Notes
Introduction
1. See Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard UP, 2006); Martha Nochimson’s Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2 (U of Texas P, 2002); Virginia Wright Wexman’s Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton UP, 1993). 2. See Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940’s (Indiana UP, 1987), among others. 3. See David Shumway’s Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (New York UP, 2003); James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties (Knopf, 2001); Elizabeth Kendall’s The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s (Cooper Square Press, 2002); Mark Garrett Cooper’s Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class (U of Minnesota P, 2003). 4. For theories of cinematic experience related to temporality, see Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard UP, 2002); Leo Charney’s Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift (Duke UP, 1998); Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion, 2006); Tom Gunning’s article ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions’ (Velvet Light Trap, 1993). For phenomenological film theory as related to embodiment and space, see Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton UP, 1991). For psychoanalytic film theory, see Slavoj Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Routledge, 2007); Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993); Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures (Indiana UP, 1989). 5. See The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge, 1995) and World Spectators (Stanford UP, 2000).
1 Love in the Time of Cinema
1. Quoted in Benjamin’s ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ Valery writes ‘We rec- ognize a work of art by the fact that no idea it inspires in us, no mode of behavior that it suggests we adopt could exhaust it or dispose of it’ (186–187). 2. Concurrent to his impassioned pursuit of what photographically piques his interest, Barthes reveals his tentative embracing of photographic truth for its capacity to, among other things, replace experience. Barthes writes ‘Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory ...but it actually blocks mem- ory, quickly becomes a counter-memory’ (91). If I remember my exhausted happiness for completing a race, for example, and then see a photograph of my crossing the finish line, my subjective recollection (the finish line’s
179 180 Notes
approach in my visual perception, my weary yet adrenaline-filled muscles, my thirsting mouth and so on) is replaced by an externalization, an image of my experience far different from my sensory memory. Instead of seeing my experience through my eyes, the photograph sees my eyes, in an imagistic disruption of my sensual recollection. Hardly is this example precise, for the ways that memory and subjectivity are anything but exact. But such haziness elicits Barthes’ cautious embrace of photographic ‘truth,’ which inevitably is overshadowed by his amazement with the punctual experience he associates with photography. 3. See also Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for its value as described within Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing. In Seel’s first chapter, he quotes Kant: ‘We linger in our contemplation of the beautiful, because this con- templation reinforces and reproduces itself’ (his emphasis, 3). Implicit in this Kantian passage is the capacity for beauty to incite duration. Delluc’s claim that art helps us to appreciate the beauty of a passing moment matches with Kant’s, insofar as the beautiful compels our lingering, thereby expanding time according to aesthetic contemplation. Later in his study, Seel extends this lingering in terms of resonance: ‘The experience of resonating is thus ...a mystical experience, but it is so in a purely for- mal sense. It is not experience of participation in unspeakable meaning or inconceivable being ...It is experience of the presence of an irretriev- able temporal appearing, an experience that can be welcomed as the experience of a unique duration, as the condition of an enduring pass- ing away’ (his emphasis, 146–147). Ephemera gain endurance insofar as their fleeting nature is constant. This ‘unique duration’ defines an ideal- ized aesthetic immersion, the temporality of which my project attempts to clarify. 4.SeeChapter3ofLove in the Time of Cinema for elaboration upon Camera Lucida’s ‘almost’ in relation to Jacquot de Nantes. 5. Quoting the last sentence from William Faulkner’s Wild Palms,Patriciareads to her lover, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), in the lengthy playful bedroom sequence that accentuates their already-apparent differences. While Patricia claims she would choose grief over nothing, the bewildered Michel matter- of-factly claims his preference of ‘nothing.’ 6. The word ‘mediation’ assumes the art’s responsibility to calibrate world and ‘representation.’ To this notion, I prefer the term ‘expression,’ which privileges creativity over fidelity. 7. In his Afterword to The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wellbery describes the ‘new form of eros’ engendered during the ‘last third of the eighteenth century’ (284). Since ‘[w]hom one loves and marries is decided independently of such non-amorous considerations as economic gain and the formation of family alliances ...one no longer desires in the beloved such general qualities as virtue or public esteem; love no longer borrows its values from other func- tional spheres. Rather, what one loves in the beloved is the particularity of that person, his or her absolute difference from everyone else’ (284). In his Foreword to Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Christopher Fynsk writes that ‘[i]t is the singularity of the other that provokes love, provided we also understand by this term the marking of a certain strangeness or oth- erness (in love this can take the form of a strange beauty ...Love is known Notes 181
always singularly, though it is the knowledge of an encounter and a relation’ (xviii). 8. Thank you to Paul Cantrell, with whom reading Ricoeur (and most anything) literalizes this subjective camaraderie. 9. See Hayden White, ‘The Burden of History,’ Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978, 27–50. 10. Sarah Ley Roff clarifies Benjamin’s emphasis upon citation and inter- textuality:‘Itwouldnotbeanexaggeration...to describe intertextuality as a fundamental mode of Benjamin’s thought. His practice of citation ...can be understood as a case of both allusion and pastiche’ (132). Though Roff’s argument primarily refers to Benjamin’s citation relative to Freud’s concep- tion of dream images, she helpfully pinpoints his citation as both allusion and pastiche. Benjamin’s intertextual rhetoric thus mimics the very histor- ical model he postulates, the writing of time as a phenomenal history that has incorporated and integrated its past while yet regarding the integrity of phenomena. Benjamin’s aesthetic style that alludes to and draws from extra- textual sources models a history equally multivalent and comprehensible. Referring primarily to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Margaret Cohen under- stands his aesthetic style and historical philosophy within the language of montage—another means of highlighting his intertextuality and citational- ity. Cohen explains that ‘[f]or Benjamin, montage was not only a style but a philosophy of history: it entailed focusing on the discontinuities separat- ing past and present, and emphasizing a utopian rather than progressive notion of historical transformation, a way to preserve a reservoir of hope in otherwise damaged life’ (200). 11. Woolf’s celebration of the cinema reflects precisely the challenges she poses to readers (and to her own aesthetic) as poetically explained in her essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Woolf writes:
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novel- ist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thou- sand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be bet- ter able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person ...but that we are living in a different world. (260)
I quote this passage at length so as to highlight, as definitive of Woolf’s valu- ing of literature, the temporal and sensual simultaneity that characterizes the cinema. The capacity to render simultaneous and beautiful the complexity and multitude of sensation, however banal, becomes a challenge for writerly 182 Notes
expression as it defines cinematic expression. Her correlation of the literary and cinematic arts through the goal of sensual and temporal coalescence helps to illuminate a temporality for which literature (in Woolf’s estimation) strives and which cinema has as its very foundation. Cinematic time, then, not only defines the art’s particularity but also its sensational achievement of sensual simultaneity. 12. As Paul Virilio explains in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception,while the cinema might resiliently withstand and express historical rupture, such atrocities actually enhanced cinematic representation: World War II surveil- lance technology literally refined cinematic aesthetics, as faster films, lighter cameras and more sensitive microphones aided the art as it facilitated military intelligence.
