The Shadows of Dreams Cinema’s Layers of Medialization
by
Jan-Helge Weidemann
A thesis submi ed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literature
Approved Dissertation Commi ee
Prof. Dr. em. K. Ludwig Pfeier, chair Jacobs University Bremen
Prof. Dr. Immacolata Amodeo Jacobs University Bremen
Prof. Dr. Leonardo Boccia Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Date of Defense: June 7, 2012 School of Humanities & Social Sciences
Statutory Declaration
Family Name, Given/First Name: Weidemann, Jan-Helge Matriculation Number: 842485 Kind of Thesis Submitted: PhD Thesis
English: Declaration of Authorship
I hereby declare that the thesis submitted was created and written solely by myself without any external support. Any sources, direct or indirect, are marked as such. I am aware of the fact that the contents of the thesis in digital form may be revised with regard to usage of unauthorized aid as well as whether the whole or parts of it may be identied as plagiarism. I do agree my work to be entered into a database for it to be compared with existing sources, where it will remain in order to enable further comparisons with future theses. This does not grant any rights of reproduction and usage, however. The Thesis has been written independently and has not been submitted at any other university for the conferral of a PhD degree; neither has the thesis been previously published in full.
German: Erklärung der Autorenschaft (Urheberschaft)
Ich erkläre hiermit, dass die vorliegende Arbeit ohne fremde Hilfe ausschließlich von mir erstellt und geschrieben worden ist. Jedwede verwendeten Quellen, direkter oder indirekter Art, sind als solche kenntlich gemacht worden. Mir ist die Tatsache bewusst, dass der Inhalt der Thesis in digitaler Form geprüft werden kann im Hinblick darauf, ob es sich ganz oder in Teilen um ein Plagiat handelt. Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass meine Arbeit in einer Datenbank eingegeben werden kann, um mit bereits bestehenden Quellen verglichen zu werden und dort auch verbleibt, um mit zukünftigen Arbeiten verglichen werden zu können. Dies berechtigt jedoch nicht zur Verwendung oder Vervielfältigung. Diese Arbeit wurde in der vorliegenden Form weder einer anderen Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegt noch wurde das Gesamtdokument bisher verö entlicht.
Bremen, May 21, 2012
iii
Abstract
Cinema gures as the crucial site where the anthropological drive to grasp the world in images nds a media outlet. Media in this sense are eternally constituted and re-constituted psychocultural ‘prosthetics’ giving space to sensation, emotion and thought. This process of medialization—the “extension” of the human being in Marshall McLuhan’s sense—condenses and sediments in media artifacts, embodying human experience in an externalized form and inviting our aesthetic engagement. Cinema seen from this perspective consists in a coupling of three anthropologically crucial domains of existence, which assume the shape of layers of medialization. This project will start with an examination of the cinematic transfor- mation of external physical and social reality, which is crucial in Siegfried Kracauer’s approach to theorizing lm. The testing grounds for this will be the strain of ‘sociocritical’ U.S. horror cinema (and the analogous melodrama, where everyday experience becomes horric) and the movie adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels. As cinematically ‘live’ motion adds both signicance and force to the expressive gestures and poses of the human body, transitional performance states loom large in a medium which gives meaningful forms to ideas of the self in action. Yet it is the highly ambiguous nature of physical interactions that sets the parameters for the second chapter, which turns to the duality of dancing and ghting in displays of romantic love and war. The fascination with seeing oneself from the outside is the third crucial domain this thesis will explore. Cinema provides the material structure for the staging of imaginary processes of projection and identication (Morin’s ‘homme imaginaire’) as compelling apparitions of the self. The claim that the self is in dire need not only of being manufactured but also of being staged is explored in the nal set of lm analyses, which paradigmatically center around the cinema of Werner Herzog. By way of conclusion, the tension between the ‘reality of pictures’ and ‘pictures of reality’ (a notion explored by K. Ludwig Pfei er across various contexts) is transmuted by the assertion that instances of cinematic experience embody perceptual thought.
v
Acknowledgments
The ideas presented in this dissertation have been with me for a long time. For lack of space, but not of appreciation, gratitude is here restricted to telling on the inner circle of suspects. To the best guide, mentor, and teacher I have ever known, Ludwig Pfei er, I can only o er my deepest gratitude not only for the professional chance to pursue doctoral studies, but also for sincere and e ective intellectual stimulation where, when, and how it was most needed. It seems that I have adopted Billy Wilder’s motto “How would Lubitsch do it?” (which he had in plain sight in his o ce whenever he worked) and turned it into “How would Pfei er do it?,” like Wilder looking for a successful role model in terms of e cacy and style. I am indebted to my second supervisor Immacolata Amodeo not only for her erudite advice on many subjects but also for the possibility to work with her beyond the academic setting, an experience which I value immensely. This thesis would not have been written without the unconditional emotional, intellectual, culinary support of my friends Heidrun, Magda, Andrea, Ste , Malte, Julia, Val, Paola, Grace, Florence, Vivi, Anh, Amber, Ejona, Donjeta, Frédérique, Leonardo and Julien, to whom I owe the last bit of sanity. Last not least, I am grateful for the unique setting that was provided by Jacobs University Bremen, more specically Krupp College, the venerable Schömann family and ‘my’ COMs Savitri da Cruz and Florence Yu. A start- up stipend from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences provided the initial funding for this project, and the two assistants to the faculty, Ms. Rena Henrika Dickel and Ms. Bianca-Maria Bergmann, proved to be helpful and diligent in all aspects of administrative work and life. Finally, it is left to me to stress that while I have beneted from many in uences and creative sources, all errors contained in the following document are my own.
January 31, 2012 Hong Kong
vii
Table of Contents
Statutory Declaration iii
Abstractv
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Substantial Shadows1
1 Layers: Initial Considerations 21 1.1 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience ...... 24 1.2 Grand Theory: (m)end it? ...... 37 1.3 Media A nities, or Cinema as Metaphor ...... 52 1.4 The Reality of Staging and the Staging of Reality ...... 62 1.5 Cinematic Layers of Medialization ...... 69
2 Materiality 77 2.1 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives ...... 81 2.2 The Pure Horror of Melodrama ...... 103 2.3 Grotesque Fear, and Fear of the Grotesque ...... 110
3 Performativity 119 3.1 Dynamic Poses of the Self ...... 121 3.2 The Performance of Identity ...... 129
4 Imagination 135 4.1 Imaginary People ...... 139 4.2 Werner Herzog’s Conjured Dreams ...... 142
Conclusion: An Unreal Horizon 147
Bibliography 163
Index 175
ix Für meine Großeltern und meine Mutter Vom Baum der Erkenntnis.
— Wahrscheinlichkeit, aber keine Wahrheit: Freischeinlichkeit, aber keine Freiheit, — diese beiden Früchte sind es, derentwegen der Baum der Erkenntnis nicht mit dem Baum des Lebens verwechselt werden kann.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, 1879.
*
Of the tree of knowledge.
— Probability but no truth: appearance of freedom but no freedom — it is on account of these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confounded with the tree of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human II, 1879.
Introduction:
Substantial Shadows
Ophelia: “Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be.”
Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5
In order to better understand what our ways of dealing with the world can tell us about what makes us human, this thesis will attempt to delineate and then conceptualize the signicance of the cinema in human experience.
What is at stake in this enterprise, however, is neither the denition of nor the search for a kind of cinematic essence, but the exploration of anthropologically meaningful congurations in the cinematic structure.
The rationale underlying this approach is that ways of experiencing and understanding the world condense into media artifacts which shape our possibilities of interacting with them and the world at large as ‘materialities
1 The Shadows of Dreams of communication.’1
From this perspective, which Hegel has already developed into a systematic theory of art,2 media turn out to be highly procedural entities free in their forms and means, operating as outlets for the fundamental and necessarily limitless anthropological drive for diversication. “One lives in proportion as one yearns to live more,”3 and media are perpetually in the process of being constituted in order to exist at all. The following theoretical considerations and analyses of individual lms will try to show that motion pictures are among the phenomena which most directly express this aspect of human vitality.
To facilitate this approach, this thesis takes its eponymous simile— cinema as dream—from theoretical writings that “consider cinema as the exteriorization of our natural faculty of using moving images as a means of expression in our nightly visions.”4 Cinema creates a virtual space which
1Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfei er, eds. Materialities of Communication. Trans. by William Whobrey. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. 2Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. by T. M. Knox. 2 vols. New York: Clarendon Press, 1998. 3José Ortega y Gasset. Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art. Ed. by Christine Bernard. Trans. by Alexis Brown. With an intro. by Philip Troutman. London: Studio Vista, 1972, p. 72, emphasis removed. 4Fereydoun Hoveyda. The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications. Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000, p. 65.
2 Introduction shares many of its properties with the other arts; very much like in theaters, opera houses, museums, and literature, the surrounding world recedes and new ones appear. But considering the way in which the other arts depend on their physicality on the one hand and human language on the other, the cinema’s phenomenology is most directly related to the way our mind works in and of itself. Although watching a movie and dreaming are two distinct states of experience that cannot be con ated, their similarity makes cinema the most concrete media metaphor of our natural perception of reality. Put di erently, “the ways in which dreams have combined ‘animated’ images since the very beginnings of mankind constitute the model for all forms of narration—literary as well as cinematic.”5
The psychoarchitectural structures comprising the experience of watch- ing movies are located across various technological and cultural set-ups, which is why going into the many material forms of cinema located in specic social contexts lies beyond the scope of this thesis. It also seems less essential to do so at a time when most current research is focused on these exact areas. The designation screen studies for the academic discipline(s) concerned with moving images supports this assessment, since what happens on one of the various screen formats and in one of the di erent
5Ibid., p. 143.
3 The Shadows of Dreams sociocultural settings is, at least to a certain extent, shared by all. As
Francis Bacon saw in his era, “knowledge, whilst it lies in aphorisms and observations, remains in a growing state; but when once fashioned into methods, though it may be further polished, illustrated and tted for use, is no longer increased in bulk and substance.”6
It thus seems essential to remember even when dealing with un- precedented technological developments that “[c]inema existed long before articulate speech appeared. Image, still or animated, goes back to the very beginnings of mankind. It preceded every other means of communication, including the rst stumbling e orts at articulate speech.”7
In this sense cinema is both ‘ancient’ immaterial psychocultural technique and ‘(post)modern’ material sociotechnological artifact. The Greek concept techne¯ not commonly used in screen studies comprises these two aspects of technique and technology and used to bridge them, which is why it genuinely commands a reevaluation for its application to our times and concerns.8
Staying in the historical vein, then, cinema as the ‘seventh art’ in traditional systems of the arts appears only very recently, even compared
6Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), cited in Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso, 1978, p. 157. 7Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 5. 8Rudolf Löbl. Techne¯. 3 vols. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997–2008.
4 Introduction to novels which as their name suggests are the new form of literary art in the modern age. (The word ‘Roman’ that emerges for example in German and Russian makes it clear that the concept had to be imported from the romance languages, originally lacking a local supply.) Yet compared to the ostensibly all-encompassing term ‘novel,’ ‘cinema’ and ‘movie’ are even harder to dene, leading André Bazin to ask what cinema actually is.9 To inquire along the same lines what architecture and painting, sculpture and music, literature and drama generally are and how they work appear to be both more straightforward and less relevant questions. Because they have been part of human culture longer, or indeed much longer, tradition ostensibly tells us exactly how to understand and deal with them, if only seemingly so.
The corresponding eld of academic study, which has given itself the name aesthetics, crucially only emerges in the middle of the eighteenth century with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) opening with the denition that aesthetics is the science of sensory and susceptible perception.10 In the wake of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought, this scientic discipline comes into being with the eponymous purpose
9André Bazin. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Collection Septième Art. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1985. 10“Aesthetica [...] est scientia cognitionis sensitivae.”
5 The Shadows of Dreams of systematizing the type of knowledge that is acquired through the senses and, more importantly, always remains tied up with its sensual expression. Mental images and world views, the terms suddenly seeming to be much more than commonplace visual metaphors, fundamentally depend on perceptual thinking in Rudolf Arnheim’s sense, which is far from being su ciently explored in all its implications.11
As Thomas Aquinas’ dictum “nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu” suggests, we need quite an elaborate sensory apparatus for complex phenomena like reality to become tangible. Media (or from the other angle: the arts), then, are extensions of our body, mind, and senses in the way, but probably not to the extent Marshall McLuhan elaborated on them. They, and they alone, can provide us with the necessary tools to comprehend the world based on other individuals’ preserved sensitive knowledge. Even before being able to (and needing to) develop logical abstraction to the degree required for the invention and use of writing systems and even language, knowledge
(such as there was) was passed on from generation to generation by social traditions, which are always inseparably intertwined with material culture.
It seems to have become more compelling to talk about this with respect to modern times as technology, which has always been an essential part
11Rudolf Arnheim. Visual Thinking. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972.
6 Introduction of the picture, supercially plays a more signicant role than technique in the experience of reality after the industrial revolution. Freud already complained quite emphatically (long before McLuhan) of the modern human being, body and mind, turning into a “Prothesengott.”12 (This image has been taken to its extreme forms in horror cinema, for example in Wes Craven’s
rst A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) “Freddy Krueger: Tina... / Tina Gray:
Please God! / Freddy Krueger [revealing his glove]: This is God!”)
Yet taking a closer look at this state of a airs, it is obvious that the more media prosthetics are at one’s disposal, the more crucial one’s ways of using them become. Additionally, the line of argument advanced by Freud and many others, criticizing the ‘articial’ and ‘unnatural’ technologies which humans create for themselves, is always blissfully ignorant of the implications of its basic premise: a person with two legs will have little use for an articial limb, but that does not mean all articial limbs are useless. It is precisely our ever-adapting psychomaterial extensions into physical and social environments which make us human—so our choice here, if we had one, would be between being prosthetic gods or common animals.
Justly removing Freud’s cultural pessimism from the acuteness of his
12Sigmund Freud. “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.” In: Abriß der Psychoanalyse / Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1953, pp. 63–129, here p. 87.
7 The Shadows of Dreams observation, the larger picture comes into focus for the rst time. Far from being contingent on their fulllment of social and cultural functions in a given time and place, media enable individuals to break through physical, social, and psychological boundaries, pushing and redening the limits of what is possible or even permissible in specic contexts. It is worth quoting
Fereydoun Hoveyda13 here at length for his acumen and optimism with respect to this chain of thought, signicant as both a co-author of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and an editor for Les Cahiers du
Cinéma
The most surprising thing about this long succession of inventions [language, painting, writing, printing, photography, telephone, radio, cinema, television, Internet] is that they all share the same purpose: transmitting (and at the same time storing) the thoughts and visions of individuals to their fellow human beings. [...] Indeed, most of today’s rapid achievements look like successive ‘improvements’ on already existing contrivances or, better yet, like new pieces of one huge puzzle. [...It] seems to me that there exists a hidden purpose behind all these activities, namely ‘externalizing’ [...] ‘internal processes’ of the human mind. In this perspective, the invention of cameras and projectors allowed the production of ‘dreams’ outside the human brain (whereas language and writing produced ‘dreams in words’!). [...] It aims at a
13For an introduction to this outstanding public intellectual, cf. his biography: Guy Millière. Mille et une vies. La vie ordinaire et extraordinaire de Fereydoun Hoveyda, diplomate iranien, écrivain, artiste, penseur... Turquant: Cheminements, 2008.
8 Introduction
formidable goal, hidden in the creases of man’s imagination (or mind?), namely, materialization of the human brain’s internal processes or, in other words, the external projection of thoughts.14
If this tendency to externalize or project thoughts is at the core of these— in the original Greek meaning—technical developments, it is clear that while
“there is no human essence, there must be media in which the historically encoded forms and illusions of human totality can be engaged”15 because
“whatever the urgencies may ‘really’ be, they need ‘masks,’ enactments and media, in which they may ‘appear’ in aesthetically striking shapes.”16
Aesthetic engagement, even when pushed and pulled in a certain direction by media technologies, is never fully preordained by social, artistic, material, or political contexts and processes. Instead, especially considering the technological hybridity of the cinema, aesthetic experience relies on the attachment to and combination of the extensions of the human being and an awareness of their possibilities and their limitations. (For example,
Immacolata Amodeo has shown how an opera audience’s engagement with the spectacle on stage is intertwined with the audience’s knowledge of and
14Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 145, emphasis in original. 15K. Ludwig Pfei er. The Protoliterary. Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 7. 16Ibid., p. 70.
9 The Shadows of Dreams attention to media ‘codes.’)17
Theoretical as well as artistic practices have the license to break through any ‘total’ perception of the world and expose the constituent building blocks of sociocultural settings, and of life at large. But the human mind functions synthetically: it perceives wholes rather than parts (their Gestalt, or unity) and quickly asserts the naturalness of its fabricated syntheses without conscious re ection. Man-made media structures are accepted as natural by our minds because they have been externalized by other minds with the same composition as ours. Crucially, with respect to cinema it seems
“that lm, our contemporary, has a denite bearing on the era into which it is born; that it meets our inmost needs precisely by exposing—for the
rst time, as it were—outer reality [...].”18 The link between “inmost needs” and inventions of all kinds cannot be put down to being mere fortunate coincidence, even if new solutions are often ostensibly stumbled upon by chance. Humankind’s technological development over the last millennia as a whole, including the processes of adapting and abandoning what works
17Cf. Immacolata Amodeo. Das Opernhafte. Eine Studie zum ‘gusto melodrammatico’ in Italien und Europa. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, pp. 167–8: “Um eine Oper zu rezipieren, muß man sich nicht ständig auf sie konzentrieren. [...] Wenn man einige der vielen heterogenen Teile des Supercodes nicht aufschlüsselt, funktioniert er trotzdem. Letztlich hängt die Decodierung wesentlich vom Rezipienten ab, von seiner Disposition, (Vor-)Bildung, Konzentration und seinem Interesse.” 18Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. With an intro. by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. li.
10 Introduction and what doesn’t, is not as elusive as its individual parts seem to suggest.
Cinema is so successful at producing reality/actuality e ects because it shows aspects of this world and our lives in it apparently unmediated, creating the kind of ‘second nature’ all our technologies strive toward. It also provides a discursive space for the analysis and interpretation of this new realm, so much so that there is something to be said for a functional prehistory of cinema, i.e., a history which is not based on technological or material categories, but based on the idea of cinema. (As will be discussed in the nal chapter of this thesis, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams points in this direction forthright.) In fact, a purely empirical account of cinema’s own who, how, what, and when even in their totality would not be satisfactory: “although we might possess every imaginable piece of information we should not have history”19 without asking the eternally open-ended questions concerning why. “There is no history without substantiated facts, but history does not consist of facts.”20
In the ontological structure outlined above, intellectual and emotional responses do not exclude each other in aesthetic experience, and neither do intellectual and emotional attempts at theorization. Before we can engage
19Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 84. 20Ibid., p. 107.
11 The Shadows of Dreams with a feature or documentary lm, we must believe in its world. If the sole aim was to make its audience think, cinema would outright fail to make them feel—and vice versa. Vital emphasis should thus be placed on how (f)actuality e ects are produced by cinematic experience; whether something is outright believed to be physically there (a literal ‘reality’ e ect) is merely an indication of whether one intellectually and emotionally collaborates in the production of the shared reality in front of one’s eyes.
The ‘emotional logic’ or ‘logic of emotions’ of the cinema needs to play a central role in any investigation of the medium as a whole.
In summary, the following paradigmatic assumptions form the basis of this study. (1) Media, rather than being xed entities, are stabilized media qualities, which after becoming well-established through common use function as if they were natural. This accounts for the many changes in the various technological forms, formats, and form factors over time; ‘lm’ is often no longer there when we watch ‘a lm.’ Such shifts and variations, however, do not fundamentally alter the underlying purpose a given medium is serving, the demands of the human mind being much more stable than its matching technological supplies. (2) The original, mystic meaning of the word ‘medium’ should be kept in mind: stepping between individual and world, media organize our encounter with reality in seemingly magical
12 Introduction ways. That even our contemporary electronic media have not lost a peculiar supernatural halo has been systematically proven by Je rey Sconce,21 and it seems reasonable to suggest that their novelty is the crucial factor here: enchantment is driven out by familiarity, and it takes time to become familiar with new technologies. D.W. Winnicott’s inquiries into transitional phenomena and objects as interfaces between inner psychological states and external physical reality also point in this direction.22 (3) The demarcation between objective, intermediate, and subjective domains of the human experience inherent in these theoretical propositions suggests a three-fold division of this study into material (object), performative (interaction), and immaterial (imagination) levels of analysis; these three are the most basic
‘spheres’ of medialization.23
As far as terminology is concerned, the term ‘levels of medialization’ instead of ‘layers,’ ‘spheres,’ and ‘thresholds’ seems inadequate since it implies distinct developmental stages that cannot overlap and extend into each other. ‘Thresholds’ (as in the German Schwellen der Medialisierung), referring to the emergence and establishment of new media, is not meant to
21Je rey Sconce. Haunted Media. Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Console-ing passions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 22D.W. Winnicott. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. 23The allusion to Peter Sloterdijk’s work here is less conceptually motivated and more an appreciative nod to a methodologically kindred spirit.
13 The Shadows of Dreams draw up boundaries around individual media and thus persists as a suitable terminological tool. Having said that, the term ‘mediality’ looks like it is denoting a rather xed state of a airs and becomes inapplicable here, whereas ‘medialization’ potently refers to a medium’s coming into being or
(re)constitution at any given point in time.
Cinema is probably the best-suited medium today to translate these theoretical considerations into media analyses because its combinations of word and image (congurations of narration/language/text and physical- ity/expression/movement) bind a lot of cognitive and a ective potential.
This is primarily due to cinema’s distinct ontological interdependence with other media like opera, theater, painting, photography, and literature, to name the whole range. The schematic approach laid out here, however, does not center on these technological and social links, but on the interaction between the material, aesthetic, and what has to be called the anthropological layers of cinema. This will also become evident in the lm selections later as the three layers to be explored relate very di erently to the other arts.
Ontologically, cinema as a ‘materiality of communication’ embodies rather than merely represents or illustrates views on the world (Vivian
14 Introduction
Sobchack speaks of ‘carnal thoughts’24 in this context), which accords with its technological origins in photography. As an aesthetic phenomenon, cinema arouses the senses by o ering its audiences compelling displays of bodily performance and spectacular vistas of human (inter)action, aligning it closely with the e ects of opera. And thirdly, as a psychotechnological apparatus expanding the boundaries of literary forms, cinema fully engages the human needs to both imaginatively fantasize and identify with externalized thoughts in order to make the surrounding world ‘our own’—
Edgar Morin has addressed this function most acutely in his seminal study
Cinema, or Imaginary Man.25
This thesis, then, will be structured in the following manner: after an initial discussion of the concept of ‘layers of medialization’ and the corresponding psycho-technological markup of the cinema, the goal is to investigate the latter’s material, performative, and imaginative layers. As the rst testing ground, cinema’s ‘materiality’ and representation of physical reality will be scrutinized; subsequently, an inquiry into the ‘performativity’ and tacit bodily knowledge of cinema will try to outline the ways in which
24Vivian Carol Sobchack. Carnal Thoughts. Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004. 25Edgar Morin. Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire. Essai d’anthropologie sociologique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1956.
