Disabilità, omosessualità e narrazione della nazione nel cinema britannico contemporaneo: Benediction di Terence Davies

Abstract

Released in UK cinemas in 2022, Benediction, the penultimate work by English director Terence Davies (1944-2023), almost reveals itself as his artistic testament, as it explores - with the necessary semantic reformulations - many of the major thematic directions that can be encountered in his entire production. Among these, exemplified by the personal, political and literary experience of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Benediction explores, first of all, the construction of identity on the part of individual subjectivities and in relation to both the body politic and historical macro-events. Against this thematic backdrop and in the light of an analytical grid drawing mainly on the interpretative axes of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Film Studies (and Film Text Analysis in particular), as well as British Cultural Studies, this essay intends to highlight how, in Benediction, the process of identity construction inevitably intersects with the egemonic Britishness elaborated, in particular, during the Great War. Such a culturally specific model, in turn, proved to be outlined in oxymoronic contrast to the forms of symbolic Otherness marked, in particular, by homosexuality, physical disability and mental illness.