2 Cinematic Reconciliation of Romantic and Historical Time: Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire
1. When Damiel observes Marion in her trailer, the camera passes over a pho- tograph of a small boy, which Wenders’ DVD commentary reveals to be an image from his own childhood. That Marion’s past includes photographs from Wenders’ past further conflates her character’s meaning-making power with her extradiegetic romance with Wenders himself. 2. For historical analysis of Wings of Desire in relation to storytelling, see Edward Plater, ‘The Storyteller in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire,’ Post Script 12.1: 13–25. For a historical analysis of Wings of Desire in relation to Peter Handke’s scriptwriting credits, see Thomas F. Barry, ‘The Weight of Angels: Peter Handke and Der Himmel über Berlin,’ Modern Austrian Literature 23.3/4 (1990): 53–64. See also Sasha Vojkovic, ‘On the Borders of Redemption: Recovering the Image of the Past,’ Parallax 5.3 (1999): 90–101. 3. See Assenka Oksiloff, ‘Eden is Burning: Wim Wenders’s Techniques of Synaesthesia,’ The German Quarterly 69.1 (Winter 1996): 32–47; Alice Kuzniar, ‘Suture in/Suturing Literature and Film: Handke and Wenders,’ Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein (Columbia, SC: Camden, 1993): 201–217; Christian Rogowski, ‘ “Der liebevolle Blick”? The Problem of Perception in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire,’ seminar 29.4 (November 1993): 398–409. Of these articles, Oksiloff’s provides the most intriguing and comprehensive thesis, claiming that Damiel’s ‘journey ...attempts to leave behind a specular realm in which seeing is the dominant mode and to enter a world determined by the interaction of the senses, above all those of hearing, seeing, and feeling. In investigating the development of this synaesthetic state of perception, [Oksiloff] would like to trace its potential as well as its possible limit as a cinematic project’ (33). 4. See Roger Bromley’s From Alice to Buena Vista: The Films of Wim Wenders (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), for consideration of Wings of Desire in relation to history and Wenders’ oeuvre. In Coco Fusco’s interview with Wenders, ‘Angels, History and Poetic Fantasy,’ Wenders explores the film’s Berlin set- ting and angelic plot in relation to his other films (Cineaste 16.4 (1988): 14–17). Notes 183
5. The first decipherable words that emerge from the muffled and polyphonic whispers within the library sequence are the following: ‘Walter Benjamin kaufte 1921 Paul Klees Aquarell Angelus Novus’ (‘In 1921 Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s watercolor Angelus Novus’). Immediately, the combined reference to Benjamin, Klee and Angelus Novus bring to mind Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in which Benjamin describes the Klee painting as an angel of history. Given Wings of Desire’s angelic characters and historical setting, this Benjaminian citation unsurprisingly spawns schol- arly consideration. See Cesare Casarino, ‘Fragments on Wings of Desire (or fragmentary representation as historical necessity),’ Social Text 8.2 (1990): 167–181. See also Christian Rogowski, ‘ “To Be Continued.” History in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Thomas Brasch’s Domino,’ German Studies Review 15.3 (1992): 547–563; Roger F. Cook, ‘Angels, Fiction, and History in Berlin: Wings of Desire,’ The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, eds. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997): 163–190; Mark Luprecht, ‘Opaque Skies: Wings of Desire—Angelic Text, Context, and Subtext,’ Post Script 17.3: 47–54. 6. Tania Modleski criticizes the film’s ‘desire to have it both ways: while pur- porting to be undertaking the painful work of remembering the horrors of the past, revising concepts of masculinity and femininity, coming to terms with the body and its mortality, and holding out an ideal of freedom and hence of responsibility ...it consoles itself with nostalgia—for simple sto- ries and mother’s womb—and a hackneyed notion of “destiny” embedded in the “happily ever after,” greatest-story-ever-told narrative of a man and a woman’ (Feminism without Women 109). In her ‘Representing Whiteness: Seeing Wings of Desire,’ bell hooks claims that the film ‘attempts to create a space of otherness, where white masculinity can be reconceptualized and white patriarchal imperialist history critiqued ...Wenders’s work represents a trend in white avant-garde aesthetic circles toward re-visioning old narra- tives of opposition. Wings of Desire does not fulfill this promise. It does not tell a new story’ (Yearning 167). 7. See also Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Per- formance. Drawing her title from Bellour’s essay, Wexman analyzes ‘how Hollywood conventions of acting relate to changing styles of courtship and marriage, focusing on the implications of the appearance and behav- ior of these well-known figures as they manifest themselves within specific cinematic texts’ (ix). Wexman’s lucid study employs sociological, anthropo- logical and cultural studies methods as she reads bodily performance relative to romantic cinematic convention. I gloss this text briefly not for any indi- cation of its minor status within film and cultural studies but rather because my own interests in reading the romance within temporal contexts causes me to limit my inquiry accordingly. I cite this text to underscore the degree to which the trope of ‘creating the couple’ literally defines not only these films but also a significant text of scholarship that reads these films. 8. The situation of this monologue within a Hollywood romantic comedy sharpens the political import inherent in Marion’s monologue within Wings of Desire’s historical romance/romantic history. Both Harry and Marion boldly declare their certitude as a completion of their pursuit and a temporal beginning in the ‘new’ of a romantic pairing. Narratively, these monologues 184 Notes
share the same function. Yet stylistically and historically, Marion’s declara- tion to Damiel draws from fascist politics and aesthetics. In the interest of my argument’s clarity, I do not further compare these films (the dramatic difference between Wenders’ and Reiner’s films make for imprecise compar- ison), but I flag this Hollywood example to highlight the explicit historical underpinnings of Marion’s declaration. 9. Far more dramatic than When Harry Met Sally’s, Casablanca’s closure pres- surizes narrative time by restricting our knowledge of Rick’s decision. The successful deployment of Rick’s plan depends upon the temporal alignment of Ilsa and Victor’s (Paul Henreid) departure prior to the Major Strasser’s (Conrad Veidt) arrival. Instead of ‘creating’ a couple, Casablanca ‘maintains’ the couple of Ilsa and Victor; moreover, in the looks exchanged between Rick and Ilsa and also in the Paris montage, Casablanca visually ensures the intensity of their romantic affection. Additionally, Casablanca guarantees the ‘completion’ of the couple (Rick and Ilsa) by letting their separation be under the aegis of noble sacrifice; the physical parting hardly undermines their affection (it seems much the contrary). Collapsing time in the name of the romance (the Paris flashback) ‘creates’ the couple more convincingly than the ending. In this way, we can see another example of temporal machi- nations that accompany the romance’s intensity, thereby stylistically and narratively accentuating an experiential immersion. 10. Between these shots, the camera lingers on an incongruously shadow-casting Cassiel in a long take static shot. Seemingly mourning the loss of his friend, Cassiel walks toward the stage and then pauses against the wall, where his downtrodden expression—at the feet of a ballerina painted on the wall—suggests his grieving Damiel’s ‘passing.’ As Cassiel faces the wall and suddenly presses his hands into the surface (a visible expression of some sort of emotion, whether grief, disappointment, heartbreak and more), the shot cuts into Marion’s entering the bar. 11. As he holds the rope upon which Marion practices her acrobatic routines, Damiel reflects (and we hear, as his aural mental subjectivity):
Something happened. It is still going on. It binds me. It was true at night, and it’s true in the day. Even more so now. Who was who? I was in her and she was around me. Who in the world can claim that he was ever together with another being? I am together. No mortal child was begot, but an immortal, common image. I learned astonishment that night. She came to take me home, and I found home. It happened once. Only once, and therefore forever. The picture that we have created will be with me when I die. I will have lived within it. First the amazement about the two of us. Amazement about man and woman has made a human being out of me. I ...know ...now ...what ...no ...angel ...knows.
