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3. Romeo and Juliet is for Zombies

38. Another series, which cuts across all the others: the name, the law, the genealogy, the double survival, the contretemps, in short the aphorism of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s play of that title. It belongs to a series, a still-living palimpsest, to the open theater of narratives which bear this name. It survives them, but they also survive thanks to it. Would such a double survival have been possible “without the title,” as Juliet puts it?

39. The absolute aphorism: a proper name. Without genealogy, without the least copula. End of drama. Curtain, Tableau (The Two Lovers United in Death by Angelo dall’Oca Bianca). Tourism, December sun in Verona (“Verona by that name is known” [V. iii, 299]). A true sun, the other (“The sun for sorrow will not show his head [V. iii. 305]).

Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime”1

At the end of our last chapter, we left Juliet up in her bedroom, imagining what it might be like to wake in the grave world from which Thomas Nashe claims public theater summons up the dead. As you recall, Nashe imagines that such a wake up call will prove highly satisfactory to all concerned. London’s authorities shall witness the distraction of its idle multitudes; said multitudes shall get high on successive hits of affect; public theater and its avatars shall grow and prosper. Nashe summons up “brave Talbot (the terror of the French)” from Henry VI Part 1 to illustrate theater’s appeal and invites his readers to contemplate the “joy” Talbot would have felt, had he known, that two hundred years on “his bones [are] newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times)” provided by London’s theaters.2

For Nashe, theater becomes akin to a mode of archival tourism or touring. It takes you everywhere and nowhere. Its chief currency lies in the “proper names” it keeps in motion and the stories they condense. By its recruitment of bio-semiotic wetware (its spectators), public theater keeps the likes of Talbot “freshly dead,” periodically opening the grave for successive revivals. Talbot’s dust-bound deeds are rescued therefore from the kinetic dead zone or media purgatory of the un-turned, worm-eaten pages of a

Chronicle. The company’s “shadows” or actors body forth such names and deeds whose bones were long since picked clean. And, come the end of the play, those names, twinned with the faces and names perhaps of certain actors, find themselves inscribed in the memories of the audience—the audience become wetware to theater as a mnemotechnic relay to the grave.3 Welcome, then, fanfare please, to the latest, new and improved, apparatus of secular resurrection. That’s the pitch, anyway.

But Juliet’s not so sure. Up in her bedroom, vial of sleeping potion beside her, she’s still wedded to the thought of actually waking up. She’s turned off by the thought of

Talbot Tybalts. Revivals, she thinks, prove scary. She wants to live; plans on dying so as to live. Unfortunately, the play she’s in seems headed into Nashe’s tomb-world and she worries that she and it might get stuck there, that the theater might become, in effect, a crypt. We join her at the moment she wakes or “rises,” as the stage directions have it, in the tomb.4 But we do so obliquely, via the cinematic delegates recruited to her survival in

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Romeo (2007). This short, three-minute film depicts a series of women in an unidentified movie theater watching the last minutes

2 of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). At no point, however, does Where is My

Romeo screen any part of the Zeffirelli film. Neither does it deliver its soundtrack.

Instead, we watch the film as mediated by the women in the movie theater. We hear the soundtrack by way of a muted, muffled, distanced rendering of the dialogue but with no guarantee that this accords with what the women hear. Juliet’s suicide unfolds, therefore, through the film’s succession of reaction shots, through these women’s faces as we listen in on the auditory stimulus that augments the screen images they see and we do not. Even as it completes a set of familiar circuits—Romeo and Juliet may be recognized;

Zeffirelli’s filmic version comes to its end; the audience emotes on cue—Where is My

Romeo disallows any translation of this circuit beyond itself, beyond the scene of cinephilia that it takes as its habit and its haunt. We do not make it out of its movie theater. We struggle to motivate the images it offers, to transform them into the semblance of a narrative.

Our aim in this chapter is to inhabit Romeo and Juliet from within the uncertainties, the mis/recognitions and mis/directions that Where is My Romeo produces by its off/staging of the play. Crucially, for our purposes, the film represents back to us the function of the spectators in Nashe’s sales pitch, offering to our eyes one iteration of the so very many audiences that have served and serve still as the bio-semiotic relay to what Derrida names the “still-living palimpsest…the open theater of narratives which bear the name[s]” Romeo and Juliet and so also the title, Romeo and Juliet.5 For the duration of the three minutes the film takes, our access to this play, this yoking together of two proper names to form a third, a third that takes on the form of a title, a title keyed to a story as it is successively backed in our archives and libraries become tombs, remains

3 mediated by the image of the emoting wetware that we both are and now are not. We

“watch” Romeo and Juliet but the tears we cry are cried for us by these women, tears that, once upon a time, Nashe offered to London’s City Fathers in order to sell public theater. Where is My Romeo enables us to identify the role of successive audiences as a substrate to the program Romeo and Juliet installs and to re-describe the play from the vantage point they afford. In what follows we shall dwell with what we take to be the film’s deforming or partial wrecking of the play even as it renders it recognizable. It’s title, for example, misquotes Juliet’s waking line, “Where is my Romeo?” (5. 3. 150), dropping the form of a question so that the line takes on the role of a figure, a topos, a haunt, from which the film will not move on. Such a deformation—perhaps an accident, perhaps a signature, how should we tell?—is of a piece with what we take to be the distancing of the play as remediated to film by Zeffirelli signaled by the withholding of the film image and the attenuation of the soundtrack. But the effect of these disorientations remains unclear.

We take such instances of partial wrecking or wrec/k/ognition as an instance of what sociologist Bruno Latour names iconoclash. “With iconoclasm,” he writes, “one knows what the act of breaking represents, and what the motivations of apparent destruction are.” The icon is broken because it is taken as a false idol. The act of breaking demystifies; it breaks one relay in order to promote what it takes to be a healthier attachment; a better icon or idol. Accusations of fetishism or a pathological relation to things or objects fly. But, “for iconoclash,” he continues, “one does not know: one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.” Where is My Romeo, we think, inhabits

4 this zone of hesitation. It troubles the play, but it does not break it. It enables us to sidle up to Shakespeare, to watch as we reach a threshold at which a minimal unit or particle of

Shakes/appear/s; in this case, proffering one of three proper names—Romeo, but not yet

Juliet, or Romeo and Juliet. For, even as we may name the missing names in our heads and so complete the title, the film refuses to deliver them; leaves them tactically un/read; pushes the play away as it invites it in by retarding our ability to eliminate the medium that backs the story in the iteration we encounter this time.

If for Latour, “we can define an iconoclash as that which happens when there is uncertainty about the exact role of the hand at work in the production of a mediator,” we go further and suggest that an iconoclash, or here more precisely a Bardoclash, serves to foreground the presence of media itself in the proliferation of this “still living” but dead- alive “palimpsest.” And since we share Juliet’s worries about the uncertain status of revivals, we are tempted to find in Where is My Romeo something on the order of a prophylactic, inoculation against the bio/bibliographical program that the yoking of

Romeo to Juliet and so to Romeo and Juliet installs. The play itself a virulent mode of survivance that keys the bio-political management of sex lives to the bibliographical living on of books and media. As Derrida writes, in addition to “missing” one another,

Romeo and Juliet “both survive…one another.”6 And, by missing one another, they both live to see the other dead, coming to serve therefore as each other’s substrate. And thereafter, both, in Derrida’s terms, live on and over, and above—their names, backed up by the play’s title such that we cannot fail to recognize them and it, and find ourselves, like it or like it, reviving this un/dead, never living, always lively, super or supra-couple, over and over again. It will never prove possible to disentangle the lovers from this title.

5 The two begin and end, as Juliet guesses, in the tomb, the archive cum vault of stories that the public theater circulates and which today migrates to successive media platforms via serial revivals. The power lies in the fact that the only bones at stake are ours, as well as those of the actors that body their proper names forth. For, if Nashe was able to predicate theater’s respectability on the supposed referential outside grounded on and in

Talbot’s bones and deeds, then in Romeo and Juliet, theater eats the grave or subsumes it, to take on the heft of an apparatus or writing machine that produces worlds.7

But we’re not sure. We hesitate. It remains to be seen and not seen. Let’s first embark on a re-description of the play on our way to Kiarostami’s movie theater—a re- description tuned already to the cascade it sets in motion—to the structure of survivance it sets in motion—its equipment for dying.8

Equipment for Dying

At the end of Romeo and Juliet, the watch raises the city and Verona converges on the Capulet tomb. “The people in the street cry ‘Romeo’, / Some ‘Juliet’, and some

‘Paris’, and all run …toward [the] monument” (5. 3. 191-193). The ballistic clamor of these proper names—Paris, Romeo, Juliet—punctures Verona’s early morning air as the names explode serially from anonymous mouths. “Juliet” has escaped the tomb.

“Romeo” returns from exile. “Paris” remains unmoored. The three have yet to enter into a significant relation. They hang in the air without conjunctions. And so Verona congregates; those who bear the names Capulet and Montague and the Prince himself are summoned by the watch or are drawn by the clamor. They are presented with the bodies:

“County Paris slain, / And Romeo dead, and Juliet, dead before, / Warm and new killed”

6 (5. 3. 195-197). Capulet’s wife says she will die. Montague’s wife, so we learn, is already dead. The Prince seals the tomb, “till we can clear these ambiguities” (5. 3. 216-217).

Clear the crime scene. Silence the cries. Inquire into the syntax we lack and that will enable us to enter these names into some set of relations that we may understand.

Nothing, so it seems, was as you thought. You woke two days ago to Juliet dead. You buried her. You choked down the “baked meats” that would have been the “wedding cheer,” and felt the word “cheer” (food that is happy, akin to happiness) fracture into the

“sad feast” of mourning (4. 5. 84-85). That morning, when you woke to her death, you did not understand but still you grieved and buried your daughter. Now you find her dead. Again.

A voice supplements the scene. Friar Lawrence takes a turn as epilogue; confesses; apologizes. His words come quickly to enumerate the plot that the parents have missed and so to parse out the agents involved in the errant course events have taken. Juliet was suicidal; came to him alone in his cell; he gave her a sleeping potion; wrote a letter to Romeo explaining everything about the “form of death” he “wrought on her” (5. 3. 244-246), but “Friar John / Was stayed by accident” (5. 3. 250-251); he came to the tomb himself, but there was a noise, within or without, and he was frightened;

Juliet would not leave; “her nurse is privy” to the marriage (5. 3. 266). If it is his fault, punish him. Besides or before this minimal revelation of the turn events took, Friar

Lawrence’s words serve to couple and uncouple bodies, to provide the syntax that the

Prince and surviving family members lack. Friar Lawrence rewrites the scene and reanimates the corpses and in doing so we witness the writing of the play’s title, the

7 production of Romeo and Juliet represented to us from within what is already and what we may never encounter other than as Romeo and Juliet:

Romeo, there dead, was husband to that Juliet,

And she, there dead, that Romeo's faithful wife.

I married them, and their stol'n marriage-day

Was Tybalt's dooms-day, whose untimely death

Banished the new-made bridegroom from the city.

For whom, and not for Tybalt, Juliet pined.

You, to remove that siege of grief from her,

Betrothed and would have married her perforce

To County Paris.

