A film without a sky: An eco-critical take on Liliana Cavani’s Francesco

In contrast to Cavani’s 1966 rendering of the Francesco story, this article analyses the anti-picturesque, iconoclastic, earth-bound perspective that she adopted in 1989. This ‘film without a sky’ locates the saint’s path to transcendence in a space below the horizon line, anchored in the body and its elemental relationship to the land. The article pivots around close readings of several key scenes, culminating in Francesco’s reception of the stigmata. A comparison with Giotto’s depiction provides a striking measure of the film’s iconographic daring. While Francesco’s hands, feet and torso are pierced by beams of light emanating from an airborne seraph in Giotto’s version, the film’s saint receives his wounds lying prone on the turf of Mt. La Verna. In Cavani’s ‘film without a sky’, it is the earth itself which becomes the dwelling place of the sacred, the place where matter and spirit come together on the way to deliverance.¹