Aestheticism and Creativity in 1900: The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean by Giuseppe Tornatore (Italy, 1998)

Abstract

The authors consider Giuseppe Tornatore's film from a psychoanalytic perspective as a metaphor of the difficult individuation-separation process of Max. He tells the lifestory of his friend Nineteen Hundred, the main character of the film, a virtuoso pianist who spent all his life on board a transatlantic ship in motion between the old continent and the new. Brought up by a black stoker in the deep noisy belly of the ship, music becomes, for him, the substitute for his unkown mother's body, his only raison d'être and the structural aspect of his personality. In fact, he can never abandon the transatlantic, where he dies in the final explosion. Max, the trumpeter, telling his story to the old instruments dealer, works through the loss of his grandiose fantasy of perfection and omnipotence, represented by his friend Nineteen Hundred, and he finds a safer dimension of creativity and life. As in the analytic encounter, the possibility to narrate one's story to someone capable of listening and holding, opens the way to the psychic change. Nineteen Hundred, on the contrary, represents the destructive/split part of the personality, unable to leave the grandiosity of the infant Self, compelled to die, becuase it is linked to primary fusionality and Ego Ideal.