(5. 3. 231-239)

If the watch was able to produce the bodies—summon up a static tableau—but not to provide an animating narrative that explains the scene, the deictically emphatic “there’s” and “that’s” suture Friar Lawrence’s voice to the scene. His voice over re/couples Romeo and Juliet; decouples Juliet from Paris; recodes Tybalt’s role in the drama. He reanimates the dropped or missing relations. The first two lines fold into one another rendering

Romeo and Juliet in and by their relation to the other. Romeo and Juliet come to figure a singularity as Friar Lawrence’s words and perhaps hands gesture to where they lie together, “there dead,” “there dead.” Tybalt enters as the first agent in the chain of their destruction. Their “marriage-day” was Tybalt’s “doom’s-day.” He figures as the occasion for Romeo’s exile, not for Juliet’s pining. The parents also figure—for by marrying her to

Paris they sent Juliet “to me…with mad looks” (5. 3. 239-240).

8 Interruptions and errors mount. But, the Prince says he trusts the Friar—or, reprising Juliet’s earlier trust, says “we still have known thee for a holy man” (5. 3. 270).

Balthasar corroborates with the letter Romeo sent to the Friar. The Prince reads and reports. “Some shall be pardoned and some punished,” he ends. And the play returns to its beginning as he offers up its title in reversed form, reconginzing thereby the constitutive yoking or coupling and uncoupling of bodies that Friar Lawrence sets in motion: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5. 3.

309-310).

Moments prior to the Prince’s estranging couplet that figures the plays title almost as palindrome, Capulet offers Montague his hand for “this [his hand] is my daughter’s jointure, for no more / Can I demand” (5. 3. 296-297). But Montague goes further:

For I will raise her statue in pure gold,

That whiles Verona by that name is known,

There shall no figure at such rate be set

As that of true and faithful Juliet.

To which Capulet adds: “As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie / Poor sacrifices to our enmity” (5. 3. 299-304). And so it begins. Icons shall be raised. Rival icons, perhaps. It’s hard to say, as the play ends, what order of “peace this morning with it brings” (5. 3.

305), or how we are to reckon with the incipient iconophilia that Capulet and Montague inaugurate. As Jonathan Goldberg comments, tempting as it is to wax lyrical and insist on the “‘purity’ and transcendentality of their love, and, by extension, of Shakespeare’s art,”

Capulet and Montague’s lines still may be read as disclosing that “the corpses…continue to have a social function: indeed that they make possible the union of the two opposing

9 houses.”9 It remains almost impossible, however, to judge their gestures, the quasi- automatic supplementing of the dead couple by a parade of coupled copies into succesive media—statues, puppets, action figures, movies, and so on and so forth.

Capulet and Montague may play at dress up; they may enter into a tit for tat accessorizing of the dead, but so what? In one register the demystifying revelation that the corpses acquire a social function seems upsetting, but where, exactly is the surprise?

Corpses have social function—otherwise there would be no need for tombs or libraries or archives. Perhaps all that remains to do at the end of the play is to enter into some order of mourning work that will unfold very precisely as some variety of fetish labor.10

After all, where were you and hat were you doing the night before and morning of the wedding to Paris? They were wrapped up in the arrangements: the burgeoning guest list, the fray of hiring “twenty cunning cooks” so skilled that they cannot help “lick[ing] their fingers” (4. 2. 1-4) while they make pies for the “wedding cheer” (4. 5. 87). They had to send the Nurse off with the keys to fetch more ingredients. Come morning, they rose to find Juliet dead, the “baked meats” (4. 4. 5) still served, but the “wedding cheer”—food that is happy, foods that condenses or cathects happiness into a word— fractured into a “sad feast” (4. 5. 87). “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead” (4. 5. 25).

Juliet was fulfilling a social function then also—felt dead to them all—and then she died, or seemed to, and then they grieved; delegate to Juliet’s living on as a name, a memory, a remainder. But now all that’s cancelled. Juliet woke from “the form of death” only to die, again, for the first time, and so now they must grieve again, begin again to grieve all over, as if for the first time. Juliet revived in order to die. No wonder they all end up hooked, embarked on rival feats of icon making.

10 Set aside the ideological heft the story is said to have as the “‘preeminent document of love in the West’”—straight, queer, otherwise, with time, inter or trans- species, no doubt.11 Forget the way the play may be said to stage “a conflict between the lovers’ individual desires and the reigning demands of family, civic, and social norms in relation to which those desires are formed.”12 None of that was primary or constitutive.

Indeed, it might be said that whatever ideological quotient or predicament you wish to derive from the play has been the legacy we have constituted by our rendering and augmentation of the plot to which it recruits us. The play begins and ends in the crypt, that ancient vault, which the Prince has stopped, and with which all of us now have to reckon. The story ends and begins with the infrastructure of survivance that Derrida names “a groundless ground from which are detached, identified, and opposed” life and death effects “that we think we can identify under the name of death or dying…as opposed to life.”13 Beyond or besides bodies and bones—the only ones at stake are those of the actors and their audience—Romeo and Juliet constitutes a “living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of a Web.”14

Before Shakespeare, there come the folk tales; Italian and French versions follow channeling Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisby; Arthur Brooke freely translates Matteo Bandella

Giulietta e Romeo (1554) as The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562);

Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1595-

1596) appears, adding the balcony scene.15 That play ends—“Curtain” (well, no curtain at the time, but still the play ends, the audience leaves)—then come the paintings—Angelo

Dall´Oca Bianca’s Morte di Giulietta e Romeo (Verona, 18??); guest appearances in

11 novels such as Nicholas Nickleby; films, so many films; broadway shows—Westside

Story; animated features such as Gnomeo and Juliet (2011); songs, by Dire Straits, Lou

Reed, Melissa Etheridge, and so on, and so forth. The touring, the fetish labor, begins and continues. Maybe such touring entails repeat re-reading of key scenes—your fingers wearing out the page like some worn icon of a saint whose hand the lips of the faithful have kissed away. Such was the case of the First Folio that was chained to the shelves of the Bodleian Library in Oxford for students to use. When removed, it was found that “the most handled page of all was the lovers’ poignant parting at dawn in 3.5.”16 Or maybe, you find yourself taking a trips to Verona, real and imagined, to find the couple’s haunt, where we find them already gone—their absence amended in the form of plaques quoting lines from the play, street signs, a stunt balcony, which, from time to time, all require maintenance and repair from the traffic.17 And so the “series” continues, a “still living palimpsest,” within a generalized structure of “sur-vivance.”

For, as Juliet discovers, as she knows already, by the impossibility of her demand in the balcony scene to what she thinks is an absent Romeo to “refuse” his name, uncoupling persons and names proves difficult, impossible, even as the two do not properly coincide. Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, constitute an “absolute aphorism,” “a proper name,” which itself couples two names with the name of a play. By this coupling, this folding together and proliferation of proper names that designate characters, assumed subject positions with regard to action, a plot, a story, a play, the series appears “without genealogy, without the least copula.” The name figures an irreducible aphorism, unfolds as a story and a semiotic chronology that always turns out

12 the same, always, remaining therefore unpredicated, which is to say that it may not be differently predicated; the names uncoupled.18

Understandably, the news that when we love, we play host to a possible revival of this dead couple, that, in fact, when we love, we continue to mourn them still, produces successive desires for cancellations—such as the happy ending in Nicholas Nickleby, in which even Tybalt makes it out of the play alive.19 Critical readings likewise share in this desire, attempting to reprogram the play so as to derive from the pair of lovers a different orientation: a more historically attuned account of desire, for example, or a script that manages to recognize, for once, two individuals where we had mistaken a “single pair.”20

Such is the impression Romeo and Juliet make on one another, the story, the lovers, the play that each subsequent iteration may only replay the terms or seek to transpose them.

The two lovers serve already, in and by the story, not as each other’s mirror, but as each other’s substrate—nothing and no one else will do. So “raise her statue in pure gold,” if you want; make one “as rich” for Romeo too. Choose whatever frame or medium you will to summon them back. You may even decide to go looking for them—“December sun in Verona,” your vacation their holy day—Italy’s nice really any time of year. What may we do other than continue the serial augmentation and memorialization of this doubled proper name across differing bio-media, living on, by, over, and above, our lives and loves contributing to the play’s on-going amassing of equipment for dying?21

Prior to Romeo’s breaking open of the Capulet tomb to gain entry to the vault, the play telegraphs an uncertainty regarding the handling of the dead that may prove instructive—even consoling. Paris looks on as Romeo begs Balthasar for a “mattock” and a “wrenching iron” (5. 3. 22). He recognizes that the man before him is the “banished

13 haughty Montague / That murdered my love’s cousin, with which grief / It is supposed the fair creature [Juliet] died” (5. 3. 49-51). Paris then wonders why Romeo has come and what his breaking open of the tomb intends—or worse, he assumes that the gesture betokens some further violence, some urgent and compulsive mutilation or iconoclasm that he must prevent: “And here he is come to do some villainous shame / To the dead bodies” (5. 3. 52-53). Paris intervenes to stop him, asking “Can vengeance be pursued further than death” (5. 3. 55)? The act of breaking and entering, the violence of the act that needs must Romeo accomplish in order to keep his appointment, to make it to the grave on time, here gets mis/read as a violent, compulsive order of fetish labor. Bythis mis/reading, it attains an impossible status—a status akin to that of Capulet and

Montague’s statue rearing.

The wrecking of the tomb combines with a recognition of the proper names it houses. And accordingly, already, from and by the beginning of the play, wrecking and recognition collapse into one another—they become impossible to tell apart, a mise en abyme, or wrec/k/ognition of the archive-crypt that theater has become. Under such circumstances, charges of fetishism come unmoored. They cease to signify. Everything depends, and must be played for, still, but by and in the crafting of an altered set of objects—successive, differently mediated, “statues” that program Romeo and Juliet,

Romeo and Juliet differently but for which the story, the play, stand not as referent or occasion but merely as that which came before. For no relation pertains other than that of a pro-active, forward, future-making mimesis, by which we re-make the play.22

What Derrida calls the “still-living palimpsest,” “the open theater of narratives which bear this name” constitutes a cascade across different media that Romeo and Juliet

14 formalizes—the play itself a strategic rendering or icon-building that splices the failure and wrecking of an image to its attempts to render that couple anew. The tomb is empty.

There are no bones to the story. But still, by our emoting, by our recruitment, as

Kiarostami shows us, the play refers.

Bardoclash 1

Does the prologue invite an order of freeze framing that produces the proper names as reduced, images cut off from the series—still living, nodes to be performed, produced taken as new inputs that then end up redirected by the counter-time that inheres or which is co-produced by the aphorism?

We can all variously nod in agreement as to the facts of their case by the mere mention of their names, which already in the play dance in relation to each other, stretching the binding conjunction between them before snapping back into the phrasing of the title. Already, before the play begins, the prologue programs the action and its aphoristic certainty, keying the outcome to a generational and generative politics that yokes scripts for loving, living, dying to the “life” or facticity of various media: the lyric counter-time of the sonnet and the linear unfolding of a play in performance:

The Prologue

[Enter Chorus]

Two households, both alike in dignity

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene)

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

15 From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;

Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.