15 The Shadows of Dreams aesthetic, bodily engagement and (re)enactments take place; and nally, an examination of cinema’s anthropological disposition concerned with the human imagination and its projection onto the world will conclude this study. The whole approach is based on the assumption that movies are enigmatically externalized experience and provide ‘virtual’ transitional zones where social, bodily, and imaginative perplexities and anxieties can be played out safely. It seems very appropriate that Siegfried Kracauer’s structural suggestion is thus turned into practice:
Perhaps our condition is such that we cannot gain access to the elusive essentials of life unless we assemble the seemingly non- essential? Perhaps the way today leads from, and through, the corporeal to the spiritual? And perhaps the cinema helps us to move from ‘below’ to ‘above?’”26
The scope of this project is in clear prole at this point. It is an attempt at the reorganization and combination of existing theoretical models into a novel framework for the understanding and analysis of how material, performative, and psychological codes are created, manipulated, and transformed in and by the cinema. This study will proceed by o ering expositions and critical evaluations of established theoretical paradigms and an assessment of their functional relevance in the understanding
26Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. li.
16 Introduction of cinema. The hypothesis informing this investigation is that cinema embodies perceptual thought in a way that is unparalleled in the other arts. This research wants to provide a fresh synthesis and application of a transdisciplinary model in the cultural domain, which aims at a reconditioned understanding of how we think in pictures and express ourselves (cinematograph) in our ongoing quest to ‘grasp’ the world. This attempt at delineating layers of medialization in the medium lm is in this sense trying to add to the existing body of theories of art.
Mental reality needs strong representations of itself in externalized forms
(i.e., media) to vent pressures from within and without. “Cultures need media in order to provide engrossing, fascinating experiences, without which social and private life would become drab and its burdens overwhelmingly oppressive.”27 In analyzing the cluster phenomenon or ‘hypermedium’28 that is the cinema, this study aims at constructing a theory which could be applied to other media forms as well since the three-fold epistemological departmentalization of world, body, and mind is a universal one. No denite phenomenological split between mind and body, nor body and world, nor mind and world has to be acknowledged; it nevertheless makes operational
27Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. xvi. 28Ibid., p. xxiii.
17 The Shadows of Dreams sense to see how these aspects of the same holistic experience emerge as layers in a given medium.
Surprisingly enough (at least from a purely technological perspective), the synergy of striking appearances, bodily performances and identication potentials on the whole puts cinema in line with opera rather than literature, drama or photography. V.S. Naipaul hints at this in an autobiographical passage: “Nearly all my imaginative life (as a child) was in the cinema.
Everything there was far away, but at the same time everything in that curious operatic world was accessible.”29 Fascinating gestures, poses, and physical abilities of the performers are of ‘operatic’ import to the cinema which, in its technological reconguration and stabilization of these, has the ability to focus on elegant, stylish movements, regardless of whether they take shape in dance or ght. These body codes engage both the social,
‘material’ relations involved in striking displays of stillness and action as well as the imaginary, ‘mental’ desires for the make-belief of projection and identication. It seems clear that aesthetic experience is potently arranged in layers of medialization in the motion pictures.
Given this kind of trajectory for the study at hand, the task is to convert
29From The Writer and India, cited in Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 3.
18 Introduction this theoretical position into feasible analyses, probing its explanatory power for specic cases in its domain. With manifold possibilities of choice of lms and their interpretation, the outlined approach adopts Molière’s dictum (from his Sept péchés capitaux): “Je prends mon bien partout où je le trouve.” The selection of lms might be striking for one reason or another, but it tries to cover a lot of ground to include highly varied and representative material from both the mainstream and its fringes. “The idea that knowledge consists in lists reaches back far into the Sumerian past.”30
Beyond the lms’ epistemological and methodological role in this study, any
lmography is somewhat tenuous in light of the vast amount and variety of cinematic production. The main reason for the proposed selection beyond its theoretical t is that every time one watches these lms, one discovers something new about them and about oneself.
30Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 263, n. 112; emphasis in the original.
19
1. Layers: Initial Considerations
The aim of this thesis is to provide a theory-fueled examination of narrative cinema’s anthropological structure. The rationale behind this project is that “the ways and especially the media in which persons, through cultural mediation, organize their most gripping experiences,”1 give shape and meaning to aesthetic congurations which, to all intents and purposes, lack any kind of proper essence in themselves. In cinema, the combination of word, image, and action is particularly engaging since it binds and stabilizes a variety of cognitive and a ective potentials through the close and distinct relationships it keeps with other media dynamics.
This premise emphasizes the need to understand the constituent bits and pieces of media merely as segments of larger, sense-giving media congurations which in their entirety, though dependent on their individual components, are much more than the sum of their parts. While (usually
1K. Ludwig Pfei er. The Protoliterary. Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. xxi.
21 1. Layers: Initial Considerations historically-minded) studies of those media clusters traditionally called ‘the arts’ have the methodological appeal of apparent and inherent continuity, simplicity, and logic, this chapter will attempt to locate cinema as an integral element in the broader array of diverse media. Indeed it seems that conceptualizations of the cinema that neglect this aspect, which from di erent angles and with varying explanatory power has been described in terms of inter-, cross- or trans-mediality, are bound to fail at capturing the cinema as a diverse and multi-layered phenomenon instead of only from a technological, or a social, or an aesthetic perspective. The question what a medium is looms large in this line of thought; for present purposes, a medium is thought of much more as a process than a xed object at any given time. This does not mean that it never makes sense in theory or in speech to treat it as a stable entity, but it is important to account for the underlying, unlimited anthropological drive for diversication inherent in externalized human experience.
The cinema, and by extension ‘moving images’ as such, exerts the most paradigmatic media force at the present time; it brings together temporally and geographically, culturally and intellectually diverse audiences (very much like opera has done from the eighteenth century onward in the context
22 of Italy becoming a modern nation state)2 making it “the only art form entirely alive.”3 In various modes, from news to televised sports events to electronic games, moving images are highly attractive and signicant not only in material but also mental life since they anchor powerful body codes in technologically stabilized forms (and indeed formats), able to order and give meaning to powerful aesthetic experiences of the self, speaking to and through the senses. This connection between material and mental reality can, for example, also be found in Georg Simmel’s seminal 1903 essay “The
Metropolis and Mental Life,”4 in which he proposes that the ‘inner life’ has to wall itself o from an aggressive ‘external milieu,’ in opposition to the argument here that our media systems act like communicating pipes with safety valves between the two domains, letting pressure in and out as needed.
2Immacolata Amodeo. Das Opernhafte. Eine Studie zum ‘gusto melodrammatico’ in Italien und Europa. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, esp. p. 143: “Die Oper konnte disparate politische und kulturelle Gebiete ähnlich stark a zieren. Sie konnte sich trotz ihrer regionalen Variabilität überregional verbreiten und auf nationaler Ebene verstanden werden. Sie war eine Art nationaler und politischer Kitt. Die Oper setzte nicht unbedingt eine Lesefähigkeit voraus, um rezipiert zu werden, sie basiert zu nur einem geringen Teil auf der verbalen Sprache und arbeitet mit gestischer Evidenz. Die nonverbalen Codes, Musik, Gestik, Kostüme, Bühnenbild, konnten die Funktion von linguae francae übernehmen.” 3Erwin Panofsky. “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture.” In: Three Essays on Style. Ed. by Irvin Lavin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 93–126, p. 94. 4Georg Simmel. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In: The Blackwell City Reader. Ed. by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, pp. 12–19.
23 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
1.1 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience
The occurrence of striking moments in one’s own individual existence creates the need to give them some external form—to preserve them, to share them, but most of all to be able to contemplate them for as long as one is
‘struck’ by them. The pressure to engage with cognitively and emotionally signicant material(ities) is intensied under conditions of repetitive daily routines where exceptional experience is scarce.
Reconsidering Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry5 from this angle, they were justied inasmuch as this situation can create a somewhat pathological condition in which more and more entertaining distractions during leisure time try to o set fewer cognitive, emotional, and imaginative experiences during work hours; due to this functional split, meaningful engagement with the world always comes second, if there is time for it at all. Evenings and weekends, which were institutionalized to provide physically and psychologically necessary o -time in the wake of the industrial revolution, continue to be lled with more and more ‘entertaining’ activities to counteract the e ects of the division of labor into highly
5Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. by John Cumming. London: Verso, 1997.
24 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience repetitive and compartmentalized tasks. One of the few lacunae left for total commitment (Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi would speak of ‘ ow experiences’) free from external guidelines and measures of success is opened up by aesthetic experiences which do not serve economic purposes, but satisfy anthropological needs.6
In this context it is straightforward enough to see how and why photographically recorded and easily projected moving images came into being in the last decade of the nineteenth century after a series of technological innovations going back to the beginnings of photography more than sixty years earlier. What is possibly harder to recognize is that cinema is not the only invented or even ‘discovered’ art form but just another example of how human beings, in a given setting with particular needs, create and use media as tools with a conscious or unconscious purpose. From the earliest cave paintings to Greek tragedy, from poetry (with its many origins and golden eras) to ecclesiastic tonal music, from Italian opera to the beginnings of cinema with Auguste and Louis Lumière, art is not nature but precisely its opposite. While the cinema relies on more advanced technology
(electricity, chemistry) than the theater, opera, the novel, or writing itself, all
6Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson. The Art of Seeing. An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990.
25 1. Layers: Initial Considerations of these also greatly depend on technical inventions and social innovations which originated in very particular contexts and kept being adapted with specic intentions, even if that eventually made them feel and function so
‘naturally’ that they started being treated as cultural givens.
In the Western world, ancient Greek culture has clearly played a pivotal role in the establishment of the media congurations dominant to this very day; Nietzsche has shown this for the invention of theater,7 Eric
Havelock for the changes in orality and literacy,8 and Jean-Luc Nancy for the di erentiation of the arts in their totality.9 Lennard Davis with his work on factual ctions has done something similar for the origins of the English novel,10 and one can nd so many studies for other arts and times that the invention of the cinema starts feeling just as ‘natural’ as the rest.
Thus, a medium is not fully dened by its constituent parts or even their specic technology, but can only be understood by taking into account its signicance in the series of other congurations of media. This runs counter
7Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy, and The Case of Wagner. Trans. and comm. by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 8Eric Alfred Havelock. The Muse Learns to Write. Re ections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. 9Jean-Luc Nancy. The Muses. Trans. by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996, especially the chapter “On the Threshold, ” pp. 57–68. 10Lennard J. Davis. Factual Fictions. The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
26 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience to the specicity argument put forward by many lm theories, which holds that cinema is a form of ‘proper’ art by exploiting its ‘specic’ possibilities.
While Béla Balázs is particularly emphatic about this and goes so far as to say that cinema’s specicity consists in bestowing human qualities on everything it depicts,11 he is not wrong inasmuch as he is referring to the cinematic perspective as externalized human vision. But it still seems more justied to speak of a medium “when an ordinary process of life changes direction for some reason, when elements of some kind of ‘staging’ come into play, and when that enactment gains some kind of formal or material-technical stability”12 so that it wields enough physical, a ective, and cognitive potential to organize our encounter with reality. Aesthetic engagement from this perspective can come from striking experiences in one’s ‘real’ life, but also (if not even more so) from reading novels, watching actors on a stage, and listening to singers in an opera. Powerful body codes in both ‘art’ and ‘life’ can be seen as the basis for this kind of engagement; “[e]xperience, when it is aesthetic experience, is heightened— that is, aesthetically crystallized and rened—vitality.”13
11Béla Balázs. Early Film Theory. Visible Man and the Spirit of Film. Ed. by Erica Carter. Trans. by Rodney Livingston. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. 12Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. xvii. 13Ibid., p. xvi.
27 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
While a child “possesses means of interpretation even before [s]he has experienced his[/her] rst clear sensation,”14 the internal reconstruction of the phenomenological world depends on experiences. We need suggestive external representations of ourselves to understand our innermost thoughts and emotions because our “senses alone, without the help of reason, cannot give us a true account of nature.”15 Literature can provide similes, metaphors, and detailed descriptions amounting to ekphrasis, but performative arts can engage us more fully through externalizations in factually embodied
ctions which in literary and oral media congurations are accessible to the imagination alone.
The synthesis of these layers in the cinema is at present unmatched and there do not appear to be concurrent, equally successful developments.
Looking at the two other markets in the realm of media that match or eclipse the economic power behind lm productions, i.e. the gaming industry and certain sports events, it is clear that these can also provide engaging experiences due to their focus on the spectator’s or player’s performative and intellectual involvement, resulting in a physiologically and psychologically heightened sense of reality. In their simulation and encoding of strong
14Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso, 1978, p. 168. 15Ibid., p. 73. Feyerabend is paraphrasing Galileo here; cf. pp. 72–76.
28 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience body metaphors (contest, ght, war), they can be seen as extensions of and complimentary to one another, with sports like soccer, football, and rugby providing performative kinds of s(t)imulation, while computer and console games engage the imagination more strongly. Although the degrees of immersion are extremely high in both cases, they operate on di erent channels, as it were; cinema manages to combine these channels in one aesthetic outlet, and in that it is unequaled.
The objection that gamers spend too much time in their own reality and should transfer their activity to physical games points, if nothing else, to the fundamental understanding that these two activities are somewhat related and interchangeable. Few people today would, however, make the same general argument with regard to the articial reality that literary texts provide; when this point gets raised, it is usually directed at specic genres of contemporary ction, particularly those enjoyed by young adults and ignored by others. Yet all story-telling functions by opening up other realities, and canonized literature has already proven that it works well in this respect.
Pressures from ‘rival’ media events add to changing technological set- ups that allow for much more controllable viewing conditions in private compared to those in public spaces. Watching a movie that is properly
29 1. Layers: Initial Considerations projected in pristine quality in a spacious and comfortable auditorium enjoyed by an anonymous mass of people might still be the ideal, but also very idealized experience. While this setting exists (and most likely will persist), contemporary multiplex cinemas with automated projectors and technicians instead of projectionists are not that reliable when it comes to guaranteeing this experience.16 Likewise, Barbara Klinger has shown that the degree of sophistication of entertainment systems in the home is ever- increasing as technology advances and mass production results in falling market prices.17 This means that the epistemological distinction between watching movies at home and in the cinema denitely can be made, but need not be made. With technological advances, television today is in much more danger than cinema, although it was once seen as the greatest threat to cinemas.
Indeed, this thesis does not want to constrict itself to a narrow denition of cinema for precisely this reason. The availability of many TV-like formats on the Internet coupled with the proliferation of access devices means that living-rooms are more and more turning into ‘home theaters’ that choose
16For a convincing analysis of the situation today, cf. Mark Kermode. The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex. What’s Wrong with Modern Movies? London: Random House Books, 2011. 17Barbara Klinger. Beyond the Multiplex. Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006.
30 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience their own content. And as (the notorious) Uwe Boll has accurately shown, audiences have the right to be ‘fed up’ with traditional TV formats and choose to take their money and attention elsewhere.18
But technology does not advance in a vacuum, and human beings “have roughly the same neurophysiological equipment, so that perception cannot be bent in any direction one chooses.”19 Starting with the beginning of aesthetics as a science in the mid-eighteenth century, when painting, poetry and literature slowly start to turn away from ‘the human story’ and become more and more interested in aesthetic form as a purpose in and of itself, the traditional arts get pushed towards the edge of society. Hegel saw this clearly in his time; for the twentieth century, Ortega y Gasset has labeled this process the ‘dehumanization of art.’ Cinema, in this sense decidedly not art, can circumvent this development because “there is no image of recorded movement in the cinema, there is only a moving image. [... R]ecorded sound, too, is directly experienced.”20
18Uwe Boll. Die Gattung Serie und ihre Genres. Aachen: Alano, 1994, for example p. 20: “Serien haben somit auch in Deutschland die Funktion von Werbe ächen. Sie sollen Zuschauer anziehen, damit diese die Werbespots sehen und zu potenziellen Käufern der vorgeführten Produkte werden. Auf dieser Grundlage entstehen Serien und auf dieser Grundlage müssen auch die Funktionen betrachtet werden, die die Formen und Gattungsmerkmale beinhalten.” 19Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 237. 20Richard Allen. “Representation, Illusion and the Cinema.” In: Cinema Journal 32.2 (Winter 1993), pp. 21–48, p. 40.
31 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
Thus, the cinema is able to provide instances of mediated, yet somehow seemingly immediate experience in spite of and not because of the aesthetic concerns of lmmakers. It is possible “to selectively perceive articially and artistically produced representations as real” even though “recipients are always aware of the articiality, which they can also experience as authentic.”21 Adorno’s and Eisler’s argument that cinematic structures are independent yet ‘enhance’ each other in a contrapuntal way, contributing to each other’s e ect in a kind of montage,22 is acceptable only from the technological perspective; phenomenologically, there exists but one coherent experience in each spectator which is not divided by the individual senses passing into consciousness.
That is why non-narrative or narratively greatly reduced ‘art cinema’ generally cannot generate enough momentum and particularly
“the promises of the New Wave were short-lived. Most of the young directors turned toward the industry and gradually became part of it. Chabrol rapidly became less interested in quality than quantity. Tru aut forgot about unknown players and embraced stars. [...] With the turmoil of the late ’60s,
21Amodeo, Das Opernhafte, p. 179: “künstlich und kunstfertig produzierte Re- Präsentationen punktuell für die Realität zu halten, ” auch wenn “sich der Rezipient der Artizialität prinzipiell bewusst ist, diese aber auch als authentische Erfahrung erleben kann.” (My translation.) 22Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler. Composing for the Films. Originally published under Eisler’s name alone. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1994, for example p. 104.
32 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience
Godard turned to ‘political’ cinema devoid of any artistic value whatsoever.”23
The same holds for much of Michelangelo Antonioni’s work:
It was with Le amiche that Antonioni found his métier (modern art galleries, cocktail parties, fashion shows), his modus operandi (multiple mysteries, many pretty women), and his dramatic meat (enigmatic emptiness, self-annihilating ennui). A scene in which the ensemble visits a deserted beach to aimlessly pair o or wander on alone is L’avventura’s concentrated essence.24
Even if, speaking with Walter Benjamin, the aneur is the quintessential modern subject, there need to be more than passing attractions available to audiences in the long run. In describing Titian’s Bacchanal, Ortega y Gasset has described how art becomes substantial: by going beyond everyday experience and by preserving the essential feeling that made a moment special.25 It follows that “art is educational when it is art, not ‘educational art,’”26 because media embody “patterns of experience—patterns shaped but
23Fereydoun Hoveyda. The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications. Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000, p. 100. 24J. Hoberman. “Adaptive behavior. ‘Killer’s tormented self gets simplied for the screen. Plus, Antonioni learns his lesson.” In: Village Voice (June 16–22 2010), p. 44. 25José Ortega y Gasset. Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art. Ed. by Christine Bernard. Trans. by Alexis Brown. With an intro. by Philip Troutman. London: Studio Vista, 1972, p. 16. 26“L’arte è educatrice in quanto arte ma non in quanto ‘arte educatrice.’” Antonio Gramsci, cited in Amodeo, Das Opernhafte, p. 90.
33 1. Layers: Initial Considerations not determined by local historical and cultural conditions.”27 We need media that go beyond providing mirror images of the real world, according to
Dorothy Sayers, “for perceiving the universal complex as an orderly whole and presenting it to us in an adequate argument and an adequate image,”28 while the artist’s task is “to present the world with an orderly scheme of the universe, but in the form, not of an argument but of an image.”29
While Sayers is trying to get at “the eternal certitudes in the midst of perplexities”30 from a theological perspective, it seems one can follow her when she likens Dante’s Paradiso to a realm of “ecstatic truth.” This phrase is also used by Werner Herzog to describe his approach to lm-making and his personal and professional quest for images. It is specically Virgil (i.e., personied ‘Poetry’) who comes to rescue Dante from the Dark Woods. It seems we need to see, or hear, or read about strong intellectual and emotional experiences such as Dante and Virgil’s excursion through Hell, especially in striking aesthetic forms like the Divina commedia, in order to be rescued ourselves.
Events and circumstances are largely beyond individual control, but the
27Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. ix. 28Dorothy L. Sayers. Further Papers on Dante. London: Methuen, 1957, p. 39. 29Ibid., p. 66. 30Ibid., p. 54.
34 Medialization and the Perplexities of Experience experience of reality depends on our understanding of situational possibili- ties and personal responsibilities. “Life lacking both the sophistication and clarity that can be so alluringly imagined, writing jumps in, as Barthes once said, ctitiously and yet also almost tangibly supplying both.”31 This is a version of the argument that tragedy enriches our lives by exposing us to situations we might have to face and o ering us possible responses in explicit and implicit ways. Considering the totality of all aesthetic media as human extensions and externalized sources of knowledge, “individuals live indeed in the same kind of world that is depicted by their artists”32 and contained in their media. “Knowledge so conceived is not obtained by trying to grasp an essence behind the reports of the senses, but by [...] inserting [oneself] into the appropriate place in the complex pattern that constitutes the world
[...].”33
As certain theories concerned with the sensibilities of our technological, materialist age would have it, we are ‘drunk with code’34 inasmuch as the gap between the world at large and our mediated experiences of it widens.
31Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 169. 32Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 245. 33Ibid., pp. 246–47; emphasis in the original. 34Cf. Sherry Turkle. Simulation and its Discontents. With a forew. by John Maeda. With additional essays by William J. Clancey, Stefan Helmreich, Yanni A. Loukissas, and Natasha Myers. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009, esp. the chapter “New Ways of Knowing/New Ways of Forgetting, ” pp. 71—99.
35 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
Imported into lm studies, for example in the work of Laura Mulvey, this criticism fed into the belief of “a suspect ideology that lured spectator- subjects into identications with false images.”35 In the context of the present study, this kind of objection to medialization misses the point since no image can yield to analyses of its ‘truth’ or its degree of ‘fabrication.’ In bygone ages, people were supposedly much more directly in touch with the world when actually, they were not closer to reality but to the weather, giving rise to mythological ctions all over the place.
The alluring aspect of the image as image seems to lead to a more intriguing theoretical trajectory which focuses on striking, unusual experience, even if in ction just as in daily life “most people want what most people want.”36 It seems that after leaving Plato’s metaphorical cave and seeing the light of day, men and women return to the dark by choice, without their chains, for the late showing in the cinema. Walking side by side with philosophers and scientists ‘above’ is just as much part of the human experience as watching the expressive shadow play ‘below.’
35Linda Ruth Williams. Critical Desire. Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject. London: Arnold, 1995, p. 3. 36Cass R. Sunstein. Infotopia. How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 22.
36 Grand Theory: (m)end it?
1.2 Grand Theory: (m)end it?
Most, if not all, multi-layered experiences, especially those we call aesthetic, do not lend themselves to experimental hypothesis-testing. Limiting oneself to empirical or even empiricist inquiries into all aspects of cinematic design is but one way of avoiding to deal with this complexity. Such investigations can focus on the ‘production’ of lm making, for example the design of credit sequences, storyboards, sets, advertising campaigns, and technological shifts, or on the ‘reception’ of lms, giving rise to the eld of reception studies. But the more lm studies veers towards sociological concepts and problem orientations, the more it turns itself into an auxiliary discipline for sociology far removed from ‘aesthetic’ experience. With both production and reception thoroughly explored and taken care of as it were, all questions concerning the qualities, the values, the status of art that one might not be able to clearly express and analyze empirically become irrelevant. While the power of an aesthetic encounter is no excuse for pseudo-intellectual discourse shrouding it in mystery, aesthetic production and reception should not and cannot be reduced to the measurable socioeconomic functions they doubtlessly have.
