The Shadows of Dreams Cinema’S Layers of Medialization
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The Shadows of Dreams Cinema’s Layers of Medialization by Jan-Helge Weidemann A thesis submied in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literature Approved Dissertation Commiee 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 veröentlicht. 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 Pfeier 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 Pfeier, I can only oer my deepest gratitude not only for the professional chance to pursue doctoral studies, but also for sincere and eective 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 oce whenever he worked) and turned it into “How would Pfeier do it?,” like Wilder looking for a successful role model in terms of ecacy 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 inuences 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 Anities, 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 Pfeier, 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.