The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,

And the continuance of their parents' rage,

Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,

Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

(1-14)

As yet, perhaps, unmarked, the prologue tunes an audience’s ears to the sonnet speak that will characterize Romeo and Juliet’s encounters and the accelerated, syncopated temporality of their bid to exit normative and normalizing chronologies underwritten by familial, social, and generative programs. As it does so, the prologue posits the “pair of star-cross'd lovers tak[ing of] their life” as the bio-political loss or trauma necessary to

“bury their parents' strife.” Household enmity endures, so it seems, especially when both households are “alike in dignity,” and excepting “their children's end, nought could remove” it. The as yet un-named pair’s death, their coming to nothing, figures a traumatic or attention-getting interruption of the generational and reproductive cycles that lead to the automatic enmity of the “ancient grudge” between Capulets and Montagues, suggesting something on the order of a bio-political balance sheet underwriting the return of the health and regimen of a city in which “civil blood” issuing from “fatal loins”

16 breeds “uncivil” i.e. bloody “hands.” This then is the story we shall see and hear. This then is the aphorism that the coupling of two proper names become title of a play locates.

Generative and generational loss, the death of a particular future that has already been imagined, voids, so the prologue declares, all the usual scripts, makes possible something

“new” that would be also a return to something lost—though it remains uncertain come the end of the play with Prince Escalus’ words “all are punished” echoing in our ears the extent to which the play offers anything more than a dead loss or dead end.

Telescoping from the city, which is one, but is doubled already by the stage

“where we lay our scene,” to the two households from which the pair issue, to the lovers who never appear singly, who, from the beginning, from before the beginning, are already a “pair,” the prologue posits their single life (two lives impressed into one course), their “death” (two deaths died in response to two deaths both lived and died), as the necessary condition of fair Verona’s renewed singularity. In the last three lines, this scene decouples from the Prologue’s language as the media that host the story assert their presence. They do so within the balance sheet of loss and gain that the Prologue’s sonnet calculates. The frames intervene, super-imposing themselves on this story whose temporality is measured already as “ancient” ancient, cosmologically underwritten, and yet also the spans of two lives, the few years the lovers live, and the few days they spend together. All of this “is now the two hours' traffic of our stage”—it will take place here.

And, if you listen carefully patiently (ears) or sit still (arse), “what here [in and by this prologue, this sonnet] shall miss, our toil [on stage] shall strive to mend.” Asserting a void or lack to its own redaction of a story that comes before, that has happened, that exists elsewhere but which by the Prologue’s delivery has not appeared or has gone

17 “missing,” the Prologue ends with a moment of sensory recruitment, listen and sit still, that stands in relation to the “toil” by which the actors shall minister to and perhaps

“mend” what goes missing. The enervated temporality of the star-cross’d pairing hovers uncertainly in the conjunction of sonnet-media and theatrical performance, which do not quite connect; which serve as different frames for launching a story that plays always, from its first telling as a revival, a bringing back to “life” on the condition of a death, a naught, a nothing, an encryption, the aphorism, the proper name, itself already an archive and a crypt, a tomb.

In Baz Luhrman’s rendering of the prologue, the last two lines of the prologue are cut or better yet translated into the en-framing devices of the televisual broadcast as figured by the TV set whose monotone exaggeration of the iambic pentameter of the sonnet spliced with the cadences of the news reporter transforms the “story” into the empty casting or shell of an “event.” The TV hovers within the frame of the film as the film asserts its sovereign ability to tell the story, the camera slowly offering a close up of the TV set such that as the announcer speaks her final line—“Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage”—the image on the TV set merges, syncs up, or is eaten by the frame of the film (sorry that this so clumsy!!!!). The prologue then repeats in a syncopated, end- stopped, now male voice, ghosting the modes of repetition that characterize TV news programs (in case you’re just tuning in) as they cater to and attempt to capture an audience, key phrases such as “Fair Verona” appearing as subtitles on screen, in various fonts miming the captions of print media alongside words that have for us, by their appearance in our built word the force of proper names—such as the way “Police” appears on a black and white police car. The civil disturbance of the “ancient grudge”

18 appear as so much stock footage of burning buildings and the like captured by an eye in the sky camera from one of the Prince’s or the network’s helicopters. The “fatal loins” are personed as we see newspaper and magazine photographs of the Capulets and the

Montagues; the prologue now dramatis personae; the film then introducing its own signature font in which the letter “t” appears as a cross in the blazoning of certain phrases, such as “star cross’d lovers” against a black background; the sequence ending in the appearance of its own title: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Ok—so the non-correlation between prologue and performance on the “stage”; the performance supplementing, mending, exceeding, what goes missing in the prologue, the lack of affect is translated into a cinematic omission of the lines that plot the non- correlation but which conserves the lines as a visual enframing of the story by the citation of other framing devices (eye in the sky cameras; news programs; features programs; newspaper headlines; magazines, etc)—what’s “missing” provided in the film by the fast cuts. Nashe’s defense of theater; his generative selling of theater as a medium that enables it or seeks to prolong its existence yoking it to print reveals the way the bio- political management and articulation of citizens comes coupled with and serves the occasion for the correlative genesis of different media that revive key “proper names” or aphoristic programs for being. That defense of theater translates for Luhrman into the selling of the cinema / his version of “William’s Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet” (cite / use Murray on “Forget Shakespeare” in Drama Trauma…the on-stage correlation of

Luhrman’s fast cuts and citation of other media would be the absorption or production of sonnets out of dialogue—one medium’s ontology may be captured only by its embrace by another—film archive TV or fights hard not to be archived by TV (1990s). Hence the

19 seriality of media platforms produces as death effects / birth defects in others….proper names remain intact as nodes or operators…as in the Hamlet / telephonic crux of the previous chapter…

Bardoclash 2

Actors were instructed to stare at a blank piece of paper and respond to what they remembered of a Persian story that bears some resemblance to the plot of the play. These reaction shots were then edited in series and synchronized to the soundtrack of

Zefferelli’s film, but at no point in Where is My Romeo? does Zeferrelli’s film appear on screen, and much of the spoken dialogue of Juliet’s scene is muffled or unavailable. In thinking through the way Kiarostami’s film addresses itself to cinema-going audiences in an age of digital media, and the variously announced and on-going deaths of cinema and print media, we… offering an instance of what adapting the phraseology of Bruno

Latour, we name bardoclash. Abbas

With iconoclasm, one knows what the act of breaking represents, and what the motivations of apparent destruction are. For iconoclash, one does not know: one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know: one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive. Bruno Latour, “What is Iconoclash?”23

20 We need to get back to her—but not in order to parse out the story so that it comes out differently, to un-write the sentences that generate “Romeo and Juliet” as aphorism or to transform their story into something else, but instead order to try to understand what might be happening in this small film by Abbas Kiarostami “Where is My Romeo?” that revives only one half of the couple, leaving the other one dead, even if freshly so.

Key points re “Where is My Romeo?”

What goes missing between two media—sonnet to play; TV to film; figures the

“death” or going missing of a story—the capacity of one medium to deliver or to more effectively revive, veridicate, and amp up the affect that the prologue—proper names migrate easily because they are empty, aphorisitic, “never arriv[ing] by itself…part

[always] of a serial logic” (Derrida, 416)—the empty fullness to the proper name (Bal on the illusion of fullness that proper names give)

The title misreads or appears to misread Juliet’s line “O Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo” from the balcony scene but instead, by its syncing to

Zefferelli’s rendering of the Juliet’s sucide removes the question from the play such that the question becomes the implied script for the extra-diegetic series of reaction shots. If

“where is my romeo” posits first a question posed by the cinema-goer or the theater-goer, it wrenches Juliet’s question as to whys and wherefores into the scene of replaying and revival as experienced as screen time by the cinema audience. Initially, the title of the film plays as a question that longs for a Romeo to appear—where is my Romeo? Where is the other for whom I would die a beautiful death; the other whose death, in Derrida’s terms, I shall bear witness to and who shall bear witness to my own; our death? Where is

21 this double and doubling consummation that overproduces images of itself relying on the succession of framings for the appearance of a content to what was already a mutual archiving by two proper names as each other’s substrates? The film therefore appears to uncouple the lovers, allowing the visually unavailable and only partially audible

Zefferelli, coded by the soundtrack, to migrate into the audience as identifying with the subject position assumed to coincide with Juliet. We are invited, if you like, to identify with Juliet through these women, in series, crossing a generational set of divides. On the one hand, the succession of reaction shots asserts therefore the mythic function of the story across media, generational, and global divisions, but by the same hand, the succession of reaction shots locates the experience in the act of cinematic viewing, or more properly now in the act of viewing cinematic viewing (the cin off) however it is mediatized. (Barthes in a Lover’s Discourse here re identification as a purely structural process one that plays out via his discussion of various substrates—wood, and so on…he does Gradiva). The film ends with an homage to a “proper name” that attaches to the last woman pictured in the series—inviting a further sense of each reaction shot as a significant series in a generational narrative about actors as biosemiotic wetware to the cinema, here positioned in an equivalent viewing position to the audiences who have and who are watching them.

Almost immediately (and it is as obvious as it is un/important) the fracturing of the series by Prince Escalus’s “All are punished” is read as an allegorical coding of the film as a statement regarding women’s and so general oppression in Iran. (New Yorker essays). So be it—though such critique of the regime remains moot / mute and does nothing to impede Kiarastomi’s career even as the regime says it does not “like” his

22 movies—their critique and the threat of sanction become a frowning reaction shot or empty seat at the theater. Where is my Romeo ? becomes an ubi sunt formula on the absence of romeos of a romeo for me—which plays nonsensically and meaningfully in terms of subject-position but which also figures the absence of death worth dying…

But the seriality of the reaction shots, which substitute a further reaction shot in a flat surface for the shot reverse shot structure the film refuses and perhaps which we are invited to supply, or supply from memory, of if we have patient “ears” we hear translated to sound serves also a refusal of diegesis, and of the suture, and so as an attempt to read instead of mending?

Syncing up the film in two browsers with the Zefferelli completes the circuit, closes out the diegesis, but what is the status of two films synced up streaming through two browsers? Instead, the film seems to own the fact of cinema and cinephilia as substrate—going to the cinema, as the prologue begs of the audience at the Rose(?), is to play a part in the relay between different media platforms—to judge whether the toile of one supplies the miss of another. Kiarastomi stages the miss/ R and J gone missing, or what? The reaction shots sync up most closely to Juliet’s anticipatory consideration of how her reaction shot to waking up too early in the tomb might go—to the wrong kind of suicide—does that describe the moment of viewing Where is My Romeo? Become the cruel unarticulated line that is implied by Juliet dashing her brains out solo in the tomb.

Revivals it must be said can prove scary—a chance to revisit if not always revise epistemic violence and damage past and still all too present.

