned in connection with allegory, myth, language and religion can be found again
when we discuss the way in which historical or overtly fictional narratives treat the
national question. This is particularly relevant for film studies, due to the particular role
cinema has been playing within the contemporary public sphere where the question of
national identities is far from being erased.
Film as a popular medium emerged at a time in which nationalism was one of the
forces that were shaping history in Europe and in the Americas, and film history in the first
half of this century was intimately connected with the competition among national powers.
Cinema took part in the expression of national rivalries in Europe and in the construction
of American hegemony after World War I, process that consolidated the United States
domination of Latin America and other underdeveloped regions of the globe. Given this
historical context, film production - like the industrial fairs and the crystal palaces of the
nineteenth century - became one additional instance for the exhibition of national values
and technical achievements within the international arena. Film itself became an index of
modernization and power, making different countries understand their efforts to improve
their cinema as a privileged strategy of national affirmation and, sometimes, celebration of
hegemony. That strategy would find its ultimate fulfillment in cases in which the subject of
the film was national history itself or a disguised representation of a national vocation to
conduct or to save humankind in a time of crisis.
The close connection between film and politics is sometimes taken as something that
became a central issue after the Bolshevik revolution and the emphasis given to cinema by

the rhetoric of Soviet power. But in fact politics and strong national concerns made their
presence in film history since the beginning of the century, paving the way for the first
strong political impact produced by a single film in a national context: The Birth of a
Nation, Griffiths racist film released in 1915. This was an outstanding example of how
film narrative and rhetoric was at that point developed to expose a full argument involving
a theory of American history, a theory of war and a theory of the role reserved to the
different ethnic groups in American society. Griffiths allegory is a blatant lesson on how
to use Personification within a melodramatic and manicheist value system. Intolerance
(1916), his subsequent film, by far more complex and more interesting, again mobilized
certain universal principles that are supposed to govern human history, building a historical
teleology in which a trajectory of centuries was suggested as a succession of different
stages that prepared the emergence and consolidation of the United States in modern
times as the privileged expression of Gods plan, the nation that materializes the basic
principles that will guarantee human salvation in the future. In Intolerance, Providence is
taken as the guiding principle, spiritual force that is made visible through different forms
of typological relationships that connect different characters who lived in distant historical
times. The Christian Passion and the paradigm of blessed motherhood as the vocation to be
fulfilled by all virtuous women are placed at the center of the intertwining of the four
parallel narratives that unfold the Great Design of history: the Fall of Babylon in ancient
times, the Passion, the Saint Bartholemews Day Massacre in sixteenth century France, the
visiccitudes of a young couple in modern United States22.
Other teleological designs that placed a nation at the center of a historical process
were built along film history, and Eisensteins October (1927), a film made to celebrate the
tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, came to confirm the sense of history as
teleology but tried to displace its basic principle, contesting the hegemonic role played by
the category of nation. Here the central category was that of the proletarian state, and class
consciousness replaced national values as the unifying force of people in modernity.
Instead of Providence as the force acting behind the unfolding of the revolutionary
teleology, Eisenstein proposed the idea of Reason as embodied by the revolutionary
leadership, and his recapitulation of the facts that took place in 1917 gave more room for
the exposition of a theory of revolution than for any other aspect of the conquest of the
Winter Palace.
I have already mentioned how this highly intellectualized sense of history, culture
and film language created severe political tensions between the filmmaker and a Soviet
power suspicious of the films modernist aesthetics and its understanding of political
allegories. Eisensteins film is an interesting example of the dialectics of fragmentation and
totalization, continuity and discontinuity typical of modern allegories, fact that, in different
ways, can be detected in other films, including the case of Intolerance, as Miriam
Hansens book has demonstrated. Apart from her discussions of the way Motherhood is
placed as a central moral force in the film, and apart from other illuminating analyses,
Hansen underlines the process by which Griffiths concern with iconography and emblems,
expressed in his emphatic use of tableau-like compositions and extended visual
commentaries throughout the film, collides with his concern with fluent and accelerated
narrative creating a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity in the texture of his film.
Intolerance, with all the awkward passages it contains, is a good example of this mixture
of an impulse toward naturalism (and classical decoupage) and an impulse toward
allegorical constructions based on the graphic isolation of images. Hansens analysis

For an analysis of Intolerance, see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent
Film (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991): pp.127-241.

