Introduction 1 Love in the Time of Cinema

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 memory, 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 contemplation 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 passing 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 intertextuality:‘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 conception of dream images, she helpfully pinpoints his citation as both allusion and pastiche. Benjamin’s intertextual rhetoric thus mimics the very historical 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 novelist 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.

Load more