23 In what follows, I pursue these high-pressure, low-stakes questions about the obscure obviousness of cinephilic wrecognition by turning, after several necessary and perhaps excessively long detours into theoretical fields involving the image, the archive, and narratology along the timber trail I will be talk/walk/ing you through, to a three minute film short directed by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Where is My Romeo, screened at Cannes in 2007 as one of thirty three films edited together as a “Cannes-pilation” film entitled Chacun son cinema (To Each His Own Cinema), and then released on DVD in a one disc edition and a two disc French edition. Both editions are out-of-print, though still for sale on various websites. However, Kiarostami’s three minute film has been extracted, compressed into streaming video, and uploaded by multiple versions onto youtube.com. Kiarostammi’s film is part of world cinema in a film addressed to cinephiles, but the “worldness” of the world cinema it enters is not easily circumscribed by the words “global” or “universal.”24

We may begin to see how the migration of the film from DVD to youtube, itself a commonplace practice, begins to complicate our sense of what an adaptation, spin-off, and even edition are as well as what cinephilia is. The youtube “editions” might be regarded as adaptations of it insofar as they isolates the film from its cinematic source, the youtube versions make no reference to the DVD edition of the film from which they extracted. They provide text in the form of viewer’s comments and a vertically arranged series what are, in the meta-language of youtube urls, “related” links with of thumbnails and titles for each. Some versions have subtitles in different languages for the English audio. Of course, the uploaders are anonymous and do not critically reflect on what they are doing. One can always watch it by itself on the DVD, but the youtube versions in

24 some sense re-edit and adapt it by extracting it from an unreferenced source. In order to understand point, however, one must become a kind of comparative philologist, searching the web to track down, perhaps accidentally, the source, and related links. Yet one will never be able to produce an edition that includes the film watched, say, on a DVD in the same computer, to the streamed video extract and its related links online. And would such an edition be cinephilic? Is there (a need for) such a thing as cinephilic textual criticism?

In complicating our sense of what an edition or film adaptation is, the practice of youtube extraction highlights a complexity Viewed on either of the two Chacun son cinema DVD or on alone youtube, Kiarostami’s film is a kind of “film with and without the film”: it differs from other films with cin-offs that show movie theater audiences watching a scene from a film in two ways: it never shows the film the audience is watching, in this case, the last minutes of Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation Romeo and

Juliet, beginning with Juliet’s suicide; and second, instead of being a cin-off scene in a film, Where is My Romeo is a cin-off that is also a film adaptation.25 If one knows

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet fairly well, one will immediately recognize Olivia Hussey’s voice on the soundtrack. And even if one doesn’t know the Zeffreilli very well at all, one will probably recognize the famous “Where is Love?” theme turned pop song as it plays at the end of the Zeffirelli film and which Kiarostami’s ends his own film with end a two shot title sequence. The aesthetic value of Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Romeo

(2007), its status as a work of art, depends on its resistance both to the mimetic economies of cinephilic viewing in particular and film theory in general that enable recognition: when viewed on youtube, Kiarostami’s film can be seen in a variety of

25 screen sizes and split into one of two computer screens in two browsers, one showing the film and the other showing the scene cited but not shown from Zeffirelli’s film. (See figure 1)

Figure 1. Split computer screens showing Kiarostami and Zeffirelli at the same moment, “Where is My Romeo”

Even when viewed by itself in a single browser, the delivery of Kiarostami’s film by streaming video on youtube invites us to read its paradoxical exploration of cinephilia as emotional reaction shots to an emotional film we don’t see ourselves from a deconstructive perspective as a breakdown of the mimesis of cinema ordinarily assumed by cinephiles: Where is My Romeo, as its title suggests, artfully invites us to question how we mis/w/rec/k/ecognize cinema thro through metaphor and analogy, including in this case, live theater and the movie theater, particularly in the case of film adaptations.26

Where is My Romeo’s remediation via streaming video makes possible, perhaps even necessary, a kind of philological comparative criticism of Kiarostami’s “film with and without the film” and its perhaps unintended status as a film that is not a film but

26 streamed video both to the film it cites and adapts and its freely associative, somewhat random links to other kinds of Shakespeare spin-offs on youtube.

By attending to the varied dynamics of cine-clash through the limiting lens of the cin-off, we may also make possible a philological film and media practice alert to the obscurity of the obvious: a given digital transfer of a film is not merely a new artifact to be reinterpreted, as Giovanni Fossati says, like a different cut of the same film, but a new edition and is even, to press my point even further, an adaptation much the way a cin-off is. Like a critical edition of a work of literature, DVDs and blu-rays come with paratextual extras that constitute something like the equivalent of a scholarly apparatus and often include documentaries on the restoration of the material artifact as well as programmed extras allowing for the simulated viewing of a film when it was originally released.

There [in theater], the handicap we suffer from is due especially to the disappearance of the race of traditional tragedians of the old school, the Mounet-Sullys and the Sarah

Bernhardts, that is, who disappeared at the beginning of the century like prehistoric creatures of the secondary period. By a stroke of irony, it is that film that has preserved their bones, fossilized in the films d’art.

Andre Bazin, “Theater and Cinema, Part Two,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1, p.122

The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles.

27 (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.

Susan Sontag, (“The Decay of Cinema”)(1996)

Behind what film gives us to see, it is not the existence of atoms that we are led to seek, but rather the existence of an “other world” of phenomena, of a soul or of other spiritual principles. It is this revelation, above all, of a spiritual presence, that I propose we seek

In poetry.”

--Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? 358

Abandon in / g Cinema: Give Me My Sin-Off Again

At last, I turn to Abbas Kiorastami’s Where is My Romeo. But before I do so, let me offer two contradictory propositions: first, examples of cin-offs may be found in a countless number of films, including the silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor during which an audience is shot “listening” to a “talkie” at a movie theater; second, there is no such thing as a cin-off; the cin-off may only be mis/wreckgcognized.27 As “example” illustrating both propositions, I turn to the film Chacun son Cinema of which

Kiorastami’s Where is My Romeo is one of thirty-three three-minute narrative films. The title Chacun son Cinema is an exercise in ontological damage control. The film is offered as a cinephilic celebration of world cinema: rather than ask “what is world cinema?,” Chacun son Cinema assumes that we already know what cinema has been and still is, dividing cinema up into discrete units of narrative films directed by single persons from single nations: each person, whether a director, cast or crew member of a film, or spectator gets his or her own singular cinema. And that cinema is available, if

28 not at Cannes, then on DVD. The “universality” of “world” cinema celebrated in

Chacun son Cinema is composed of a nationally bounded geopolitics, each film exchangeable in the same universal currency.

One could reasonably say that the entire film is a compilation of cin-offs since each film is in some way about film. All have scenes in movie theaters, though one of the thirty films stops at the ticket window and another ends at a bar after the film is over.

One film actually shows clips from the cin-off in Vivre sa Vie in which Nana (Anna

Karina) and her john go to the cinema to see Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc (a.k.a

The Passion of Jon of Arc, 1928), shifting the narrative focus to the Antonin Artaud playing a priest away from Maria Falconetti playing Joan.

Yet the narrative films Cannes-piled in Chacun son Cinema are cin-off-wrecks or cinemauras in that they are merely narrative films in which films in the film are part of the theme, and the only kind of film they show is celluloid. Moreover, Chacun son cinema arranges the thirty films in an order that neither quite serial and random nor successive and logical. The DVD has a paratextual problem remediating the film’s narrative structure, however. On the DVD menu, the last film is entitled Happy Ending.

If you choose this option, you do to a comedy by Ken Loach about a father and son standing in line deciding which film to see only to change their minutes at the last second and to go to a football match instead. The last fade to black shot of Loach’s carries over a roar of soccer fans from the last shot, with credits in white type. Yet the Happy Ending title on the DVD menu does not appear in Loach’s film with a happy ending. The happy ending arrives in the form of a short clip from the end of Rene Clair’s Le Silence est d'Or

(a.k.a. Silence is Golden, Many About Town, 1948) and shows Emile (Charles Boyer)

29 asking his young date, Lucette (Dany Robin) while they are watching a hand-cranked projection of a silent film, if she likes happy endings. She replies “yes,” and he says “so do I.” Play music, fade to black, followed by a thank you to Rene Clair and then by a citation of the film’s French title. Why does the DVD menu not properly index the contents of the film.? Among the many possible reasons, I suggest that the Epilogue remains concealed on the DVD because it is not integrated into the film itself. The epilogue is a cin-off from a film, not a film in its own right. It is in excess of the thirty films of the films that cannot be recognized on the paratexts of the DVD or peritexts of the film. The referent of the dislocated “happy ending” goes missing.

Where is My Romeo significantly contributes to the cine-“wreckage” of Chacun son cinema by interrogating the ontology of the film medium, what we might now call

“cinenoma,” instead of telling a story about film that takes it for granted that cinema-- still-- has an ontology. The title of Kiarostami’s film is conspicuously missing the question mark that follows Juliet’s question in the play. By improperly re-citing a question from Romeo and Juliet as an unpunctuated and non-sensical declarative sentence, Kiarostami pressures the viewer to hallucinate the question mark and hear the silent title as a question. The French subtitle underneath the film’s title on the two disc

DVD edition succumbs to this pressure and supplies the missing question mark, as if emending the film, repairing and correcting its unwitting error.

30 This correction is itself something of an error, however. For Kiarostami’s film puts cinema’s ontology into question by reproducing yet disturbing the citation practices that underwrite its apparently specular economy. Much the way Jean-Luc Godard cuts from

Dreyer’s close-ups of Falconetti in Vivre sa vie (1964 ) to Anna Karina watching her in a movie theater, both of whom shed tears, Where is My Romeo lets us identify with the anonymous women in the audience who are identifying with Juliet, as in a hall of mirrors.

Kiarostammi follows Godard in making film spectatorship into an archival and auratic effect. In Vivre sa vie, no music (live accompaniment) plays during Dreyer’s (silent) film, nor does any extra-deigetic music sound play on the soundtrack as Nana watches it.

The theater showing Dreyer’s film seems to be in disrepair. Only the neon letters “cine” of “cinema” to the left of the marquee are lit. Only three people are watching Dreyer’s film (one woman walks out just as Nana and her john sit down). Godard represents the specularity of two beautiful, young women actresses in two different films as a cinpehilic

31 effect, a fantasy of auratic immediacy that is no longer, perhaps never was available, and that is grounded in the total silence of the soundtrack of Vivre sa vie.

Godard was not in a position to say that cinema was dead until the 1980s when he filmed his four part l’histoire du cinema, but he already seized on a kind of cinematic death in Vivre sa Vie, adding the title “Le mort” a second time to his redition of Dreyer’s film (it appears only once in Jeanne d’Arc). A different analogue medium, which Godard deployed in l’histoire, may it possible to keep cinema intact, something that had a history that began and ended even if what cinema was remained an open question. In Where is

My Romeo, Kiaorstami stages spectatorship as an archive effect by turning a con-off into a narrative film. Like Vivre sa Vie, Where is My Romeo shows a number of women in a movie audience are shot successive in close-ups of approximately the same length while they watch a woman committing suicide near the ending of Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation Romeo and Juliet (1966). The crucial difference is that Kiraostami never shows the film the women are watching, intensifying the auratic immediacy of the emotional responses we see on the screen by withholding the image of the film they are reacting too.28

Let me back up a moment. Even before Where Is My Romeo begins with a shot of the audience, the title of the film--its missing question mark—disturbs what it seems to recite. Romeo and Juliet is of course deeply engaged in citation: not only the (always already anti-) Petrarchan sonnet tradition enacting a sonnet when Romeo and Juliet first speak to each other at the Capulet ball. Kissing by the book, Romeo and Juliet play out the tropes of a literary sonnet tradition as the actors playing them recite lines from a prompt-book. The play’s iterations complicate from the story an economy of love

32 between pilgrims through which sin and redeemed through repetition: “give me my sin again.”29

Kiarostammi’s Where is My Romeo deep-en-d-s the play’s own concerns with citation and media. The film is both a narrative and a non-narrative film: the soundtrack is of course a narrative, but the reaction shots of the spectators are randomly ordered.