suggests how the development of film narrative in its formative period involved something
more than the acquisition of skills related to the construction of a naturalist space-time
structure, verossimil action, and psychology. At that time, as it will happen later in film
history, narratives required specific cultural codes to be read, not only logical expertise.
Among those cultural codes, one finds foundational narratives, like the Bible or more
specific cultural artifacts that account for a national past and its values.
Sometimes a central love-story involves a couple whose struggle and final blessed
union is an allegorical allusion to a national destiny as viewed from a restrict perspective,
as it happens not only in Griffith films, but also in many John Ford westerns. In The
Searchers (1956), we cannot fully understand to unfolding of the characters experiences
without referring to the foundational narrative of the conquest of the West - the paradigm
of the transition from barbarism to civilization, the expansion of the nation-state crossing
Native-Americans territory (as represented by the gradual occupation of the diegetic space
by the U.S. Army), the consolidation of law and regular family life after a time of
instability, violence and sacrifice, a time in which legendary transitional figures, like
Ethan, played a decisive role as leaders of the struggle, only to leave the screen at the end
because there is no space for them in the new order they helped to create.
A variety of films made in different countries along film history could be
mentioned as interesting examples of the of incorporation of myth or traditional story-lines
to give shape to an experience lived in the present or even in the future. The genre of
science-fiction is plenty of allegorical references of a national kind. Metropolis, made by
Fritz Lang in 1927, was a first major example of a complex network of past references
informing a fictional story that takes place in the future and aims at a discussion of present.
The story of the young son of the Master who comands the allegorical city brings all kinds
of Christian paradigms, combined with its gray view of the technological society. Its
environment exhibits high technology, sky-scrapers, machines, robotised workers,
alienated life, desumanization - a nighmarish view of industrial society. Nevertheless,
when the story develops we encounter fragments of a gothic scenario in the struggle
opposing Good and Evil, perverse science and good feelings, the pure young virgin and the
femme fatale, father and son. The melodramatic tissue of actions and characters turns the
critique of the desumanization of society into a celebration of the role of a Messiah as the
mensenger of Love. Here again mythical paradigms shape the story-line and the
iconography, suggesting the connections between Metropolis and a specific German
version of Christian piety that had its role in the German modern nationalism23.
If a formal analyses help to characterize allegorical structures and identify their
narrative or iconographical sources, one needs to go further and ask about the meaning that
those narrative paradigms ans traditional imagery acquire when incorporated by a f ilm;
that is to say, we have to understand the film in its connection with its own time, how it
can be taken as an allegory referred to the specific political juncture from which it arose.
Here, our question changes its direction and converge with that kind of inquiry usually
addressed to historical films that, although representations of the past, are taken as a
disguised comment on the present. I refer to those narratives that can be seen as
pragmatic allegories, those in which the underlined analogies between past and present
are taken as a piece of rhetorics, a form of raising a question about the present using the
past, given that the episode focused on by the film had similar issues at its center. In La
Marseillaise (1936), by Jean Renoir, the representation of specific episodes of the French

See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992) :