These final words comprise a sound bridge to a point-of-view close-up of his writing the words (‘Ich weiss jetzt, Was kein Engel weiss’). At once, these reflec- tions are simultaneous with his holding the rope for Marion and they’re offered retrospectively, through the written word’s matching the sound- track in a compelling assertion of aural/visual fidelity. The degree to which Damiel’s ‘amazement’ mimics Marion’s declarations of the night before Notes 185
attests to the efficacy of her rhetorical and sexual seduction; his words con- vincingly fit within the ‘story’ that she claims they will together create. He reflects as if he were a character who abides his author’s creation of his desire. His words also emphasize the conventional closure of the romantic ‘now’ that implies duration: ‘only once, and therefore forever.’ 12. In Chapter 4, this anticipation of retrospection returns in the form of Barthes’ punctum. 13. White’s critique of narrative ultimately leads him to favor non-narrative forms, or at least non-linear narrative, as appropriate and ethical for post- war aesthetics. In D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Gunning claims that Griffith’s moralizing tactics incarnate an implicit nar- rator; the film is governed by an overarching morality that functions not unlike a literal film narrator. While White asks whether narration might do other than moralize, Gunning claims that moralizing gives rise to narration. 14. Kolker’s and Beicken’s analysis of Wings of Desire has perhaps most urgently pushed the sharpening of my own. I agree with their reading of Marion’s ‘neoconservative tinge’ that ‘discolors the utopian rhetoric, allowing images of Nazi racial superiority to creep in’ (158), and I quote them later in the chapter with regard to the camera’s distance during the conjunction of the couple. Kolker and Beicken, however, think about the tension between the historical and romantic closures in terms of the possibility of a saving irony: ‘the suggestion that movies diminish the realities of romance while, at the same time, speaking to our most profound desires’ (160). They rightly under- stand that this irony falls apart, but they follow this decision against an ironic reading with the following sentence that ostensibly shuts down the film’s romantic strains: ‘The fantasies of romance seem to have closed all outlets to the everyday world suspended between heaven and earth’ (160). In the verb tense (‘seems to have’) alone, their turning from a compelling equation of romantic and historical simultaneity incites my own desire not only to establish this simultaneity but also to cast it within cinematic time. 15. Taylor Downing describes how Huber stood behind a glass screen in the same pose and the outline of the statue was painted in black on the glass. Using a mixture of artificial lighting and daylight, a transition was effected by which the statue appears to come to life and the film moves from the world of the classical imagination to the physical world of the athlete. (52) This transformation, achieved cinematically, from ‘classical imagination’ to the athlete’s ‘physical world’ precisely describes the imbuing of the present with a mythological essence. 16. Though he does not mention the correlation with Olympia, Frederic Spotts describes the best surviving copy of Myron’s Discus Thrower as Hitler’s ‘favorite sculpture’ and ‘one of his most prized possessions’ (20–21). Frederic Spotts’ Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics includes a photograph of Hitler as he shows the sculpture to honored guests at the Munich Glyptotek, July 1938. Having acquired the statue in 1938, Hitler immediately raised it as an aesthetic exemplar that transcended its time and space. He addressed his audience accordingly: ‘May you then realize how glorious man already was back then in his physical beauty ...We can speak of progress only if 186 Notes
we have attained like perfection or if we manage to surpass it’ (21). Hitler’s speech, quoted in Spotts and taken from Max Domarus, ed., Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, vol. 2, 1962. 17. For example, in a sturdy formalist reading of Triumph of the Will,Frank P. Tomasulo describes Triumph’s opening prologue, ‘der Führer comes out of the clouds just as the Book of Revelations predicted that the Second Coming would take place ...Hitler is cast as a veritable German Messiah who will save the nation, if only the citizenry will put its destiny in his hands’ (103–104). Tomasulo’s entire essay convincingly situates the film’s style within the state’s politics. 18. See Joachim Fest, Speer: The Final Verdict. Trans. Ewald Osers and Alexandra Dring (New York: Harcourt, 2001) and Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (New York: Overlook, 2003), for an extensive elaboration of the extent to which Hitler’s politics were immeasurably informed by his own aesthetic inclinations. 19. Pierre Nora finds lieux de mémoire ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’; he claims ‘[t]here are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’ (7). 20. Kreuder’s argument assumes that Damiel decides, once incarnated, to ‘start his life-story with his love,’ when the film very strongly suggests this deci- sion actually to compel his fall. I highlight this discrepancy less to critique Kreuder and more to ensure the plausibility of my analysis of Marion’s love declaration relative to narrative selfhood. 21. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed., trans. and intro. Lewis A. Coser, The Heritage of Sociology, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, fwd. Fredric Jameson, Theory of History and Literature, vol. 10 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985); Gary K. Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2000). 22. To clarify this claim in terms of my earlier example, both Marion’s and Riefenstahl’s projects rely on the present moment to determine time; while Marion dwells within her storyless past and erases history for the ‘now,’ Riefenstahl would seem to posit a history and desire a grounded, mythical past. Yet Riefenstahl, too, erases the past in order to establish a direct corre- lation between ancient civilization and 1936 Berlin. Both exist within a now that so intensely demands legitimization, any past or future exists only in its shadow. 23. See Chapter 4’s analysis of After Life for further development of Kristeva’s ‘women’s time’ in relation to feminist film theory. 24. De Beauvoir’s claim that the woman in love ‘gives up her transcendence, subordinating it to that of the essential other’ can apply to romantic love, regardless of gendered context. As this chapter’s earlier example suggests, Harry puts his fate in Sally’s hands. Yet de Beauvoir rightly emphasizes that the submission that defines any kind of ravished or shattered subject-in- love takes on greater weight in relation to the historical fact of women’s alterity. 25. In Chapter 3’s analysis of Jacquot, I consider the close-up’s relation to amorous perception at greater length. Notes 187
26. This contrast becomes all the more ironic, in that Dommartin died of a heart attack at age 45 (16 May 1961–11 January 2007), while Bois lived to be 90 years old (5 April 1901–25 December 1991). 27. Exemplifying readings of the sincerity of this sequence, Roger F. Cook celebrates the film’s conclusion for its romantic sincerity: The evolving narrative reflects itself as cinematic love story at every step, without becoming self-parody, even when the climactic scene—from the lavishly decorated barroom, including a bucket of champagne on the bar, to Marion’s passionately red dress and matching lipstick—says to the spectator at every turn, ‘This is a romantic scene in a movie.’ Thus the film both draws attention to the way desire is generated in cinema and also induces the spectator to take the investment of desire seriously. (177) Although he at least acknowledges the scene’s self-reflexivity, he ultimately reads such awareness as contributing to its serious ‘investment of desire.’ 28. As the single space where mere humans (who aren’t actors/crew) can- not go but angels can, the movie set becomes the setting within which Damiel’s becoming human reveals its spatial limits. In choosing the ‘now,’ Damiel loses his access to the scene of explicit production of spectacle. The mechanisms of the invisible apparatus must remain hidden so as to sus- tain the illusion. Wings of Desire maintains cinema’s sanctity in reducing our/Damiel’s access to cinema’s demythologizing site of production in pro- portion to our humanness. Within historical time, we cannot see historical time, even its aesthetic generation. The spectacle remains a spectacle for its concealed origin.
