El Cid and the Circumfixion of Cinematic History: Stereotypology/ Phantomimesis/ Cryptomorphoses

9780230601253ts04.qxd 03/11/2010 08:03 AM Page 75 Chapter 2 The Passion of El Cid and the Circumfixion of Cinematic History: Stereotypology/ Phantomimesis/ Cryptomorphoses I started with the final scene. This lifeless knight who is strapped into the saddle of his horse ...it’s an inspirational scene. The film flowed from this source. —Anthony Mann, “Conversation with Anthony Man,” Framework 15/16/27 (Summer 1981), 191 In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. —Karl Marx, Capital, 165 It is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction, in which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon allegorical contempla- tion, rather than its ideal quality. The bleak confusion of Golgotha, which can be recognized as the schema underlying the engravings and descriptions of the [Baroque] period, is not just a symbol of the desolation of human existence. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented, so much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection. —Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 232 The allegorical form appears purely mechanical, an abstraction whose original meaning is even more devoid of substance than its “phantom proxy” the allegorical representative; it is an immaterial shape that represents a sheer phantom devoid of shape and substance. —Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 191–92 Destiny Rides Again The medieval film epic El Cid is widely regarded as a liberal film about the Cold War, in favor of détente, and in support of civil rights and racial 9780230601253ts04.qxd 03/11/2010 08:03 AM Page 76 76 Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media equality in the United States.2 This reading of the film depends on binary oppositions between good and bad Arabs, and good and bad kings, with El Cid as a bourgeois male subject who puts common good above duty. El Cid presents a critique of totalitarianism in favor of liberal democracy. There is, to be sure, a lot of extraformal evidence for this reading of Mann as a liberal filmmaker. He is credited with rehabilitating Indians in his Westerns as early as Devil’s Doorway (1950). Mann also cast Ricardo Montalban as the lead in his film noir Border Incident (1949). Furthermore, Mann used an uncredited blacklisted writer on El Cid, Ben Barzman, whom Mann credited on his next film, The Fall of the Roman Empire.3 In the shot of the title in the film’s opening title sequence, various graffiti are written, and the words “vox populi” appear in the lower right side of the screen, with a smaller “vox dei” written below them. The heroic emperor Marcus Aurelius gives a speech about citizenship and civil rights that is even more explicitly about America and the Cold War and comes even earlier. In short, Mann’s liberal/Communist sympathizer papers are in order. Like so many historicist readings of films, this reading of El Cid is based on analogies between the history represented in the film and the history of its production as a film. As Mark Jancovich (2000) puts it, “the film takes as its central narrative the forging of a sense of collective purpose in relation to an external other in a manner that is clearly developed as an analogy with the Cold War” (88). Amy François de la Bretèque (2004) finds similar analogies between the film’s Spanish past and its Cold War (see the quota- tion above) present: the Moors are like the Communists and the colonized; El Cid is a liberal, American hero.4 Along parallel but somewhat different lines, Neal M. Rosendorf, a historian and biographer of Sam Broston, and Broston’s son, Bill, frame the film in their Miriam Collection El Cid DVD audiocommentary track in relation to the Cold War but regard the film as pro-Franco, El Cid being a dictator rather than a liberal.5 In my view, however, the film’s politics cannot properly be understood apart from its Christian theology. Apropos are Jacques Derrida’s (1994) com- ments about Marx’s Capital in Spectres of Marx: “only the reference to the religious world allows one to explain the autonomy of the ideological, and thus its proper efficacy, its incorporation in apparatuses that are endowed not only with an apparent autonomy but was sort of automaticity. ” (161). To be sure, El Cid makes use of theological analogies through a process of typological historicism that Erich Auerbach called “figura” and which he showed exerted a great influence in the Middle Ages.6 Yet the means by which El Cid makes analogies involve far more than a simple metaphorical substitution of a set of political terms for a set of religious terms.7 My point is that El Cid cannot properly be historicized by mapping its diegetic narrative of eleventh-century Spain onto the moment of its production in 1961 only through analogical matches and substitutions of religion for politics. The