One might consider the film as a compilation of reaction shots. The close ups of women

Romeo are differentiated in two respects: first, the last women we see is quite old, in contrast to the other women, all of whom are young, we see before her; moreover, this actress turns her head to her right as if looking at the person seated next to her, but we can’t tell what she sees, or if she is seeing anything; this actress also gets a line of text at

33 the bottom of the frame thanking her by name, Mrs. Keradmand.

34

35 Second, most of the women begin to cry as the film gets more dramatic, especially at

Juliet’s line, “O happy dagger.” These shifts from many young women to one old woman, from women sad to women sad enough to cry, may be interpreted in a number of ways (for example, even a very old woman may still young be enough identify with a fourteen year old teenager; women may be deeply moved by a film about a woman; the film is really a tribute to the Iranian actress it names and appears to accept by turning and nodding her heard; and so on). Yet these shifts nevertheless do not constitute a narrative shift: their multiplicity and heterogenity prevent one either from totalizing Where is My

Romeo as a random series or as a narrative film. The film’s last shot is not an ending (no one gets up to leave), and the music from Zeffirelli’s film plays over the two credits that end Kiarosotami’s film. The initially diegetic soundtrack of the film becomes extradeigetic during the end title sequence.

36 By redividing Where Is My Romeo’s cuts in their relation to the content of their images and its film soundtrack, Kiarostami invites his film to read philologically.

Whoever added the question mark after Romeo in the French subtitle was not merely resisting the film. Philology is essentially a reparative operation, emending texts, preserving and saving them, making sense of them, rendering them readable. Yet the kinds of comparative film philology made possible through DVDs and youtube prevents one from achieving a restored, corrected edition of the film that might include an audiocommentary made by a person who uploaded the film or added to latter DVD or blu-ray edition of the film. As I mentioned earlier, Youtube.com allows one to restore the unseen Zeffirelli film: one only has to opening up two browsers and place them side, almost as if the film had been shot in split screen, to see the one clip and the other at the same time.

37 The scene from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet we hear in Where is My Romeo begins with

Juliet’s lines “where is my lord? / I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am. Where is my Romeo?” The scene ends with ends with the Prince’s lines, reassigned by Zeffirelli to the voice-over narrator who delivered the prologue and serving as the film’s epilogue:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head . . . .

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Zeffirelli cut these two lines from the Prince’s speech: “Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; / Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished.”

Where is my Romeo offers an opportunity to re-read the Romeo and Juliet passages and see what Zeffirelli did with them. Yet to do so is Yet to do so is to return to a philosophical question about philology focused on violence30: what did Zeffirelli cut from the text and why? Why did Kiarostami cut the suicide scene from that film and use

38 it in his own film? What happens when you cite a film by cutting its sound from its image, when you reroute a visual mirror stage that allows for the identification of faces through a sonic mirror stage--what Kaja Silverman calls the acoustic mirror? To pursue these questions through new media means that a film philology begins with the assumption of cinewreckage, or something we might (not) call what we still refer to as cinema. The ontological status of Kioarostami’s own film becomes next to impossible to convert into philological terms.

If one does the most basic google searches with the words “Where is My Romeo,” one may very quickly discover that the women in the film are not actually watching Romeo and Juliet but staring at a piece of blank A4 paper. Kiarostami says he shot the women looking the paper first, then added the soundtrack from Zeffrelli’s film later.31 Though the production of film may be sequenced into image and sound, the meshing of the one and the other produces a problem at the center of cinephilia, namely, the relation between readability, mourning. As Anselm Haverkamp writes in “Error in Mourning,” “The death of Mnemosyne exhausts the possibilities of lyric in that it grounds the impossibility of reading in the inability of mourning . . . Without memory and the defensive abilities of understanding (“to re-collect”), there is no possibility left for a future hermeneutics.”32

Where is my Romeo might be read as a kind of funeral procession, anticipating the mourning of the Mrs. Kammamerkand who perhaps already mourning her death as she watches Juliet end hers, but any such thematic reading of Kiarostammi’s film runs aground on the fact that Where is My Romeo has already serialized mourning:

Kiraostammi returns to a film that ends with mourning, but the shots of Zeffirelli’s

Romeo and Juliet’s funeral are registered only through music and hence cannot be

39 registered in Where is My Romeo. The referent of mourning, whether that referent is alive or already dead, fictional or real, all forestall a thematic, linearization of Where is

My Romeo.

Let me go further. In refusing to make mourning a narratable sequence with a single object, Kiarostammi’s film deconstructs the presumed ontological integrity of cinema, the central issue being whether or not film is indexical. Where is My Romeo ex-poses the question “What is cinema” as a questioning of cinenoma, cinemaura, and cinemarchive as that turns on the screen and the frame. What matters is how the screen produces referent effects based both on what we see and hear on the screen and what we don’t. The clarity of Where is My Romeo that allows us to mis/recognize is predicated both on deafness (the film we watch has no soundtrack) and blindness (the film we hear has no image track).

Yet blindness and clarity, deafness and hearing do not map exactly to what is on or off screen since the soundtrack of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is also the soundtrack of

Where is My Romeo.

The multiple and seemingly obvious s-ways in which Kiarostammi divides hand redivides Where is My Romeo defer the authority of any single set of opposed terms to operate as the opposition that masters all the other. Nevertheless, Where is my Romeo calls into question the limits of the screen, its relation to the frame, and hence is not yet another garden variety example of a deconstructive mise-en-abyme, yet another frame of reference.33 Most cin-offs, the film in the film is shown diegetically on a screen that is a prop, in effect, on the set. It is a film within-a film, a self-reflexive moment in which film reflects on its medium by framing it. However, there are almost many cin-offs in which the film cuts to the film in it by showing it without a screen. All of the shots in

40 Vivre sa vie from Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc take up the entire screen; they are directly cut into Godard’s film. Godard does the same thing with the rushes of Fritz

Lang’s Odyssey in Contempt and Alain Resnais does the same thing with 8mm rushes shown in Muriel: The Time of a Return. In films like Hitchock’s Sabotage (1936),

David R. Ellis’s The Final Destination: 3D (2009), and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious

Basterds (2009), the proscenium arch over the movie theater screen image appears in the cin-offs and, more importantly, the film in the film is shot from a space behind it.

Seemingly recognizable cin-offs, when collected and compared philologically, show that the capacity of film to reflect itself on screen through a screen image of film on screen in the shot is merely an effect, a distorted way of rendering cinema’s self-reflexivity.

41 In Where is My Romeo, the questioning of cinematic mis/wrekcognition and of mourning a “decayed” or “dead” cinema derives from a more local questioning of the movie theater, perhaps the one constant in all cin-offs, though the “theater” takes a wide variety of forms. By withholding Romeo and Juliet from view, Kiraostmami collapses the movie theater into the screen they are watching, directing our attention by using the film soundtrack of a film adaptation of a play to a difference between theater and movie theater audiences we ordinarily cannot see. Yet as the screen collapses into the frame. Yet phantom effects of a frame return. If one assumes

(mistakenly yet correctly) that the audience in Where is My Romeo are watching

Romeo and Juliet, one may wonder where the camera has been placed even though one knows it has obviously been placed in front of them. It may appear to have been a hidden camera partly because the film refuses to obey the convention of the shot reverse shot that it mis/uses. Whereas the shot reverse shot convention would put prevent the camera’s location from ever being a question, the fact that we never get the reverse shot puts more and more pressure on our understanding of the shots we are watching: since women never look at the camera or acknowledge it in any way, it is clear we are not watching a documentary of a live performance, on the one hand, yet, on the other, it is clear that the immediacy of the women responses depends on the (hallucinated) mediation of the camera and the women, on something like a phantom fourth wall, an invisible proscenium arch between the camera and the women shown on screen that women cannot see, just as we cannot see what they are

(not) watching.

42 Kiarostammi’s Where is My Romeo puts the ontology of cinema by undoing the presumably evident opposition between screen and frame. In his essay “Painting and

Cinema,” Andre Bazin contrasts the two media in relation to the frame. Paintings, of course are framed, but not the screen: “The outer edges of the screen are not, as the technical jargon would seem to imply, the frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. . . A frame is centripetal, the screen centrigual.” Anticipating the moves made in Shakespeare and film adaptation studies in the 1990s to liberate films from a fidelity model centered on original, complete texts, Bazin disagrees with critics who feel that the film s not true to the painting wants to save films about paintings as “works in their own right. They are their own justification. . . . The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence” (168). Bazin saves film adaptations of theater in a similar way, dialectically arguing that just as bad theater saved theater, so bad films of theater, save film adaptations of theater.34 Bazin’s brilliant and laudatory attempt to save cinema as something about which one can ask “What is?” depends on an intractable structuralist account of film and other media. Film and painting are both indivisible media insofar as paintings and films are complete: films about paintings paradoxically “use an already completed work sufficient unto itself. But it is precisely because it substitutes a work one degree removed form it. . . that it throws a new light on the original. It is perhaps to the extent that film is a complete work and as such, seem s therefore to betray the painting most, that it renders it in reality the greater survive” (169).

43 The importance of Where is My Romeo and of the Shakespeare cin-off in generally in part in making us see the central limits of Bazin’s theory of film adaptation, namely, it uncritically assumes that film and works of film are indivisible units and it forgets the movie theater. Viewed in relation to new media, Bazin’s still dominant film theory also works against any attention either to remediation as a philological practice of editing or to what a new film philology would look like or whether it is even possible.35 From a deconstructive point of view, it is naïve to think that any film or a work of literature is complete and completely readable. As Derrida writes, “we are no longer credulous enough to believe we are setting out from things themselves by avoiding ‘texts” simply by avoiding quotation or the appearance of ‘commentary.’ The most apparently direct writing, the most directly concrete, personal writing which is supposedly in direct contact with the ‘thing itself,’ this writing is ‘on credit’: subjected to the authority of a commentary or a re-editing that is not even capable of reading.36

“A thing like death”

O comfortable Friar, where is my lord? I do remember well where I should be, And here I am. Where is my Romeo? (5. 3. 148-150)

What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand? Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end. O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop To help me after? I will kiss thy lips. Haply some poison yet doth hang on them To make me die with a restorative. [Kisses him.] Thy lips are warm!

Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger! [Takes Romeo’s dagger.] This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die. She stabs herself, falls [and dies].