3 Mortality and Cinephilia in the Cinematic Elegy: Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes
1. For a substantial interview in which Varda discusses Jacquot, see Jean Deacock and Agnès Varda, ‘Entretien avec Agnès Varda sur Jacquot de Nantes,’ The French Review 66.6 (May 1993): 947–958. For an elegant prose piece, in which Varda reflects upon Demy’s death and the production of Jacquot,seeVarda, ‘Jacques Demy ou le Monde en Manège/Vers le visage de Jacques,’ Cahiers du Cinema 438 (December 1990): 30–33. 2. Uniquely, Wings of Desire and Jacquot share the cinematography of Agnès Godard, who worked as a cameraperson under the direction of Wings of Desire’s cinematographer Henri Alekan and debuted as a director of photog- raphy in Jacquot. Godard also was director of photography for, most notably, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999). Consistent with Jacquot’s film style, Godard claims that she likes ‘filming the body, the skin, you feel like you’re in con- tact with something secret. How does the light fall on people, how does it fall on the skin? It’s tactile’ (202, quoted in ‘The New Female Chef-Op:Agnès Godard,’ an entry by Alison Smith in The French Cinema Book; Smith quotes Godard’s 2000 interview in Positif ). 3. In this chapter, I cannot begin to address fully the significance of the soundtrack to Jacquot, but I want to emphasize Varda’s reliance, here and throughout the film, on the soundtrack to vivify her images. In La Jetée, 188 Notes
the soundtrack gives life to the otherwise frozen images, connecting them in time and space, and such a bestowal of life, a production of movement, might similarly inform Jacquot. Possibly an antidote to the irreparable death inflicted by photographic apparatuses (such as that believed by Benjamin), sound offers an underlying rhythm, motion and life that counters the two-dimensionality of the image. In Composing for the Films, Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno look to for- mal components other than the visual to compensate for the loss that occurs with reproduction. They concede that film sound—particularly music—gives back to the ‘dead’ photographic images some of the life inevitably lost in the alienating process of mechanical reproduction. They write,
Music was introduced [to the film] as a kind of antidote against the pic- ture. The need was felt to spare the spectator the unpleasantness involved in seeing living effigies of living, acting, and even speaking persons, who were at the same time silent. The fact that they are living and not living at the same time is what constitutes their ghostly character, and music was introduced not to supply them with the life they lacked, but to exorcise fear or help the spectator absorb the shock. (75)
Describing a realm quite akin to Freud’s uncanny, Eisler and Adorno posit music as a spectatorial aid, consoling the shocked audience member who cannot come to terms with the haunted image. They proceed to claim that the purpose of music is ‘to justify movement’; to the petrified images ‘man- ifesting a kind of life of its own,’ music ‘intervenes, supplying momentum, muscular energy, a sense of corporeity [sic] as it were. Its aesthetic effect is that of a stimulus of motion, not a reduplication of motion’ (78). Jacquot’s saturation with music—be it classical or pop, performed or broadcast—undoubtedly informs much of its duration. Particularly the film’s final sequence, in which Varda soothes her dying husband with her solo song, might seem to support this claim. The graceful cadences of her voice; its soft, gentle timbre; the turn to art (poetry and music, not dialogue) as an aural support for the image of her dying husband: all of these qualities would bestow these particular scenes with motion (e.g. the rise and fall of vocal pitch, the foot and meter of poetry, the linkage of musical notes). The film begins and ends with imagistic focus on Demy, with Varda present as voiceover. 4. In The Seducer’s Diary, Johannes reflects: ‘The moment is so very significant here because being-for-other is always a matter of the moment. A longer or shorter time may pass before the moment arrives, but as soon as it has arrived, then that which was being-for-other assumes a relative being, and with that everything is finished ...To have an understanding of the moment is not an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand’ (182). 5. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), for example, a triangulated love intensifies through the characters’ impassioned exchange of cinephilic moments; desire and affection grow in proportion to identifying cine- matic references, and the audience becomes similarly welcome or alienated Notes 189
from the diegesis, depending on the familiarity of such allusions. Impas- sioned cinephilic knowledge intensifies diegetic character intimacy as well as spectatorial investment. 6. In her Narrative Mortality, Catherine Russell offers an exemplary analysis of Lightning Over Water, to which my own analysis of Jacquot is indebted. Defin- ing her titular term, Russell writes that ‘[n]arrative mortality is a method of understanding the function of narrative endings in the politics of repre- sentation, a means of moving beyond formalist categories of “open” and “closed” endings, as well as mythic categories of fate and romance’ (2). To Russell’s analysis of cinematic death, this chapter factors love in the form of cinephilia. 7. Varda has, to date, made three films in this elegiac series: Jacquot de Nantes (1991), The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993)—a retrospective documentary film that celebrates the 25th anniversary of Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and The World of Jacques Demy (1995). 8. In The Gleaners and I, Varda turns the gaze with which she highlights Demy’s mortality onto herself through, as Virginia Bonner describes, the ‘highly abstracted close-ups of the roots of [Varda’s] greying hair, cabbages after the harvest, mangled cars after they’ve been crushed, a lucite clock missing its hands.’ As Bonner points out, ‘[t]he film’s voice-over and cutting always relate these moments back to Varda’s self-portrait of her own aging pro- cess ...Her close framings in loving detail almost fetishize these harbingers of death and, in an adept feminist move, revalue the physical signs of age that society chooses to malign.’ 9. Thanks to Dorian Stuber for this valuable article.