same point holds true for classically Freudian readings that allegorize films by means of substituting one metaphor for another (a severed or missing hand stands for castration).8 And, as we will 9780230601253ts04.qxd 03/11/2010 08:03 AM Page 77 Passion of El Cid 77 see in the next chapter, it holds true as well for film and media theories of transition based on analogies and parallels between old and new media (Manovich 2001). As Frederic Jameson (1981) shows in The Political Unconscious, Marxist allegories of history are politicotheological in that they reinscribe a medieval Christian fourfold, typological hermeneutics derived from Saint Augustine’s City of God and the Confessions and, I would add, from Dante’s influential discussion of allegory in his letter to Can Grande della Scala (1316–1317).9 Marxist and other historicist hermeneutics resemble religious typological hermeneutics in matching parallel, mimetic elements. The political unconscious is always already, in my view, a political theological unconscious. El Cid’s political theology is driven by its theological poetics. The film generates two kinds of repetitions. The first kind is an overt historicist sequential mimetic matching I call “stereotypology” that elucidates and establishes very visible and recognizable political theological oppositions between Christians and Moors.10 The second kind is a less visible kind of repetition I call phantomimetic. It has a parasitic, spectral relation to stereotypology in that it too matches elements and gestures. It does so, however, by “phantomiming,” anamorphically or furtively, and in a syn- chronic rather than sequential manner that doubles and undoes the politicotheological oppositions apparently established through stereotypology. As we will see, both kinds of mimetic matches proliferate so extensively, often linking elements that bear little obvious relation to one another, that the practice of ideological matching threatens to collapse Derrida’s dis- tinction between autonomy and automaticity, deconstructing the film’s moral and political oppositions between bad Moors and good Christians. The legitimacy of El Cid’s (non)violence derives in the film from a state of exception: the Cid stands for a law outside the law of the state; he is a man unlike any other in standing beyond the sovereign’s reach. Stereotypological matches establish his position as a paralegal supplement to sovereignty: he pointedly refuses to become King when given the chance, choosing to serve King Alfonso instead, but serving him by resisting him.11 The film’s phantomimesis undoes El Cid’s exceptionalism, however, making him only one of a series of Christ-like martyrs and, furthermore, deconstructs the film’s politicotheological opposition between El Cid the epic male hero and his abject Others—the militant brown-faced, black-robed Africans and impotent aristocratic women. By the end of the film, the Spanish sovereign himself becomes a phantom. This deconstruction emerges visually in Mann’s film as a collapse of spirit into machine for two reasons: First, the monotheistic medievalism of the film’s narrative poses a problem of representation and rhetoric because what is being made visible is also what is being hidden; what is lacking is also being filled in; what is being made present is being made spectral. Rodrigo/El Cid (“the Lord”) is himself a copy of a Lord who is absent and who was resurrected as a ghost, a ghost, moreover, with holes in the form of stigmata and a hole in his chest made by the spear of a Roman guard. 9780230601253ts04.qxd 03/11/2010 08:03 AM Page 78 78 Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media Thus the wounds and scars on Rodrigo’s body that make him similar to Jesus also figure metonymically the absence of the wounded, spectral Lord that Rodrigo’s alias mimes and recalls.12 Second, Mann addresses El Cid’s political theology as a question of biotechnology: the proliferation of mimesis and its mechanization shows that the human does not precede a technological recording as an original to a copy, as if the director were, by virtue of being human, exterior and prior to a later and mechanized scene he manipulates; rather, the human is already designed technologically. The spirit is the machine. To understand El Cid’s circumfixion of history and how its furtive phantomimesis parasitically resembles and erodes the obvious analogical cer- tainties and assurances of stereotypological historicism, I call up a top-heavy theoretical apparatus announced in the subtitle of the present chapter and put it in the service of attending closely to the film’s invest- ment in its highly dense formal abstractness, which may be made concrete in the image captures from the Miriam Collection DVD included below, though they fail to do justice, of course, to the widescreen 70mm Super Technirama Panavision-projected screen image.

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