44 Kottman wants to see off the contretemps—have a single law of the name…

Dying a living death / passing over into water and both being lost and also unable to mourn / be mourned. Wet death, then defeats funery rites (Alonso)—

Beast and S—one cannot die alive—but one can die in another / the other name as ubstrate to your death / alive…this is the aphoristic asynchrony that R and J inaugurate as an infinite haunt… 130+

On middle voice to survivance—as slipping through sovereitny’s fingers; that the sovereign cannot capture even as he / she may retrace it…

—our thoughts of our death are always, structurally, thoughts of survival. To see oneself or to think oneself dead is to see oneself surviving, present at one’s death, present or represented in absentia at one’s death even in all the signs, traces, images, memories, even the body, the corpse, or the ashes, literal or metaphorical, that we leave behind, in more or less organized and deliberate fashion, to the survivors, the other survivors, the others as survivors delegated to our survival…all of which is banal and well known. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, volume II37

Romeo and Juliet, the heroes of contretemps in our mythology, the positive heroes. They missed each other, how they missed each other! Did they miss each other? But they also survived, both of them, survived, one another, in their name, by chance, of temporal and aphorsitic series. Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime”38

Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

45 Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse39

Her present remains tied to the future that she imagines will have been; into which, accordingly, she projects herself.40 She has no choice. “Our thoughts of our death are always, structurally, thoughts of survival,” writes Derrida, “to see oneself or to think oneself dead is to see oneself surviving, present at one’s death.”41 The plan, as pill- pushing Friar Lawrence told her back in Act 4, scene 1, is to enter a drug-induced, “thing like death…that cop’st with death himself to scape from it.”42 To “cope” means Juliet shall meet, face, battle, buy off, dwell or detour with death in order to make possible a literal survival.43 Death or death effects prove necessary to cancel out the marriage to

Paris upon which her family insists. Death will enable her to rise again and as if for the first time as “Juliet.” She must enter, so the Friar thinks, into a becoming “dead” to her family in order to wake to a future that is not scripted by them or the conflicts of their present. She must embark upon a becoming corpse, a becoming thing, gathering her family to her, so that by their handling of her, by the care they take of her body in mourning, they shall unwittingly become delegates not to her memory but to a literal survival. If, as Derrida suggests, death figures a blanking out or erasure of habeas corpus, the legal writ “which accords a sort of proprietorial sovereignty over one’s own living body,” Juliet’s “thing like death” works in reverse.44 Only by becoming corpse may she attain some measure of sovereignty over her living corpus. She will quite literally enter into a “habeas corpse” so that, “two and forty hours” on, she shall “awake from a pleasant sleep” (4. 1. 105-106). In the interim, she lives on as if dead, having given up any control

46 over what will have happened to her body when she finds herself woken. Thus shall

Verona be rebooted.

Back in the Friar’s cell, Juliet was eager, reckless. Bent on suicide, high on the strong sovereignty of deciding her death, she demands that Friar Lawrence “hide me nightly in the charnel-house, / O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,” or “bid me go into a new-made grave, / And hide me with a dead man’s shroud” (4. 1. 81-85).

She wants the drug now. “Give me, give me,” she demands (4. 1. 121)—give me the drug that will give back my family to me such that by mourning, by caring for me in my

“thing-like death,” they become unwitting delegates to my literal survival. Fearing that she may self medicate too early, Friar Lawrence demands she “Hold” and “Get…gone”

(4. 1. 122). He will have the vial sent round.

But now, up in her bedroom, alone, “a faint cold fear thrills through [her veins]”

(4. 3. 15). Juliet can’t help but fantasize about the living death she will endure. She doubts the narrative the Friar supplies for what will happen to her in her “thing-like death.” Back in act 4 scene 1, he tells her as is the “manner of our country…Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault / Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie” (4. 1. 109-

112). “In the meantime…against that thou shall wake…Romeo shall by [Friar

Lawrence’s] letters know [their] drift” (4. 1. 113-114) and the two “will watch thy waking” (4. 1. 116). But, such assurances do not assuage the thoughts that race on to fill in the void of sleep that a “thing-like death” entails. Maybe the Friar seeks to cover his tracks and to dispose of her. “How if, when I am laid into the tomb, / I wake before the time that Romeo / Come to redeem me? There's a fearful point” (4. 3. 30-33). She shall

“stifle,” “strangle,” in the “foul mouth” of the tomb that breathes no air (4. 3. 34-35).

47 Worse still, she may not suffocate; she may, in terror, “run mad”

And madly play with my forefather's joints,

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud

And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,

As with a club, dash out my desperate brains

(4. 3. 50-54)

What would it mean to wake from a “thing-like death” to the dead, to the tomb, to a permanent hiatus or unpleasant sleep? In the event, she drinks because she thinks she sees Tybalt’s ghost “seeking out Romeo that did spit his body / Upon a rapier’s point” (4. 3. 55-57). Death comes calling but not for her. “Stay, Tybalt, stay!” But Tybalt won’t wait or cannot hear her. And so she drinks. Toasts Romeo. Passes over into a “thing like death” (4. 1. 74). Juliet goes after Tybalt; blacks out; blanks out—a delegate to a spectral revenge plot she hallucinates and aims to prevent.

48 Notes:

Key points re “Where is My Romeo?”

What goes missing between two media—sonnet to play; TV to film; figures the

“death” or going missing of a story—the capacity of one medium to deliver or to more effectively revive, veridicate, and amp up the affect that the prologue—proper names migrate easily because they are empty, aphorisitic, “never arriv[ing] by itself…part

[always] of a serial logic” (Derrida, 416)—the empty fullness to the proper name (Bal on the illusion of fullness that proper names give)

The title misreads or appears to misread Juliet’s line “O Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo” from the balcony scene but instead, by its syncing to

Zefferelli’s rendering of the Juliet’s sucide removes the question from the play such that the question becomes the implied script for the extra-diegetic series of reaction shots. If

“where is my romeo” posits first a question posed by the cinema-goer or the theater-goer, it wrenches Juliet’s question as to whys and wherefores into the scene of replaying and revival as experienced as screen time by the cinema audience. Initially, the title of the film plays as a question that longs for a Romeo to appear—where is my Romeo? Where is the other for whom I would die a beautiful death; the other whose death, in Derrida’s terms, I shall bear witness to and who shall bear witness to my own; our death? Where is this double and doubling consummation that overproduces images of itself relying on the succession of framings for the appearance of a content to what was already a mutual archiving by two proper names as each other’s substrates? The film therefore appears to

49 uncouple the lovers, allowing the visually unavailable and only partially audible

Zefferelli, coded by the soundtrack, to migrate into the audience as identifying with the subject position assumed to coincide with Juliet. We are invited, if you like, to identify with Juliet through these women, in series, crossing a generational set of divides. On the one hand, the succession of reaction shots asserts therefore the mythic function of the story across media, generational, and global divisions, but by the same hand, the succession of reaction shots locates the experience in the act of cinematic viewing, or more properly now in the act of viewing cinematic viewing (the cin off) however it is mediatized. (Barthes in a Lover’s Discourse here re identification as a purely structural process one that plays out via his discussion of various substrates—wood, and so on…he does Gradiva). The film ends with an homage to a “proper name” that attaches to the last woman pictured in the series—inviting a further sense of each reaction shot as a significant series in a generational narrative about actors as biosemiotic wetware to the cinema, here positioned in an equivalent viewing position to the audiences who have and who are watching them.

Almost immediately (and it is as obvious as it is un/important) the fracturing of the series by Prince Escalus’s “All are punished” is read as an allegorical coding of the film as a statement regarding women’s and so general oppression in Iran. (New Yorker essays). So be it—though such critique of the regime remains moot / mute and does nothing to impede Kiarastomi’s career even as the regime says it does not “like” his movies—their critique and the threat of sanction become a frowning reaction shot or empty seat at the theater. Where is my Romeo ? becomes an ubi sunt formula on the

50 absence of romeos of a romeo for me—which plays nonsensically and meaningfully in terms of subject-position but which also figures the absence of death worth dying…

But the seriality of the reaction shots, which substitute a further reaction shot in a flat surface for the shot reverse shot structure the film refuses and perhaps which we are invited to supply, or supply from memory, of if we have patient “ears” we hear translated to sound serves also a refusal of diegesis, and of the suture, and so as an attempt to read instead of mending?

Syncing up the film in two browsers with the Zefferelli completes the circuit, closes out the diegesis, but what is the status of two films synced up streaming through two browsers? Instead, the film seems to own the fact of cinema and cinephilia as substrate—going to the cinema, as the prologue begs of the audience at the Rose(?), is to play a part in the relay between different media platforms—to judge whether the toile of one supplies the miss of another. Kiarastomi stages the miss/ R and J gone missing, or what? The reaction shots sync up most closely to Juliet’s anticipatory consideration of how her reaction shot to waking up too early in the tomb might go—to the wrong kind of suicide—does that describe the moment of viewing Where is My Romeo? Become the cruel unarticulated line that is implied by Juliet dashing her brains out solo in the tomb.

Revivals it must be said can prove scary—a chance to revisit if not always revise epistemic violence and damage past and still all too present.

So—the key proposition of the film is not to “read” R and J but to take up a relation to the play a aphorism and as program, that decouples it from its contretemps / counter-time, making explicit the keying of generational, bio-political plots of romance / romantic love

51 (and their resistances—queer, Arendtian, otherwise) by staging the media allegory of seriality already at work in Shakespeare’s play. Sonnet and play as each other’s substrates, enabling us to see and to hear a whole new order of death / life on stage and in this “here.”

Co-articulation of generation and the generative cast to media; coupling of stories of media genesis with scripts for living / dying, taking up our relation to the state, of understanding the plots of romantic love to run in biopolitical terms…prologue…

Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet.

They may lead you to do so very many things; fall in love; yawn; even, to part with the cash for a plane ticket to Verona, as some have done and do, in order to find that courtyard and that balcony from which Juliet troubles the name of Romeo—“O Romeo,

Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” going on to ask him, the person who bears the name but who is not the name, and who she does not yet know is listening, to “deny thy father and refuse thy name.” The yoking of these two proper names to form a third thing, this play, launches an instantly recognizable aphorism that stitches the biopolitical management of sex lives with the bibliographical liveliness of certain books and stories—

Romeo and Juliet.45 As the last lines of the play attest, and as countless writers who play

52 with inverting the names for effect confirm, the measure of the title’s efficacy, its stability, comes by its reversal: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5. 3. 309-310). Or, maybe, you’re completely turned off by the whole thing; avoid the play; shun its revivals and migration to popular songs—revivals, as we all know, can prove scary, relaying epistemic violence across time and space.46

Spun-Out / Cinephilia Beyond Wreckcognition: Know Me No and Juliet

I stop, not close, this essay with a brief look at what seems like a totally recognizable spin-off of Romeo and Juliet, the 3D animated feature film Gnomeo and Juliet. How much more obvious could one be? I do not want to discuss the film “itself,” however, but the ways in which its remediation in variety of formats contributes to our understanding of cinewreckognition. Like many films are now, Gnomeo and Juliet was simultaneously released in three digital editions, the most expensive of which says on the cover that you can watch the film four ways: on blu-ray 3D, on blu-ray 2D, on DVD, and on digital copy. (Another, cheaper edition includes the blu-ray DVD and digital copy, and another still cheaper edition includes a DVD and digital copy).

53 Just as blu-rays included stickers telling the potential buyer that they would not play on a DVD-player, so 3D blu-rays include information about the new equipment they require: a 3D enabled HD flat-screen TV, an HDMI cable, a 3D enabled blu-ray player, and a special set of wraparound dark glasses, different from the ones used in movie

54 theaters (which don’t work with 3D blu-rays that one can play without a 3D enabled blu- ray player) and that differ depending on whether they have been made by SONY or

Disney. All of this equipment is now on the market. In order to market a product that requires marketing new equipment, however, Disney and SONY 3D blu-rays begin with what I call media trailers that showcase the benefits of the new upgrade of the disc (some

DVDs did the same thing in relation to video when DVDs first arrived on the scene, and the DVD edition of Gnomeo and Juliet begins with a media trailer about blu-ray, and the

2D blu-ray begins with a trailer about 3D blu-ray and 3D equipment since each disc is also sold separately).

