LA GRANDE BELLEZZA: Adventures in transindividuality

Abstract

This essay examines Paolo Sorrentino’s LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (THE GREAT BEAUTY, 2013) as a film where the conjunction of human and milieu maps the immanent links between individual and collective. I draw on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of transindividuality as simultaneously a spatial and temporal process of collective individuation. In making the city and its human inhabitant indiscernible, the film preserves the link between solitude and the collective. The collective arises in a preindividual zone of affects that inscribes a non-conscious form of intimacy among bodies in a shared milieu. I examine two major aspects of the film’s expressions of transindividuality: the artwork as a catalyst for the affirmation of disparate forces coalescing around the dynamic disparation of sacred and profane realities, classical and contemporary art; and the conjoined image of city and human crystallising as successive existential territories that are shown in paradoxical simultaneity. The city-human spectacle shows the body passing through endless processes of individuation. It is the dephasing of temporalities in the city-human body, rather than a judgmental opposition between sacred past and profane present, that energises the film in its ability to capture preindividual forces and affective singularities.