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The Animate Image Subjectivity and Objectivity in Spanish Avant-Garde Texts on the Cinema (1923–1931)

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The Animate Image Subjectivity and Objectivity in Spanish Avant-Garde Texts on the Cinema (1923–1931) The Animate Image Subjectivity and Objectivity in Spanish Avant-Garde Texts on the Cinema (1923–1931) by Alice McAdams A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in The University of Michigan 2020 Doctoral Committee: Professor Juli Highfill, Chair Professor Michèle Hannoosh Assistant Professor Ana María León Professor Cristina Moreiras Menor Alice McAdams [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2129-1479 © Alice McAdams 2020 Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my dad, Tom McAdams, who reminds me to be myself and enjoy my life. ii Acknowledgements I was extremely fortunate to have Professor Juli Highfill as my advisor and dissertation director. Throughout the process of completing this project, from its inception as an idea to the final revisions, she was a source of guidance and encouragement that was invaluable to my ability to finish the dissertation. Her detailed and constructive feedback on each chapter pushed me to make my writing stronger and to express my ideas more clearly and effectively. The value she places on elegant, engaging writing and honest representation of a text’s perspective has improved these qualities in my own work and helped me clarify the kind of scholar I want to be. I am indebted to Juli not only for guiding my education of the Spanish avant-garde and providing me with a model for meaningful academic writing, but also for supporting me in pursuing the ideas I was interested in and producing a project I can stand behind. I would like to thank Professor Michèle Hannoosh for offering many useful references throughout my work on the project, and for teaching me about the ideas of several nineteenth- century artists that been instrumental to my approach to the avant-garde. Her reading suggestions were particularly vital to the argument of Chapter Four. Professor Nilo Couret also aided this project by providing me with many helpful references on the close-up for Chapter Two. I would like to thank Professor Cristina Moreiras for offering feedback on my interests from the beginning of my time at the University of Michigan and helping me arrive at what would eventually become my dissertation topic, and Professor Ana María León for serving as the cognate member of my dissertation committee. iii Finally, thank you to my husband, Brook Luers, who cheered me on through every step of the process, and without whose unwavering support and love this piece of writing would not exist. iv Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Mirar És Inventar: Objectivity and Subjectivity in Salvador Dalí’s Essays on Photography .................................................................................................................................. 13 Chapter Two: The Shattered Star: The Close-Up as Dehumanizing Force in the Avant-Garde Prose of Francisco Ayala .............................................................................................................. 61 Chapter Three: The Film Image, the Voice on the Telephone and the Illusory Lover: Pedro Salinas on the Double ................................................................................................................. 103 Chapter Four: Todo Está en la Superficie: The Physiognomic Film-City of Cinelandia (Ramón Gómez de la Serna, 1923) ........................................................................................................... 162 Chapter Five: Leveling the World: Metaphor and Deshumanización in the Cinematic Dissolve and the Greguerías ...................................................................................................................... 203 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 249 Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 253 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 254 v Abstract This dissertation examines texts from the Spanish avant-garde (1923–1931) that present the advent of cinema as a force that alters the fundamental distinction between subjects and objects. I analyze a selection of avant-garde literary and theoretical texts to demonstrate the presence of a persistent leitmotiv throughout the art of this period: the idea that the mode of vision employed in film-watching is one that makes no distinction between surface and depth, between what actually experiences thought and emotion and what merely has the appearance of doing so. The texts explored over the course of this dissertation identify the cinematic spectator’s instinctive understanding of the film image as an animate being; they depict the spectator relating to the human figure onscreen as though it were the real person it copies rather than an inert reproduction. As I demonstrate, these texts posit a connection between this mode of perceiving the film image and the dissolution of the notion of a significant difference between subjects and objects, or entities with and without inner worlds. They suggest that the movie screen is an arena in which reality consists solely of what can be perceived by the eyes, thus situating images and real people in a relationship of equivalence. My first chapter analyzes Salvador Dalí’s essays on photography and film during the late 1920s, which exalt the camera as a source of objectivity and “neutral vision”: a mode of seeing that circumvents the subjectivist hierarchies of regular life in order to lessen the power of human beings and increase that of objects. In Chapter Two, I employ close-readings of Francisco Ayala’s short stories of 1927–1930 to show that Ayala consistently presents the technique of vi close-up as a dehumanizing force that converts the filmed person into an object-like amalgamation of independent parts. Chapter Three focuses on Pedro Salinas’s poetry and short stories of 1924–1931, in which the theme of the double that usurps the original recurs frequently in connection with technologies such as film that substitute “electronic presence” for real presence. My fourth chapter centers on Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s 1923 novel Cinelandia, a parody of Hollywood that, I argue, depicts cinema as following the logic of physiognomy: the pseudoscience of character whose founding belief is the idea that man lacks a distinction between appearance and essence. In my final chapter, I connect José Ortega y Gasset’s 1924 essay “La deshumanización del arte,” which advocates for art that places human beings and objects on the same plane by attending only to their visible surfaces, to the cinematic dissolve as it is employed in films like Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929). The artists whose work I examine exhibit conflicting attitudes toward the effects of the film image: some celebrate cinema as a vehicle for dismantling the traditional subject-object hierarchy, while others express anxiety about its consequences for interpersonal relationships. However, they are united by their adherence to the idea that film weakens or nullifies the essential distinction between the human and the nonhuman. By identifying these artists’ suggestion that film engenders a new way of relating to one’s surroundings that extends beyond the walls of the movie theater, this project speaks to the fundamental transformation of perception and reality that was wrought by the arrival of cinema. vii Introduction The radical innovation of film is that it appeared to duplicate rather than depict reality. As Richard Abel observes, the cinema’s “reproduction of movement gave the illusion of life or reality as no other spectacle did” (“Before the Canon” 14). For the spectator in the early decades of cinema, the movie reel seemed miraculous and utterly unprecedented in its ability to bring to the screen human beings themselves, who walked, danced and made facial expressions with a fluidity that was undeniably lifelike. In 1920s Spain, as the country belatedly and rapidly entered into capitalist modernity, this introduction to the miracle of film was all the more intense. The period of artistic production constituting the Spanish avant-garde (roughly 1918–1931) is accordingly replete with depictions of the experience of film-watching, as well as essays and articles theorizing the art of film and describing (whether speculatively or from experience) the position of the filmmaker. This dissertation examines a selection of those texts, identifying the common themes that unite them and the opposing attitudes that separate them. The texts collected in this study share an understanding of the film image as reality itself, as the being or thing captured by the camera rather than a mere portrait of that entity. For the authors of these texts, film was fundamentally
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