4 Learning to Love What Passes: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life
1. The Japanese title of this film, Wandâfuru raifu, literally translates as Wonder- ful Life. 2. Here and elsewhere, when addressing the inextricability of cinema from human experience of time, I hardly mean to suggest that, prior to cinema, such a vitality was unknowable. The same argument for cinema might be revised in terms of literature, painting, language and more. But I do mean to suggest, as is the point of this book, that cinematic time and expres- sion transform prior conceptions of temporality, intimacy, communication, sensation, all of which can be rethought within the specific intimacies, dis- tances and temporal manipulations that cinema enables. As over a century of film spectatorship, theory and criticism illustrates, new apprehensions and concerns regarding our temporal and intimate relation to the world and humanity have evolved; to these apprehensions and concerns, I direct my attention. The conclusion of Love in the Time of Cinema addresses this attention more precisely. 3. For more on this connection, see Miriam Hansen’s excellent essay ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,’ Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Con- temporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 41–73. 190 Notes
4. See Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990). Thanks to Amelie Hastie for bringing this comparison to my attention. 5. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Intro. Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 53. Also see the section in Chapter 3 that traces Varda’s XCU attention to Demy’s dying body. 6. Wings of Desire, as Chapter 2 outlines, relies on this overdetermined con- flation of female spectacle, melodramatic cliché and cinematic convention as a means to critique its fascist political history and heteronormative film history. 7. The almost-anagrammatic similarity between Mochizuki and Mizoguchi fur- ther attests to Kore-eda’s further indebtedness to Japanese film history; in the case of Shiori, the ‘priestess’ archetype veritably enables the transcendence of the very character whose name clearly resembles the director renown for creating such a priestess archetype! Kore-eda’s primary character stands in for the classic Japanese director, whose eternal life is enabled by this young new way of seeing (both Shiori’s and Kore-eda’s). 8. In an inverse but equally gendered trajectory, Marion enables Damiel’s worldly salvation; she incites his movement from eternity to temporality, and justifies this turn through her passionate attention, as Chapter 2 explains. 9. Focusing more on the narrative and less on the scopic regime, Kore-eda overtly defines his sense of Shiori’s progress: ‘Like Mochizuki, Shiori finds her place as part of someone else’s memory and happiness ...It is her start- ing point to lead her own life at the institution. In that sense, After Life ends in the future tense. But for Shiori to gain her awareness, she has to lose Mochizuki. Awareness of her place comes from a shared memory, and her experience of loss. So I don’t consider the end as either pessimistic or opti- mistic, but as the start of her growth. Growth means a series of losses and gains’ (Paletz 55). 10. In an interview published in Film Journal, Kore-eda actually claims that this actor was the only one he had in mind while working on the script, a coin- cidence that at least underscores the particularity of this character’s look,his facial features and specific gaze, to the film (Eagan).
5 Making Art of What Endures: Doris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms and Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours
1. See Chapter 3 for elaboration, through Freud and Bronfen, on the fantasy that seeing or reading about a death reinforces the fact that we’re alive to perceive this aesthetic death. 2. The German title of the English-translated Cherry Blossoms is Kirschblüten— Hanami, which includes the Japanese ‘hanami’ (‘flower viewing’) that also more customarily refers to the ritual of enjoying cherry blossoms each spring. In short, the German title means literally ‘to watch the cherry blossoms,’ an action in lieu of the English title’s noun Cherry Blossoms. 3. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, a comparison between Up’s digital animated, computer-generated images and Cherry Blossoms’ digital Notes 191
video (often handheld) would further complicate this argument about ephemerality and long-term love. 4. As examples of this trend, J. Hoberman writes the following of Summer Hours: ‘Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent’s death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It’s also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value—as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.’ Andrew Schenker calls Cherry Blossoms a ‘self-conscious aping of Tokyo Story ...Dörrie attempts to incorporate Ozu’s famed pillow shots into her visual scheme, inserting a series of fixed images of unpeopled settings between scenes as a counterpoint to the action.’ 5. See Chapter 1 for more on Ricoeur’s formulation. Thanks to Patrick Keating for his supportive feedback on my paper presentation at the 2009 World Picture Conference. 6. For more on murder and style in Renoir’s Rules of the Game and other films, see Karla Oeler’s excellent A Grammar of Murder (U of Chicago P, 2009). 7. In Death 24x a Second, Mulvey writes the following: ‘At the end of the twen- tieth century new technologies opened up new perceptual possibilities, new ways of looking, not at the world, but at the internal world of cinema. The century had accumulated a recorded film world, like a parallel universe, that can now be halted or slowed or fragmented’ (181). 8. As developed in Chapter 4, Benjamin’s description of the aura of natural objects takes on landscape contours. Rudi’s performance would seem to embody the masses’ desire to ‘bring things “closer” spatially and humanly,’ as it represents the culminating gesture to Trudi’s own collection of repro- duced images of Mt Fuji. Thanks to Rosalind Galt for helpful comments on my presentation at the 2009 World Picture Conference. 9. In 2006, the Musée d’Orsay commissioned four films to celebrate the museum’s 20th anniversary, with the understanding that these films would somewhere feature the museum within the setting or plot. Summer Hours is the second in this series, with the first being Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007). Future films will be directed by Jim Jarmusch and Raoul Ruiz. 10. A comparable closing sequence in Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009) features Alice de Lencquesaing as Clémence Canvel, her face figu- ratively melting with tears running down her cheeks, as she rides in the car while her family drives away from Paris. Scored to ‘Que Sera Sera,’ this ending—outside of the plot—projects these questions of ‘whatever will be’ onto this sensitive young female actress. Bibliography
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Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ represent note numbers.
