Image to Infinity: Rethinking Description and Detail in the Cinema
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IMAGE TO INFINITY: RETHINKING DESCRIPTION AND DETAIL IN THE CINEMA by Alison L. Patterson BS, University of Pittsburgh, 1997 MA, Cinema Studies New York University, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical and Cultural Studies University of Pittsburgh 2011 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Alison L. Patterson It was defended on February 23, 2011 and approved by Troy Boone, PhD, Associate Professor, English Adam Lowenstein, PhD, Associate Professor, English Colin MacCabe, PhD, Distinguished University Professor, English Randall Halle, PhD, Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German and Film Studies Dissertation Director: Marcia Landy, PhD, Distinguished Professor, English ii Copyright © Alison L. Patterson 2011 All Rights Reserved iii IMAGE TO INFINITY: RETHINKING DESCRIPTION AND DETAIL IN THE CINEMA Alison L. Patterson, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2011 In the late 1980s, historian Hayden White suggested the possibility of forms of historical thought unique to filmed history. White proposed the study of “historiophoty,” an imagistic alternative to written history. Subsequently, much scholarly attention has been paid to the category of History Film. Yet popular concerns for historical re‐presentation and heritage have not fully addressed aesthetic effects of prior history films and emergent imagistic‐historiographic practices. This dissertation identifies and elaborates one such alternative historiographic practice on film, via inter‐medial study attending to British and American history films, an instance of multi‐platform digital historiography, and an animated film – a category of film often overlooked in history film studies. Central to this dissertation is Gilles Deleuze’s development of varieties of the Movement Image. Deleuze’s Movement Image includes the “discursive image,” a form which has not yet broken the coherence of sensori‐motor connections between the object perceived and the affective response of the viewer. Related to the “discursive image,” I propose that the “descriptive image” can capture what the larger category “representation” and the cinema‐specific “spectacle” cannot. Drawing from literary and art‐historical conceptions of the differences between “descriptive” and “narrative” forms, I propose that in the history film, the “descriptive image” functions as a meta‐critical aesthetic, insisting that viewers perceive naturalized relationships as instead contingent. I argue that, rather than a “mature form” of realism, the “descriptive image” is a form of critical realism. Descriptive iv images are characterized by: long takes of long shots; the co‐presence and co‐equivalence of objects; a point of view neither neutral nor attributable to a character; and expressions of scope or forms for framing that assert that the given view is only one view from the set of possible views. Thus I examine exemplary texts that demonstrate a difference between “narrative understanding” and “descriptive understanding.” These texts, despite their material differences, similarly present mixed historiographic forms, and enable us to see what studies of history on film, in their interest in re‐presentation over presentation, have often missed: “descriptive images” allow us to differentiate the event of the film from an inadequate copy of an historical event. v TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION A. INTRODUCTION TO DESCRIPTION (CONTRA NARRATION) . 1 B. THE HISTORY OF THE “TANGLE” AND THE TANGLE OF HISTORY . 5 C. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE THINGS OF HISTORY . 15 D. HISTORY FOR STRANGE REALISTS . .22 E. DECORATION AND DESCRIPTION, AND THE GEOMETRICS OF HISTORY . 27 F. QUALITIES OF VISUAL DESCRIPTION . .36 II. DECORATED SOLDIERS AND DESCRIPTIVE VISTAS: THREE FILMS BY DAVID LEAN . .43 A. “BALLS! I LIKE SPECTACLE!”. 46 B. “CONSTRUCTING THE TAJ MAHAL OUT OF TOOTH PICKS”. 56 C. “POET[RY] OF THE FAR HORIZON”: PICTURESQUE FIGURES AND PAINTERLY LANDSCAPES . 60 D. PANORAMATIC HISTORY – RYAN’S DAUGHTER . 72 E. PICTURESQUE HISTORY: A PASSAGE TO INDIA. 81 F. “[HE] TRIED TO SYMBOLIZE . .”. 91 III. ART AS HISTORY: FIGURATION IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S BARRY LYNDON. 93 A. ART AS HISTORY. 101 B. “MINUTE AND ACCURATE, THOUGH NOT VERY IMPORTANT . .” . 109 C. COSTUME REDRESSED . .113 D. “I APPEAR AS AN ORNAMENT OF ENGLISH SOCIETY . .. 123 vi IV. ASPECT, ARCHIVE AND APERTURE: PETER GREENAWAY’S VIEWS OF HISTORY . 130 A. THE BAROQUE CATEGORICAL FRAME . 134 B. DESCRIPTION AND THE DATASET: ACTIVATING THE ARCHIVE . .138 C. FROM LINKAGES TO THE GRID . 149 D. ALTERNATIVE GRIDS, OR WHY THE DRAUGHTSMAN HAS TO DIE . 151 V. ILLUSTRATED HISTORIES: WINSOR MCCAY’S SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA (1918) AND THE ANTI‐BALLISTIC IMAGE. 163 A. DRAWING FOR THE MOVIES . .165 B. MATTERS OF PERSPECTIVE . 175 C. TRAJECTORIES . 181 D. “I SHOULD TELL YOU THE NEWS THAT I AM NO LONGER A CARTESIAN” . 