Many obstacles are conspicuously curtailing the path which this thesis is trying to take: for example, the fact that aesthetic theory becomes quite
37 1. Layers: Initial Considerations super uous the closer it gets to its subject matter. Possibly the only way around this is an attempt at elucidating concrete empirical phenomena without, however, predetermining or destroying the a ective and cognitive experience of such phenomena.37 This is important because, even after academic interest has shifted from the hypothetical ‘author’ of a lm to its real modes of production and from the hypothetical ‘spectator’ of a lm to its real modes of reception, neither approach is fully able to come to terms with the fundamental human necessity for both production and reception.
The theoretical validity and attractiveness of the mid-point between these two extremes, aesthetic determinism and empirical materialism, needs to be emphasized here; while authorial intent can and does exist, it can also be completely irrelevant, and while the audience can be seen as the sum of all veriable individual responses, it can also be understood as an abstract object that is created through the work of art itself. Whether authorial intent and audience response are empirically recorded and available or can only be guessed at, they are always part of what Foucault has called the
37Cf. the discussion of this problem in K. Ludwig Pfei er. Das Mediale und das Imaginäre. Dimensionen kulturanthropologischer Medientheorie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999, pp. 19–20.
38 Grand Theory: (m)end it?
‘author function,’38 and of what by extension should be labeled the ‘audience function’ of a work. What point of view does the work have? What does it enable its recipients to see through its perspective? What is the point of view of its creator? These questions can all be raised independently of each other, and even without concrete answers powerful aesthetic encounters will continue taking place.
Paradoxically, the present investigation constitutes both an act of conservation and of discovery. While Kleist rightly claims that ‘l’idée vient en parlant,’ theory beyond vague assumptions and working hypotheses only comes into being through materialization in xed forms. What is attempted to be conserved here are observations made in and through the cinema. But at the same time, theory-building allows for connections to be discovered and invented (both processes being inseparably linked in scientic inquiry) which go beyond ‘historiography by lmography,’ i.e. the practice of condensing thematic or contextual material into lists of ‘signicant’ movies.
Theory can give “a breathing space”39 to the experience of large amounts of empirical data, whatever the particular nature of that material is, allowing for
38Michel Foucault. “What is an Author?” In: The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. by David H. Richter. 3rd ed. Boston, Mass.: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007, pp. 904–14. 39Imre Lakatos. “History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions.” In: Boston Studies for the Philosophy of Science 8 (1970), pp. 91–136, here p. 113.
39 1. Layers: Initial Considerations exploratory and explanatory investigations into its preconditions, structures, and e ects. However, one needs to be aware of the danger of “theory
[becoming] a veritable monster of rigour and precision while its relation to experience is more obscure than ever.”40
Stabilizations of knowledge in the form of theories (or meta-realities) can always only be working hypotheses until refuted as both culture and reality at large are moving targets. Yet empirical (arti)facts, despite their need of elucidation because of inherent theoretical presuppositions, carry with them lots of adhesive power, pulling discrepant or even arbitrary pieces of knowledge into seemingly cohesive wholes. Social reality in particular is always charged in this sense as social acts inherently constitute staged realities which can never be called ‘natural.’ Thus, action observed from the outside takes on a di erent meaning compared to when one performs it oneself; Norbert Elias has shown this for life in the court society,41 and
C.G. Jung for the experience of life as such.42 But the mapping of thoughts and inner-world concepts to outer reality is a two-way street when potent
40Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 64, n. 23. 41Norbert Elias. The Court Society. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. 42See for example Jung’s acute observation (in his introduction to the Tibetan Book of the Dead): “Es ist so viel unmittelbarer, au allender, eindrücklicher und darum überzeugender, zu sehen, wie es mir zustößt, als zu beobachten, wie ich es mache.” Cited in Thomas Mann’s afterword to Sigmund Freud. “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.” In: Abriß der Psychoanalyse / Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1953, pp. 63–129, here p. 141.
40 Grand Theory: (m)end it? media like motion pictures are involved.
In both theoretical discourse and in the physiological markup of our brains, the distinction between creating and understanding aesthetic experience is di cult to make and to maintain because theories, just like media, give space to and shape our experience of ‘empirical’ reality, essentially sharing our innermost processes with the outside world. Science, while necessarily providing empirically contestable frameworks, constantly
(re)creates images of ambivalent physical, social, and mental reality in its theoretical constructs. Strictly empirically-minded research approaches are in constant danger of being mere collections of any amount of ambiguous data which has been rigorously veried at the cost of producing ‘ndings’ on a small scale only. One’s own (re)interpretation of the very same data might be much more compelling as a research possibility, albeit in a less pertinent fashion from the methodological standpoint. In the artistic realm under scrutiny in this thesis, it is clear that
a literary work depends on reception for the redemption of its semantic potential. Reception does not, however, disintegrate into [...] single acts of perception and interpretation, because it is caught in the continuity of human self-conception and situated in acts of transmission.43
43K. Ludwig Pfei er. “Rettung oder Verabschiedung der Hermeneutik? Funktions- geschichte und Wirkungspotential neuerer hermeneutischer Denkguren.” In: Journal for
41 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
Theory, in this sense, is literature on the edge. While this obviously presents a set of fundamental problems for scientic research which cannot be easily resolved, instead of tackling these questions directly the comparatively nascent eld of lm studies has mostly ignored them—a reasonable course of action inasmuch as it is necessary to secure funding by producing predictable results. But the question remains
whether it is still possible to maintain a theoretical grasp of the relations between moving images and viewers without succumbing to an anything-goes pluralism. [...] No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the e ects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on hypothetical viewing subjects.44
It would seem that while much academic focus has shifted from the
‘soft’ interpretation of arrays of cultural works in context towards the more empirically-minded study of ‘hard facts’ (whatever their epistemological yield), we have simply taken a detour to arrive at the same fundamental problem of proving signicance. But both approaches ask fundamentally di erent questions with one side rooted in the humanities, the other one in sociology. Compiling all the contextual information in the world might not
General Philosophy of Science 14.1 (1983), pp. 46–67, here p. 49. 44Williams, Critical Desire, p. 4.
42 Grand Theory: (m)end it? help with the understanding of a work of art in the former tradition, while that understanding is not even a relevant research objective in the latter. Far from negating the validity of either approach as they can be complementary to one another, the question that needs to be raised is simply whether or not
lm studies should limit itself to just one of the two.
In the framework of this thesis, then, lms will be examined by using quite inconsistent methods (inconsistent from a sociological perspective, that is) which are, however, obviously not chosen at random. The goal is to arrive at convincing ways of engaging with many di erent types of lm, using a kind of “epistemological anarchism” as suggested by the work of
Paul Feyerabend.45 Incidentally, although he suggests the term and might be described as an ‘epistemological anarchist’ himself, Feyerabend’s English book title Against Method should not be taken too literally as the German original, Wider den Methodenzwang (“Against the Obsession with Method”), points in a somewhat di erent direction; also, any book that has a footnote to its subtitle (“some comments on the term ‘anarchism’”) clearly follows certain methodological conventions. From the perspective taken here, on the other hand, many discussions of cinema raised by scholarship in the sociological eld, without explicitly stating their theoretical assumptions,
45Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 189.
43 1. Layers: Initial Considerations appear to “derive their strength from a few paradigmatic cases” and subsequently “have to be distorted to cope with the rest.”46 While this con ict cannot be resolved within these these preliminary remarks, at least its scope has become apparent.
It also seems that lm analyses (in the linguistic vein, as it were, as lm studies rely on many other disciplines to ll their methodological void), whether shot-by-shot or based on some other structural criterion, often only elucidate the structure they are using for analysis, and not the lms themselves. “All theoretical models are similar in that they specify xed patterns of observation which usually disregard the particular cinematic experience.”47 This has also been acknowledged by former members of
Les Cahiers du Cinéma, possibly the most in uential collection of diverse writings on cinema: “what was written and published about our doings in
Cahiers du Cinéma did not re ect the fun that animated us at the time.”48
Indeed, the central theoretical paradigm associated with the group, ‘la politique des auteurs,’49 seems to be reminiscent of the ‘arts and crafts’
46Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 40, n. 5. 47Boll, Die Gattung Serie und ihre Genres, p. 25: “Alle theoretischen Modelle ähneln sich, indem sie feste Beobachtungsraster angeben, die meist das spezische Filmerleben unter den Tisch fallen lassen.” 48Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 64. 49Cf. Andrew Sarris. The Primal Screen. Essays on Film and Related Subjects. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973, p. 14: “certain Hollywood directors [...] showed across their
44 Grand Theory: (m)end it? dichotomy, i.e. the question whether a work is merely well executed on a technical level or whether it constitutes an ‘artistic endeavor.’ Film analysis is clearly no substitute for lm theory proper: although empirical data necessarily shapes theoretical understanding, theory implicitly or explicitly also informs our knowledge of the scrutinized materials.
What is needed most in this situation seems to be an anthropological framework “in which sense-making strategies acquire material, historically substantial signicance, i.e. not merely scientically plausible legitimacy.”50
The thorough reorientation that this framework calls for would also help dispose of a number of paradigms whose explanatory power has been diminished as “variable experiences of actual viewers, who are in possession of many more ‘ways of seeing’ than Berger, Metz, Mulvey, or Baudry could have imagined, have recently challenged a more monolithic account of the
‘gaze.’”51 This mode of thinking (or indeed ‘way of seeing’) tries to tap into cinema as a source of meaning and a means for orientation with a strong anthropological thrust. As a species, homo sapiens sapiens has an insatiable
respective bodies of work consistencies of style, theme, and worldview [...] through the visual aspects that they did control, such as camera placement and movement, lighting, direction of performances, pacing, etc.—variables that, when combined, went by the term mise-en-scène.” 50Pfei er, “Rettung oder Verabschiedung der Hermeneutik?” P. 64. 51Williams, Critical Desire, p. 3.
45 1. Layers: Initial Considerations thirst for knowledge, which has to keep the balance between being mere
‘information’ and exaggerated ‘truth’; anthropologically speaking, we need knowledge understood as meaning, i.e. the coupling of fact with relevance.
This is in line with Norbert Elias’ denition of knowledge as “the social meaning of human-made symbols, such as words or gures, in its capacity as means of orientation.”52
Media, in both the modern and the ancient sense of the word, step in where orientation systems erode or break down. “Priests were the traditional guardians of a society’s fund of knowledge. They provided what human beings, together with some other basic requirements such as physical security and food, needed most—additional means of orientation.”53
When challenged by gures like Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, the knowledge contained in sacred teachings suddenly comes to be seen relative to the available empirical information about the world.54 Human beings, in this case Europeans at the transition point from medieval to modern times, suddenly need new(er) media in larger quantities than before. Knowledge
52Norbert Elias. “Knowledge and Power. An Interview by Peter Ludes.” In: Society and Knowledge. Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge. Ed. by Nico Stehr and Volker Meja. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984, pp. 251–91, here p. 252. 53Ibid., p. 258. 54For a thorough discussion of this process, cf. Jürgen Mittelstrass. Die Rettung der Phänomene. Ursprung und Geschichte eines antiken Forschungsprinzips. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962, and also see the conclusion of this thesis where this paradigm is picked up again.
46 Grand Theory: (m)end it? in this disenchanted world becomes the domain of the expert, and this process is what Elias calls ‘scientization.’ But even if this can also be seen as the continuation of medieval expert cultures, it “is a grave mistake to conne a theory of knowledge to the consideration of what we call scientic knowledge, disregarding other forms of knowledge.”55 It should be noted that a kind of ‘re-enchantment of the world’ is in full ow, since after passing from magical to more scientic thinking, science itself has been advancing so quickly that the results it produces almost seem magical again.
Also, ‘artistic’ media play a crucial role in the changing psychotechno- logical settings, maybe even more so than ‘information’ media, and one can “consider lm theaters as akin to temples [...] where people usually kept silent in the dark and looked straight ahead at the screen, as if they were worshipping some Supreme Being.”56 Erwin Panofsky was even able to extend this metaphorical image, stipulating a motion picture to be “the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral”:
It might be said that a lm, called into being by a co-operative e ort in which all contributions have the same degree of permanence, is the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral; the role of the producer corresponding, more or less, to that of the bishop or archbishop; that of the director to that
55Elias, “Knowledge and Power,” p. 263. 56Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 69.
47 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
of the architect in chief; that of the scenario writers to that of the scholastic advisers establishing the iconographical program; and that of the actors, cameramen, cutters, sound men, make- up men and the divers technicians to that of those whose work provided the physical entity of the nished product, from the sculptors, glass painters, bronze casters, carpenters and skilled masons down to the quarry men and woodsmen. And if you speak to any of these collaborators he will tell you, with perfect bona des, that his is really the most important job—which is quite true to the extent that it is indispensable.57
Film studies, as an academic eld probably more than as an intellectual endeavor, appears to be in a problematic position to address these issues.
With reception studies and the exploration of national and minority cinemas being the current focus of most research, incisive media-historical links seem to be ignored or considered irrelevant by the discipline. For example, on the one hand the continued investigations into the cinema of the Weimar
Republic are very visible and provide good funding opportunities due to their location at the crossroads of many disciplines, but they patently reduce
lm studies to an auxiliary science for history (or even more bizarre, for
German studies). On the other hand, turning concepts like ‘nostalgia’ into paradigmatic research models in lm studies betrays its lack or ignorance of pertinent theoretical traditions. While, for example, Fellini’s Amarcord
57Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” p. 167.
48 Grand Theory: (m)end it?
(1973) might yield some interesting results considering its autobiographical aspects, lms that invoke nostalgia for a certain time and place, capturing life “on the wing”58 a long time ago, would seem rather sterile when looked at only from this angle. It seems that “the worries of some observers hide their [own] nostalgia for the past,”59 and that lm studies is in dire need of more meaningful pursuits.60
On another critical note, it can be argued (as Rosalind Krauss has done) that “visual studies is really only training students to become better consumers,” a criticism that applies to lm studies just as well.61 Also the continued search for meaning in ‘genre studies’ apparently lacks the basic understanding of genre as merely an e cient classication system for marketing purposes. Added to that, the concept itself is not even as capable to structure research as some would hope.62 Industrial funding decisions,
58Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. With an intro. by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. xlix. 59Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 133. 60For a discussion of this within the discipline, cf. Thomas Elsaesser. “Film Studies in Search of the Object.” In: Film Criticism 17 (Winter 1993), pp. 40–47. 61James Elkins. Visual Studies. A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 18: “In 1996 the journal October ran the responses to a questionnaire in which a number of scholars in art history, political science, and lm studies answered a page of questions about visual culture. The general tenor of that forum—and here I am forced to simplify what is really a wide spectrum of detailed responses—was that visual culture is a disorganized, possibly ine ectual, illegitimate, and even misguided extension of art history and other disciplines. The art historian Rosalind Krauss summed up the reactions best when she proposed that visual studies is really only training students to become better consumers.” 62Cf., for example, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Short
49 1. Layers: Initial Considerations marketing strategies, general classication systems in libraries and video stores, based on genre or not, seem trivial for a consideration of the e ect a motion picture has on the individual viewer and the kind of experience it provides. In the theoretical framework developed here, the production process is not as relevant as the experience o ered in and through ‘the product.’63 A lm is cut o from the people that made it when it is released for distribution, just as a “poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s
(it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it).”64
While schematic typologies like the one advanced in these pages leave
(possibly important) parts out by design, they can often cover a lot of material in a more e ective way than clear-cut empirical approaches. Also,
History of Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, esp. the bibliography divided by director, genre, and country, pp. 389–409. 63Also cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bänden. Ed. by Karl Schlechta. Munich: Hanser, 1994, p. 843: “man tut gewiss am besten, einen Künstler in so weit von seinem Werke zu trennen, dass man ihn selbst nicht gleich ernst nimmt wie sein Werk. Er ist zuletzt nur die Vorausbedingung seines Werks, der Mutterschoß, der Boden, unter Umständen der Dünger und Mist, auf dem, aus dem es wächst, - und somit, in den meisten Fällen, Etwas, das man vergessen muss, wenn man sich des Werks selbst erfreuen will. [...] Man soll sich vor der Verwechselung hüten, in welche ein Künstler nur zu leicht selbst gerät, aus psychologischer contiguity, mit den Engländern zu reden: wie als ob er selber das wäre, was er darstellen, ausdenken, ausdrücken kann.” 64W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In: The Verbal Icon. Ed. by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954, pp. 293– 306, here p. 295; also cf. p. 293: “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, ” mirroring Nietzsche’s sentiment above.
50 Grand Theory: (m)end it?
Ludwik Fleck has shown how scientic facts are actually not ‘found,’ but rather ‘created’ through theoretical e orts.65 Whichever approach one chooses, the outcomes of processes of human understanding cannot be deduced beforehand from psychological qualities or social situations, because knowledge is never predetermined and also depends on a methodological repertoire for its application.66
65Ludwik Fleck. Genesis and Development of a Scientic Fact. Ed. by Thaddeus J. Trenn. Trans. by Fred Bradley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 66Pfei er, “Rettung oder Verabschiedung der Hermeneutik?” P. 49.
51 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
1.3 Media A nities, or Cinema as Metaphor
While “[t]here are many possible ways to describe the history of lm theory,”67 it is not di cult to see the one uniting structural element inherent in most lm theories: cinema as metaphor, or as a stand-in for the description and analysis of another set of problems or experiences. Victor Perkins has expressed very clearly how lm is usually used and abused for purposes external to it, so he tried to see ‘lm as lm’; perhaps tellingly, his theoretical e ort necessarily lacks the signicance imported from other elds available to the theories he criticizes.68 To understand the two realms of existence uniquely fused in cinema, i.e. the fantastic (based on the imagination and
‘imaginary’ needs) with the photographic (with all its implications for
‘reality’), their grounding in metaphors seems to provide the appropriate amount of structural support to lm theories. (Plato’s image of the cave
67For what is possibly the most concise overview, cf. Robert Stam. Film Theory. An Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000, p. 2: “It can be a triumphant parade of ‘great men and women’: Munsterberg, Eisenstein, Arnheim, Dulac, Bazin, Mulvey. It can be a history of orienting metaphors: ‘cine-eye, ’ ‘cine-drug, ’ ‘lm-magic, ’ ‘window on the world, ’ ‘camera-pen, ’ ‘lm-language, ’ ‘lm-mirror, ’ ‘lm-dream.’ It can be a story of the impact of philosophy on theory: Kant and Munsterberg, Mounier and Bazin, Bergson and Deleuze. It can be a history of cinema’s rapprochement with (or rejection of) other arts: lm as painting, lm as music, lm as theater (or anti-theater). It can be a sequence of paradigmatic shifts in theoretical/interpretative grids and discoursive styles—formalism, semiology, psychoanalysis, feminism, cognitivism, queer theory, postcolonial theory—each with its talismanic keywords, tacit assumptioms, and characteristic jargon.” 68Victor F. Perkins. Film as Film. Understanding and Judging Movies. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972.
52 Media Affinities, or Cinema as Metaphor might be the high point of this kind of inquiry, while Mulvey’s and Metz’ contributions seem incidental.)69
The concept of cinema as metaphor brings us back to the “anthropological thought pattern” discussed in the preceding sections, which “zooms in on the link and the interaction between historical situations (elds of reference), needs, and the various strategies of sense-making, their importance, performance, and scope.”70 It seems clear that there are direct and indirect links between all material, performative, and imaginary aesthetic forms, even if this group is somewhat extended to include practices and objects usually not considered ‘art’; for example, Italian funeral possessions and court proceedings have many constituting performative elements, lending aesthetic form to the experience of grief and justice.71 But inasmuch as the question of signicant relationships (which in the German idealist vein is called ‘die wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste’) has loomed large in the theoretical discourse for more than two millennia from Aristotle to Lessing and from Hegel to contemporary media theory, it remains an open-ended one. The salient point for the investigation here is that there are no essential,
69Jean-Louis Baudry. “Ideological E ects of the Cinematographic Apparatus.” In: Narrative Apparatus Ideology. A Film Theory Reader. Ed. by Philip Rosen. Trans. by Alan Williams. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 286–98. 70Pfei er, “Rettung oder Verabschiedung der Hermeneutik?” P. 64. 71Amodeo, Das Opernhafte, p. 185.
53 1. Layers: Initial Considerations unchanging, necessary qualities that link the arts to one another, in the same way that artistic conventions cannot fully determine individual artistic practice.
However, in the course of sociocultural, technological, aesthetic developments, such links do develop, sometimes even stabilizing in new media forms that cannot be ignored. In the religious context across various
Christian denominations, one can take Holy Communion as an example of this: wine and bread change their substance through a performative church ritual based on a symbolically charged idea; the technological and chemical renement processes resulting in the two agricultural products and the link to the narrative of the last supper with the metaphor of esh and blood come together with a clear purpose at a certain historical moment. Opera is another such structure: given Dante’s language, the Florentine Camerata in their salon-like meetings nd that mere reading does not su ce, and are somewhat forced to bring in music—a step that necessarily expands the performative dimension at the expense of the textual and one reason why
“opera is not so much a medium as one of many analogous condensations of media trends.”72 An inquiry into the anthropological basis of cinema, then,
72Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 186; also cf. the succeeding paragraph: “Theoretically, it is impossible to really dene one medium, whether by reference to the form of its elements or to its dominating ‘technology.’ That is why most media studies are either technologically radical, that is, purist, or conventional, taking what is called a—new—medium such as TV
54 Media Affinities, or Cinema as Metaphor must not limit itself to lm, but also needs to address similarly paradigmatic links.
The cinematic system is based on a number of such signifying—and signicant—structures. Its technological link to the photographic process bases it on ‘physical reality’ as such and not on material abstractions and stylizations of it; its performative structure connects it to the long- standing and highly developed dramatic arts in terms of their ‘spectacular’ components like physical movement, speech, and music; and nally, its conjunction of ‘the world’ with imaginative, imaginary potentialities allows for a synthesis of what could only be explored as written or spoken text before. Analogously, Walter Benjamin demanded a mode of “analysis of artworks which considers them as a complete expression of the religious, metaphysical, political and economic tendencies of an epoch and which, as such, cannot be limited to a particular discipline.”73
Both cultural history (‘Kulturgeschichte’) and the history of ideas
(‘Geistesgeschichte’) feature prominently in media anthropology. The etymological development of the Greek concept ‘techne’¯ via the Latin
for granted.” 73Cited in Thomas Y. Levin. “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History. An Introduction to ‘Rigorous Study of Art’.” In: October 47 (Winter 1988), pp. 77–83, here p. 78.
55 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
‘ars’ to our contemporary ‘art’ o ers a paradigmatic picture, which in the philosophical eld has already been incisively explored in terms of the relationship between cinema and technology.74 One overall conceptual division runs between performance-driven, technology-aided, literally aesthetic experience (e.g., ancient Greek tragedy) and imagination-driven art that conjures situations for the mind’s eye (e.g., literature from the eighteenth century onward); the highly problematic notion of ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ seems to derive from just this division. Cinema with its technological roots in photographic reproduction and the performative qualities inherited from the stage (the opera stage rather than the theater stage) breaks through this dichotomy by providing an externalized ‘mind’s eye,’ as it were, which is not part of our biology, but surely of our psychology.