400 Blows, The, 84, 163, 167 Beaches of Agnès, The, see Varda, Agnès beauty Abe, Hiroshi, 129 and ephemera. 9, 143–4, 164, 180n3 Adorno, Theodor, 188n3 and fascism, 51–3, 185n16 After Life, see Kore-eda, Hirokazu and female film stars, 62–4, 166–7 Agacinski, Sylviane, 4, 72, 81, 89, and photogénie, 115 118–20, 154, 178 and Woolf, 31–2 Alekan, Henri, 63, 187n2 Beicken, Peter, 51, 58, 185n14 Allen, Woody, 176 Bellour, Raymond, 38, 173, 183n7 Amélie,40 benevolent gaze or look, 1–2, Andersson, Harriet, 174 136, 138 Andrew, Dudley, 5 and After Life, 103–4, 120, 125–8 Annie Hall, 176 and Agacinski, Sylviane, 118–19 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 174 and Epstein, Jean, 116 Arata, 116 and Jacquot de Nantes,76 Assayas, Olivier, 138–140, 154, 157, and Silverlake Life,87 158, 164, 168 and Summer Hours, 158 Summer Hours, 6–8, 104, 136, 137–9, Benjamin, Walter, 16, 19, 52, 64, 152–169, 171, 175, 178 189n3 Au Hasard Balthazar, 177 Arcades Project, 181n10 aura, see Benjamin, Walter aura, 16, 114, 120, 150, 154, 191n8 Away from Her, 175 ‘A Berlin Chronicle,’ 55–7 ‘The Image of Proust,’ 151–2 Bach, 78 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ Balázs, Béla, 61–3, 81 113–14, 120, 153, 179n1 Barker, Jennifer, 177 ‘The Storyteller,’ 84, 182n2 Barthes, Roland ‘Theses on the Philosophy of Camera Lucida 11–13, 15–16, 17–18, History,’ 30, 37, 183n5 75, 80, 119, 157, 173–4 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of ‘The Face of Garbo,’ 62–3, 69, 81 Mechanical Reproduction,’ 114, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater,’ 74, 120, 150, 157 119, 173–4 Bergman, Ingmar Pleasure of the Text, The,9–10 Cries & Whispers, 174 punctum, 12, 15, 121, 185n12 Seventh Seal,22 ‘The Third Meaning,’ 12 Bergman, Ingrid, 177 Baudelaire, Charles, 77 Berlin see also Benjamin, Walter, ‘On Some in Cherry Blossoms, 141, 145 Motifs in Baudelaire’ in Wings of Desire, 36–7, 41–2, 49, Bazin, André, 34–5, 68, 75, 93, 130, 51, 54–58, 71, 182n4, 147, 154 186n22
201 202 Index
Berlin: Symphony of a Great cinephilia City,41 and Beaches of Agnès, The, 95–6, 102 Berling, Charles, 153 and detail, 4 Berling, Emile, 159 and film reviews, 72, 106 Bicycle Thieves, 167 and history, 5 Bloom, Harold, 38 and cinema’s future, 171, 174 Blue Valentine, 176 and mortality, 7, 75, 84–91, 93 Bois, Curt, 41 and revelatory moments, 2–3, 85 Bonnaud, Frédéric, 154, 158 close-up, 61–2, 81–3, 171, 175 Bonner, Virginia, 189n8 and Cherry Blossoms, 142, 145, 146, Bordwell, David, 38, 111 168 Braudel, Fernand, 48 and Kore-eda, 117–18, 120–1, 128, Breathless, 17–18 130, 132–3, 143 Breillat, Catherine, 177 in Summer Hours, 156, 169 Bresson, Robert, 177 and Varda, 77–8, 80–4, 98, 100–1, Bridget Jones’ Diary,40 189n8 Bringing Up Baby, 170, 177 in Wings of Desire, 43–5, 48, 61, 68–9 Bromley, Roger, 58, 182n4 closure Brooks, Peter, 47 and Casablanca, 184n9 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 74, 190n1 and Cries & Whispers 174–5 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 21 and death, 84, 88, 149, 189n6 Burch, Noël, 111–12 and Father of My Children, 191n10 and happy endings, 38, 68, 128 Butoh dancing (in Cherry Blossoms), and Jacquot de Nantes, 78–80, 83, 136–7, 148–51 101, 142 butterfly (in Still Walking), 129–36 and Summer Hours 159–68 and Sunrise,23 camera movement, 44, 70, 114, 122, in texts, 4, 18, 173 131, 152, 154, 166, 171, 175 and When Harry Met Sally,39 handheld, 72, 83, 100, 108–9, 130, and Wings of Desire, 50, 185n14 131, 133, 159, 191n3 Cohen, Margaret, 181n10 panning, 77–8, 83, 163 Cook, Roger F., 183n5, 187n27 tracking, 42, 61, 156–8, 167 Covert, Colin, 107 Canby, Vincent, 83 Cries & Whispers, 174–5 Casablanca, 39–40, 68, 178, 184n9 Crystal, Billy, 38 Castelnuovo, Nino, 95 Cuarón, Alfonso, 175 Cave, Nick, 42–3, 58 Cukor, George, 40 Cavell, Stanley, 3, 40, 170 Curtiz, Michael, 39 Chaplin, Ben, 25 Charney, Leo, 107, 179n4 Dargis, Manohla, 143 cherry blossoms De Beauvoir, Simone in Cherry Blossoms, 140–3, 146–7 and Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, 73–4 as ephemera, 137, 146, 147 and The Second Sex, 11, 59–60, 124, in Still Walking, 143 186n24 Cherry Blossoms (film), see Dörrie, De Lencquesaing, Alice, 159, 166–9, Doris 191n10 Children of Men, 175 De Rougemont, Denis, 20 Christmas Tale, A, 176 Deleuze, Gilles, 81–2, 109, 126 Cinema Paradiso,66 Delluc, Louis, 9, 180n3 Index 203
Demy, Jacques Ebert, Roger, 106–7, 121 Donkey Skin,98 Eisler, Hanns, 188n3 Pied Piper,86 elegy, 73–5, 83–4, 86–7, 91–2, 94–5, 97 Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The, 77–8, Eliot, T.S, 10, 13, 26, 103, 122 86, 90, 94–5 Elsner, Hannelore, 139 see also Varda, Agnès, Jacquot de Endell, August, 54–5 Nantes ephemera Denby, David, 144 and beauty, 9 Deneuve, Catherine, 95 and cinema, 11, 24, 111, 126, Denis, Claire, 187n2 137–8, 140, 143, 146–8, 153, Derrida (film), 77 155 Desser, David, 111–13, 115, 120, and lifespan, 136, 137–8, 146, 152, 125 155 Doane, Mary Ann and love, 24, 28, 35 and cinematic time, 11, 35, 65, 69, and mono no aware, 113, 120 74, 111, 123–5, 147 and spectatorial control, 172–3 and cinephilia, 4, 85 Epstein, Jean, 4 and the close-up, 81, 83 and the close-up, 81 and photogénie, 6, 107, 115–16, 138 and Eadweard Muybridge eros, 174, 180n7 Zoopraxographer, 66–7 Esumi, Makiko, 122 documentary film, 42, 52, 55, 70–1, eternity 74, 81, 85, 89, 155 and After Life, 103–4, 107, 113, 125 Dommartin, Solveig, 36, 63, 73, and Bazin, 34–5 187n26 ‘From Her to Eternity,’ 42–3 Donkey Skin,98 and love, 14, 60 Dörrie, Doris, 6, 138–40, 144, 146–7, and Potsdamer Platz, 54–5 176, 191n4 