Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of We All Loved Each Other So Much
1974 · Ettore Scola · We All Loved Each Other So Much on Sightlines
Scola stops his film at one point to let his characters hang around the edge of a movie being shot. The movie is De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and one of them tries to get himself cast in it. It plays as a small comic scene. Watch it again once you know how the film ends and it's the whole thing in a minute: a generation standing just outside the picture it believes is about it, asking to be let in.
Keep that image. The rest follows from it.
The three men meet as partisans. Antonio comes home to a hospital porter's job and stays loyal to the class he came from, increasingly sore about it. Gianni, the promising left-wing lawyer, marries into money and corrodes quietly under a charming surface. Nicola, a provincial schoolteacher who loves movies more than he manages to love his own life, wrecks that life over his convictions and loses a television quiz because he will not back down. All three love Luciana, an actress whose gift never finds its decade. The film opens near its own ending, tells you early that the friendship has already failed, and then takes thirty years to show you how.
Deleuze is worth bringing to this one for a precise reason: the story he tells across his two Cinema books, at its hinge, is the story Scola is telling. In Deleuze's account, movies before the war ran on a circuit he calls the movement-image, and its strongest form is the action-image: someone perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes. Situation, act, new situation. That circuit at full power is the Resistance, and it's where these men begin, in the grainy monochrome Scola reserves for the 1940s, in the one stretch of their lives when what they did altered what was.
Then the circuit stops working. Deleuze calls the break the crisis of the action-image: characters who see perfectly well and can no longer do anything adequate to what they see. Italy got there first, in the rubble, and produced a cinema of people who walk, look and wait. Deleuze's name for such a character is the seer, the voyant: someone who registers the world instead of changing it. Scola's invention is to have made a popular comedy about exactly that transition, from the inside, thirty years on, with stars the audience adored. Deleuze wrote the change as philosophy. Scola filmed it as three biographies and a series of increasingly uncomfortable reunions.
That's how the film measures time, in fact. Not by events but by reunions, each one an occasion to see how far a man has drifted from the act that once defined him. And watch what Scola does with Nicola, the joke and the wound in one body. There is the seer in his purest form: a man whose only remaining action is an opinion about a film. He is right. It costs him everything.
The time structure earns a finer concept. A conventional flashback, what Deleuze calls a recollection-image, is a dated postcard from a former present; we drop in, retrieve, return. Scola has those, chaptered and narrated by the men themselves. But the film also circles, coming back to the same shared years from different vantage points and changing its film stock as it goes: high-contrast black and white for the neorealist 1940s, colour for the boom and after. Deleuze, following Bergson, describes the past as sheets or regions that coexist rather than a line receding behind us. You don't travel back along time, you move among layers, and each layer has its own light. Scola literalizes this. The change of stock is the change of sheet. It's why the film doesn't feel like remembering. It feels like being inside several pasts at once.
The most Deleuzian minute in the movie is the Trevi Fountain. Scola re-enacts the La dolce vita sequence and folds Fellini's Mastroianni-and-Ekberg material into his own fiction, so that his characters' lives and the film history they grew up on stand in the same water. Deleuze calls this a crystal-image: a present and its mirror (memory, dream, the movie) becoming impossible to tell apart, the two faces turning into each other. Usually the mirror is a mirror. Here it's cinema. And that is the film's real claim about its generation. They didn't merely watch movies. They stored their own youth in the form of movies, and by 1974 there's no separating the memory from the reel.
Which is also why the film has to be read, not only watched. Aldo Fabrizi, Rossellini's martyred priest in Roma città aperta and one of the founding faces of neorealism, turns up here as Romolo Catenacci, a grotesque construction magnate lounging in kitsch. Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and asks to be deciphered is the lectosign, the readable image. If you know the face, a whole sentence of Italian history arrives without dialogue: the man who once stood for the Resistance now presides over the concrete poured across it. If you don't know it, you see a rich vulgarian and miss the indictment. Scola takes that risk. The film trusts your cinephilia the way other films trust your grasp of plot.