It seems that the amount of detail that the cinema can provide, both materially and imaginatively, informs its storytelling. Moving images, either on cinema, television, or mobile phone screens, compete with each other in their quest for details. Although sound can also be rich in detail and be perceived as ‘full,’ on the visual level cinema can be compared with painting as another mode of depicting striking moments on a at canvas (as even
74R.L. Rutsky. Art and High Techne. Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Trans. by Edward Shils. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
56 Media Affinities, or Cinema as Metaphor
3D-lms do not go far beyond the illusion of three-dimensionality produced by painting in perspective). It is then possible to see how “lmmakers have learned from great painters. [... The] lighting in Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959) reminds one of his father’s canvases!”75 Two lms by Peter
Greenaway, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Nightwatching (2007), also come to mind here for their focus not only on painterly techniques in their production, but also on the fundamental idea of what a painting is and does.
However, lm as narrative idea coupled with its (more or less immediate) photographic expression comes much closer ontologically to the guiding metaphor of this thesis, namely cinema as externalized dream. Georg Lukács sees this externalization as a denite turning (if not breaking) point in human psychological development as the gures on the screen “are not people, but the movements and actions of people. [...] Man has lost his soul, but in exchange has gained his body.”76 While the latter sentiment is problematic and might just as well be turned on its head (‘we have lost our bodies, and instead gained our souls’), lming is indeed akin to dreaming inasmuch as through ‘dream work’ (a name taken up in its Freudian sense
75Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 94. 76Georg Lukács. “Thoughts on an Aesthetic for the Cinema.” Trans. by Barrie Ellis-Jones. In: Framework 14 (Spring 1981), p. 2, p. 3.
57 1. Layers: Initial Considerations by DreamWorks, Inc.), humans transform latent into manifest content.
Narrative, in all its forms, provides the discursive space for the projection of meaning into its structures, going beyond the material-technological level of a given artifact. Even if “the techniques of the dream predated both literature and cinema,”77 watching a movie joins dreaming as an anthropologically paradigmatic type of experience.
Art historian Erwin Panofsky saw the ‘dynamization of space’ and the ‘spatialization of time’ as the most decisive properties of the motion pictures.78 We can go ‘anywhere’ and ‘anytime’ in the cinema, yet these realms are not mere gments of our imagination: they appear in front of us as material realities, even if we cannot interact with them directly on screen. All artistic media drag a concept from its abstract, ‘imaginary’ plane down to its concrete, seemingly ‘natural’ expression through the use of various technological, economical, and perceptional means. Following this line of thought, it is possible to connect the eeting, mobile, spectacular art of the cinema to the ‘ne arts’ that Hegel outlined in his aesthetic theory; the ‘naturalness’ of the experience of cinema, making the world accessible through primarily visual and auditory means, lends itself to a Hegelian
77Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 22. 78Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” p. 154.
58 Media Affinities, or Cinema as Metaphor analysis since “[t]he beautiful mean between these extremes of architecture and poetry is occupied by sculpture, painting, and music because each of these arts works the spiritual content entirely into a natural medium and makes it intelligible alike to sense and spirit.”79
More exible typologies of media congurations are needed for the kind of phenomenological structures targeted here. This need also arises due to changes on the technological level which merely shift around the constituent parts of media.80 (Even if the amount of reproductions instantly available in digital formats creates a metaphorical ‘museum without walls’ in the sense of André Malraux’s musée imaginaire, this concept focuses on the technical problem of availability, not the phenomenological investigation into the encounter with a work of art. Technological possibilities do not and cannot create the conditions understanding works of art.) What makes the underlying and much more stable psychotechnological set-up of the cinema so powerful is its alignment with our biological and cultural systems, in terms of human perception and the institution of the theater, respectively. Fereydoun Hoveyda expressed this very clearly: “Everyone can
79Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. by T. M. Knox. 2 vols. New York: Clarendon Press, 1998, vol. 2, p. 968. 80Again, cf. Elsaesser, “Film Studies in Search of the Object,” for a discussion of the implications this has for lm studies as a discipline.
59 1. Layers: Initial Considerations make cinema without any special apprenticeship. The inventions of Edison and the Lumière brothers have simply made it possible for cinema to become
‘externalized,’ just as the invention of alphabets made it possible to move from the spoken word to literature.”81
In another context, Dorothy Sayers has likened “the Baedeker-like precision of Dante”82 to the way he gives one the visual impression of the
Divina commedia’s “whole action as though it were shown on a screen: Virgil moves o —Dante, with a start, remembers what he is doing and turns to follow.”83 Even if Sayers would not have agreed, we are simply not immune to thinking in the structure of the cinema after its psychotechnological framework has become institutionalized in our time, so much so that we can say that “cinema is modern life”84 and that “[m]ovies are the lingua franca of the twentieth century.”85
This is certainly in line with the metaphor of cinema as dream, as giving in to externalized ctions is “precisely analogous with sleeping and dreaming:
I can choose to sleep, but once asleep my awareness of and control over
81Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 9. 82Sayers, Further Papers on Dante, p. 11. 83Ibid., p. 106. 84Murray Pomerance, ed. Cinema and Modernity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006, p. 4. 85Gore Vidal. Screening History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 2.
60 Media Affinities, or Cinema as Metaphor my state is (to say the least) diminished.”86 In these states, “both sensory and imaginative dimensions are integral to the experience” since no hard and fast barrier can philosophically or neurologically be “set up in principle between perception and thought or imagination.”87
It seems that today, as Kracauer had it, we move from outside appearance to spiritual essence, not from inner to outer life, but from outer to inner. One should keep in mind, though, that the “techniques of cinema, which have always existed at humanitiy’s core, have in uenced the most ancient texts and paintings [...]. After all, do we not understand the world through our senses and primarily through our eyes?”88 Thus, combinations of material physicality and immaterial imagination have always informed aesthetic practices, but enjoying these two domains separately, while both always play a role, might not be as “dependable” anymore compared to the more complete experience of watching a movie, or dreaming with the help of cinema while being fully awake.89
86Murray Smith. “Regarding Film Spectatorship. A Reply to Richard Allen.” In: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56.1 (Winter 1998), pp. 63–65, here p. 63. 87Ibid., here p. 64. 88Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 10. 89Vidal, Screening History, p. 1.
61 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
1.4 The Reality of Staging and the Staging of Reality
Moving on from here, Kendall Walton’s work points in the direction that
ctional works engage us in a kind of ‘make-belief’ rather than have us simply accept their worlds; on one level, we know they are not real, but paradoxically we take them for granted and even feel as if they were real.90
Cinema can be particularly convincing in this respect since “lm bears a relation to reality unprecedented in the other arts.”91 People and things that do not exist, at least not physically in the same room, appear to be present and ‘alive’ when a movie is projected, due to their direct availability to perception, producing factually compelling images of ctional worlds.
Whether the moving picture was actually photographically ‘reproduced’ or technologically ‘animated’ does not even particularly a ect our experience of cinema since in either case, “the artistic object is artistic only to the extent that it is not real.”92
Even images strictly created through processes of photographic reproduc- tion lead us and at the same time do not lead us to believe in the world they
90Kendall L. Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. 91Stanley Cavell. The World Viewed. Re ections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 166. 92Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 67.
62 The Reality of Staging and the Staging of Reality create; we know that Elizabeth Taylor is not Cleopatra, but plays her. “Yet theater and life may be considered as a Möbius strip, each turning continually into the other. [...] Performers are not, but also are not not what they represent.”93 Seeing Elizabeth Taylor and absolutely knowing that she is not
Cleopatra, we still accept for more than three hours that she is Cleopatra, this paradoxical theatrical illusion, which is not even experienced as such, further enhanced by Richard Burton playing/being Mark Antony. The conventional split into fact and ction in works of art does not at all help to resolve this issue, and we are not consciously playing a game of ‘make-belief’ either.
Instead, cinema—like all art—presents us with externalized mental constructs of reality that make it absolutely natural to believe in them while at the same time being fully aware of their articiality. Art does not create facts, but
a vivid conviction of fact—the sort of conviction that used to lead people to address letters to “Sherlock Holmes Esq., 221 Baker Street,” begging him to investigate their problems. We believe in the Inferno as we believe in Robinson Crusoe’s island—because we have trudged on our own two feet from end to end of it. We are convinced that it is there, independently of the poet; if necessary, we could nd our way through it without him.94
While the arts all lack a priori denitions of what constitutes their
93Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 87. 94Sayers, Further Papers on Dante, p. 10.
63 1. Layers: Initial Considerations appeal, this e ect that the cinema and other dramatic media congurations like opera, theater, and TV series have on us is practically irresistible.
“Rather than look through the image ‘from the outside’ at a photographic reproduction of something staged in this world, you perceive the events of the lm directly or ‘from within.’ You perceive a fully realized, though
ctional, world that has all the perceptual presentness or immediacy of our own.”95 Thus, cinema provides us with a material, imaginative, narrative space which is constituted by both partial replication (photographic processes) and partial ‘enhancement’ (design processes like editing, framing, and animation) of the real world:
On the one hand, ction lms present us with complex narrative scenarios, which we are required to engage with imaginatively in order to experience fully; on the other hand, the cinema is built upon an ‘apparatus’ which can, in certain limited ways, generate the perceptions and sensations which we would expect to experience in the ctional scenarios it prompts us to imagine.96
The dichotomy between aesthetic distance and immersive experience, between passionate involvement and intellectual detachment is resolved by
95Allen, “Representation, Illusion and the Cinema,” p. 40. 96Murray Smith. “Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction.” In: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53.2 (Spring 1995), pp. 113–27, here p. 119.
64 The Reality of Staging and the Staging of Reality
“a perfectly full sense of being there”97 generated by the cinema and our engagement with it, which at the same time suspends actual reality around us. It is possible to di erentiate this kind of aesthetic experience from similar neurological states which result from a loss of awareness, like “hallucination, seance, hypnosis, drug,”98 and dream, but it seems impossible to insist on the divide between real/unreal in the heightened states of awareness which art provides. Because of cinema’s phenomenolgical structure, according to
Noël Carroll, even documentary lm-making must be understood to produce
‘lmed essays’ rather than a direct rendering of reality99 so that in the end, it actually seems that “[r]ealism in cinema is nothing but a style of narration.”100
Leaving aside concerns for realism, what the belief in cinema’s articial state of at the same time being and not being, knowing and not knowing, has to o er us “are the pleasures of mobility, of moving around among a range of di erent desiring positions.”101 While desire plays a crucial role
97Noël Burch. “Narrative/Diegesis—Thresholds, Limits.” In: Screen 23.2 (July 1982), pp. 16–33, here p. 30. 98Smith, “Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction,” p. 113. 99Noël Carroll. “From Real to Reel. Entangled in Nonction Film.” In: Philosophic Exchange 14 (1983), pp. 5–46. 100Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 31. 101Linda Williams, ed. and introd. Viewing Positions. Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994, p. 15.
65 1. Layers: Initial Considerations in the processes of identication which Linda Williams has explored, what cinema as a cultural technique lets us try out, so to speak, are virtual positions of being. The experience of watching a movie puts us in the middle of the situations the movie is portraying, necessarily in the same way that Greek tragedy did and with the same goal: “katharsis, which was not thought of by
Aristotle as a purging so much as a clarication of emotions.”102
By providing situations in which con icts emerge, art allows us to ‘live through’ the resulting emotions that can then become our own. Often enough, we actually desire being put in highly ‘undesirable’ situations in art, because the experience takes place in a safe space. A distinction between
‘poetic’ and ‘prosaic’ cannot be made here, if at all, since categorizations of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art miss the fundamental equality of the ‘positions of being’ that are o ered up for our experience, whether a particular position is culturally and socially approved of or not. Given the large quantity and variety of cinematic productions, this means that in this way cinema also functions as a shared external ‘storage space’ of human experience, since it
actually amounts to a distinct kind of knowledge, to be placed alongside the more widely acknowledged forms, knowing how to do something and knowing that something is the case: knowing what it is like to be someone other than oneself, what
102Smith, “Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction,” p. 123.
66 The Reality of Staging and the Staging of Reality
it is like to be in a situation of a type one has never experienced, and so forth.103
It is clear that not all cinematic treatments of ‘tragic’ events are particularly realistic (as we saw above, they cannot and do not claim to be) and that compelling images need not have much explanatory power.
But while “[a]ppearances are not held to be a clue to the truth [...] we seem to have no other.”104 In spite of relying heavily on music and sound
‘e ects,’ “cinema is rst and foremost based on images”105 and derives its psychological e ectiveness to a large extent from its status as “an image, or a symbolic extension of perception.”106 It is even understandable in this line of argument that “the suggestive power of the images denitely takes precedence over the story line”107 because, with some lms being less plot- driven than others, all depend on visual perception—which again shows the close relation between cinema and opera.108
103Ibid., p. 122. 104Ivy Compton-Burnett. Manservant and Maidservant. London: Gollancz, 1972, p. 5. 105Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, pp. 108–9. 106Paul Crowther. The Transhistorical Image. Philosophizing Art and its History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 19. 107Amodeo, Das Opernhafte, p. 190: “Die Suggestionskraft der Bilder hat eindeutigen Vorrang vor der Handlung.” (My translation.) 108Cf. ibid., p. 160: “Der einzige wirklich mächtige Gegenpart zur Musik, der diese in den Schatten stellen kann, ist nicht der Text des Librettos, sondern das Spektakuläre. Unzählige spätere Versuche, die Oper auf ein literarisches Medium zurückzuschrauben, konnten das
67 1. Layers: Initial Considerations
Nietzsche’s idea in The Birth of Tragedy that our existence and the world are only justied as aesthetic phenomena seems to be put into practice with the invention of moving images ‘taken’ directly of the world.109 In times of eroding orientation systems—“mon Dieu (s’il y en a un), ayez pitié de mon âme (si j’en ai une)”110—we seem to have to more and more forsake the ancient motto to ‘know thyself’ and change it to ‘imagine thyself’ with the help of potent congurations of media like the cinema.
nicht verhindern.” Also cf. p. 136: “Das Wort Spektakel ist vom lateinischen Verb ‘spectare’, sehen, blicken, erwarten abzuleiten, mit dem auch ‘speculum’, der Spiegel, zusammenhängt. Zum Spektakel gehört neben der visuellen Komponente, dass es ö entlich ist, dass es kollektiv produziert und rezipiert wird und das Publikum eine konstitutive Rolle spielt.” 109Fereydoun Hoveyda’s experience of watching Apollo 10’s view of the earth, May 19, 1969, on his television set is particularly signicant in this respect: “There I was, sitting in my room on earth, and yet at the same time I was observing my planet from the outside, as if I were in the spaceship that was sending back the image! And even more extraordinary: At the same time I was also present in the picture I was looking at, and this at that very instant!” Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 118. 110Voltaire in a letter to Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du De and, cited in Charles Avezac-Lavigne. Diderot et la société du Baron d’Holbach. Étude sur le XVIIIe Siècle, 1713–1789. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. Repr. of the Paris Edition, 1875, p. 221.
68 Cinematic Layers of Medialization
1.5 Cinematic Layers of Medialization
When cinema was invented, commentators “envisioned a world in which ‘moving images’ would replace written and printed words.”111 The underlying argument of the present study is that, while movies have not superseded all text, they have created a new artistic reservoir of tacit knowledge in the sense Michael Polanyi uses the term, externalized, preserved, and made accessible in cinematic form.112 Cinema, with its word/image constellations—resulting in potent narrative, language, text and striking physicality, expression, movement—combines many cognitive and a ective potentialities, which to no small degree originate with cinema’s distinct extensions to and from the other, older media congurations. The hypothesis here is that, if cinematic essence had to be dened, then it would lie in the interaction between the material, the aesthetic, and imaginary dimensions of the cinema.
The aim is to disentangle the vital signicance of the whole, then, without however tearing aesthetic experience as such apart. As Berthold Brecht put
111Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. x. 112Heinrich von Kleist already had a very good idea what tacit knowledge is, as evidenced for example by his two-liner Die unverho te Wirkung: “Wenn du die Kinder ermahnst, so meinst du, dein Amt sei erfüllet. / Weißt du, was sie dadurch lernen?—Ermahnen, mein Freund!” Cf. Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
69 1. Layers: Initial Considerations it, “[w]ho believes the poem to be unapproachable really won’t get close to it. The application of criteria provides the majority of pleasure. Pick a rose apart and every leaf is beautiful.”113 This process of dissection requires the individual layers to remain intact if intellectual understanding is to enhance aesthetic contemplation. The present study proposes an analysis of the layers of medialization of the cinema to achieve this. The theoretical framework outlined above will be used in the subsequent three chapters to analyze lm examples in order to test the assumption that media can indeed be understood as externalized sensuous experience.
The listing of the three domains that are treated as crucial for the cinema in this book does not imply more emphasis on the rst, materially-oriented section than on the parts focusing on performative and mental aspects.
While this three-fold prole emerges from theoretical considerations and cannot as such assess the functional importance of its substructures, it does provide enough traction on the cinematic material to make up for its superimposition. At this stage one faces the question where, in Feyerabend’s attractive terminology, a good “point of attack in the historical material”114
113Berthold Brecht. “Über das Zerp ücken von Gedichten.” In: Werke. Vol. 19. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 392–3, “Wer das Gedicht für unnahbar hält, kommt ihm wirklich nicht nahe. In der Anwendung von Kriterien liegt ein Hauptteil des Genusses. Zerp ücke ein Rose und jedes Blatt ist schön.” (My translation.) 114Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 167, emphasis in the original.
70 Cinematic Layers of Medialization is to be found. Since the cinema as a cultural entity often reuses—indeed, recycles—materials, one has to look for functional rather than numerical importance. Actually, given the proposed eld of reference, particular instances of cinema come into clear-cut prole and give the impression of a somewhat coherent, intelligible, and highly stimulating aesthetic project.
It is those lms that will be used to help delineate the proposed cinematic layers of medialization.
These considerations open up a wide, yet specic range of examples.
As far as the rst chapter on materiality and the perception of the outer
(social) world beyond individual control is concerned, especially horror,
(melo)drama and crime lms lend themselves to an analysis using this scheme. They depict situations in which social, economic, historical, external realities create the space and need for individual emotions, thoughts, decisions, actions, and reactions. As will be seen from a comparison of Douglas Sirk’s work with that of George Romero, Sam Raimi, and Wes Craven, following a discussion of cinematic adaptations of Agatha
Christie’s novels, these movies operate on di erent levels in various genres while actually addressing the very same material anxieties.
The desire for physical (inter)action looms large in the analysis of a performance-based, ‘operatic’ medium o ered here. Yet performativity
71 1. Layers: Initial Considerations only emerges in the tension between the (social) world—or its mental representations—and the individual—or its external projections. “The world is one: it is not merely gross matter, nor is it merely imaginary spirituality.”115
In the scheme of things of this thesis, the second realm bridges the gulf between the material and ‘spiritual’ layers, making the world whole in the act of performing it. Social relations and the pressures from the imagination are physically staged and manipulated in more or less all moving images, but taken to its extremes, these dimensions of performativity have a particular thrust in ‘action’ movies. Signicantly, these movies focus surprisingly often on husband and wife or involve screen couples who have to go through extraordinary circumstances. The selection of lms in this second chapter cannot and does not want to amount to a study of types or genres, however.
The third and last chapter will deal with the cinematic obsession with projecting potent images of the self that invite or even command one’s identication with them. Bruce Willis’ character in Terry Gilliam’s 12
Monkeys (1995) and the array of roles Klaus Kinski played in Werner
Herzog’s lms cannot escape their internalized, compulsive constructions of
‘self,’ which forces them to externalize and thus create this powerful image in the rst place. Analogously, lms like Don Juan DeMarco (1994) and Darren
115Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 18.
72 Cinematic Layers of Medialization
Aronofksy’s The Fountain (2006) are highly stimulating lms arguing for the anthropological need to actively manufacture the conditions of our very existence.
The three layers o ered in this model intersect and structure each other, so none of the following analyses can really do justice to the individual works in all their aspects—and neither should they, because only repeated encounters with the lms themselves might achieve that. While specically cinematic layers of medialization are the focus of this thesis, many examples could easily be drawn from all kinds of ‘moving images’ such as music videos and TV series, because they exploit the exact same phenomenological set-ups in di erent formats. But since “theories may be removed because of con icting observations, observations may be removed for theoretical reasons.”116
Considering the social, performative, and symbolic functions that the cinema serves in this scheme of things, these layers become somewhat aligned with other media congurations as guiding metaphors for the individual chapters: materiality in its social implications brings to mind the novel, performativity is strongly connected with opera and, in a di erent way, Greek tragedy, while poetry reigns supreme in the externalization of
116Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 168.
73 1. Layers: Initial Considerations the imagination. However, although other media congurations continue to assert their in uence as successful cultural paradigms, they do to an extent fall behind cinema since it is “only the movies that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization. [...] The medium of the movies is physical reality as such: [...] objects and persons must be organized into a work of art.”117 It seems that in an analogous way, “the death of literature coincides with the birth of opera,”118 while we might make “a distinction between ‘book’ and ‘literature’”119 in order to be able to see a partial functional equivalence, or at least an overlap, between all these media congurations.
In terms of cinema’s materiality, something is—and needs to be—depicted and stated, if only in metaphorical terms, to be made sense of in melodrama, horror, and crime. As far as performativity is concerned, something happens to the protagonist, and he or she responds well or badly in dancing, ghting, focused on ‘action.’ From the perspective of the imagination, humans need to create themselves (or rather their selves), forming a striking image of their
117Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” p. 169. 118Amodeo, Das Opernhafte, p. 74: “Der Tod der Literatur ist gleichzeitig die Geburtsstunde der Oper.” (My translation.) 119Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 133.
74 Cinematic Layers of Medialization essence by dreaming and nding—or producing—‘ecstatic truth.’ While such analyses are not crucial to the enjoyment or e ect of these lms, they are hopefully able to add something to one’s experience of them. “As theory has lost its innocence, so has methodology lost its purity.”120 Nevertheless, the following chapters will try to come to terms with these three fundamental aspects of experience in the medium lm.
120Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. xxv.
75
2. Materiality
The previous chapter focused on the ways in which media take on the task of externalizing, sharing, and preserving individual experiences, thereby turning into treasure troves of human experience with the power of shaping these experiences themselves. The cinematic structure in particular achieves this by o ering other ‘points of view’ (or ‘points of being’) in a darkened auditorium where the adherence to social pressures is suspended by the experience of watching a di erent reality unfold. “In a theater the patron looks at the stage and in a cinema, at the screen; in both, their immediate neighbors look at them and judge their social rank according to their clothes.”1 But beyond that, the anonymity provided by the cinema prevents all kinds of judgment and punishment because when we watch a movie, only the movie is really watching us.
When an individual has a lucid vision of the world (in all the prosaic
1Fereydoun Hoveyda. The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications. Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000, p. 118.
77 2. Materiality and mystical meanings the word ‘vision’ can have), the most saturated way of communicating it is through artistic expression, which in itself is a kind of lucidity generator. The resulting heightened form of externalized experience cannot be subjected to standards external to it, for example whether it is ‘realistic’ or whether it ‘sets a good example to follow.’ Indeed, heated debates about the supposed detrimental e ects of media (which ironically take place in the mass media despite their own such set of e ects) usually ignore the basic psychological fact that an unexpected, in ammatory, revolting experience is all the more attractive to audiences inasmuch as it challenges, upsets, overwhelms them. By such external standards, one could dismiss the drug-induced hallucinations of Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)2 and the hyper-stylized violence of Quentin Tarantino’s
Kill Bill, vols. I & II (2003/2004) along with whole genres of ‘low’ cinema like crime, horror, and melodrama—but this is possible only with a moralistic intent, not within the realm of aesthetic criticism.