and Wings of Desire, 46, 104, 171, Cherry Blossoms, 6–7, 70, 104, 136, 190n8 137–55, 168–9, 171, 176, 178, 191n4 Falk, Peter, 42, 54 Nobody Loves Me, 176 family Downing, Taylor, 185n15 and Jacquot de Nantes, 97, 100 Dreamers, The, 188n5 and photography, 81, 93 duration and Sherlock, Jr.,19 and Bazin’s ‘change mummified,’ and Still Walking, 129–36 34–5, 75, 93 and Summer Hours, 139, 155, 157–8, and beauty, 180n3 159, 167–8, 175 as definitive of cinema, 75, 124–5 and Tokyo Story, 149 and lifespan, 75, 80, 84, 87, 148, fantasy, 171, 178 169 and After Life, 103, 104, 123, 125 and memory, 125–6 and Barthes, 13, 156–7, 173 and the moment, 6, 11, 24, 48–9, and Cherry Blossoms, 138, 151–2 103 and Jacquot de Nantes, 76, 80, 83, 88, and narrative, 38 91, 102, 151, 170 and scale, 83, 138 and Summer Hours, 152, 155–7, 158, screen duration, 76, 80, 84, 113, 168 145, 148 and Wings of Desire, 46, 57 shot duration, 39, 87 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 175 204 Index
Father of My Children, 191n10 Heidegger, Martin, 22 Faulkner, William, 180n5 Hepburn, Audrey, 62 Fest, Joachim, 186n18 Hepburn, Katharine, 40 film-souvenir, 89–90 Hiroshima, mon amour, 34, 78, 84, 172 Fischer, Lucy, 175 Hitchcock, Alfred, 177 Flight of the Red Balloon, 191n9 Hitler, Adolph, 52–3, 185n16, 186n17, Freud, Sigmund, 74, 181n10, 188n3 186n18 Frey, Matthias, 144 Hoberman, J., 72, 165, 191n4 Friedman, Peter, 87 home movies, 40, 89, 90, 97 Frye, Northrup, 64–5 Homer and The Odyssey, 58–60 Ganz, Bruno, 41 and Wings of Desire, 36, 37, 41–2, Garbo, Greta, see Barthes, Roland, ‘The 50, 54–9, 63, 69, 71, 123, 159 Face of Garbo’ hooks, bell, 64, 183n6 Garland, Judy, 166 Hotel Esplanade, 42, 57–8, Gaynor, Janet, 23 62–3, 68 Gautier, Eric, 153 Hsiao-Hsien, Hou, 191n9 Geist, Kathe, 109 Huyssen, Andreas, 48, 55, 70 Gilbert, Sandra, 74–5 Gleaners and I, The, 101, 189n8 I Am Love, 175 Godard, Agnès, 187n2 I’m With Lucy, 40–1 Godard, Jean-Luc, 17–18, 88 identification (with) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and Barthes, 16–17 16–18, 32 and the cinematic kiss, 68 Gornick, Vivian, 50, 70 and cinephilia, 85, 91 Graf, Alexander, 50 and film style, 121, 148 Grant, Cary, 40, 177 and time, 118–19 grief, 7, 80 ikebana (flower arrangement), 109 and Breathless,18 Ikiru, 140 and Camera Lucida, 12, 81 impermanence, 144–7 and Dörrie, 138–40, 144, 146 see also ephemera and elegiac form, 74 intimacy and Kore-eda, 122, 131–6 and aesthetics, 15, 16 and Silverlake Life,87 and cinema, 18, 20, 32–3, 75 and Summer Hours, 156–7 and cinephilia, 85–6 and Varda, 92–5, 98, 101 and distance, 43 Guadagnino, Luca, 175 and Kierkegaard, 67–8, 85 Gunning, Tom, 33, 185n13 and photogenic love, 116 and Ricoeur, 22–3, 38, 139 Halbwachs, Maurice, 58 and spectatorship, 61, 66–8, 84, 87, Handke, Peter, 182n2, 182n3 94, 114, 120, 171, 189n5 hands and Sunrise, 23–4 and Kore-eda, 117–18, 120–2, 128, Ishido, Natsuo, 117 130, 143 and Varda, 95, 99, 100 James, Henry, 49 Hansen, Miriam, 4, 15, 189n3 Jarmusch, Jim, 191n9 Hansen-Løve, Mia, 191n10 ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’ 78, 80, Harada, Yoshio, 129 84, 97, 101, 114 Hawks, Howard, 170 Jetée, La, 75–6, 84, 187n3 Index 205
JLG/JLG—Autoportrait de Décembre,88 Lightning Over Water, 86–8 Joslin,Tom,87 Lippit, Akira, 110 long take, 178 kabuki, 108 in After Life, 107–8, 112–13, 115, Kant, Immanuel, 180n3 120, 125–7, 130–3 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 40 in Cherry Blossoms, 142, 149 Kauffmann, Stanley, 106, 153, 158, and point-of-view shots, 25, 84, 87, 165 100, 120, 126–7, 142 Keathley, Christian, 5 in Summer Hours, 159–60, 162, Keaton, Buster, 18–20 167–9 Kierkegaard, Soren, 67–8, 85, 188n4 in Wings of Desire, 43–4, 68, 184n10 Kiki, Kirin, 129 Lukács, Georg, 48 Klee, Paul, 183n5 Lyotard, Jean-François, 186n21 Kolker, Robert, 50–1, 58, 185n14 Kore-eda, Hirokazu, 120, 122–3, Maborosi, see Kore-eda, Hirokazu 135–6, 190n9, 190n10 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 46, 49, 60, 70 After Life, 6–7, 70, 102, Maguire, Sharon, 40 103–129,131–136, 143, 167, Malick, Terrence, 25–8, 170, 176 171, 178 Marker, Chris, 75 and Japanese film history, 103, Marks, Laura, 177 105–6, 109, 113, 126 Marlene,88 Maborosi, 105–6, 109–10, 121–3 Márquez, Gabriel García, 28 Nobody Knows, 106 Marriage of Maria Braun, 175 Still Walking, 104, 106, 128–136, Martin, Adrian, 170, 173–4 137, 139–40, 143 Massi, Mark, 87 Kracauer, Siegfried, 4, 14–15, 33–4, 52, Mayne, Judith, 117 83, 117–18, 177, 190n5 McMahon, Laura, 177 Kreuder, Friedemann, 54, 57–8, medium shot, 18, 78, 96, 141, 156, 186n20 159, 160, 162 Kristeva, Julia medium long shot, 43, 130 Black Sun, 34, 53 melancholia, 49, 72–3, 81, 99, 162, Tales of Love, 21–3 169, 177 “Women’s Time,” 59, 123–5 memory, 7 Kurosawa, Akira, 106, 108, 140, 146–7 and Benjamin, 55–6, 114–15 as creation, 76, 80, 96, 102, 105–6, landscape 110–11, 117–18, 121, 127 in After Life, 103, 109, 126 and elegiac form, 74–5 in Beaches of Agnès, The, 95, 100 and history, 28, 37, 48, 55–6, 58, 90, Berlin, 54–6 186n19 in Cherry Blossoms, 137, 140–1, 144, and love, 15, 28, 49 145, 148–51, 191n8 and photography, 15, 121, 179n2 in Summer Hours, 159, 162–4, 166–9 and spectatorship, 72, 81, 84, 85–6, Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 167 89, 91, 95, 97–9, 101, 126–7, Legrand, Michel, 94 133–5 light Metz, Christian, 5, 147, 170–1 in Cherry Blossoms, 141, 146 Meunier, Jean-Pierre, 89–90 and Kore-eda, 107–11, 143 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 4 in Summer Hours, 152–4, 162, 168 Mitsuda, Kristi, 143 in Wings of Desire, 44, 63 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 105–6, 108–9, 125 206 Index