Revolution was taken as a form of asserting the position of the popular Front in the 1930s
France; in Danton (198 ), by Andrej Wajda, the same historical event is taken as a pretext
to discuss Polish politics of the 1980s; and Land and Freedom (1995), by Ken Loach, takes
the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to present an allegorical representation of the
filmmakers encompassing view of the shape of European history in the twentieth century.
Apart from these pragmatic allegories, there are cases in which, the analogies that
suggest the connection between past and present, are taken as something more than
pedagogical references, and the film gets closer to a radically asssumed figural realism of
the Christian kind (Auerbach), reworking typological relationships as confirmations of the
sacred truth embodied in historical facts that unfold the Great Design administered by
Providence. I have already mentiond Griffiths Intolerance is a major exemple of this.
Intolerance, Metropolis and October are suggestive examples of the construction
of historical allegories that required a magnified visual spectacle conceived as a kind of
national monument. The mobilization of material ressources, technical skills and a
considerable amount of people made visible on the screen allowed for these great
achievements that, among other effects, could be exhibited as a sign of a nations (or of a
social regimes) strength and legitimacy. They are instances of a self-conscious
representation of a nations role within the international order or, to be even broader in
scope, in universal history. From the period of silent movies, another title that comes to
mind in this connection is Napoelon , by Abel Gance, made in 1928, a national allegory
that celebrated the glorious times of the French hegemony in Europe in a monumental
scale, and praised the national spirit and its vocation to lead humanity toward a better
Produced in France, in the U.S., in Germany and in the Soviet Union, that is to
say, , involving the major forces of Western history at that point (with the exception of
England), those outstanding monuments formed a suggestive quartet related to the
exacerbated nationalism of the early twentieth century. Political rivalries among the nationstates (or the socialist confederation) produced their effect on film history, as they would
produce again in the 1930s, when the nationalist monument found its manifestation in
Rienfenstahls Triumph of the Will (1934), Eisensteins Alexander Nevsky (1938) and in
Hollywood films like Gone with the Wind (1939), directed by Victor Fleming.
More recently in film history, Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa
became privileged areas for the production of films concerned with the way in which social
problems and power struggles can be shaped by particular national contexts. From the
1960s on, the rise of different national cinemas turned the film culture of the Third World a
source of new allegorical strategies of representation. Sometimes, like in Sembenes case,
historical films with allegorical overtones, like Ceddo, were part of a discussion of national
politics and culture that included the reflexion on the complex question of building a
national cinema in adverse conditions24. In Latin America, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, the
Third Cinema from Argentina and the Cuban post-revolutionary cinema from the 1960s
took national destiny as one of their central themes. Their social concerns related to
poverty, labor exploitation, old power systems and foreign domination brought a new point
of view on modern history, in opposition to the usually eurocentric perspective expressed
by North-American and European cinema. The decolonization in Asia and Africa, the antiinperialist consciousness raised in Latin America, the Cuban and the Argelian revolutions
were all historical episodes that created a sense of a new source of historical change
coming from the peripheral countries within the international order, fact that made cinema

Phil Rosen

come to the foreground as an instance of the affirmation and discussion of emerging

national values, a key factor in the construction of national identity (this was before
Television started playing this role within the context of mass culture from the 1970s on).
The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of intensive political debate, and film
production became politicized as never before. The ideological atmosphere favored the
effort toward encompassing views or a state of the nationdiscourse. The idea of
Revolution as national liberation fostered the creation of political films that focused on
past events to find examples of struggle and change with suggestive resonances for the
present political movements. They were pragmatic allegories based on analogies that
wanted to raise class consciousness and a willingness to participate in the national struggle
for liberation. The reflexion on history is found in The First Charge of the Machete (1969),
by Manoel Octavio Gomez, a Cuban film that reenacts an episode of the struggle against
the Spaniards in the nineteenth century to assert a postrevolutionary view of Cuban history.
A similar way of approaching past events to comment on the present revolution can be
found in Rebellion in Patagonia(1972), made by Hctor Oliveira in Argentina, or in The
promised Land (1972), made by Miguel Littin in Chile, narrating an episode of popular
struggle that took place earlier in this century as a way of raising some questions about the
politics of the Popular Unity that supported Salvador Allendes government. Inspired by
Brecht, a bitter recapitulation of the past was performed in the Brazilian film, The
Conspirators (1972), made by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. He questioned the behavior of a
group of intellectuals who led a well known rebellion against the Portuguese colonizers in
1789 in order to launch a delicate debate on intellectuals, armed struggle and the guerrilla
warfare that was taking place in Brazil at the time of the film.
Reworking the tradition of what Carlos Monsivis calls the cinema of the
Mexican Revolution, Paul Leduc directed Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1971), introducing the
typically documentary-like strategies of modern cinema in a film that placed the question
of the Mexican national character in a new perspective25. Concerned with a new political
view of the past, Leduc discarded the kind of national allegory that, since the 1930s and
1940s, had turned the early century Revolution and values into a folk-show (Carlos
Monsivis term). Here we are far from the monumental, spetacular version of that crucial
historical event in Latin America, an event that created special conditions for the
affirmation of a national imagery before that kind of celebration of national-popular values
could have a similar presence in other countries of Latin America. The experience of
Mexican cinema with national allegory, by its force and specific role in society, has been
unique in the continent, as one can see expressed in its major emblem, the pictorially
monumental melodramas directed by Emilio Fernandez and photographed by Gabriel
Figueiroa in 1940s and 1950s.
Although having outstanding female stars at the root of their commercial success,
Emilio Fernandezs films gave continuity to a reformed patriarchal view that celebrated the
traditional roles played by men and women who personified the positive values of the
nation. Latin American cinema had to wait until the 1960s to promote woman to a central.
and transgressive role, understood as a condensed representation of national history. In
different countries, historical films or quasi documentary representations of present
conjunctures adopted allegorical strategies to place the female protagonist as a
personifiation of the national predicaments or hopes within the historical process. The
Cuban cinema developed more intensively this kind of national allegory, as Marvin
DLugo studies in his essay, and the best synthesis of that tradition is Lucia, film made by

See Paulo Antonio Paranagu (editor), Mexican Cinema (London, BFI Publishing, 1995): pp.117-127.