One would then fail to see how in these movies, just like in the best examples of ‘high’ art, lmmakers are able to actualize virtual realities that are often more incisive than reality itself. “The complexity of modern
2Based on Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. New York: Random House, 1971.
78 situations, in particular, seems to demand highly exible, indeed ‘ctional,’ discourses, because the direct connection between discourse and event turns out, in all too many cases, to be a short circuit. Fiction produces forms of both complexity and concreteness that can hardly be matched elsewhere.”3 Unlike textual media that have to show their worlds to ‘the mind’s eye,’ the cinema actually presents its contents in a way which is not only more or less directly based on ‘physical reality’ (in Kracauer’s sense), but which is also modeled on our own perceptual ways of experiencing the world. While added soundtracks, editing, slow motion, etc. are assuredly part of cinematic ‘camera reality,’ human experience of real world events and personal interactions is similarly shaped by psychological processes that, when committing sensuous data to memory, depend on sounds, time perception, and striking visual material. After more than a century of cinema, it has become impossible to tell whether ‘camera reality’ is merely informed by real world experiences or whether, conversely, it mostly informs them.
The present chapter, then, is concerned with the peculiar way movies transform ‘ordinary’ physical, social, visible reality into building blocks of
3K. Ludwig Pfei er. The Protoliterary. Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 171.
79 2. Materiality narratives, thereby exposing the structures of our world. The question can be raised as to why ‘social’ reality is included in this conception insofar as the epistemological and phenomenological division between material and social phenomena is also decidedly acknowledged. The answer stems from the almost dogmatically pragmatist perspective that material structures shape social processes and vice versa: ‘yo soy yo y mi circunstancia’ (Ortega y
Gasset). This approach of con ating the material and the social domains also seems justied in light of the chosen lm examples which suggest that dealing with one necessarily means dealing with the other.
80 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives
2.1 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives
If the cinema is related to literature at all, the connection between the two has to be understood in terms of the original functions of the novel. When reality, or pressures perceived to be ‘real,’ reached a degree of complexity that deed established means of orientation (like institutionalized religion, nobility, family structures, economical systems), the novel came into existence.
Far from being vented once and for all by the adventures of Cervantes’
Don Quixote or Dickens’ investigations into the English social order, such pressures of adjustment continuously require being compensated in highly imaginative forms of writing.
Considering the general literary dynamics in the twentieth century, it can be said that cinematic adaptations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and James
Joyce are well-nigh impossible. While (televisual) mini-series have taken up some of the narrative thrust of more plot-driven literary works, they tend to fall short of their imaginative possibilities. Don Quixote himself stands out as the literary gure that both Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam, two directors with many accomplishments, could not bring to life in the cinema. While the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002) blames the economic conditions, unfavorable weather, and health problems that plagued Gilliam’s production, the argument beyond these circumstantial reasons is that the imaginative
81 2. Materiality thrust of the novel led to the real-world crises which ended the project.
Surely, counterexamples to this argument can be easily found. One movie which stands out is Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), based on
Angela Carter’s short story of the same title.4 In this case, however, the original writer collaborated with the director on a script which, while taking up the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’-motif found in the short story, incorporates stylistic and narrative elements from many of her works. The resulting movie cannot be said to have a unied narrative, but it successfully provides a highly evocative blend of Angela Carter’s literary fantasies. The fact that only one of her novels, The Magic Toyshop,5 was made into a feature lm
(by David Wheatley in 1987, with Carter’s own screenplay) seems to suggest that highly imaginative works like Carter’s are just very hard to lm. One cannot really conceive of a movie adaptation of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Ho man,6 because this novel stuns the central nervous system directly, as it were, using its rich language to bypass our sensory apparatus which the cinema so e ectively engages.
So where is the asserted junction of the original functions of the novel and
4Angela Carter. “The Company of Wolves.” In: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. With an intro. by Helen Simpson. London: Vintage, 2006, pp. 129–39. 5Angela Carter. The Magic Toyshop. London: Heinemann, 1967. 6Angela Carter. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Ho man. London: Hart-Davis, 1972.
82 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives its expression in the cinematic medium to be found? One paradigmatic area is crime ction, which simultaneously developed with and is rmly based on scientic inquiries into social, technological, and aesthetic problems. “From the rst steps, from the furthest origins of the detective novel, we nd ourselves in the presence of science and the scientic spirit.”7 It is signicant that next to the success of Agatha Christie’s literary works—she is the best- selling and most-translated novelist of all time, according to The Guinness
Book of World Records—her two most famous characters, Miss Jane Marple and Monsieur Hercule Poirot, hold up very well in terms of total screen time in their various cinematic and televisual incarnations.
Despite starting her highly successful writing career a decade earlier, movies based on Christie’s works notably started being made only after the advent of sound. Inasmuch René Clair’s version of And Then There Were None
(1945) is more theatrical than Peter Collinson’s 1974 remake 10 Little Indians, one could deduce that recorded sound—which features as a plot device in both versions—along with exotic settings, happy endings, and at least one shot of a helicopter constitute ‘the cinematic.’ The enigmatic thrust of these
7Régis Messac, Le ‘detective novel’ et l’in uence de la pensée scientique (1914), cited in Paul G. Buchloh and Jens P. Becker, eds. Der Detektivroman. Second, extended edition. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978, p. 7: “dès les premiers pas, dès les plus lontaines origines du detective-novel, nous nous trouvons en présence de la science et de l’esprit scientique.”
83 2. Materiality structures and devices actually kept high-prole lm adaptations going for over a decade after Christie’s death in 1976. Indeed, the argument could be made that with their ensemble casts, adaptations of Agatha Christie’s works kept the star system from the studio era alive well beyond the latter’s disappearance.
One need not list the many movies and TV series adapted from Christie’s works when all but a critical assessment of their overall tendencies is needed here. Picking out one particular ‘cycle’ of adaptations, namely those made by EMI Films in the 1970s and ’80s, the outline of how Agatha Christie adaptations generally operate already emerges. The lms in question,
Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Death on the Nile (1978), The Mirror
Crack’d (1980), and Evil Under the Sun (1982), are not only indicative of a certain mode of production, but also of a particular outlook on society, in the way in which they construct their ‘realities’ for the cinema.
Using this set of lms, one admittedly excludes a number of worthwhile productions made before and after, like the aforementioned And Then There
Were None adaptations from 1945 and 1974.8 Sir Peter Ustinov reprised his role as Hercule Poirot in several lms made for television in the 1980s, and
8The novel was published under the title Ten Little Niggers in 1939 in the UK; the rst US edition (1940) changed the title to And Then There Were None, which is the title commonly used for subsequent editions.
84 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives
(most signicantly) in an adaptation of Appointment with Death directed by Michael Winner in 1988, in which Golan-Globus Productions seemingly tried to emulate EMI Films’ original style with their ensemble casts and exotic settings. It is clear that the EMI Films’ directors—Sidney Lumet,
John Guillermin, and Guy Hamilton, who directed the last two adaptations— had a very good grasp on the material and the casts involved since their approach was attractive (and nancially successful) enough to be copied by another production company. Additionally, Anthony Sha er, whose other screenplays include the emblematic The Wicker Man (1973), provided some unifying vision as the screenwriter for the three lms starring Sir Peter
Ustinov as Poirot.
Turning to the rst of the EMI Films productions, Murder on the Orient
Express9 stands out from the three lms following it by establishing a pattern from which only The Mirror Crack’d slightly digresses. After some narrative exposition of the upper-class setting introducing an all-star cast, a murder is committed which the (unwittingly) attending detective—in the given cases, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple—then has to solve by evaluating the material evidence, understanding the motives of the suspects (usually
9“EMI Film Distributors Ltd.” is given as the production company of the lm, with the three other movies under discussion here listing “EMI Films.”
85 2. Materiality everyone present is a suspect), and eventually discovering and in a court- like scene exposing the exact way in which the crime and its detection were carried out. Because all this is not only based on, but steeped in, literary devices, history, and modes of storytelling, these lms are closely linked to their original sources while also showing certain theatrical tendencies.
These are understandable considering the high number of adaptations for the theater Christie herself and others have made from her works; among the works under discussion here, only The Mirror Crack’d has not been adapted for the stage.
But a closer look at Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express is warranted to see how he uses physical materiality to delineate the social world and the processes it governs. The lm’s opening is marked by a ashback to the scene of the ‘original’ crime that causes the events later portrayed: an infant girl is kidnapped while her parents, a British Colonel and his American wife, are not at home; after a ransom is paid, the child is found murdered.
The scene then changes to Istanbul where all future suspects, some after crossing the Bosporus in a ferry with Hercule Poirot, board the eponymous
Orient Express, a direct train line from Istanbul to Paris with a connection to London.
While the atmosphere surrounding the main characters is uneasy in
86 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives these early scenes of the lm, especially during the boarding of the train, the horric tension of the opening ash-back is picked up again when an
American business man tries to hire Poirot for personal protection after having received several death threats. After he is murdered and Poirot is asked by the owner of the train line to investigate, it is evident that the criminal(s) must be among the passengers, which throws suspicion on the assembled members of high society in the rst class carriage and on their entourage. Among the suspects, one nds many nationalities and strata of society represented: a French conductor, the victim’s secretary, his butler, a Swedish missionary, an English teacher, an o cer of the British Army, an
Hungarian diplomat and his wife, an American socialite, a Russian aristocrat and her German maid, an Italian-American car salesman, an American detective, and a Greek doctor.
(It seems desirable to see Agatha Christie less in light of her nostalgia for the Victorian age which sometimes shines through in her work and instead focus on her acute awareness of the place and time into which she was born.10
10For a perspective on this, cf., for example, H.G. Wells. The World Set Free. A Story of Mankind. London: Macmillan, 1914, p. 16 (concluding ellipsis in the original): “The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast table, decide between tea from Ceylon or co ee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all over the world, scrutinize the prizes current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father’s eight) that he thought the world
87 2. Materiality
The cultural make-up of the society contemporary with Christie is rather adequately expressed in the assortment of her characters, both here and in general. The nation state as an unproblematic cultural entity seems to be forever gone, which in hindsight is also attested by the train getting stuck in Yugoslavia; representative types in her work do not stem from what used to be called ‘national characters,’ while a certain avor of these structures remains. With the Orient Express Line at present not operating anymore with low-cost airlines o ering much faster and cheaper travel, the setting itself can trigger some nostalgic feelings; at the time of lming, however, the foreign locations, the clothing style, and the set design exuded the somewhat exaggerated grandeur of life in the upper social classes. Since both Agatha
Christie and EMI Films were based in Britain, this idea of class depicted in the lms is closely intertwined with that of Empire—and indeed that of crime because of the framing narrative in place.)
After many a false clue is recognized as such by the power of Poirot’s superhuman analytical skills while the train is stuck because of too much snow in a narrow passing, it becomes clear—and is seen again in ash-back— that apart from the owner of the train line and the doctor, who is exonerated
changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with them...”
88 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives early on and then helps with the investigation, all suspects stabbed the victim. Fleeing the country and changing his identity to thwart any attempt at prosecution, he had masterminded the girl’s abduction that was seen in the opening ash-back. All his murderers were in varying degrees a ected by the aftermath of this original crime through several suicides of relatives and loved ones. Poirot leaves it to the owner of the train line, who had hired him to investigate the murder in the rst place, to decide whether to try and explain all this to the local police or to give them the false clues that point to a maa killing, substantiating a conventional understanding of the events.
The owner chooses the latter and Poirot allows his own conscience to be burdened with the knowledge of this very unusual case of self-administered justice.
This is the most basic pattern of detection, at least in Agatha Christie’s works: the detective has to assimilate all (usually con icting) pieces of evidence and see what kind of picture of the crime they amount up to— and which particular arrangement of clues truly denotes the actual series of events that took place. In doing this, the detective is like a machine that computes all the relevant elements until they appear to give a unied solution foregoing, in particular, moral judgment of individual parts of the whole—in order to arrive, without distortions like prejudice or personal
89 2. Materiality feelings, at an accurate ‘world image.’ That, in this particular scenario, everybody involved tried from the beginning to cover up the actual events in order to mislead Poirot, merely results in his delighted exposition at the climactic revelation scene at the end of the lm where all suspects, young and old, rich and poor, are stripped of their social masks and their entanglements with the victim’s past—i.e., their relationships to those who died in the aftermath of the original kidnapping—are uncovered. Additionally, the initial clue to the solution is highly visible from the very beginning of the plot: Poirot has a problem reserving a cabin at short notice when at this time of winter, the train should not be fully booked, and it is only the intervention of the train line owner that allows his friend to board.
Beyond providing a highly successful formula (in cognitive and nancial terms) for crime ction, both printed and on screen, this structure is signicant in a number of ways.
Just as Sherlock Holmes would unravel a mystery through the study of numerous footprints, di erences in mud, cigarette ashes, and the like, moviegoers must understand and appreciate a lm through all that they see on the screen, including the accumulated details in the setting. Like a master’s canvas, a good lm provides hidden meanings behind its apparent display.11
11Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 96.
90 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives
This is di erent from meaning that needs to be ‘found out’, i.e., a lm like this also provides the discursive space for the projection of meaning onto its structure.
Social relations dened by class, profession, age, nationality, etc., are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ‘true’ constellations of degrees of involvement with one another; what the narrative provides here is a way of testing, removing, repairing this façade: by breaking the manifest (legal) or latent (moral) codes governing society, embodying them in individual cases, and rebuilding them with a better empirical foundation at the end. The demolition of social order carries no meaning in and of itself. The nature of social codes and their digression, as it were, only becomes tangible through the process of detection, and because social and cultural frameworks keep evolving with more ‘cases’ appearing, ‘detection,’ like interpretation, never ends. The parallel with scientic method in general and hermeneutics in particular is quite striking; Christie, consciously or not, was aware that with this structure, she had to keep producing new cases in order to fuel this protable enterprise so highly stimulating for her and her readers’ mental economy.
When the lm Murder on the Orient Express was a commercial and critical success in 1974—Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award for her supporting
91 2. Materiality role with the lm being nominated in six categories in total—it was clear that more adaptations would follow.12 The next ensemble-cast adaptation was
Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin with Albert Finney being replaced by Sir Peter Ustinov as Poirot. This movie also features an upper-class setting, but unlike Murder on the Orient Express being lmed in
France exclusively, principal photography actually took place on location in Egypt. The formula of the movie allowed for the continuation of the established pattern of detection, although it was not as nancially and critically successful as its predecessor. The shift from earning an Academy
Award in an acting category to winning for Best Costume Design might be indicative of the way craftsmanship can both compensate for and take away from narrative thrust.
Similar to Murder on the Orient Express four years earlier, Death on the Nile opens with a series of shorter scenes that introduce the principal characters: Jackie (Jacqueline) and Simon are engaged to marry each other; they discuss “the job” that Simon is about to start with Jackie’s friend Linnet, a rich heiress; Simon then marries Linnet and they go to Egypt for their honeymoon, with Jackie following the couple around and preventing them
12Also cf. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo. The Agatha Christie Companion. The Complete Guide to Agatha Christie’s Life and Work. New York: Delacorte Press, 1984, pp. 438–41 for Christie’s own “grudging appreciation” of the movie.
92 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives from enjoying themselves. It is at a hotel full of holidaying guests that the group meets the other characters of the story, including Hercule Poirot and his friend Colonel Race. Jackie follows Linnet and Simon when they board a
Nile paddle steamer despite Poirot’s warnings that taunting the couple in this manner is bad for Jackie herself. When Linnet is shot with a pistol similar to the one Jackie is known to carry, it is only her unshakable alibi that prevents her from being suspected. Being asked by the manager of the steamer to assist the police before reaching the next port, Poirot begins his investigations with the help of Colonel Race; most passengers quite openly had motives for killing Linnet for various nancial, legal, and political reasons. Two of the suspects are killed while Poirot is still investigating the case, and an attempt is even made on his own life. It is again through his seemingly unlimited abilities of detection that he solves the mystery by understanding the ‘real’ evidence and ignoring the false clues: Simon shot his wife in order to inherit her money, as had been Jackie’s plan from the opening scene of the lm onward. Faced with their arrest and impending criminal prosecution, it is also Jackie who decides to shoot Simon before committing suicide.
The list of innocent suspects this time includes a physician, an eccentric novelist and her daughter, a lawyer, a maid, a communist, an elderly
93 2. Materiality kleptomaniac and her servant. Unlike in Murder on the Orient Express, this time there are mainly Anglo-American passenger-suspects, albeit of a similar social variety as in the earlier lm. However, the main structural di erence seems to lie in the fact that the amount of socioeconomic and personal motives for committing the crime cannot be explained anymore by the orchestrated plot developments, i.e., the planned murder of the victim by a group. It is either by accident that so many people are involved in the a airs of a rich heiress, some of them having heard of Linnet’s and Simon’s marriage and honeymoon in Egypt and decided it is a good time to settle some business, or that society at least partly breeds envy and hostility, which would explain the tense situation on board the holiday steamer before the murder is committed.
Even if society is as malicious and makes most people bitter in the way suggested by this set-up where everyone has a motive for murder, it still remains a problem of individual choice, of agency, and of the cognitive, physical ability to actually carry out a crime. The extent to which Jackie goes through with her plan, killing her accomplice and herself instead of being arrested, underlines the degree of determination that is necessary to act on the possibilities of committing the crimes for which one has motifs.
The extraordinary purposefulness on both the side of the criminal and
94 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives the side of the investigator make this ctional experiment so compelling because “new, invented life to which no spontaneous response can be gained from previous experience, is precisely what artistic comprehension and enjoyment is about.”13 The insight that can be gained from both the larger- than-life drama and the adventure in this kind of narrative does not stem so much from critical comprehension based on intellectual detachment (as
Brecht would have liked the theater to work), but from our involvement in the human story presented to us—the resolution of the narrative often providing closure by o ering the prospect of a happier future.
The last two lms in this cycle, The Mirror Crack’d (1980) and Evil
Under the Sun (1982), were both directed by Guy Hamilton, who before these two Christie adaptations had already been responsible for four James
Bond movies based on Ian Fleming’s novels—Goldnger (1964), Diamonds are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), and The Man with the Golden Gun
(1974)—as well one of the lms in the ‘Harry Palmer’ series based on the novels by Len Deighton—Funeral in Berlin (1966). After working on these other important franchises based on adaptations from literature, EMI Films could safely assume that Hamilton would have a rm grasp of the material
13José Ortega y Gasset. Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art. Ed. by Christine Bernard. Trans. by Alexis Brown. With an intro. by Philip Troutman. London: Studio Vista, 1972, p. 71.
95 2. Materiality and the all-star cast. In the discussion of the four lms based on Christie’s novels, it seems justied to continue with the last one featuring Poirot, Evil
Under the Sun, whose exterior island scenes were shot on Majorca, while the
lm is set on a ctional Adriatic island, drastically diverting from the novel’s original location, which was Devon.
Going into the exact plot machinations is not really necessary for the purpose of understanding the signicance of Christie’s and EMI Films’ well- established formula. The elements are very similar to the other two movies featuring Poirot: an opening murder in ash-back, a hotel on an exotic island, a second murder with no apparent perpetrator. The list of characters this time includes a famous actress, her family, her lover, his wife, two producers, a writer, and a millionaire Poirot is investigating for fraud. This time, the social circle represented is more narrow than before while, again, more or less everyone present may have had a motif for committing the murder. The real change from the previous lms is that everyone has an alibi, so Poirot has to nd out who is lying and how exactly the murder took place. He is only able to do so by leading the murderer on to make mistakes, thereby revealing the connection to the rst killing in the lm’s opening scene. The solution to this ‘whodunit,’ then, is also based on Poirot’s psychological prodding of his criminal opponent rather than merely being presented in a revelation
96 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives scene. Due to this change, Poirot becomes more involved physically, as the murderer makes use of the opportunity to punch him before being arrested.
In the argument of this thesis, the e ect of this kind of narrative formula on the audience is in clear prole now: reality, and especially social reality, needs to be ‘staged’ and understood as ‘staged’ in order to become intelligible. In order to satisfy this need, the movies just discussed present, dissect, and reassemble the basic conditions of social class, friendship, love, and crime, all being enacted and reenacted for their clarication and elucidation in a particular time and place, for the audience to understand and see them in terms of ‘the rules of the game.’ (Indeed, Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939) might be seen as the quasi-theoretical backdrop to and cinematic masterpiece in the back of these analyses.)
The last of the lms to be discussed in this section is The Mirror Crack’d
(1980),14 featuring Miss Marple instead of Hercule Poirot and set in a ctional
English village instead of a more exotic location. The discussion of this
lm also assists in the transition to the next set of lms, since it steers in a direction not found in other adaptations of Christie’s works: melodrama in the Victorian, but not in the Italian sense of the word. The plot not only
14The lm uses this short form of the novel’s original title, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962); the line is taken from Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott.”
97 2. Materiality involves suspects with theatrical professions (like in Evil under the Sun): it actually takes place on a lm set.
In a small English village, an American production company wants to shoot a movie about Mary, Queen of Scots. The two lead actresses playing
Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I despise each other; Marina Rudd (Elizabeth
Taylor), who has had a nervous breakdown and could not work for a while, is married to the director of the lm (Rock Hudson), while Lola Brewster (Kim
Novak) is married to the producer (Tony Curtis). Marina keeps receiving anonymous death threats, and when a star-struck villager spills her own drink while describing their previous meeting during the war and dies from the one o ered by Marina in exchange, the death threats she received are seemingly corroborated. Miss Marple’s nephew, who helps his aunt (Angela
Lansbury) in collecting evidence from afar due to her foot injury, is Scotland
Yard’s lead investigator for the case, in which several members of the lm production are suspects. The director’s assistant and production manager
(Geraldine Chaplin) is killed after trying to blackmail the murderer; Miss
Marple, in a nocturnal epiphany, realizes that it was Marina who poisoned the villager for unknowingly infecting her with German measles during her pregnancy, leading to her giving birth to a disabled child. Before Marina can be confronted by Miss Marple and the police, her husband had intended to
98 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives end her life to protect her from prosecution, but Marina instead commits suicide by poisoning herself.
While the contraction of German measles because of a fan breaking quarantine, leading to complications during pregnancy, is actually based on the real-life tragedy of American actress Gene Tierney,15 the themes, motives, and cinematic devices of the lm can only be described as melodramatic, i.e., emotionally overcharged and unrealistic. The lm within the lm (about Mary, Queen of Scots) is a highly stylized costume drama;
Marina su ers from mental illnesses and has a disabled child; the lead actresses cannot stand each other and disrupt the lm production at every opportunity; the villagers (‘the extras’) mingle with the celebrities in the most unprofessional way. Technically speaking, the use of music, the sets, the lighting, the plot, and also the acting are not in line with the other
EMI Films’ adaptations of Christie’s novels despite being made by the same director who so closely followed their model two years later in Evil under the
Sun. Rather, they all refer back to a line of lm-making that can be traced back to the works of an American director with whom Rock Hudson had previously worked extensively: Douglas Sirk.
Indeed, instead of depicting social anxieties and tensions in the disa ected
15Gene Tierney. Self-Portrait. New York: Wyden Books, 1979, p. 101.