Modleski, Tania, 59, 64, 183n6 New World, The, 170 mono no aware, 113, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15–16, 28–31, 35, montage 59, 69–70, 73 in Amélie,40 Night and Fog,54 in Casablanca,40 Nobody Knows, 106 in Cinema Paradiso,66 Nochimson, Martha, 3 in Jacquot de Nantes, 78, 84, 95, 101 Noiret, Philippe, 66, 98 and love, 25–8, 40, 43, 178 Nora, Pierre, 186n19 in Thin Red Line, The 26 nostalgia in When Harry Met Sally,43 and anticipation, 74, 117, 164 in Tokyo Story, 149–50 and cinephilia, 83, 89–90, 95, 106 mortality for early cinema, 62–3, 65, 81 and the close-up, 77–84, 145 for place, 55–6 and photography, 13 and romance, 25, 29, 37 and spectatorship, 73–4, 84–91, Notorious, 177 148 as temporality, 22, 49, 70, 72–3, O’Brien, George, 23 121, 125, 144, 175, 178 Oda, Erika, 110, 128 see also closure Oeler, Karla, 191n6 mourning, see grief Oksiloff, Assenka, 182n3 Mt Fuji, 136–7, 140–1, 144, 146–7, Olympia, 51–3, 185n16 150–1, 191n8 Orlando, 175 Müller, Ray, 52 Otto, Miranda, 25 Mulvey, Laura, 123–4, 147–8, 166, Ozu, Yasujiro, 105–6, 109, 111–13, 172–4, 191n7 120, 126, 140, 143, 191n4 Murdoch, Iris, 49–50 Murnau, F.W., 23–4, 42 Paletz, Gabriel, 190n9 Musée d’Orsay, 153, 155, 159, 191n9 patrimony, 8, 153, 155, 157–8 music Pausch, Randy, 96 in Cherry Blossoms, 150 pensive spectator, 172–3 in Cinema Paradiso,66 permanence, see impermanence and in Summer Hours, 160, 163, 166, ephemera 168–9, 188n3 Perrin, Jacques, 66 in Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The,94 photogenic love, 6, 115–16, 121, 128 in Wings of Desire,43 photogénie, see Epstein, Jean and Varda, 78, 80, 84, 93–5, 101 Pied Piper,86 pillow shots, 112, 120, 140, 143, 149, Naitô, Takashi, 110 169, 191n4 Naitô, Taketoshi, 116 point-of-view Nakabori, Masao, 106 and After Life, 117–18, 120–1, 123, Nancy, Jean-Luc, 24–5, 27, 180n7 126–7 Naruse, Mikio, 105, 109 and Jacquot de Nantes, 74, 84, 96, Natsukawa, Yui, 129 101 nature (natural world) and Still Walking, 130–1, 135 and After Life, 103, 113, 120, 126 and Summer Hours, 156, 168 and Cherry Blossoms, 141, 148–50 and Wings of Desire, 42–4, 184n11 and Summer Hours, 167 Potsdamer Platz, 42, 54–5, 57 and Sunrise,24 Potter, Monica, 40 and Thin Red Line, The, 24–6 Potter, Sally, 175 Index 207 prescience, 47, 115–21, 122–3, 131, Silverlake Life: The View from Here, 141, 143 87–88 Proust, Marcel, 14–15, 18, 34, 151 Silverman, Kaja, 4 punctum, see Barthes, Roland slow motion, 25, 83, 175 Smith, Alison, 72, 90–1, 187n2 Quinlivan, Davina, 177 Sobchack, Vivian, 75–6, 89–91, 179n4 Sontag, Susan, 171 Rampley, Matthew, 30–1 Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 16–18, Ray, Nicholas, 86–7, 88 32 Reichardt, Kelly, 176–7 Speer, Albert, 52, 57–8 Reiner,Rob,38 Staiola, Enzo, 167 Renoir, Jean Stewart, James, 40 Rules of the Game, The, 145 Stewart, Susan, 89 and Summer Hours, 158–9 Still Walking, see Kore-eda, Hirokazu Resnais, Alain, 34, 54, 78 Summer Hours, see Assayas, Olivier Rich, B. Ruby, 106 Sunrise, 23–4 Richie, Donald, 108–9 Swinton, Tilda, 175 Ricoeur, Paul, 22–3, 38, 48, 139, 143 Riefenstahl, Leni, 51–3, 186n22 Tadao, Sato, 113 Riva, Emmanuelle, 172 Tautou, Audrey, 40 Rodowick, D.N., 147 Thin Red Line, The, 25–8, 176 Roff, Sarah Ley, 181n10 Thomas,Henry,40 Romance (film), 177 Thomas, Kevin, 106, 144 Romeo & Juliet,38 Tokyo Story, 140, 149–50, 176, 191n4 Royal Tenenbaums, The, 176 Tomasulo, Frank P., 186n17 Ruiz, Raoul, 191 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 66 Rules of the Game, The, 145 Triumph of the Will, 52–3 Rushmore, 175 Truffaut, François, 84, 163, 174 Russell, Catherine, 122, 189n6 Ryan, Meg, 38 Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The, see Demy, Jacques Sander, Otto, 41 Up (film), 139–40 Sander, August, 42 Sarris, Andrew, 150 Valery, Paul, 9 Schenker, Andrew, 144, 191n4 Varda, Agnès Scob, Edith, 152–3, 166 Beaches of Agnès, The, 70, 73, 88, Scott, A.O., 144, 153–4, 158 95–102, 104, 114, 151, 178 Seasons, 7–8, 111–15, 120, 126 Cléo from 5 to 7, 176 Seberg, Jean, 18 Créatures, Les, 102 Seel, Martin, 180n3 Gleaners and I, The, 101, 189n8 Seventh Seal, The,22 Jacquot de Nantes, 6–7, 70–1, 72–102, Sherlock, Jr., 18–20 104, 114, 118, 142, 145, 151, Sherman, Jon, 40 171, 178 Shigehiko, Hasumi, 113 Pointe Courte, La,98 Shock, see Benjamin, Walter, ‘On World of Jacques Demy, The, 92–5, Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ 101 Shot-reverse shot, 18, 41, 127, 130, Young Girls Turn 25, 189n7 143, 156, 177 Virilio, Paul, 182n12 208 Index voiceover Williams, Linda, 38 in Cherry Blossoms, 140 Williams, Michelle, 177 in Still Walking, 134–5 Wings of Desire, see Wenders, Wim by Varda, 78, 83, 94, 96, 98–101 Wings of the Dove, The,49 in Wings of Desire, 43, 49 Winterson, Jeanette, 37 in World of Jacques Demy, The, 92–3 Wisniewski, Chris, 165 Wizard of Oz, 166 Wellbery, David, 16–18, 32, 180n7 women Wenders, Wim and love and time, 59–60, 123–5 Lightning Over Water, 86–8 and film spectacle, 62, 66, 68, 122, Wings of Desire, 6–7, 36–71, 73, 81, 124, 125, 128, 166–7 102, 104, 123, 159, 171, 175, Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni 177–8 Riefenstahl, The,52 Wepper, Elmar, 139 Wood, Michael, 101–2 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 3, 183n7 Woolf, Virginia, 31–2, 175, 181n11 When Harry Met Sally, 38–9, 43, 47, 178 Y tu mama tambien, 175 White, Hayden, 50, 51, 70 Yi-Yi, 134 Widow Jones, The, 66–7 Wilbur, Richard, 1–3, 9, 11, 24 Zacharek, Stephanie, 153–4, 158 Willemen, Paul, 2–3, 85, 91 Zizek, Slavoj, 77