The media trailers promote the format of DVDs and 2D blu-rays by using clips from existing releases and then identifying them by name at the end. 3D blu-ray trailers go a step further, however, taking narrative form, showing characters or people watching the blu-ray on a home theater. The aim of the trailer is convince the buyer that “Sony 3D brings the theatrical experience back to your home.”47 Yet the trailer makes that case by differentiating the home theater from the movie theater. A TV set is shown in both the

Disney and SONY media trailers, for example. More interestingly, the home theater experience is reproduced through various kinds of special effects. For example, Sony shows a family at home watching a blu-ray: shot from behind the family, the image shows us the TV image from Toy Story 3 (without its soundtrack audible) they are watching in front of them and placing us, in effect, in a row of a movie theater behind them. The media trailer compensates us for our greater remoteness, however, by making the family and the living room almost invisible and the TV frame extremely visible.

55 The special effects make the media trailer into something like a simulation training film, helping us understand how immersive 3D blur-rays are by making the world in the films far less visible and by bringing the film frame toward us. Yet by detaching the TV frame from its location on the wall in the living room, the trailer creates a double frame, with the “real” but less visible frame, exposed behind the “imaginary” but more realistic frame foregrounded for us. The dimensionality of the image in the frame gets distorted (there is no single vanishing point). The better image is being sold not only by returning the image to the frame, but by divided the frame in two The frame thus become as much an obstacle to clarity of the image as a vehicle of it.

These trailers may be seen on Disney’s and SONY’s websites as well as on youtube.

Their remediation on youtube evinces even more bizarre kinds of obscurity.48

56 QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture.

57 The new media way in which the screen and frame are related are permutations of problem of framing that Bazin mis/recognized. As Derrida shows in his chapter

“Restitutions” from The Truth of Painting, the “parergon” or frame of painting does not close the work from interpretation. Moreover, the parergon is not reducible to a single referent, the material frame but operates figuratively. Though Derrida is speaking of literature below, his point about the frame could easily be extended to whatever we want/ed to call cinema was or is:

58 Framed, embedded, bordered, de-bordered, overrun, the smaller becomes

metonymically, larger than the larger—that borders and frames it. Such a

frame fixes the space and time given, that is, instituted by a convention, a

convention which is, by convention, irremovable. But this structure is

rather a movement that also overruns and de-borders the coded language

of rhetoric, her of metonymy as identifiable figure. For the very identity

of figures supposes stable relations between the part and the whole. This

relative stabilization always appears possible, to be sure, and it allows for

rhetoric and the discourse on rhetoric. But as no natural stability is ever

given, as there is only stabilization in process, that is, essentially

precarious, one must presuppose “older” structures, let us not say

originary structures, but more complicated and more unstable ones. We

propose to call them structures, and even to study them as such in literary

processes, because they are not necessarily chaotic. Their relative

“anteriority” or their greater complexity does not signify pure disorder.

(94-95)

The frame is not medium specific, in short, and the multi-media formats through which

“film” is presently delivered are permutations, redivisions within and between film and media. The divisibility of the frame throw even a newer philology or textual criticism into disarray not only because, as Derrida puts in the quotation I cited above, the most apparently direct writing. . . is . . .subjected to the authority of a . . . a re-editing that is not even capable of reading,” but because, as Derrida observes in “Living On:

Borderlines” and “Before the Law” readable and unreadable are no strictly opposed49

59 What Derrida calls the “unreadability” of literature, law, and philosophy might have cinematic parallel, an unwatchablility from which the cin-off spins off.

As divisible media, film and media cannot completely be historicized as a linear sequence or accommodated by existing accounts of the history of film and (new) media since those accounts all assume a fundamentally indivisible unit of cinema, whatever that unit might be. Distinctions between film and new media, between old and new cinephila

( 50) , between the ontological certainty of film and the ontological uncertainty of virtual film (Rodowick) underwrite mythic narratives, or, more radically, expose existing historicisms as the production of mythic narratives, whether they are grand or anecdotal.

If I have shown that film has no proper name, just “that which was formerly known as cinema,” then I have not shown very much. I can only return to my point of departure, with more questions that try to push past the seeming self-evidence and obviousness of

Shakespeare spin-offs on film into Bardo-clash. Consider the four digital versions of

Gnomeo and Juliet, for example. Are we watching the same film in four different ways?

Or are we watching four different films differently? Even in the days of movie theaters projecting nitrate or celluloid prints that made up what self-described new cinephilics call

“old” cinephilia, were we ever watching and writing about the same film? Were even watching a film?

60 and enables us to register its efficacy within the film’s diegesis but by opening a question as to what purposes that diegesis might serve.

Crucially, for us, as we will show you, the making of the film involved leaving

Shakespeare, let alone Romeo and Juliet quite literally unread, off-stage, and unrecognized, raising the question as to the mode in which it speaks and does not speak to the play—whose misquoted line “Where is my Romeo?” it takes as its title—the line become topos, no longer a question but an occasion, a vantage point, ap lace from which to register if not read or activate the play and its filmic translations. Where, then, we ask, does the film fall in the scales of iconophilia? Its refusal to actualize Romeo and Juliet, to allow the image and the sound of the Zeffirelli film to envelop its own frame and soundtrack, does not seem to constitute a moment of iconoclasm, a shattering of one set of idols. But, nor does it fully authorize a full-blown iconophilia. Where is My Romeo is not “about” the play; it inhabits one scene from it that it takes as its entirety. The film offers us something less easy to identify and classify: a moment of what sociologist

Bruatour names “iconoclash,” a term that, given the subject matter we specify to

“Bardoclash.”

As Latour observes,

that we may not involve an act cautious fashion because we seek to think through the way the play programs its own afterlife, its own living on in different media.

Where is My Romeo …insert outline of chapter here and then plug in the various parts… we wish to avoid activating the quasi-automatic program or aphorism that the proper names “Romeo” and “Juliet,” or Romeo and Juliet, set in motion. Like Juliet, we feel that revivals can prove pretty scary—and few more so than Romeo and Juliet. In this play

61 theater tropes the tomb, passes its characters through it so as to confect a relay that it seems impossible to activate without further translating or disseminating or giving into the desire to break it, smash it. Already, the play itself programs our responses.

Of course, should audiences fail to show up or, worse still, fail to recognize and so reactivate the name “Talbot,” then Talbot, if he ever paused to consider it, will find his bones collecting dust once again. War hero that he was, he might have been an excellent name to drop as part of a sales pitch in the 1590s, but today his name hardly registers.

Poor Talbot, he was after all, merely a minor player. In order to survive, to keep on living on and over and above, it helps to find your name yoked with another and also with some third thing—a title. Input the Romeo and Juliet program or virus, what Derrida calls the

“still-living palimpsest,” the yoking together of two proper names to form a third, the title of the play that sets in motion a cascade of differently mediated and so backed iterations: performances, manuscript copies, print copies, revivals, revisions, filmic adaptations, spin offs, digital migrations, and so on.

Equipment for Dying

62 With iconoclasm, one knows what the act of breaking represents, and what the motivations of apparent destruction are. For iconoclash, one does not know: one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.

Bruno Latour, On the Cult of

the Modern Factish Gods51

63 Notes:

64 1 Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” in Acts of Literature, ed., Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 433. 2 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed., Ronald B. McKerrow Rpt. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), vol. II, 211-212. 3 On the phrase “mnemotechnic” as an attempt to insist on memory as an extrinsic, technology, see Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription: “Cultural Studies” After Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1-12. 4 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (Arden Edition Third Series, 2012), 5. 3. 147. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. 5 Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” 433. 6 Ibid., 417. 7 KirastIf for Latour iconoclash, entails a series of questions regarding the act of breaking or wrecking or recognizing— is it a hand ready with a hammer ready to expose, denounce, debunk, show up, disappoint, disenchant, dispel one’s illusions, or let the air out? Or, is it, on the contrary, a cautious and a careful hand, with palm turned as if to catch, elicit, educe, welcome, generate, entertain, maintain, or collect truth and sanctity? —we wish to sideline the implied value of fidelity, even a mode of fidelity that understands that translation involves successive transformations. In Latour’s invocation of religious language, tuned always to the icon and the idol, we hear instead a set of questions concerning the way different media re-tie (re-ligere) us to the stories they relay, and so un/make different orders of world or futures. We agree entirely that the act of breaking may be counter-productive. But we sponsor a reading that understands the way recognizing entails a wrecking. The issue for Latour lies in his desire to sponsor what he regards as optative and optimizing models of reference production and management—models that enable an immanence to acts of making that so prevent the potentially disastrous side effects that making may entail. Note on circulating reference and the production of reference His interest and investment in iconoclash lies in sponsoring a model of making that draws a “crucial distinction…between…the interrupted flow of pictures and a cascade of them.” For Latour, it is only by a series of images in cascade that a truth may be delivered. By standing in for one another, by keeping a succession of By directing the attention of readers to those cascades, I do not expect peace—the history of the image is too loaded for that—but I am gently nudging the reader to look for other properties of the image, properties that religious wars …” (91) 8 Burke, Worthen, Lupton 9 Jonathan Goldberg, “Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs,” in Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 272. 10 Note re fetish 11 Dympna Callaghan, ed., “Introduction,” in Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts (New York: Beford / St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 1. Quoted in Paul A. Kottman, “Defying the Stars: Tragic Love As The Struggle For Freedom in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63: 1 (Spring 2012): 1. For a still signal and inspiring queering of the play, see Goldberg, “Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs”; on the endurance of the plot and the couple transcoded into gay, lesbian, and queer registers see, Carla Freccero, “Romeo and Juliet Love Death,” in ShakesQueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 302-308. On the popularity of “Romeo” and “Juliet” for feline littermates see, PetPlace.com, accessed 11/9/12. 12 Kottman, “Defy the Stars,” 1. 13 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, 131. 14 Ibid. 15 For a fuller sorting of possible sources and analogues see, the introduction to Romeo and Juliet, 32-37. 16 Catherine Duncan-Jones records this anecdote in Ungentle Shakespeare 282-284; as does René Weiss in Romeo and Juliet, 57. 17 Paul Kottman notes that in “in contemporary Verona…one finds marble plaques fixed to the city walls…with inscriptions of lines, in English, from Shakespeare’s play, along with the mythical balcony and tomb of Juliet, and even a street named after Shakespeare—all, in a city where Juliet’s balcony receives a constant stream of pilgrims, presented apparently for visitors” and cites for confirmation his correspondence with the Verona Tourism Office, Paul Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 166 and 250. 18 Bal on semiotic chronology in Lethal Love 19 Dickens 20 Goldberg and Kottman, Kahn etc 21 Note to Burke and Worthen re equipment for living + survivance 22 23 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 68. 24 On worldness and world, see Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,

Finitude, SOlitude. On “universal,” see text for Chacun. Criterion Eclipse mission statement: "...a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer." Maria Ambrovich is dead: A

Biogrpahy / her MOMA self-exhibit a kind of analogue—just staring at you, the sitter, saying nothing, not blinking, as it were. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVrpp_TLY50

For the trailer of Kings and Queens.