99 2. Materiality way of the other three lms, using ‘detection’ as a method for revealing the true constellations underlying social reality and the way reality is always in the process of being constructed and reconstructed, The Mirror
Crack’d intentionally follows a di erent cinematic scheme of portraying events, characters, and situations. The criminal decision-making process in all the other Christie adaptations under discussion here is one involving long, detached planning and plotting to achieve particular material or, in the case of Murder on the Orient Express, moral goals. Only in the latter movie does revenge (or justice, from another perspective) feature as the prime motif for the murder of a man, late at night and with the help of a sedative, foresight and the necessary prearrangements being of paramount importance to the deed. Only in The Mirror Crack’d, killing takes place openly, even publicly, while the victims are awake, and in the case of the
rst victim as a spontaneous emotional reaction. Likewise, the process of detection is one of intuitive, subconscious realization instead of logical deduction, and this is also in contrast to the way Miss Marple usually solves the cases she is confronted with (namely, by drawing logical parallels from her experience of village life).
Additionally the last scene of the lm, in which Miss Marple wants to confront the murderer with the evidence she collected, could have been
100 Agatha Christie: High Society, Base Motives
lmed by Douglas Sirk as the nal scene of a melodrama that need not have included double homicide (or manslaughter, as the case may be); this is in no small part due to Rock Hudson’s presence since he was the leading man in several paradigmatic lms made by Sirk in the 1950s. In this scene,
Marina’s husband (Hudson) turns paler and paler as Miss Marple exposes the actual events surrounding the murders, giving clear evidence of his wife’s guilt. The tracking shot that shows the two walking towards Marina’s bedroom has him dissolve into tears and admit to knowing of her crimes.
This is followed by a ecting music that foreshadows the discovery of the third corpse, countering his hope when he cannot nd his wife immediately where he left her with a poisoned drink the night before. Miss Marple’s last sentence of the lm—“she’s given the performance of her life”—when they nd Marina, dressed in white and holding a yellow rose, laid out on a chaise longue, is indicative of the tone the lm wants to conclude with: emotional involvement instead of the intellectual appreciation in the three
lms discussed above.
This tipping over into melodrama as a phenomenon cannot be ignored, and it might at times even provide a justied way for reducing complexity when dealing with the tensions between society (and its rules) and individual decisions. Pure intellectual appreciation in art, if it exists in this extreme
101 2. Materiality form, makes involvement impossible; and yet many cultural traditions see this aesthetic detachment as a positive standard to aspire to. “Weeping and laughter are aesthetically fraudulent. The expression of beauty never goes beyond a smile, whether melancholy or delight, and is better still without either. ‘Toute maîtrise jette le froid’ (Mallarmé).”16 This is true inasmuch the melodramatic mode is a highly formulaic one that does not allow for a psychologically necessary position towards life events: the outsider’s perspective that allows for irony. “The problematic narrative way to counteract the narrative drift into confused complexity consists in falling back into the pseudo-immediacy of melodramatic events and situations.”17
While The Mirror Crack’d only occasionally tips over into this narrative style, an analysis of Douglas Sirk’s cinematic works will try to show how this approach, instead of elucidating social structures, actually obfuscates them; by merely o ering a space for the projection of a ective states, this mode of storytelling does not provide or allow for the creation of emotionally and intellectually relevant world images.
16Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 73. 17Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 31.
102 The Pure Horror of Melodrama
2.2 The Pure Horror of Melodrama
Cinematic drama, when it limits itself to depicting the everyday situations, events, and decisions seemingly ‘real’ people have to tackle, frequently lacks the kind of involvement to be had with other, less ‘realistic’ genres because all too often, these lms turn into highly formulaic problem plays, well-characterized by the term infotainment. But such movies are neither informational nor entertaining enough to vitalize the sociopolitical context they are scrutinizing. It seems that melodrama gains a lot of its mass appeal by providing its audiences pleasurable distraction in the form of a highly
ctionalized version of human reality. In order to enjoy [such works] we do not have to have artistic sensibility. It is enough to possess humanity and a willingness to sympathize with our neighbour’s anguish and joy. It is therefore understandable that the art of the nineteenth century should have been so popular, since it was appreciated by the majority in proportion to its not being art, but an extract from life.18
In terms of lm history, Douglas Sirk’s output is clearly a landmark of this approach, despite Sirk certainly having something of an outsider’s perspective on Hollywood. He was the managing director of the Bremer
Schauspielhaus from 1923 to 1929, and it is obvious that his style as a
18Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, pp. 68–9.
103 2. Materiality
lmmaker is very much related to the theater traditions it originates from. It seems that his place in the histories of cinema and the continuing academic discussion of his work not only stem from his use of literary and theatrical devices in his lms in the 1950s, but primarily from his personal participation in the canonization of his work at the time university lm departments were
rst being established. But it is the ‘Sirkian’ tone of his lms that is relevant here: when, how, and especially why does the depiction of an individual’s relations to the outside world (family, society, and ‘reality’ as such) take on unrealistic, highly stylized contours?
It is in the penultimate movie Sirk made in Germany before emigrating to the United States (his second wife was Jewish) that seems to o er some answers in this regard. La Habanera (1937) is set on a ctionalized version of Puerto Rico, for which lming took place on Tenerife, the largest of the
Canary Islands. A Swedish woman (Zarah Leander) on vacation impulsively decides to stay and marry a rich politician whom she just met on the island.
As time passes, she becomes less and less happy about her decision to stay.
Their di erences lead them to quarrel about the education of their young son since, among all the riches she has, the female lead somewhat inexplicably keeps dreaming of Swedish winters and wants to leave the island. Eventually, after her husband succumbs to a tropical disease, she takes a ship back to
104 The Pure Horror of Melodrama
Europe with the Swedish doctor who was on the island to investigate the fever her husband died of.
The main thrust of the lm lies in the way the characters handle the situations they are facing; while the general gist of the plot is easy to grasp— a housewife from another country gets bored abroad, starts an a air and returns ‘home’ with her new lover after the untimely death of her husband— the treatment of the commonplace situations is stylized to the highest degree.
The most interesting character is the husband who appears to truly love his wife; he is possibly the only mentally sound character, providing some consistency in the plot’s overwhelmingly confused and confusing array of heightened emotions largely produced by his wife, whose actions and reactions can only be understood from a psychiatric perspective. While there are more realistic tendencies in this lm compared with Sirk’s later movies— a bull ght takes place and the husband is portrayed as a straightforward, realistic man—nothing seems to happen as in ‘real’ life where situations can
(and usually do) have at least some ambiguity.
The way that the movie illogically identies the husband as the source of all problems for his wife is also demonstrated by his convenient removal from the plot, which happens in the most impassive way. It can be argued that if his wife had made her wish to visit her home country clear to him
105 2. Materiality without overemphasizing how indeterminably unhappy she is on the island, he would have reacted much more openly to the request—this would require that she has the willpower and agency to follow through on a plan, like
Agatha Christie’s characters above. But pathological states (both mental and physical) like those of Zarah Leander’s character seem to be the norm in Sirk’s depictions of the world as reality keeps tipping over into, quite frankly, nonsensical anxiety states. If “[t]he wax gure is pure melodrama,”19 then melodrama is mostly peopled by wax gures who do not bear much resemblance to ‘real’ humans, and who do not improve our understanding of them.
As in all of Sirk’s later American lms, there is also no irony to be found here; characters behave and reason like children, which negates the possibility of seeing themselves from the outside instead of only focusing on the drama that is taking place in their (mostly disoriented) inner selves.
Distancing devices, like the use of comedic interludes, would make all the di erence in Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955) when, for example, after a long time of emotional struggle to face their love for one another given their status di erence, Rock Hudson falls several meters o a cli into a heap of snow when seeing his love interest from afar. One simply has to laugh, just
19Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 74.
106 The Pure Horror of Melodrama like Oscar Wilde did at the death of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity
Shop, because of the irreality and insubstantiality of the events depicted.
Sirk’s overconcretizations of American anxieties and realities—for example, the alcoholic, adulterous, and reckless oil dynasty at the center of his Written on the Wind (1956)—are most clearly embodied in his Imitation of Life (1959).20 This movie ends with a black woman who ‘passes’ for white crying and screaming for a very long time at the funeral of her mother, whom she had abandoned in order to be able to lead a ‘white’ life—which, without the emotional overtones, would have come easily since she was, to all intents and purposes, white. This performance is so striking because it contains
Sirk’s cinematic essence: a situation that need not be seen as ‘tragic’ from the outside is emotionally interpreted, to the full, as an epic catastrophe.
It should be noted that the underlying racial con ict and its resulting anxieties are nothing to be taken lightly or made fun of. And yet, Sirk manages to portray the situation in a way that takes away all the character’s realistic trauma: in his version, a white woman (played by a Caucasian actress) is tormented because she wants to pass for white—which she does, because she is. In a way, Sirk seems to be revealing, our problem is that
20Fannie Hurst’s novel of the same title (published in 1933) was rst adapted into a feature lm in 1934, which Sirk then remade.
107 2. Materiality there really is no problem; or, alternatively, social con icts and tensions can just not be represented and elucidated particularly well by melodramatic formulas of storytelling—if their exaggeration even allows them to remain comprehensible at all.
Signicantly, Sirk’s most incisive work outside of the melodramatic realm is to be found in his lm The Tarnished Angels (1957), an adaptation of
William Faulkner’s novel Pylon, the literary weight of which makes is the least ‘Sirkian’ of his lms, despite starring Rock Hudson. It was shot in black and white at a time when Sirk primarily worked in Technicolor
(the exuberant color process), and while ‘proto-melodramatic’ issues like alcoholism, adultery, and fatal accidents after taking emotional decisions, lie at the heart of Faulkner’s story—surely the reasons Sirk agreed to direct— the residual realism in George Zuckerman’s script prevents a melodramatic exploitation of the state of a airs.
Especially when comparing Sirk’s works to that of lm-makers who admired him and actually remade some of his works—most importantly,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (1974) and Todd Haynes’s
Far from Heaven (2002), both based on Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows—it is clear that they portray more realistic situations, problems, and ways of reacting to them instead of o ering prolonged displays of (often voluntary)
108 The Pure Horror of Melodrama helplessness in the face of pseudo-tragic circumstances. While Sirk went as far as anyone could have with this approach, it seems that his voluntary retirement to Switzerland after completing Imitation of Life is indicative of the limits of the melodramatic paradigm of lm-making.
109 2. Materiality
2.3 Grotesque Fear, and Fear of the Grotesque
It seems that the social anxieties that are played out in Sirk’s movies in the
1950s neither disappear nor diminish in the 1960s and 70s; and it is the genre best described as ‘sociological horror’ which takes up where Sirk (literally) left o . Racial tensions, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam
War, and an economic stratication leading to the pauperization of sizable parts of the general population provided the backdrop to many anxieties in everyday life in the United States. While Sirk, the German emigré, found his prime subject matter in the heavily stylized depiction of social situations, the
lms of American directors like George Romero, Wes Craven, and Sam Raimi use a di erent approach in the pursuit of portraying the drama of American life in its historical, political, and cultural context. In many countries,
the 1960s witnessed important societal changes. There was a kind of ‘maturation’ of the public: People demanded ‘adult’ pictures. They were fed up with movies that were made to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Hollywood’s ‘code’ was bursting at the seams. [...] This was not a passing fad. Rather, it re ected a profound shift in the tastes and perceptions of all age groups and social classes, brought by World War II and the spread of education and information (compounded by the development of television).”21
21Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, pp. 97–8.
110 Grotese Fear, and Fear of the Grotese
It is clear that technological and scientic advances do not reduce, but often intensify social anxieties because “the rational understanding of the world in causal relationships permits the controlled manipulation of outer and inner nature, but it does not make feelings and fantasies disappear.”22
People who are most outraged by horror lms usually never actually saw one from beginning to end; if they had, it would have been clear to them from their own experience that we actually reduce anxiety by watching from a safe distance, that stress leads to relaxation (“Entspannung durch
Spannung”)23 in a psychologically highly e ective manner. (This has been shown by a government-commissioned study on violent and pornographic
lms, the subtitle of which points to the need for imaginative stagings of emotions in order to make sense of them, especially for “terror and lust.”)24
The movement away from reality proper, both in terms of ‘realistic’ subject matter and also the genre’s reliance on ‘special e ects,’ proves to be unproblematic for this analysis of cinema as a materiality of communication;
22Roland Eckert et al. Grauen und Lust. Die Inszenierung der A ekte. Revised from a survey for the German Federal Ministry of the Interior. Pfa enweiler: Centaurus, 1991, p. 47: “Die rationale Weltauslegung nach Ursache-Wirkungszusammenhängen ermöglicht den kontrollierten Umgang mit der äußeren und der inneren Natur, läßt Gefühle und Phantasien aber nicht verschwinden.” (My translation.) 23Ibid., p. 16. 24Also see their clear appraisal of the need for horror cinema: ibid., p. 48: “Für den modernen Menschen ist die Angst aus dem Alltag verschwunden. Sie kann in der Regel nur künstlich wiederbelebt werden.”
111 2. Materiality as Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du De and exclaimed when asked if she believed in ghosts, “[j]e n’y croix pas, mais j’en ai peur,”25 the experience of a threatening situation depends far more on one’s experience than on the material component of the threat. Correspondingly, “reality itself, once transferred to the picture, without ceasing to be the stark reality that it is, should acquire the fascination of the unreal.”26 In this sense, Virginia Woolf was right to note that “art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough.”27
The obvious use of ‘tricks’ in horror lms and the audience’s expectation that no one is actually harmed in the making of a lm does not speak against the e ect of horror as “unrealism [is] essential to all great art” in order “to convert the everyday into permanent surprise.”28 Inasmuch as it is one of the strongest emotions, the feeling of fear carries with it the knowledge that we are intensely alive, inducing a state of heightened awareness as is its wont.
Shirley Jackson has expressed this lucidly in her novel The Haunting of Hill
25Raymond Trousson. “Du fantastique et du merveilleux au réalisme magique?” In: Le Réalisme Magique. Roman—Peinture—Cinéma. Ed. by Jean Weisgerber. Cahiers des Avant- Gardes. Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1987, pp. 33–42, p. 34. In various other places, this is rendered as “Est-ce que je crois aux fantômes? Non, mais j’en ai peur.” 26Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 99. 27Cited in Nelson Goodman. Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 3. 28Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 99.
112 Grotese Fear, and Fear of the Grotese
House: “Fear [...] is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we ght it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”29 This complete involvement in the present moment is the main basis for the fascination surrounding the horror genre.
It is commonly believed that to run away from reality is easy, whereas it is the most di cult thing in the world. It is easy to say or paint a thing which is unintelligible, completely lacking in meaning: it is enough to string together words without connection, or draw lines at random. But to succeed in constructing something which is not a copy of the ‘natural’ and yet possesses some substantive quality implies a most sublime talent. ‘Reality’ constantly lurks in ambush ready to impede the artist’s evasion.30
When it comes to potent media congurations that horror can exploit, cinema seems to be the most appropriate phenomenological and technological set-up as it o ers seemingly immediate reality with, however, the possibility of restructuring it. “L’ordre des faits peut être renversé. Les morts revivent et rient.”31 This is nowhere as e ciently achieved as in George
Romero’s Dead series—Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead
(1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead
29Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984, p. 159. 30Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 72. 31Paul Valéry. Cahiers. 29 vols. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1957, vol. 2, p. 1583.
113 2. Materiality
(2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). In this vein of making lms about the aftermath of an undened epidemic disease that turns the deceased into esh-eating zombies, Romero has addressed (in chronological order) racial problems, the consumer society, the ethics of scientic research, the impoverishment of the masses, digital recording technologies, and family feuds. Doing this, he seems to be following Edgar Degas’ dictum that
“drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.”
He has also achieved an e cient fusion, and a less formulaic one than the Christie adaptations, of the need to stage imaginative relationships and their changes in extraordinary, but not self-chosen life circumstances. Or, as in Day of the Dead, he is not guilty of what Sarah complains about to
Dr. Logan, who is pursuing science for science’s sake: “You’re wasting time trying to dene what’s happening instead of looking for what’s making it happen.” Instead, Romero cuts right through the appearances and achieves a heightened fusion of paradigmatic anxieties, surprisingly imaginative narratives, and the possibility to distance oneself from the story through devices like humor and irony.
While a link to more clear-cut shockers like 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007) can be made thematically, in terms of
Hoveyda’s ‘hidden meaning’ in the cinema, Wes Craven’s works are closer
114 Grotese Fear, and Fear of the Grotese in tone and ‘actual’ subject matter. Craven’s early collaboration with Sean
S. Cunningham on The Last House on the Left (1972), a cheaply made exploitation movie inspired by the ood of horric mass media images of the Vietnam War, betrays a perspective equally grounded in sociology, while his The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) portrays the investigation of an anthropologist into Haitian voodoo cults. Possibly his most signicant work,
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is more focused on the special e ects that became available at the time that he used for striking displays of human death. (The lm also had a total of six sequels and saved its production company, New Line Cinema, from bankruptcy, as evidenced by its uno cial name, ‘the house that Freddy built.’)
The rst Nightmare movie did, at least in its subtext, exploit the fact that John F. Kennedy was driving along Elm Street when he died—teenagers die because of their parents’ self-administered justice in the form of the horric execution of a child murderer, an incident the young protagonists are neither fully aware of while its e ects are deciding their lives. Craven’s
New Nightmare (1994), the nal installment of the series (without taking into account the 2010 remake) in which the cast of the original movie is haunted by the evil that was captured on lm ten years earlier, is closer in its postmodern tone and sensibility to his (less signicant, yet entertaining)
115 2. Materiality
Scream series, which makes use of all kinds of narrative distancing devices.
In terms of walking the line between full bodily e ect and critical elu- cidation of reality, Sam Raimi has proven, beyond the (quite unremarkable) blockbusters to his credit, that he belongs with Craven and Romero in this list. While his The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987) only go for the slightest of plots, they possibly achieve the most e ective fusion of body horror and comedy in cinema history; Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (2009) also achieves this balancing of horror and irony in a vivid sociological critique of the economic crisis, when a demon is set loose on a bank clerk who refuses an elderly immigrant a loan extension in order to advance in her career.
Speaking of greed, nowadays a younger generation of lmmakers is involved in recycling and remaking the most iconic lms from the 1960s to the ’80s, apparently because of the monetary incentive o ered by the possibility of supplying younger audiences with ‘proven’ narratives. While
lm-makers—like Eli Roth with his stimulating Cabin Fever (2002), Hostel
(2005), and Hostel II (2007)—sometimes can nd their own voice in spite of this conformity, the links between the older and the newer generation of horror movies need not be made explicit for the purpose of the investigation at hand. Tt seems that the ‘classical’ strain of horror cinema—possibly most notoriously associated with the de(con)struction of the American family in
116 Grotese Fear, and Fear of the Grotese
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), which has not been remade (yet)—for the time being still provides the most telling examples for the inquiry into the material aspect of the cinema.32
32Mark Kermode. The Exorcist. Rev. 2nd edition. London: BFI Publishing, 2003.
117
3. Performativity
From the earliest silent reels to the latest cineplex o erings, cinema is unthinkable without dancing bodies, stylized poses, ghts, shoot-outs, in short: striking images of the self in action. In addition to this, understanding situations and acting adequately, even stylishly, in our everyday lives will always to some extent depend on our vocabulary of aesthetic (re)presentations; they alone seem to be able to transmute ‘real’ complexity, the complexity of the real, into striking appearances. Indeed it seems that the Nietzschean dichotomy between Apollo (‘ideal’ articial beauty) and Dionysus (‘real’ physical stimulation) is somewhat suspended in narrative spectacles.
“Those who see any di erence between soul and body have neither,” says
Wilde, and the connection between inner emotional states and their outer performative expression must be taken into account since we have no direct access to consciousness outside of ourselves. “If signicance there is, it
119 3. Performativity manifests itself as a tacit emergent quality of enactment.”1 The following pages will attempt to outline the cinematic space in which such enactments take place.
1K. Ludwig Pfei er. The Protoliterary. Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 97.
120 Dynamic Poses of the Self
3.1 Dynamic Poses of the Self
One obvious example for cinematic creations of “dynamic poses of the self”2 is the genre of comedy. So-called ‘screwball’ comedies like Peter
Bogdanovich’s Noises O ... (1992) and What’s Up, Doc (1972) focus on the playful and ridiculous aspects inherent in orchestrated movement; another strand of lms, including Jacques Tati’s Play Time (1967), the Swiss comedy
Beresina oder Die letzten Tage der Schweiz (1999), and the adaptations of the Austrian ‘Brenner’ novels by Wolf Haas—Komm, süsser Tod (2000),
Silentium (2004), and Der Knochenmann (2009)—are all based on a existential absurdity which betrays the ambiguity inherent in all action. Tati’s own motto describes how this philosophical stance and cinematic style actually stems from real experience: “La vie, c’est très drôle, si on prend le temps de regarder.” In the cinema, where we are turned into observers in the second degree, this kind of tacit knowledge is o ered to us and creates a shared experience between us. As is evident in the genre of comedy, emotions can take on a di erent and also a clearer meaning in art than in reality.
Even if most spectators are “attracted by stars, not by meanings,”3
2Ibid., p. 197. 3Fereydoun Hoveyda. The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications. Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000, p. 27.
121 3. Performativity famous actors and actresses, in unison with all of cinema’s ‘spectacular’ elements, play a very important role in the creation of the cinematic eld for the projection of meaning.4 ‘Stars’ and their recognizable screen personas are a decisive part that cannot be overestimated for the psychocultural functions the cinema fullls: through the alluring ‘masks’ they put on, they are able to mold “the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behaviour, and even the physical appearance”5 of a large part of the public by engaging its imagination through physical stimulation, thereby setting certain performative standards. These performative codes challenge the link between cinema and literature and instead point to close relationships between cinema and other performative arts, especially opera. This
‘challenge’ should be accepted in a sportsmanlike manner since strict denitions and hierarchies of artistic systems are always open to attack in times of changing media dynamics; indeed, it seems “that Eisenstein and everyone else who sought to link cinema to literature [in the rst place] went to a great deal of trouble to state the obvious.”6
As it stands, “lmmakers follow the opposite road taken by many
4Also cf. Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 71. 5Erwin Panofsky. “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture.” In: Three Essays on Style. Ed. by Irvin Lavin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 93–126, here p. 125. 6Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, pp. 19–20.
122 Dynamic Poses of the Self contemporary novelists and arrive at the same impossibility: Images cannot become words (and vice versa)”7 because “even in still photographs, there exists an insurmountable abyss between images and words.”8 Roland Barthes might have come close to bridging this gap, albeit ‘only’ from a semiotic perspective, in his The Language of Fashion.9 But pieces of literature exist— short stories, like Kleist’s Anecdote from the Last Prussian War and Poe’s
The Man of the Crowd, ballads like Schiller’s The Glove, and (short) plays like Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy—which bring the scenes they describe immediately to their readers’ inner eyes through the use of dialogue, suspense, and proto-lmic descriptions of expressive movements. Their protagonists do not need to be ‘created,’ as it were, and made to act and react: they are simply there as they would be on screen, bringing their surrounding world with them, living in our minds as if they were real but also, by virtue of not existing and being ‘mere’ ction, more than real.
In terms of its story line, James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) is roughly the cinematic equivalent of Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy, which itself is based on “El Curioso Impertinente” in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In True Lies, the
7Ibid., p. 61. 8Ibid., p. 14. 9Roland Barthes. The Language of Fashion. Ed. by Andy Sta ord and Michael Carter. Trans. by Andy Sta ord. New York: Berg, 2006.