The Antonioni debt works the same way. From L'eclisse Scola takes a register in which architecture and objects carry what people no longer can, what Deleuze calls the any-space-whatever: space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a pure emotional field. The boom years arrive here as décor. Catenacci's kitsch abundance, Antonio's cramped modest rooms. You read the inner lives off the furniture, because the inner lives have gone quiet.
Under all of it sits the title, in the past tense. Scola's political point isn't that his men were weak, though two of them are. It's that the collective subject they fought for never showed up. Deleuze, writing on modern political cinema, argues that politics in these films passes through an admission: the people are missing, there is no unified people left to represent. What remains is fabulation, individuals caught in the act of telling their own legend. That is what Scola's Brechtian breaks are for. Characters turn to the camera, narrate themselves, comment on their own fates, judge their lives out loud. They are legending. The legend concerns a Liberation that was supposed to produce an Italy and produced a villa, a hospital corridor and a quiz show.
The lineage isn't decoration; Scola is settling accounts with his own discourse. The ensemble-of-failures shape comes from I soliti ignoti and the Age & Scarpelli method — and Age & Scarpelli wrote this film, so the debt is literal. The abrupt farce-to-grief pivot is Il sorpasso's diagnostic instrument, stretched from one road trip to three decades. De Sica's location-shot working-class ethos is the yardstick the characters are measured against, which is why the film is dedicated to him. Forward, it opens onto Scola's own historical-choral mode in Una giornata particolare three years later, and more widely it handed later filmmakers a usable form: private disappointment as the honest measure of collective history.
What it did to narrative is easy to state and hard to do. It made film history narratable as autobiography. Citation became structure instead of garnish, so a change of stock advances the story and a casting choice makes an argument. And by telling you the ending first, Scola turns the whole picture into an autopsy conducted with enormous affection.
One question it leaves open and declines to answer: is this an accusation or a confession? The dedication to De Sica, the borrowed faces, the neorealism quoted as a standard nobody met. Scola came out of that industry. When the film says we all loved each other so much, the we includes the movies, and it includes him.
Watch it again for the exact moment each man stops being able to act. It's never a defeat scene. It's usually a party.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Three partisans whose Resistance action is the last thing they do that changes anything; the film thereafter is structured as reunions measuring how far each has fallen from his youthful ideals, with the framing device announcing early that the friendships have already failed.
- the seer (voyant) — Nicola, the cinephile schoolteacher, reduced to a man whose only remaining act is a film opinion — he loses everything, including a television quiz, to his convictions.
- action-image, large form — The 1944–45 Resistance and Liberation, rendered in the grainy monochrome reserved for the 1940s: a global situation that presses until collective action transforms it — the founding act the rest of the film mourns.
- sheets of past (order of time) — Time braided rather than linear: the film opens near its chronological end and repeatedly circles the same shared years, keying each historical layer to its own photographic mode — high-contrast neorealist black and white for the 1940s, colour for the boom and after.
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The chaptered, character-narrated flashbacks and voice-over retrospection through which each of the three men recounts his own decades.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — The Trevi Fountain sequence of La dolce vita re-enacted with Mastroianni/Ekberg material integrated into Scola's diegesis, and the characters loitering at and auditioning for the shooting of Bicycle Thieves — lived life and film history made indiscernible.
- the readable image (lectosign) — Aldo Fabrizi, Rossellini's priest in Roma città aperta, cast against type as the grotesque construction magnate Romolo Catenacci — a physiognomic citation that only signifies if the viewer reads the face as film history.
- any-space-whatever — The L'eclisse register of 'sociological décor' Scola quotes for the boom years: Catenacci's kitsch abundance against Antonio's cramped modest interiors, architecture and objects standing in for evacuated inner lives.
- the people are missing — The partisan collective of the Liberation dispersing into three isolated private failures; the film's argument that the emancipatory hopes of 1945 were betrayed by careerism, consumerism and accommodation.
- fabulation (legending) — Brechtian breaks in which characters address the camera directly, comment on their own fates and step outside the scene to narrate and judge their lives.