Humberto Solas in 1968, at a period of rich aesthetic debate and film production in Cuba26.
Solas work presents a very original structure based on the allegorical juxtaposition of
three stories that took place in different moments of Cuban history - the time of the
struggle for political independence from Spain in the nineteenth century, the time of a
frustrated attempt to radically change the country by liberating it from a right wing
dictatorship in the 1930s, and the time of ideologial change and new proposals on gender
relationships that opposed the macho tradition in the post-revolutionary 1960s. Adopting in
each episode a filmic style adequate to the tone of the historical time and the specific
conditions of female mentality in Cuba, Lucia gives us a lesson on how to use film style
allegorically in order to make statements about the countrys political history. Lucia is
not a film about a woman; it is a film about society. But within that society, I chose the
most vulnerable character, the one who is most transparently affected at any given moment
by contradictions and change - this statement by Humberto Solas is very similar to
Fassbinders explanation of his strategy in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), film in
which the construction of the female protagonist as the personification of German
experience in the postwar period implied a sense of irony also coming from style and
acting, as one could see in Lucia27.
Apart from Cuba, where women have been playing their role as personifications, one
can mention other examples of the treatment of female characters as national allegories in
modern Latin American cinema. Iracema (1974), made by Bodansky and Senna, focuses
on the predatory dimension of the expansion of economic activities in the Brazilian
Amazon, and centers its analysis in the pathetic and representative story of a young native
female who is destroyed by her contact with people coming from Southern Brazil at the
time of the construction of the Transamazonian highway. The Official Version (1985),
made by Carlos Puenzo in Argentina, chose a melodramatic tone to discuss the kidnnaping
of children born inside the dictatorships camps of torture and execution. The female
protagonist condenses, in her own experience and will to know the truth, the process
lived through by the Argentinian society after the redemocratization occurred in 1983.
Puenzos film places family affairs at the center of his humanist approach to the political
question and, through this choice, he inscribes his film within a long and diversified
tradition of melodramas that work social questions taking a nuclear family as the
exemplary microcosm that condenses the entire nation. This was typical in the American
classical cinema as one can see in Griffith, King Vidor, John Ford (remember Young
Mr.Lincoln among others), Frank Capra and Douglas Sirk. And it was also typical in
Italian cinema, from Visconti films, specially in a case like Rocco and his Brothers (1960),
to the Taviani Brothers films, as Good Morning Babylon (1987) makes evident. The
modern Latin American cinema also explored this kind of allegorical strategy, either in
Mexico, in films like The Castle of Purity, made Arturo Ripstein in 1972, or in Brazil, in
films like Its All Right, made by Arnaldo Jabor in 1972. Both Ripstein and Jabor films are
typical examples of the construction of the Family House as an allegorical space
representing the nation, in narratives that take place almost entirely indoors, creating a
sense of claustrophobia that is taken as a central commentary on the political conjuncture
of the nation.


See Marvin DLugo, Transparent Women: Gender and Nation in Cuban Cinema in Ana Lpez, John
King & Manuel Alvarado (editors). Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas (London,
BFI Publishing, 1993): pp.279-290
Solass statement is quoted by Marvin DLugo in his article Transparent Women: Gender and Nation in
Cuban Cinema. See op.cit. p.279.