Un extrait du film mythique d'Arnaud Desplechin sorti en salles en décembre

2004http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Rs8Ao89kM

Rois et reine ( Kings and Queen) ... Added to queue Rois et Reine -extrait-by awon7824558 views http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mQoHaaloE

This extract is in French. A commenter summarizes the dialogue in English.

Film becomes more foreign. No English subtitles for a film that, on DVD< has English subtitles.

So extracts require translations and other kinds of philological / editing work. World cinema is also multi-lingual / foreign-er cinema)

The uploaders have pseudonyms / code names. 2 min - Mar 29, 2007 - Uploaded by charllotte84

French is “extact,” not clip. There are of course diffrnece sin image nad audio quality, between projection and digital at home, eventhough the digital projectorsand digital prints are decreasing (Myexperience watching Jane

Eyre in a theater —that’ a rally great transfer). The point is htat hter eis now no original against which to measure all others. Viewing the “original” invoves other contrasts between transfers of transfers—from DVD tocomputer. Form computer (a website trailer) to you tube. Trailers can be accessed in different sizes and different densities, btw. So comparative film philology is demanded / invited / enabled by Dvd and computer, esp. youtube.

One scene can function as an annotaiton. Like Beyond Good and Evil / Genealogy of Morals clip from A Christmas Tale from the Criterion DVD. There's a sequence with three scenes from William

Dieterle's A Midsummer Night's Dream on TV in

A Christmas Tale: The Criterion Collection [Blu-ray] (2008)Catherine Deneuve (Actor), Jean-

Paul Roussillon (Actor), Arnaud Desplechin (Director) http://www.amazon.com/Christmas-

Tale-Criterion-Collection-Blu-ray/dp/B002PHVGYA/ref=sr_1_2? s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1309265513&sr=1-2

(Btw, the blu-ray tansfer is grogeous!)

No dialogue is audible because extra-diegtic music on the film soundtrack overrides it. All three scenes involve Oberon and Titania(awaking from her slumber with Bottom)

The play is referenced three times later in the film via sound clips from

Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream used in Dieterle's film and also later by Woody Allen in A

Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

The charrater who opens the film also ends it, concluding her final voice-over comments with the first part of Puck's epilogue:

” If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

She compresses the last three lines of hte six above a bit. The English subtitles do not translate the

French back into Shakespeare's verse, however; I assume the translators did not recognize the citation.

There is also an interestingly enigmatic Jewish thread in the film. One character is Jewish and she leaves the family get together before the gift giving celebration. Cecil B. Demille's remake of The

Ten Comandments (theone wiht Charlton heston) is also hearin French before we see him on TV parting the Red Sea. The randmother ) Deneveuve) calls theson she dislikes "my little Jew," though in an endearing rather than insulting way. He tells her she can keep her anti-Semitism. His girlfriend is the Jewish character (she wears a necklace with a star too).

And there is reading of the Preface to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (seen in

German--"Vorede"- with handwritten French notes, some trnslating the German, surrounding it.

The text is not identified until the rader lays it down on the table andwe see that it is an edition of

Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. Someone uploaded the clip to youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jg8jsbRP84If you own the DVD the extract is taken form, like

Joan of Arc, Criterion, you can recognize the clip. Ditto for Criterion Vivre sa vie. And you can go back and watch it on DVD player or blu-ray player. You watch the “same” thing differently in order to interpret “the” film even though “the” film no longer is equivalent to eh film print, celluloid of digital. Slow reading (Mulvey) by video or by DVD is no longer still seemed to be watching the

“same” film (on TV too), just a different way, even though it arguably was not. The “don’t steal DVDs” tailers have disappeared. Questions of intellectual property, unlike music, seem moot.

25 The one exception is A Cottage on Dartmoor, in which we neeither see nor hear the talkie film the audience sis watching. For a discussion of a much more conventional cin-off of Zeffreilli’s

Romeo and Juliet, film, see Qing ren jie / A Time to Love Dir. Jianqi Huo, 2005. China. Beijing

Film Studio, Starlight Intl. Media Co. Sound, col., 113 mins. A love story set in China’s Cultural evolution, with the romantic relationship between Qu Ran (Vicki Zhao) and Hou Jia (Yi Lu) opposed by both their families includes a cin-off of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

26 See Tom Cohen. I don’t think an anti-mimetic cinema is possible. A para-mimetic cinema is possible, however, that attends to the seldom scenes and oscillations of peripheries and centers.

27 Sound and silent cinema. Silent cinema has musical accompaniment in the Spiral Staircase (dir.,

Robert Siodmak, ) and in The Fall Tarseem).

28 Kiarostammi is not the first director to introduce a cin-off that does not show the screen image of the film in the film. A Cottage on Dartmoor does not show the talkie” his audience is watching, just the orchestra for the silents, and that stops when the sound film comes on, and various members of the audience adapting to the talkie. Some of the films in Chacun son cinema besides Where is My

Romeo do not show the screened image either.

29 on the book topos see E. R. Curtius, “European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.”

30 Violence of reading versus philology, see Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” in

Blindness and Insight (1971; U Minn, 1983), 246-66. See Derrida, Given Time: This violence appears to be irreducible, within the circle or outside it, whether it repeats the circle or interrupts it. (147) as well as modern technical processes (study of paper and writing with the aid, I am told of slides of enlargements of the manuscript) Beissner has produced the irreproachable critical edition (248). In the case of Hölderlin, this margin of indeterminacy is especially large, for the material condition of the manuscripts is frequently such that it is impossible to choose between two possible lessons in the very places where explication is most necessary. The editor finds himself obliged to rely upon the principle that he follows; as a result, scientific philology attempts to find objective and quantitative criteria, while Heidegger decides in the name of the internal logic of his own commentary. 248

A rational decision between these two criteria is obviously difficult. The quantitative method does have in its favor a certain positive probability, but its final choice remains nevertheless arbitrary for it is most unlikely that Hölderlin chose his term on the basis of statistical distribution. Philology knows this well and proceeds in the honest and sensible way; in a note, the editor draws attention to the problem and leaves he question open. But it cannot be denied that he exegete capable of providing a coherent and responsible interpretation has the right, indeed, the obligation, to decide according to the conclusion of his interpretation; that is, after all, one of the goals of all exegesis.

Everything rests, then, on the intrinsic value of the interpretation. (249)

There’s a kind of infra-reading in de Man—an internal split whereby one kind of internal philological reading (cruxes are left open, unresolved) is forever at odds with an other internal reading that has to go far beyond the philological. Yet the criteria for the value of this ”intrinsic interpretation” is difficult to establish, even if we posit that Being becomes the editor, and de Man shortly ironizes Heidegger’s interpetation when de Man says that Heidegger makes Hölderlin say the opposite of what Holderlin actually says. Resolving the split rationally is made even more difficult, de Man notes, by Heidegger’s violent rejection of philology. Heidegger chooses one over the other in polemical fashion in order to distinguish himself as a thinker from a philosopher. p.

249 With Hölderlin, there is never any critical dialogue. There is nothing in his work, not an erasure, no obscurity, no ambiguity, that is not absolutely and totally willed by Being itself. Only one who has truly grasped this can become the “editor” of being and impose commas that spring forth “from the necessity of thought.” We are far from scientific philology. 254

Heidegger’s need for a witness is understandable, then, but why must it be Hölderlin? . . . it is the fact that Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Hiedegger makes him say. Such an assertion is paradoxical only in appearance. With Hölderlin, Heidegger cannot take refuge in the ambiguity that constitutes at once his positive contribution and his defense strategy; he cannot say, as in the case of the metaphysician, that they proclaim both the true and the false, that they are greater the more they are in error, that he closer they are to Being, the more they are possessed by the absconding movement. For the promise of Heidegger’s ontology to be realized, Hölderlin must be Icarus returned from his flight: he must state directly and positively the presence Being as well as the possibility of maintaining it in time. Heidegger has staked this entire “system” on the possibility of this experience. (254-55. Ronell's brilliant essay “Andenken” PMLA in a new light, since she totally forgets de Man's essay (the way Weber forgets the translation essay). De Man's question is more fundamental than Ronell's. His question is not why does philosophy need poetry (this is her question) but why Heidegger turns in particular to the poetry of Hölderlin (rather than Rilke, who seems more Heideggerian). De Man poses the question twice within two pages. His answer is that

Hölderlin is a witness, and this what Heidegger needs, namely, a witness, someone who has gone out and seen Being and returned show us what he has collected and to talk about it (de Man makes the poet sound like a sci-fi astronaut angel). Heidegger couldn’t make the trip himself because all he knew was that Being is concealed; he didn’t know where to find it. Very much not excuses confessions since the witness of Hölderlin would presumably testify that Heidegger was not a Nazi, that the Nazi thing was just a bad connection, and misunderstood the call because he didn’t have called I.D., he thought he was talking to someone else, etc.

The unreadability of the book is linked linked to the impossibility of mourning.

See de Man “Anthropomorphism and Lyric.”

31 Kiarostami used the same device when making his next film Shirin (2008). He added the soundtrack in post-production.

32 YFS No 69 (1985), 246

33 See Barbara Johnosn on Derrida nad Lacan The frame of reference.

34 “ Theater and Cinema, Part Two, section two “The Cinema Will Save the Theater.” 117-120 .

35 Opening bazin: postwar Film Theory and Its afterlife 36 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, (100)

37 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, volume II, 38 Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” in Acts of Literature, ed., Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 433. 39 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans., Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 129. 40 On the wedding of the subject to the “will-have-been of future anteriority, see Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry, 33: 4 (2007): 756. 41 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, eds., Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 117. 42 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (Arden Edition Third Series, 2012), 4. 1. 74-75. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. 43 The verb “to cope” condenses a series of possible modes of association ranging from the commercial to the martial, Oxford English Dictionary, Accessed October 23, 2012. 44 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, 210-211. 45 Morgann on dramatic character and fullness; Bal on the same; Desmet etc on character + special issue of Shakespeare studies. 46 Murray, Drama / Trauma; Episode of Slings and Arrows on Macbeth as “evil play.” 47

48 LogoSpace 3D- Warner Bros. Pictures heads into nature! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIUIYYeZ3Vk&feature=related

49 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, (100)

50 Marijke de Vlack, “Reflections on the Recent Cinephilia Debates,” “Cinephilia appears to be brought into the death of cinema debate to prove the unchallenged significance of contemporary world/art cinema favorites—Abbas Kiorastami, Tsai Ming-liang, and Terrence Malick, to name but a few.” Cinema Journal 40 (2) Winter 2010, 134. Nearly all writers on cinephilia reference Susan

Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema,” See Liz Czach, “Cinephilia, Stars, and Film

Festivals”:

Woven through these investigations has been the vexing question of whether cinephilia is dead, and if not, what new manifestations of cinephilia are evident. . . . Sontag’s “The Decay of

Cinema” might aptly be refigured as “The Death of the Big Screen.” [himself a cinephilic Iranian director celebrated by new cinephiles, Marijke de Vlack, writes the non-death of cinema is proven by the unchallenged significance of contemporary world/art cinema favorites Abbas Kiorastami,

Tsai Ming-liang, and Terrence Malick, to name but a few.” Tarantino might be added. He and Kiarostami were both judges at Cannes and there is a youtube of Kiarostami about QT. Where is my Romeo the opposite kind of cinephilia from QT’s Inglourious basterds.]

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