123 3. Performativity husband (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a secret agent who becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) is having an a air because of his dull cover life; when he seizes the opportunity to nd out how far she is willing to go with another man, they are coincidentally abducted by terrorists; in this situation, she is able to show him her beauty and he his strength to her, and their marriage is rekindled. The movie ends with the couple working together as equals and enjoying a tango (Carlos
Gardel’s “Por una Cabeza”). Taken on its own, this movie provides an alluring reinterpretation of Cervantes’ and Wilde’s understanding of the human condition embedded in their story lines; taken in its media qualities, cinema here can be said to lend performative spectacle to literature and theater, combining the strengths of the two.
The assumption here is that inasmuch “the idea of liberty could be made clear only by means of the very same actions [...] which were supposed to create liberty,”10 cinema’s embodiment of ideas is at the same time their ctional realization. As humans we need such dynamic, alluring, and ine able images of how relationships can (or could) function since what society demands of its members is passive observation and implicit
10Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso, 1978, p. 26.
124 Dynamic Poses of the Self reproduction of the status quo. No one was more angry than Freud about the failure of modern education systems in this respect, unable and unwilling as they are to actively prepare young adults for the experience of both sexuality and violence.11
It is not by chance that cultural forms exist which allow for the compensation of the shortcomings of formal schooling: curiously, only the artistically staged portrayal of love and hate makes our own psychological functioning accessible to ourselves. If we need these kinds of proxies, then cinematic productions become classiable by the kinds of tacit knowledge they provide; it is lms like Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988) and Bitter Moon
(1992) which serve the purpose of exhibiting the sadistic enactments of the pathological side of relationships; Kathleen Turner’s and Michael Douglas’ adventures in Romancing the Stone (1984) and The Jewel of the Nile (1985) inevitably lead to a veritable War of the Roses (1989);12 and the love life of
11Sigmund Freud. “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.” In: Abriß der Psychoanalyse / Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1953, pp. 63–129, in unnumbered note on p. 119: “Daß sie dem jugendlichen Menschen verheimlicht, welche Rolle die Sexualität in seinem Leben spielen wird, ist nicht der einzige Vorwurf, den man gegen die heutige Erziehung erheben muß. Sie sündigt außerdem darin, daß sie ihn nicht auf die Aggression vorbereitet, deren Opfer er zu werden bestimmt ist. Indem sie die Jugend mit so unrichtiger psychologischer Orientierung entläßt, benimmt sich die Erziehung nicht anders, als wenn man Leute, die auf eine Polarexpedition gehen, mit Sommerkleidung und Karten der oberitalischen Seen ausrüsten würde.” 12Kathleen Turner, in particular, has taken a variety of roles that explore the basis of identity (for example, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married, 1986) and modern society’s pathological tendencies (for example, in John Waters’ Serial Mom, 1994).
125 3. Performativity intellectuals can claim no crisper expression than in Mike Nichols’ Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). In this line of thinking, one of the most potent combinations of all the structural elements of cinema providing space for the meaningful enactment of love and hate can be found in Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill, vols. I & II (2003/2004).
His mise-en-scène is suitably mesmerizing, and at the same time a perfect example of the most accessible “technique by which all great directors convey their style, their world.”13 This adds to the female lead character’s drama, the drama of the portrayed person in the Hegelian sense; George
Steiner would speak of ‘real presence’ which is produced when something is vividly shown, not told, in terms of body language, not language. The two
lms, much like the rest of Tarantino’s work, stand as exemplary showcases for “the importance of bodily grounded experience and its urge toward imaginative, (proto)literary verbalization”14 in striking performances. In the combination of highly stylized dialogue, music, and ghting sequences that are actually closer to dancing, especially in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003),
Tarantino succeeds in bringing together an altogether irresistible mixture.
This compelling force, however, far from sweeping up every single audience
13Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 96. 14Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 252.
126 Dynamic Poses of the Self member, often creates a kind of intellectual resistance toward
contemporary movies, in which super uous dialogue, pompously dubbed ‘adult language,’ and repetitious images often dull more than one scene. In many cases, directors rely on rowdy, loud, and disruptive special e ects and high-pitched sound tracks to impress the audience and suspend its disbelief. Otherwise, movies such as the Die Hards or the Terminators are well edited and entertaining. [...] The rub, if any, is that extreme violence doesn’t replace ‘meaning.’15
This allure has been articulated by Antonio Gramsci in his assessment of the opera libretto, another media mixture and one of “the most pestiferous, because musical words are easily remembered and create something like matrices which shape the ow of our thinking.”16 This lack of freedom and tying of meaning to a particular form should not be regretted, however, but be accepted as a process-turned-medium of human perceptual thinking.
Also, when it comes to style (in the non-trivial sense of the word) in art, factual accuracy and consistency—and sincerity, as Oscar Wilde has added— are not essential. “Movement and music, while complicated, appear as an ideal experience in which physical, protosocial layers and levels of awareness
15Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 106. 16Cited in Immacolata Amodeo. Das Opernhafte. Eine Studie zum ‘gusto melodrammatico’ in Italien und Europa. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, p. 100: “il melodramma è il più pestifero, perché le parole musicate si ricordano di più e formano come delle matrici in cui il pensiero prende una forma nel suo uire.” (My translation.)
127 3. Performativity merge.”17
As far as the dialogues intertwined with the bloodshed in Tarantino’s works is concerned, it is necessary to remember that “‘[v]irtue without terror is ine ective,’ says Robespierre. [...] And what is the use of an argument that leaves people unmoved?”18 The semblance of an ongoing argument also adds dramatic tension to textual forms like Ancient Greek dialogues and those in their image, like Galileo’s, while for the Kill Bill lms, dialogue becomes more crucial and more intertwined with action in Kill Bill: Vol. 2
(2004). “Operas are less tied to the realistic claims of dramatic speech,” a property they share with movies, just like “the old quarrel about the priority of music or words (or ‘drama’) in opera is pointless. Opera may enact a meaningful drama, but it is necessarily music,” in the same way that cinema is necessarily spectacle.19 One is not going along with the powerful musical score in spite of the plot, but because the suggestiveness of highly stylized gestures, ght sequences, driving, smoking, and other everyday activities creates an “immediacy without explanation, yet an immediacy capable of being embedded in some form of coherence.”20
17Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 264. 18Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 25. 19Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 18 and p. 196, respectively. 20Ibid., p. 32.
128 The Performance of Identity
3.2 The Performance of Identity
Identity, far from being a xed entity, is in constant ux and needs to be externalized in order to become tangible. “In so-called real life, we emphasize the reality or at least the consequences of an act. In the theater, we enjoy the projections of the roles. But both components are always there.”21 Speaking with Maréchal Lyautey, “la joie de l’âme est dans l’action,” and cinema o ers precisely the kind of movement that can be enjoyed no matter what the ‘real’ consequences of the actions would be. Other means of stabilization without the openness o ered in and by media systems often turn pathological, and even such artistic prosthetics do not safeguard against the insanity that can unfold in their structures, as is evidenced by Darren Aronofsky’s Black
Swan (2010). Nevertheless, the least restrictive and most productive way of expressing and asserting one’s identity lies in its staged performance, since
“[t]he interesting thing is not the ideal [itself], but the ways in which one may approach its empty center.”22 Ultimately then action, and not acting, is political; but action always involves elements of staging.
Regarding telling performances, cinema as a prime medium of movement
21Ibid., p. 92. 22Ibid., p. 81.
129 3. Performativity and expression provides an inexhaustible wealth of examples from every period, country, and genre—but it seems that it is nowhere as focused on the decisive dimension of identity creation and stabilization as it is in movies that rely on the actors’ physicality, i.e., action and comedy lms. Some of them also follow the formula focusing on relationships as outlined above, for example Knight and Day (2010) with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, which ends with their complete role reversal. But more generally speaking, the high degree of stylization found in these genres, coupled with their reliance on music and a certain disregard for ‘realistic’ narratives, often evokes diverse echos of older performative arts, like the staged ghting in Chinese opera
(from Beijing and many other Chinese provinces) and slapstick comedy in Italian commedia dell’arte—and especially from the media format that developed out of the latter: Italian opera.
This media-typological set-up largely explains the popularity of the action comedies starring Jackie Chan (a trained Beijing opera actor)23 and the Italian duo Bud Spencer (a former Olympic swimmer) and Terrence Hill.
It is clear that the physical aspect of role play in such performances of
23Also see David Bordwell’s introduction to the cinema of Hong Kong: David Bordwell. Planet Hong Kong. Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
130 The Performance of Identity the self in action also o ers direct links to the realm of sports.24 Whatever their lms’ shortcomings compared to live performances and more ‘serious’ art are, the invention of “cinema intensied the perception of the rhythm and choreography of a gesture.”25 Rob Minko ’s The Forbidden Kingdom
(2008), for example, pairs Jackie Chan and Jet Li in a multicultural time- traveling adventure in which an American teenager (Michael Angarano) has to decide who he really wants to be. Spencer and Hill’s 1983 action comedy
Go for It (originally called Nati con la camicia) uses a popular trope of the genre in which the protagonists are mistaken for secret agents, being highly successful in their new-found roles. The image of Norma Desmond (Gloria
Swanson) in the nal scene of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) could be seen in this light as the ultimate expression of the need to stage reality, and serve as proof of the reality of staging.
Films starring Je Goldblum, Bill Murray, and Whoopi Goldberg similarly explore the interface between reality and acting in their various plots. While
24For the elucidation (and invention) of social roles in team sports, cf. Hunter S. Thompson. The Rum Diary. London: Bloomsbury, 2004, on college football, p. 79: “It was a torturous thing, beautiful in its way; here were men who would never again function or even understand how they were supposed to function as well as they did today. They were dolts and thugs for the most part, huge pieces of meat, trained to a ne edge—but somehow they mastered those complex plays and patterns, and in rare moments they were artists.” 25Petra Lö er. “What hands can tell us. From the ‘speaking’ to the ‘expressive’ hand.” In: Media, Culture and Mediality. Ed. by Ludwig Jäger, Erika Linz, and Irmela Schneider. Trans. by Brigitte Pichon and Dorian Rudnytsky. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010, pp. 367–89, here p. 386.
131 3. Performativity
Goldblum’s characters are fully transformed by chance encounters in John
Landis’ Into the Night (1985) and Matthew Tabak’s Auggie Rose (2000), Bill
Murray seems to portray variations of one very exible screen persona in most of his movies. While he does impersonate Hunter S. Thompson very well in Where the Bu alo Roam (1980), he is usually recognizable as ‘himself,’ as it were, across most of his lms, from Ghostbusters (1986) via Scrooged
(1988) to Quick Change (1990) and Groundhog Day (1993). In The Man
Who Knew Too Little (1997), he is mistaken for a professional hitman while participating in a reality TV show lmed in ‘real’ locations—and matters are not helped by the production being called ‘The Theater of Life.’ Whoopi
Goldberg, similarly, is often caught in narratives of changing and challenging identities, like in her movies Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Sister Act (1992), and
The Associate (1996).
“In the absence of a denable human nature, human self-production in and through ‘acting’ may appear both as a fundamental necessity and an attraction.”26 Perhaps Jeremy Leven’s Don Juan DeMarco (1994) provides the best case analysis for the lack of a human essence in dire need of being staged. In this movie, John DeMarco (Johnny Depp) has created his public persona in the image of Don Juan, and consequently runs into trouble with
26Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 203.
132 The Performance of Identity the authorities who need him to be declared insane so he can be ‘treated’ and dealt with. In the course of the movie, however, he manages to convince the veteran psychiatrist who is assigned his case, Dr. Jack Mickler (Marlon
Brando), that this psychotic transformation of himself is a necessary part of mending his life. As even Dr. Mickler’s love for his wife (Faye Dunaway) is rekindled by the insanity that spreads from DeMarco, they both realize what is at stake if mental life is reduced to the e cient performance of mundane tasks, and what is in their power to move forward in their personal development. This opens up the inquiry into the cinematic externalization of our imagination, which the following chapter will try to elucidate.
133
4. Imagination
According to Hegel, art, being free in its aims and means, embodies ideas in seemingly ‘natural’ forms that are crucially made of, but not part of everyday reality surrounding us. The criticism directed at the cinema in its infancy that lm merely captures reality without artistic intervention does not hold, even disregarding the problem that the simplest recording requires making many decisions; the reproduction of reality, by whichever means and in whichever form, reduces what was immediate and ‘present’ to be merely indirectly ‘represented,’ that is: staged, distorted, unreal.
Even if articial reality could be fed directly into the human neurological system without relying on the senses, the experience of that ‘reality’ would have to provide more than factual reality (like a juicy steak, for example, in the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 hit movie The Matrix), because otherwise it would be unnecessary to develop such technology. “Tendencies always reach out towards ideas, from the real towards the ideal. One cannot tend
135 4. Imagination towards reality, because that is where we are.”1
Thus, the power that our imagination and its artistic representations have over our conscious and subconscious understanding of reality needs to be accounted for in any aesthetic theory, given “la collaboration du monde extérieur et de notre esprit pour construire la réalité,” as Edgar Morin put it. This is even more the case since “‘reality’ consciousness and the life of dreams and fantasies cannot be strictly separated. Experience [...] is not necessarily tied to ‘real’ objects.”2 Regarding the paradigmatic media conguration that is the cinema, the impact of Morin’s work investigating l’homme imaginaire in the duplicity of being imaginary and tied up with the imagination cannot be overstated.3
To be clear, his analyses concerning processes of projection and identication in the cinema are in complete accordance with the ideas collected in this thesis; the e cacy guaranteed by their integration into the larger research domains of lm and media anthropology (elds for which
Fereydoun Hoveyda and K. Ludwig Pfei er provided the starting point for
1José Ortega y Gasset. Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art. Ed. by Christine Bernard. Trans. by Alexis Brown. With an intro. by Philip Troutman. London: Studio Vista, 1972, p. 21. 2K. Ludwig Pfei er. The Protoliterary. Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 68. 3Edgar Morin. Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire. Essai d’anthropologie sociologique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1956.
136 the discussions here) should also be highly appealing to future research.
Humans need to see themselves re ected in powerful forms outside of themselves, and the movie close-up continues the task that the portrait has been fullling since before the advent of cinema. In the anthropologically charged dynamics of images of the self and the imaginary self, external representations of (one’s idea of) oneself become crucial. “A painting is a portrait when it purports to transcribe the individuality of the object. It is a mistake to think one can only make a portrait of a man, or perhaps of an animal. [...] Of each object it makes a thing unique.”4 It goes without saying that both photography and cinema take over this function which used to be tied up with painting only.
Seeing these external products of interpretative processes, we somehow intuitively behave “as if taking for granted that what matters is the images of things and not their reality,”5 and it could not be otherwise in our singularly complex relationships with the world, with other people, and with ourselves.
“In the absence of binding or necessary relationships between language, experience, action, and the world, they must be invoked, conjured up. Mythic
4Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 97. 5Gore Vidal. Screening History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 89.
137 4. Imagination images are thus transferred into the world; they do not inhabit it.”6 The way in which cinema, in its combination of older media congurations and eventually, in its own right, facilitates and shapes this transferal from within to without will be the subject of the following pages.
6Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 98.
138 Imaginary People
4.1 Imaginary People
When Valéry saw himself in a newsreel in 1926, he wrote in his notebook that cinema suddenly makes “you see yourself like you do not see yourself, and could not imagine yourself [...]. You are driven out of yourself by this sight, changed into another.”7 Moving images have the strength to subvert the reality status of what one once knew to be real since they “have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological experiences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character.”8 When watching movies, especially as a child and an adolescent, one’s own reality status does not seem that assured anymore as Gore Vidal experienced when seeing a
gure on screen for the rst time: “He was real. I was not, except observing him.”9
But with the construction of reality comes its possible breakdown— attested to by a highly diverse set of lm productions. In Nicolas Roeg’s
7Paul Valéry. Cahiers. 29 vols. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1957, vol. 12, p. 343: “se voit comme il ne se voit, et ne se pouvait imaginer [...]. On est chassé de soi par cette vue, changé en autre.” (My translation.) 8Erwin Panofsky. “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture.” In: Three Essays on Style. Ed. by Irvin Lavin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 93–126, p. 156. 9Vidal, Screening History, p. 53.
139 4. Imagination
Don’t Look Now (1973), Donald Sutherland’s character has a premonition of his own funeral procession and dies while investigating the vision
(Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers from 1990 somewhat inherits this atmosphere, which is not present in all the movies that are set in
Venice); in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), the protagonist Cole can travel successfully through time due to a vivid childhood memory—he witnessed his own death, which inevitably happens the way he remembers it;10 Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno (2006) as well as Juan Antonio
Bayona’s El orfanato (2007) both feature protagonists who retreat and die in a dream world after catastrophic events in their life occur.
Confronted with traumatic experiences, these characters retreat into their self-made realities and modes of experience, only partly based on their factual existence, and they all carry on with the creation of rich, imaginative realities to their deaths.
Narration, narrators, and narratives start their careers as devices for coping with situations in which surprising events, inspiring joy, terror, or anxiety, overtax the capacities for direct, immediate, and concrete problem-solving. Storytelling, from the outset, mingles factual report and imaginative participation in various degrees until pure ction with a mere semblance of
10The lm’s screenplay was heavily inspired by Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), which was based on the insinuation of time travel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
140 Imaginary People
reality and a seemingly pure imaginative appeal is reached.11
Being in this world, in and of itself, is denitely the greatest paradox and the basis for a large part of artistic expression. The degree to which this is expressed on lm is probably nowhere greater than in the work of Werner
Herzog, from the conviction that building an opera house in the jungle means conquering the world to the need to create shared aesthetic environments, be it in a cave lit by re or in the cinema.
11Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 43.
141 4. Imagination
4.2 Werner Herzog’s Conjured Dreams
There is quite a bit in Herzog’s movies that a merely academic discussion of them cannot capture and expand on, but it seems possible to at least situate them in the theoretical structure envisioned here.
The existence of the particular artwork entails the existence of a unique personal history—namely that of its creator. However, the creator’s experience is presented in a symbolic form that is accessible to other human beings. In the necessary order of the artwork’s structure, the audience nds the echo of its own existential problems and specic ways of articulating (and thence dealing with) these.12
If light can become as important as a character in Ingmar Bergman’s lms, or the camera in Orson Welles’s, then with Werner Herzog we look together at the void at the center of all human existence. “He is the most metaphysical of cinema’s auteurs (if German expressionism was already penetrated by the metaphysical, it was so within the limits of the question of Good and Bad, to which Herzog is indi erent).”13 In his career, which already spans half a century and took him to shoot lm on all continents, on erupting volcanoes,
12Paul Crowther. The Transhistorical Image. Philosophizing Art and its History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 15. 13Gilles Deleuze. Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983, p. 252: “C’est le plus métaphysicien des auteurs de cinéma (si l’expressionnisme allemand était déjà pénétré de métaphysique, c’était dans les limites d’un problème du Bien et du Mal indi érent à Herzog).” (My translation.)
142 Werner Herzog’s Conjured Dreams and quite literally ‘at the end of the world,’ particularly his relationship with Klaus Kinski—Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972), Nosferatu: Phantom der
Nacht (1979), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987), and
Mein liebster Feind: Klaus Kinski (1999)—and his approach to documentary
lm-making stand out.14 (Herzog’s singularity becomes obvious in direct comparison with other directors like Oliver Stone, who has also worked extensively in both the ‘drama’ and ‘documentary’ genres, and who follows the opposing lm-making paradigm from Herzog’s point of view.)15
One of his most recent documentary features, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
(2010), delineates through the exploration of the caves of Chauvet how we are bound to “a kind of perpetual mirror stage”16 in our relationship with the
14Ibid., p. 251: “Dans Aguirre, l’action héroïque, la descente des rapides, est subordonnées à l’action sublime, seule adéquate à l’immense forêt vierge: le projet d’Aguirre d’être le seul Traître, et de tout trahir à la fois, Dieu, le roi, les hommes, pour fonder une race pure dans une union incestueuse avec sa lle, où l’Histoire deviendra l’opéra de la Nature. Et, dans Fitzcarraldo, c’est encore plus directement que l’héroïque (le franchissement de la montagne par le lourd bateau) est le moyen du sublime: que la forêt vierge entière devienne le temple de l’Opéra de Verdi et de la voix de Caruso. Dans Cœur de verre, enn, le paysage de Bavière abrite l’œuvre hypnotique du verre-rubis, mais se dépasse encore dans les paysages hallucinatoire qui appellent à la recherche du grand gou re d’Univers. Ainsi le Grand se réalise en tant qu’Idée pure, dans la double nature des paysages et des actions.” 15Urs Bühler. “Ich zeige nur—die Zuschauer urteilen. Oliver Stone über ‘Wall Street 2’ und die unmoralische Aufgabe eines Spiellmregisseurs.” In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Oct. 21, 2010), p. 19. url: https://www.nzz.ch/ich_zeige_nur__die_zuschauer_urteilen-1.8081495 (visited on 03/10/2011), p. 19: “Gekko war ein Spiegelbild jener Ära, in der Reagan die Märkte dereguliert hatte und sich alle schnellen Reichtum versprachen. Ich persönlich nde die von Gekko verkörperte Haltung widerlich. Aber ich wollte sie nicht kritisieren, sonst hätte ich einen Dokumentarlm gemacht. Drehe ich einen Spiellm, bin ich Dramatiker, ich zeige nur. Die Zuschauer urteilen.” 16Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 36.
143 4. Imagination natural environment:
We are creatures who pigeon-hole everything; we have got the world divided into boxes: each box is a science, and inside it we have locked the splinters of reality that we have been prising from the vast maternal quarry, Nature. And so, in little heaps assembled by chance or perhaps caprice, we hold the debris of life. In order to procure this lifeless treasure we had to dismember Nature, we had to kill her. Ancient man, on the other hand, had before him the living cosmos, articulate and unfragmented. The principal classi- cation which splits the world into things material and things spiritual did not exist for him. Wherever he looked he saw only manifestations of elemental powers, torrents of specic energies which both created and destroyed. The ow of water was not a succession of drops on drops: it was a way of life peculiar to the river gods. Day was a being with the magnicent task of periodically setting the elds on re, and Night was a restorative force that brought the dead to life.17
But the power of our modern devices for controlling the environment and emotions—science, certain kinds of drugs, even art—is not nearly enough.
In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House,18 the ordinary life of the protagonist, nursing her mother for more than 10 years without much help from her sister and brother-in-law, never going out, not sleeping well, is denitely more ‘real’ than the problems arising from her stay in a ‘haunted
17Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 15. 18Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
144 Werner Herzog’s Conjured Dreams house,’ but if anything even less endurable, more painful, and taking much longer. In J.A. Bayona’s El orfanato, the catastrophic loss of her child, without even taking into account the backstory that involves the killing and burning of all children in the house 30 years ago, is enough to deprive Laura of the possibility of living a ‘normal,’ controlled life. Even Fitzcarraldo’s relatively mundane task to try to nd a shorter route to transport rubber from the jungle to a larger port takes on mythical qualities in real and in mental life
(dragging a steamer over a mountain, combined with the need to project opera on the stark emptiness of jungle). Because of scientic thinking in more or less all areas of life, from physics to psychology, we gain a sense of security while we are clearly not more or less in control of our own destiny than at any other point in the history of humankind.
The cinema is able to meet this need for security: if the projection of and identication with potent images, the (re)enactment of striking poses, and the ordering and understanding of physical reality are some of the most basic human dispositions, then cinema is the most tting psychotechnological device addressing “a cultural (and personal) need for transitory but gripping enactments in which a sense of reality and the heterogeneous drives of the imaginary may merge for a short while.”19
19Pfei er, The Protoliterary, pp. 33–34.