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY . .192 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 The Mosquito molests his victim . 172 Figure 2 The Mosquito filled to near‐exploding . .172 Figure 3 Rendering "the moving sea." . 174 Figure 4 Dividing the space between the viewer and the Lusitania. 176 Figure 5 Inside/Outside replaces Above/Below . 185 Figure 6 An unexploding frame . .187 Figure 7 How a mosquito explodes . at the edges of the screen. .187 Figure 8 McCay's Illustration of "The Lusitania Coming into View on the Horizon and Advancing to the Position Where it was Struck by the Torpedo" (McCay 1919) . .188 Figure 9 Charles Frohman suspended in animation . 189 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I must first offer my thanks to the faculty and staff of the University of Pittsburgh Department of English and the Film Studies Program for providing the material support required to produce this dissertation and an intellectual home for combined film and literary scholarship. Teaching support from the department and a Mellon Pre‐doctoral Fellowship granted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabled my study, which was conducted under faculty – Marcia Landy, Colin MacCabe, Adam Lowenstein, Troy Boone and Randall Halle – who, from the inception of this project, struck a balance between support for my pursuit of an alternative philosophy of history on film and the advice to Kierkegaard from Poul Møller’s deathbed: “Tell the little Kierkegaard to be careful not to set himself too ambitious a plan of study . .” I was fortunate to study with Eric Clarke before his untimely passing. His imprint is everywhere, and he is loved and missed. I have been surrounded by extraordinary colleagues. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the contributions of Dan Chyutin, Kathleen Murray, Jessica Pannell, Shelagh Patterson, Seung‐hwan Shin, Margot Stafford, Kyle Stevens and John Trenz. This work – and these years – would not have been the same without them. I am grateful to my father, Robert Post, whose own academic pursuit required me to learn to read early and to my mother, Bonnie Post, who does not even recall introducing me to David Lean’s films but who does remember tolerating an endless string of “whys” that now culminates in what my daughter has called “winning the last level of school.” I am grateful, as well, to my children: William, who has been with this project from the beginning and who insisted that I see everything; Iris, who joined my program already in progress and who insists that I see the world otherwise; and Lila Roshna, who arrived just in time, and who finds everything at least as funny as I do. It is an extraordinary privilege to live in the light of these three suns. ix There is a now well‐known story of reporter Jon Ronson’s visit to Stanley Kubrick’s home, after Kubrick’s death but before his materials were re‐homed in what is now the Kubrick archives. Kubrick had intended to store research materials, objects from filming and personal obsessions (fan mail, a prop head in a box, bottles of ink). Unsatisfied with the dimensions of available archival boxes, Kubrick designed his own to less “restrictive dimensions.” I will always be grateful to Marcia Landy for encouraging me to make boxes of my own specifications – Chinese boxes, Pandora’s boxes even. I am in awe of Marcia’s intelligence and intensity, and her generosity humbles me. Finally, I offer endless thanks to Kevin Patterson, my partner and best friend, who has been willing, all these years, to make a home among those boxes, whose tolerance for complexity is as valued as is his constancy and who, if I asked him to, would build boxes with less “restrictive dimensions” if only because I asked. x I. INTRODUCTION All cinematic fictions are stretched more or less tightly by this knot of denegation. But historical fiction . takes things further, and brings into play a movement of denegation to infinity. — Jean‐Louis Comolli A. INTRODUCTION TO DESCRIPTION (CONTRA NARRATION) While history films, in their thematic, structural and atmospheric diversity, do not constitute a genre, it seems possible to articulate a cinematic historicizing impulse. Scholars who have begun to articulate this common cinematic‐historical impulse across generic boundaries include Marcia Landy (Historical Film: History and Memory in Media 2000), Adam Lowenstein (Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film 2005), Anton Kaes (From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film 1992), Vivian Sobchak (Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event 1996), and Phillip Rosen (Change Mummified 2001). Collectively, these scholars indicate a pressing need to re‐envision the relationship between history and cinematic seeing, and recognize that sometimes when we speak of history on film, we are speaking of particular historicizing tendencies of film as a medium, and sometimes we are speaking of problems for the philosophy of history on film.1 History itself is a form that can and must be expressed multiply: It does not correspond to “reality,” it is logically dependent on other forms, and it is always necessarily incomplete.