In opposition to this allegory based on confinment and family dramas, a great

number of national allegories in Latin America are based on peregrinations, or the
experience of exile, or the migration caused by famines or chronic poverty. They explore
the social experience of a continent whose modern history has been shaped by immigration
since the beginning of the European colonial enterprise. The displacement of human
beings, the experience of frontier, the building of new cities and the occupation of land has
been an emblem of the Americas, and film production could only take advantage of this
historical background. Hollywood produced the western, with its Manifest Destiny
ideology. And in Latin America, a variety of social dramas featured migrating people
observed as though reenacting a frustrated version of the journey in the search for the
Supreme Good, or Eldorado. In opposition to the North-American popular fiction, the
theme of the promised land has not been treated in euphoric and epic ways (a prerrogative
of the winners), either in the Amazon - see Oswaldo Caldeiras Ajuricaba: the Rebel of the
Amazon (1977), Gustavo Dahls Uira: an Indian in Search of God (1972) - or in Mexico see Cabeza de Vaca (1990), by Nicolas Echevarria - or in the entire continent in a journey
started in Patagonia - see Fernando Solanas El viaje (1991).
Authoritarian regimes, censorship and crude repression produced a specific
motivation for journeys that inspired allegorical representations in which exiled people
take the experience of separation from home and the new conditions of life to reflect upon
their native land and on their national history and character. Solanas Tangos: the Exile of
Gardel (1985) is the most typical example of this kind of fiction in Latin America, as
Tarkovskys Earth is a well known example in Europe.
The films above mentioned give testimony to the significant presence of allegory
in modern and contemporary cinema in connection with national questions that, although
set in a changing world and becoming increasingly circumscribed by a globalized market
dynamics, have kept their dramatic interest as operative totalities of reference for the
fictional works engaged in the production of general statements about our historical time.
The presence of the category of nation, and the invitation to teleology that comes from it,
do not mean that all these national allegories can be inscribed in the more traditional type
of figural totalization. Against this view, many of them are effectively engaged in the
reflection on the crisis of the category of nation as a social and a political framework,
exhibiting most of the features of a modern fiction that problematizes its own status in the
face of the real world, showing awareness of the limits of language nad its discontinuity in
relation to experience. One cannot find a definition of allegory that could account for all
the films under consideration, since art works and even mass products of our century have
confirmed that protean nature of allegory pointed out by Angus Fletcher.
The maleabillity of this mode of representation has been made evident in film
history. Cinema, because it came late and could assimilate an enormous repertory of forms
and themes, has been able, in a few decades, to resume, in an accelerated pace, certain
processes of change that, in other art forms, took centuries to be developed. Even in a
single decade or in a single country, one can follow the gradual change in the allegorical
strategies that confirm this strong dialogue with the tradition and with the ruptures of
modern times. I can mention the example of Brazilian modern cinema to illustrate this
diversity, since a whole set of political and cultural motives engendered, in that specific
national context, a rich collection of national allegories which set an interesting play of
intertextual relationships between 1964 and 1970. This happened partially because of the
leading role played by Glauber Rocha (a major allegorist), partially because of political
censorship, and partially due to a strong inclination expressed by the filmmakers to come
to a synthesis, to produce a condensed and totalized view of national history. Before the

coup dtat - therefore without the obstacles presented by political repression - an

allegorical narrative expressed the political hopes concerning revolution and used history
to legitimaze violence as a valid instrument within class struggle: Rochas Black God
White Devil (1963-4) placed the process of national liberation at the center of an allegory
that answered to the demands brought by his totalizing impulse, allowing for a condensed
representation of society in a single story able to articulate issues concerning the entire
nation. Here we have a canonical example of figural realism, or typological allegory, in
cinema, with its teleological view of history. From this film on the changes in the political
life of the country, from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s, found a correlated process of
transformation in the allegorical design of the narratives. After this first allegory of hope,
the 1964 military coup dtat placed the leftist filmmakers in a difficult position, obliging
them to perform historical revisions and a kind of autocritical recapitulation of the recent
past that found its best translation in the baroque drama of disenchantment made by Rocha
in 1967 - Land in Anguish. The most celebrated political allegory made in Brazil, this film
presented a hard critique of populist illusions and of the Christian-like teleological schemes
incorporated by leftist thought in Latin America. Other developments included a satirical
approach to the crisis of patriarchal values caused by accelerated modernization, like in
Red Light Bandit (1968), made by Rogrio Sganzerla, where allegory as collage emerged
in Brazilian cinema, featuring the juxtaposition of fragments borrowed from other texts.
Macunaima, made by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade in 1969, took an ironic view of the
traditional question of a national character that had engaged Brazilians since the
nineteenth century; the film connects the account of the adventures of Macunaima, the
central Personification in the film, with the ideological debate on the lack of political
consciousness among the Brazilian people set in the late 1960s. Finally, in the same year of
1969, a deconstructive turn addressed to old nationalist constructs engendered films like
Killed the Family and Went the Movies (1969), by Jlio Bressane, and Bang Bang (1970),
by Andrea Tonacci, examples of an anti-teleology in which allegory performs a radical
critique of narrative itself.
As a rule valid for different national contexts, allegorical representations in films
went through significant changes in the last twenty years, revealing the intimate
connections existing between forms of representation and specific social conjunctures.
Filmmakers from different continents now share a common historical ground that, in spite
of all difficulties, challenge them to express encompassing views of the contemporary
scene that engenders allegories. These end up revealing their contemporary appeal as the
language of crisis, satisfying the demands presented by dramas that are typical to periods
of transition and accelerated technical-economic changes that enforce people to revise
their views of identity and shared values. Recent films made in Eastern Europe express the
labirinth of politcal ideologies and national identities that shape the contemporary history
in areas that, being at the crossroads of collective migrations and economic stagnation,
suffer from a chronic instability, as we can see in the already mentioned films made
Kusturika and Angelopoulos.
From the 1980s on, the new debates related to a visible increase in the speed of
exchange in the world market, the continuous displacement of people in search for jobs,
despite the strong control coming from big powers on their boarders, and the compression
of space-time created by high technology as well, have engendered new challenges for
narrative practices and visual representations of human experience. And there has been a
symptomatic increase of migrating characters and cross-boarder love affairs (and
frienships) on the screen. A new trend of story-lines involving multi-national encounters of
protagonists that belong to distant cultures but are led to an unexpected interaction, most of