145
Conclusion:
An Unreal Horizon
Perhaps, where Lear has rav’d, and Hamlet died, on ying cars new sorcerers may ride.
(Samuel Johnson, Prologue Spoken at the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre, 1747)
Theory-building in the humanities is a form of knowledge management, a way of (man)handling diverse and discrepant pieces of information. And although theoretical elaborations and elucidations are necessarily ‘works in progress,’ always confronted, tested, and revised by new empirical evidence, it seems that in a number of incisive aesthetic theories a stable perspective emerges: we, as humans, think in pictures and grasp the world by both forming mental representations of it and creating material proxies of ourselves in it. These ‘world pictures,’ Heidegger’s critical analysis of them notwithstanding,20 have always been at the heart of sense-making
20Martin Heidegger. “The Age of the World Picture.” In: The Question Concerning
147 The Shadows of Dreams strategies, given the dependence on visual sensory input in the perception of our environments.
While each of the arts creates and changes the aesthetic playing eld for itself and for the others, none is higher than the rest. Considering that viewing is highly conditioned by the privileged role it plays in our experience of the world, sensorially-reduced forms of artistic expression like literature can e ectively become more appealing compared to the cinema since “the visual includes too much.”21 The material, performative, and imaginative layers outlined in this thesis wanted to o er a way of looking at and understanding cinema both in its own right and in relation to other media, with these tasks trying to compliment and clarify each other. The chosen movie examples can obviously only include a small number of cinematic productions, nevertheless they are indicative of certain possibilities o ered by the cinema to lmmakers and audiences.
In summary, the present study aimed more at a synthesis rather than an analysis of lm examples in order to scrutinize the kind of knowledge, which Michael Polanyi has called ‘tacit,’22 externalized in the cinema through
Technology and Other Essays. Ed. and trans. by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977, pp. 115–54. 21Fereydoun Hoveyda. The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications. Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000, p. 26. 22Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
148 Conclusion the process of medialization. This idea relies on a number of framing conceptualizations and powerful ‘grand narratives’ which have already been theoretically and empirically di erentiated and substantiated in and across various elds. The underlying ‘anthropological’ perspective, grounded in biology, history, psychology and other disciplines, in combination with
‘proper’ media theories strongly suggests a common paradigm which sees media as embodied human experience to be easily shared and engaged with.
Anthropological models have a “placement potential,”23 which means that beyond highlighting the signicance of particular experiences, they also provide frameworks in which to situate them. “It is not a new cryptography that we need, especially when it consists of replacing one cipher by another less intelligible, but a new diagnostics, a science which can determine the meaning of things for the life that surrounds them.”24
The question can be raised, then, to what degree the many forms and instances of human self-stylization in artistic media are reducible to mere displays of vitality, a somewhat similar accusation to being sheer entertainment. It seems clear that modern living conditions have to be
23K. Ludwig Pfei er. “Rettung oder Verabschiedung der Hermeneutik? Funktions- geschichte und Wirkungspotential neuerer hermeneutischer Denkguren.” In: Journal for General Philosophy of Science 14.1 (1983), pp. 46–67, here p. 63. 24Cli ord Geertz. “Art as a Cultural System.” In: Modern Language Notes 91.6 (Dec. 1976): Comparative Literature, pp. 1473–99, here p. 1499.
149 The Shadows of Dreams counterbalanced by strong ‘special’ e ects, and some media congurations and formats denitely exploit their structural possibilities to provide this kind of recreational, escapist engagement “when art is made to represent living realities.”25 There may not be the clear line that is often assumed between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, or ‘art’ and ‘entertainment,’ but it is understandable to criticize vapid works in this vein (which can also be badly executed on a technical level in daily soap operas, for example), with Sirk’s cinematic output surely among the highest aesthetic expressions of this mode of production.
Yet movies such as Sirk’s are also meaningful and play an important role for some audiences because they cater to undeniable human needs because “[t]he eye does not see itself except through its re ection in a mirror. Consciousness becomes aware of itself by being aware of objects and then by being re ected back into itself from them.”26 This process of externalization, of ‘embodiment’ with all its implications covered and examined above, is in and of itself signicant regardless of the intellectual faults of its products since “we do need images of moving human bodies as
25José Ortega y Gasset. Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art. Ed. by Christine Bernard. Trans. by Alexis Brown. With an intro. by Philip Troutman. London: Studio Vista, 1972, p. 74. 26T.M. Knox, in his preface to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. by T. M. Knox. 2 vols. New York: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. x.
150 Conclusion suggestions of (f)actuality, that is occurrences taken to be real.”27
Not long ago the concept of ‘art’ still carried a clearer charge which is still too powerful to simply be discarded. For a single denition where many could be given, Ortega y Gasset provides but one credible example: “Art is not justied if it limits itself to reproducing reality, to vain duplications. Its mission is to conjure up an unreal horizon. To achieve this we can only deny our reality and by so doing set ourselves above it.”28 One way to salvage this philosophical surge, which also animated past discussions on whether
lms are a form of art, is to locate it in a broader anthropological context in which one is able to contrast media, rituals, and techniques with reality proper, “since reality does not begin to mean until it has been made art of.”29
Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s terminology, ‘meaning’ in this sense “certainly is not an ‘object to be dened,’ but ‘an e ect to be experienced.’”30
It is from this angle that an astonishing occurrence very common in our lives becomes altogether comprehensible, namely (as Gore Vidal phrased it)
“how, through ear and eye, we are both dened and manipulated by ctions
27K. Ludwig Pfei er. “Imagination, Imaginary and (F)Actuality.” In: Orientation in the Occurrence. Ed. by István Berszán. Cluj-Napoca: Komp-Press, 2009, pp. 169–84, here p. 182. 28Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the Dehumanization of Art, p. 80. 29Gore Vidal. Screening History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 5. 30K. Ludwig Pfei er. The Protoliterary. Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 136.
151 The Shadows of Dreams of such potency that they are able to replace our own experience, often becoming our sole experience of a reality become as irreal as the Turkey of Oblomov’s co eehouse, or the Alaska of my dreams.”31 This insight has been poignantly incorporated into lm theory proper by Vivian Sobchack, who has argued “for a specically cinematic embodied vision that challenges all previous models of lm theory in the name of a phenomenological experience,”32 exposing the cinematic duality of seeing and being seen: “Film is not just an object of the viewer’s vision; it is also a ‘viewing subject’—not that lm is human but that it is an act of vision with both a subjectivity that views and a view that is seen [...].”33
This line of thought also o ers an attractive extension back to lm theories from the rst half of the twentieth century which posited that a lm camera is metaphorically both an ‘eye’ (Vertov’s camera eye) and a ‘pen’ (Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo), thus in its totality a device that supplements vision by allowing for its (re)organization—a function it shares with all other arts, which always have and always will mediate our
31Vidal, Screening History, p. 32. 32Linda Ruth Williams. Critical Desire. Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject. London: Arnold, 1995, p. 10. 33Ibid., p. 9.
152 Conclusion perception and experience of the world.34 Given that the thirty years or so of a delay between the technological developments for the recording and editing of sight and sound are negligible with live musicians bridging the gap in the cinema from the beginning, it is clear how and why movies by their combination of a large number of aesthetic pathways have become “nally, the only validation to which that dull anterior world, reality, must submit.”35
In the scope of this thesis, the argument has been that some of the aesthetic thrust of Greek tragedy persists in the motion pictures through changing cultural and media congurations via their link to opera, all three being media clusters which are tied to the two poles of (social) ritual and
(artistic) representation as Nietzsche’s pointed out in The Birth of Tragedy.36
Accidentally albeit signicantly, the metaphysical sometimes collapses onto the concrete. Expressive human action, whether it aims at producing art(ifacts) or not, enters into a complex relationship with the material domain in that it uses, molds, and changes that world. “To the texting of the world
34For a telling inquiry into the unjustied split into “extreme Künstlichkeit und Konventionalität” and “reine Unmittelbarkeit und Ursprünglichkeit” in Italian opera, cf. Immacolata Amodeo. Das Opernhafte. Eine Studie zum ‘gusto melodrammatico’ in Italien und Europa. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, p. 197. 35Vidal, Screening History, p. 6. 36Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy, and The Case of Wagner. Trans. and comm. by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
153 The Shadows of Dreams corresponds the worlding of the text.”37
As an activity, creation has a performative dimension: actions are carried out in certain ways, for certain purposes, within certain constraints, only in certain settings and times, either with or without an audience. And
nally, creative acts mean something to the person engaged in them and to those who are present either physically or by proxy. In light of these considerations, it is clear that “the most basic empirical data is charged with theory, hence in need of interpretation.”38 Aesthetic phenomena naturally demand more than average amounts of attention inasmuch as they are concentrated forms of communication capable of producing intense responses.
The idea, then, was to outline some ‘grand’ narratives in which the works discussed here could be situated and elucidated. Since “theories are mere pictures of natural processes,”39 they have the power to bring into clear outline features and tendencies which would otherwise remain hidden from conscious understanding. (It is remarkable how Constable in his address to the Royal Institution successfully reverses this line of thought when he
37Robert Stam. Film Theory. An Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000, p. 328. 38Pfei er, “Rettung oder Verabschiedung der Hermeneutik?” P. 55. 39Boltzmann, cited in Henk W. de Regt. “Ludwig Boltzmann’s ‘Bildtheorie’ and Scientic Understanding.” In: Synthese 119 (1999), pp. 113–34, here p. 115.
154 Conclusion posits that pictures are actually theories of natural processes: “Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.
Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”40) Inasmuch as brain research cannot prove a work of art to be meaningful or even beautiful, it is narrow-minded to accept only that which can be proven by a certain method. Chances are the method is limited or inadequate, not our experience of reality. Only by combining smaller and larger theoretical frameworks, and without wholly restricting oneself to middle-range theories, can aws in both one’s paradigms and the empirical data be exposed and possibly corrected.
The main argument throughout these pages has been that cinema embodies perceptual thought, so the framework assembled and proposed here focuses on media functions rather than forms. This implies that the existence of cinema is more strongly grounded in its psychocultural purpose rather than its volatile technological design—actually, the continuing development and diversication of what we dene as ‘cinema’ proves just how unchanging its anthropological import is. Beyond a cinematic “unità
40Cited in Geo rey Parrinder. African Mythology. London: Hamlyn, 1967, p. 76.
155 The Shadows of Dreams distintiva,”41 which is common to all arts having passed the thresholds of medialization and which has been investigated by the earliest lm theories, one can go further and say that the cinematic structure is as close as we have ever come to a complete externalization of our ways of perceiving the world and that cinema is thus an art non murato, ma veramente nato (as Vasari described Peruzzi’s Villa Farnesina).
Cinema aligns most accurately not only with our perception of reality, but also our drive to externalize experience and delight in or su er from such materializations. If one believes with Neil Postman and Guy Debord, for example, that entertainment especially in the form of motion pictures is becoming “the format for the presentation of all experience,”42 the crucial point is missed that phenomenologically, this is precisely cinema’s strength— and as with any tool, it depends on how its power is harnessed by lmmakers.
The cinematic structure can thus be seen as an aesthetic means to “enhance people’s capacity for orientation in their social and natural worlds,”43 not by clear and direct identication “with a character, a gaze, or a particular
41Umberto Eco, cited in Amodeo, Das Opernhafte, p. 168. 42This criticism is examined and discussed in Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 29. 43Norbert Elias. “Knowledge and Power. An Interview by Peter Ludes.” In: Society and Knowledge. Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge. Ed. by Nico Stehr and Volker Meja. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984, pp. 251–91, here p. 285.
156 Conclusion position but rather with a series of oscillating positions”44 of ‘being-in-the- world’ (in the Heideggerian sense).
The only true journey, the only fountain of youth, would not lie in going to new lands, but to have di erent eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes which each of them sees, which each of them is.45
Processes of medialization, of media coming into being, depend on anthropological potentials in constant need of being staged in tangible and telling forms, always relating back to the human body and conditioned by its senses. From this point of view, lm is not a hybrid or intermedial variation since a non-hybrid, ‘authentic,’ or ‘natural’ arrangement cannot exist—and yet the cinema’s psychotechnological e ciency is able to subsume the enigmatic powers of several other artistic forms of expression.
As much as objective contemplation may be the proclaimed goal among critics across various elds, in art and in general one often wants more than intellectual stimulation and looks for real involvement. Institutionalized platforms become obsolete very quickly in our age, i.e., experts will be left
44Williams, Critical Desire, p. 15. 45Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu. 14 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1927, here vol. 12, p. 69: “Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est.” [My translation.]
157 The Shadows of Dreams to talk among themselves if they cannot arouse an audience’s emotional attention, which is more of a marketing problem than one of stimulating content.46
Neglecting this intuitive awareness of cognitive and a ective needs led to “the dilemma of what has been called Enlightenment emotionalism.
Rationalistic world pictures failed to satisfy a demand for order as both an intellectual conviction and an experienced emotion.”47 Correspondingly,
Jürgen Mittelstrass has investigated this from the perspective of the philosophy of science based on the formula ‘salvare apparentia,’ referring to the primacy of tangible phenomena in our experience over discrete theories and ways of reconciling the latter with the former.48
Understanding art in the Greek sense as “the sensuous expression of a rational concept”49 suspends this problem somewhat as the act of giving
46Cf. JoAnn Levy, cited in Hoveyda, The Hidden Meanings of Mass Communications, p. 136: “In San Antonio [...] a Barnes and Noble store asked twenty-three authors from a Women Writing the West Conference to sign books at their store. Employees picked us up at our hotel, had a huge horseshoe of tables, backed with 23 chairs, and 23 stacks of books next to place cards with our names in calligraphy. Plus a big spread of cookies and co ee. Not one person came! [...] After one hour we started buying each other’s books and then we ate all the cookies.” 47Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 303. 48For example in his dissertation: Jürgen Mittelstrass. Die Rettung der Phänomene. Ursprung und Geschichte eines antiken Forschungsprinzips. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962. 49Friedrich Schiller. “Über Anmut und Würde.” In: Werke. Nationalausgabe. Vol. 20: Philosophische Schriften. Ed. by Benno von Wiese. Weimar: Böhlau, 1962, pp. 251–308, here p. 261: “der sinnliche Ausdruck eines Vernunftbegri s.” Also cf. pp. 251–2: “Das zarte Gefühl der Griechen unterschied frühe schon, was die Vernunft noch nicht zu verdeutlichen fähig
158 Conclusion embodied form to an idea is a highly experimental process and thus one of the most intuitive ways of testing out hypotheses. While it is possible to verbalize categories and abstract qualities, it is more e ective to indulge the persistent anthropological need for the fabrication of and engagement with material representations of internal experiences, which allow us to see ctional objects, individuals, locations and situations as the most authentic instances of lived reality precisely because they are imaginary.
The distinction between ‘art’ and ‘culture industry’ that was set up in
The Dialectic of Enlightenment disappears in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory by necessity: “Only appearances can achieve the fusion of heightened vitality and spiritual suggestiveness. To such fusions we cling, psychologically and culturally, even if we can no longer make sense of them theoretically.”50
It appears that in the unyielding split between “the reality of performance and the performance of reality,”51 there is for the time being no better juncture than the cinema to watch “le faux par le vrai,”52 as Paul Valéry put
war, und nach einem Ausdruck strebend, erborgte es von der Einbildungskraft Bilder, da ihm der Verstand noch keine Begri e darbieten konnte. Jener Mythus ist daher der Achtung des Philosophen werth, der sich ohnehin damit begnügen muß, zu den Anschauungen, in welchen der reine Natursinn seine Entdeckungen niederlegt, die Begri e aufzusuchen, oder mit andern Worten, die Bilderschrift der Empndungen zu erklären.” 50Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 206. 51Ibid., p. 211. 52Paul Valéry. Œuvres. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1957–1960, here vol. 2, p. 220.
159 The Shadows of Dreams it. One might also turn this around and understand cinema as ‘le vrai par le faux’ since “we need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit”53 and “to handle the idiosyncrasies of mental life through vivid depictions.”54 The “dynamic, suggestive, yet inconclusive images”55 of the cinema are, like other media in their right, means to perceive and understand the world from other points of view, opening the space for shared perspectives which always remain rooted in concrete individual experiences. Both ‘writing’ and ‘thinking’ in highly a ecting and e ective images are the main driving forces of processes of medialization, which will continue as long as there are humans with a passion for sharing their lives, their stories, and their dreams.
53Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso, 1978, p. 32, originally in italics. 54Sigmund Freud. “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.” In: Abriß der Psychoanalyse / Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1953, pp. 63–129, here p. 70: “die Eigentümlichkeiten des seelischen Lebens durch anschauliche Darstellung zu bewältigen.” 55Pfei er, The Protoliterary, p. 37.
160 Appendix
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Index
Amiel, Jon Carter, Angela, 82 The Man Who Knew Too Little Chabrol, Claude, 32 (1997), 132 Chan, Jackie, 130, 131 Angarano, Michael, 131 Chaplin, Geraldine, 98, 121, 140, Antonioni, Michelangelo, 33 145 Ardolino, Emile Christie, Agatha, 71, 83–92, 96, 97, Sister Act (1992), 132 100, 106 Aronofsky, Darren Clair, René Black Swan (2010), 129 And Then There Were None The Fountain (2006), 73 (1945), 83, 84 Barboni, Enzo Collinson, Peter Go for It (1983), 131 10 Little Indians (1974), 83, 84 Bayona, Juan Antonio Coppola, Francis Ford El orfanato (2007), 140, 145 Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bergman, Ingmar, 142 125 Bergman, Ingrid, 91 Craven, Wes, 71, 110 Bogdanovich, Peter A Nightmare on Elm Street Noises O ... (1992), 121 (1984),7, 115 What’s Up, Doc (1972), 121 New Nightmare (1994), 115 Boll, Uwe, 31 The Last House on the Left Brando, Marlon, 133 (1972), 115 Burton, Richard, 63, 126 The Serpent and the Rainbow Cahiers du Cinéma, Les,8, 44 (1988), 115 Cameron, James Cruise, Tom, 130 The Terminator (1984), 127 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 124 True Lies (1994), 123 Curtis, Tony, 98
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Deighton, Len, 95 Death on the Nile (1978), 84, Depp, Johnny, 132 92 DeVito, Danny The War of the Roses (1989), Hamilton, Guy, 85 125 Diamonds are Forever (1971), Diaz, Cameron, 130 95 Donner, Richard Evil Under the Sun (1982), 84, Scrooged (1988), 132 95, 96, 98, 99 Douglas, Michael, 125 Funeral in Berlin (1966), 95 Dunaway, Faye, 133 Goldnger (1964), 95 Live and Let Die (1973), 95 Eisenstein, Sergei M., 122 The Man with the Golden Gun Fassbinder, Rainer Werner (1974), 95 Angst essen Seele auf (1974), The Mirror Crack’d (1980), 108 84–86, 95, 97, 100, 102 Faulkner, William, 108 Hardy, Robin Fellini, Federico The Wicker Man (1973), 85 Amarcord (1973), 49 Haynes, Todd Finney, Albert, 92 Far from Heaven (2002), 108 Franklin, Howard Herzog, Werner, 34, 72, 141–143 Quick Change (1990), 132 Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes Friedkin, William (1972), 143 The Excorcist (1973), 117 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), 11, 143 Gilliam, Terry, 81 Cobra Verde (1987), 143 12 Monkeys (1995), 72, 140 Fitzcarraldo (1982), 143, 145 Fear and Loathing in Las Mein liebster Feind (1999), 143 Vegas (1998), 78 Nosferatu (1979), 143 Godard, Jean-Luc, 33 Woyzeck (1979), 143 Goldberg, Whoopi, 131, 132 Hill, Terrence, 130, 131 Goldblum, Je , 131, 132 Hitchcock, Alfred Greenaway, Peter Vertigo (1958), 140 Nightwatching (2007), 57 Hudson, Rock, 98, 99, 101, 106, The Draughtsman’s Contract 108 (1982), 57 Guillermin, John, 85 Jackson, Shirley, 112, 144
176 Index
Jordan, Neil Silentium (2004), 121 The Company of Wolves Murray, Bill, 131, 132 (1984), 82 Quick Change (1990), 132
Kinski, Klaus, 72, 143 Nichols, Mike Who’s Afraid of Virginia Landis, John Woolf? (1966), 126 Into the Night (1985), 132 Novak, Kim, 98, 140 Lansbury, Angela, 98 Leander, Zarah, 104 Petrie, Donald Leven, Jeremy The Associate (1996), 132 Don Juan DeMarco (1994), 72, Polanski, Roman 132 Bitter Moon (1992), 125 Li, Jet, 131 Frantic (1988), 125 Linson, Art Raimi, Sam, 71, 110 Where the Bu alo Roam Drag Me to Hell (2009), 116 (1980), 132 Evil Dead II (1987), 116 Lumet, Sidney, 85 The Evil Dead (1981), 116 Murder on the Orient Express Ramis, Harold (1974), 84–92, 94, 100 Groundhog Day (1993), 132 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 25, Reitman, Ivan 60 Ghostbusters (1986), 132 Mangold, James Renoir, Jean Knight and Day (2010), 130 La règle du jeu (1939), 97 Marker, Chris Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959), La jetée (1962), 140 57 Marshall, Penny Roeg, Nicolas Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), 132 Don’t Look Now (1973), 140 McTiernan, John Romero, George, 71, 110 Die Hard (1988), 127 Dawn of the Dead (1978), 113 Minko , Rob Day of the Dead (1985), 113, The Forbidden Kingdom 114 (2008), 131 Diary of the Dead (2007), 114 Murnberger, Wolfgang Land of the Dead (2005), 113 Der Knochenmann (2009), 121 Night of the Living Dead Komm, süsser Tod (2000), 121 (1968), 113
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Survival of the Dead (2009), 128 114 Tati, Jacques Roth, Eli, 116 Play Time (1967), 121 Taylor, Elizabeth, 63, 98, 126 Schmid, Daniel Teague, Lewis Beresina oder Die letzten Tage The Jewel of the Nile (1985), der Schweiz, 121 125 Schrader, Paul Thompson, Hunter S., 78, 131, 132 The Comfort of Strangers del Toro, Guillermo (1990), 140 El laberinto del fauno (2006), Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 124, 127 140 Sha er, Anthony, 85 Tru aut, François, 32 Sirk, Douglas, 71, 99, 101–108, Turner, Kathleen, 125 110, 150 All that Heaven Allows (1955), Ustinov, Sir Peter, 84, 85, 92 106, 108 Wachowski Brothers, The Imitation of Life (1959), 107, The Matrix (1999), 135 109 Waters, John La Habanera (1937), 104–106 Serial Mom (1994), 125 The Tarnished Angels (1957), Welles, Orson, 81, 142 108 Wheatley, David Written on the Wind (1956), The Magic Toyshop (1987), 82 107 Wilder, Billy Spencer, Bud, 130, 131 Sunset Boulevard (1950), 131 Stone, Oliver, 143 Willis, Bruce, 72, 127 Swanson, Gloria, 131 Winner, Michael Appointment with Death Tabak, Matthew (1988), 85 Auggie Rose (2000), 132 Tarantino, Quentin Zemeckis, Robert Kill Bill, vol. I (2003), 78, 126 Romancing the Stone (1984), Kill Bill, vol. II (2004), 78, 126, 125
178