the time of a clearly private nature, are one the main reasons for the impact created by
films like Il Postino (Michael...), or for the market values of recent films made by Wim
Wenders who became specialized in planetary allegories that run from Eastern Europe to
Australia, crossing America, Japan and Portugal. Third World films like the Macedonian
Before the Rain can take some charm from its fresh landscape and some outstanding scenes
involving the local population, but there is also the allegorical dimension related to its
sense of international connections created by the love-affair between the photographer and
the English woman.
e) Coda: allegory in history
I pointed out in my first section how allegories emerge from controversies,
conflicts of interpretation, confrontations related to struggles for hegemony in a world in
which the shock of cultures and the network of material interest and symbolic systems
tends to produce a reiteratd instability in peoples lives. Although not a proficuous mode of
representation when reduced to conventional pedagogical functions, allegory has acquired
in modernity a new meaning - more related to the expression of social crisis and the
transient nature of values, with special emphasis given to its connection with the sense of
fragmentation, discontinuity, abstraction, that the compression of space and time produced
in our contemporary technological world. So allegory is bound to persist today, as an
ingredient of the spirit of the time, a privileged signifying practice that bring to light all
the ambiguities related to national identity and interests, or related to an omnipresent
mediasphere that shapes our everyday life.
In this text, I have emphasized how allegory, as a mode of representation (or a
mode of expressing the crisis of representation), remains inscribed in the very dynamics of
our time. And I would like to finish observing how the relevance of allegory in film studies
does not come only from the actual conditions that surround film practice in recent years.
Film studies -- history and theory -- will always have to deal with the question of
Figuration. In other words, how a certain conception human experience in time or an
encompassing view of history are presented in a condensed way, sometimes requiring
personifications, sometimes requiring the appeal to juxtapositions, or to the montage
principle that the beginning of our century developed and offered to the future of art
production as one of its major legacies.
Film criticism should be able to explain the structure and identify the sources of a
given allegorical design (given models, iconographies, narrative patterns); and should also
be able to perform a historical analysis that would explain why those paradigms and
iconographies are there, what do they mean within that specific context given the social
conjuncture in which the film in inserted. The clarification of the notion of allegory and
the scholarly research on its history certainly help to clarify the way in which a film can
intervene in cultural and political debates. I have referred many times to the ambiguity of
the notion of nation, and the new essays on the subject make clear the connection of this
political category with historical narratives. I can add , allegorical narratives. For whom is
concerned with the dangers of globalized systems of domination that monopolize
information and interpretation, or for those who live under particular authoritarian regimes
oriented by an exacerbated nationalism inspired by secular or religious doctrines, the
clarification of the sctructure and sense of allegories in modern times is helpful in the
struggle against mythical reductions and false totalizations of different kinds, specially
those leading toward fascism.. The dynamics of allegory, with its typical dialectics of

fragmentation and totalization, is far from being a closed system; it is rather a sygnifying
practice most involved with and formally permeate to historical change.