Film Before and After New Media, Anec-Notology, and the Philological Uncanny 1
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Notes Introduction: Film before and after New Media, Anec-notology, and the Philological Uncanny 1. Scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, history, and art history have drawn similar analogies between medieval and early modern media for close to a century (Poucet 1952a, Poucet 1952b, Renoir 1958 and 1960). The earliest instance of the analogy I have found is the art historian Dagobert Frey’s (1929) comparison of Gothic painting to film. Kendrick (1999) com- pares what she calls “animated” letters in medieval manuscripts to contem- porary electronic media: “It is not difficult to think of analogies between imaging technologies being integrated into modern electronic writing and those used by early medieval scribes—for example, variable scaling or ‘zoom’ effects and greatly enlarged letters of the chi-rho page of the Book of Kells” (3). In his book on the history of the bookshelf, Petroski (1999) simi- larly maintains that present-day print and television journalism “still oper- ates on the medieval model of book production” (38–39). Rhodes and Sawday (2000) have edited a book entitled The Renaissance Computer in which they and the other contributors compare the modern computer with early modern book machines of encyclopedic memory. More broadly, Hayles (2003) calls for a rethinking of the translation of books from print to electronic media with attention paid not only to “the relation of linguistic and bibliographic codes” but also to “the relation of meaning to digital codes” (265). Similar links have been drawn between predigital and digital media. Medieval and early modern scholars have compared old, preprint medieval manuscripts and visual culture and early modern printed books to new “postprint” digital media, reconceptualizing the transition from script to print in digital terms, as an interface, attending as well to images of books and reading in medieval and early modern paintings (see Robinson 1997, Camille 1998b, Driver 2000, Stallybrass 2002, Christie 2003, Crick 2003, and Foys 2007). As Foys (2007) comments, “digital media and medieval dis- course share a number of common traits that print does not, and early com- mentators [Marshall McCluhan and Walter Ong] of electronic media linked the transformation of expression in post-print technologies to pre-print forms...An increasing number of critics have refined such functional analogies, further developing how pre- and post-print worlds connect through analogies of their respective operation” (36). Along similar lines, Conley (1992/2007a) has described the graphic unconscious of French Renaissance literary texts in cinematic terms: “motion”; “fading”; “mon- tage”; and “screen-memories” (2, 4, 7, 13, and 14). In a chapter on Athanasius Kircher’s magic lantern (1671) and other light and shadow devices Kircher invented, Zielinski (2006) says that Loyola's Spiritual Exercises “translated into media terms . read like the shooting script of a film” (123). Biagialio (2006) draws an analogy between film and Galileo’s illustrations of the moon, writing that for Galileo “what counted... was...the ‘movie’ of their 188 Notes motion.... Galileo... presented his claims in visual terms—as movies about satellites and shadows” (103, 110–11). In a footnote, Biagialio presses the analogy quite far, writing that his “reference to Galileo’s observation as a kind of movie is not meant metaphorically. While Galileo’s visual narrative is articulated on the printed page rather than on film, its logic is distinctly cinematic” (n. 94, 103). Biagialio also uses film in many of the titles that divide his chapters into shorter sections, including “Cinematic Presentations” (143) and “Public Movies and Private Dark Rooms” (196; see also 103, 135, 177, and 214). An extensive interest in film informed Erwin Panofsky (1997) and Aby Warburg’s iconological art histo- ries of ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance period (see Levin 1996 and Michaud 2004). In a discussion of Florentine court spectacles, Levin (1996) notes that Panofsky (1941/1971) gave lectures using slides of his book The Codex Huygens and Leonardo da Vinci’s Art Theory comparing the codex to a film Art Theory and that Panofsky’s essay “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures” is cited in German art history in connection with “discussions of the protocinematic structure of antique and medieval image sequences” (n. 17, 28). I would add that Panofsky (1941/1971) draws between film and Codex Huygens in the final paragraph: “In order to arrive at those astonishing drawings which seem to foreshadow the modern cinema, or rather what is now called ‘multiflash photographs,’ our author had only to work out Leonardo’s sketches and ideas in a methodical way” (128). For more on Panofsky, film, and medievalism, see Burt (2007c). Conversely, some film and new media scholars have considered medieval and early modern visual media as part of the prehistory of film, or film before film. Kittler (2002) begins his history of new media with the “old” media of the printed book and Renaissance perspective painting. As Manovich (2001) writes: The shift from analogue to digital filmmaking to the shift from fresco and tempura painting in the early Renaissance . medieval tempera painting can be compared to the practice of special effects during the analog period cinema. A painter working with tempera could modify and rework the image, but the process was painstaking and slow.... change[s] in painting technology led the Renaissance painters to create new kinds of compositions, new pictorial space, and new narratives. Similarly, by allowing a filmmaker to treat a film image as an oil painting, digital technology redefines what can be done with a camera. (305) See also Manovich on Alberti and Dürer (104–06) and the Northern and Italian Renaissance (327). Robinson (1995) begins his history of the transition from the peep show to the movie palace with a prehistory of cinema beginning with the magic lantern (3–17). Laurent Mannoni (2000) begins his book on the archaeology of cinema with chapters on the camera obscura and the magic lantern dating back to the thirteenth century. In an essay on the cinematic imaginary after film, Bieliky (2003) tells a story about Rudolf II being enter- tained by a Rabbi who used a magic lantern to transform his house into a palace and concludes that we may speak of a “medieval virtual reality” (197). See also Rossell (1998); Bolter and Grusin (2000); Thorburn and Jenkins (2003); Munster (2006, 11–12; 73–85) on early modern collecting, the Wunderkammer, and information aesthetics; and especially Friedberg (2006, 26–48; 77–81) on connections between Alberti’s and Dürer’s perspective machines, the camera obscura, and the magic lantern, and on the centrality of Renaissance perspective to apparatus film theory. The subtitle of Usai’s (2001) book on the death of cin- ema, “History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age,” medievalizes the future of digital cinema as a return to a bleaker past. Notes 189 2. Filming on digital cameras has also blurred a distinction operative in cellu- loid cinema between cinematography and postproduction editing. Editors of digital film can now “punch in” a camera shot to produce a zoom effect that could only have been achieved with a camera in celluloid film. On anal- ogy with respect to painting and digital media, see Davis (2006). 3. A similar convergence of now separate film editing computer programs into a single program also seems visible. 4. Be Kind, Rewind has a series of uncanny features arising from a variety of nested frames, including cameos by actors who appeared in videos for rent and a black and white film within-the-film that is initially part of the open- ing title sequence and completed and shown at the end of the film narrative. 5. I develop this point in chapter 4 and the conclusion. I have in mind collections such as Mazzio and Trevor (2000) and Freccero (2006). Pye (2000) is an impor- tant exception. 6. See, for example, Mazzio and Trevor (2000), 12. 7. Tellingly, psychoanalysis flags as an unmarked narratological problem in the histories of film and media constructed by Manovich (2001) and Rodowick (2007, 5, 19) at the moment history turns into story or allegory: Oedipus or a given set of films turned into characters that are examples of Freudian dis- avowal respectively drive Manovich’s and Rodowick’s narratives of film and media history. After discussing the parallel histories of the cinema and the computer, Manovich (2001, 19–25) mentions Oedipus (25) and drops history in favor of “the story” and “our story” (25), to which he gives a “happy end- ing” (25). Rodowick (2007, 5–19) flanks a discussion of the death of cinema in which films such as The Matrix and Toy Story, among others, serve effec- tively, without being recognized as such by Rodowick, as characters or per- sonifications in a historicist allegory, with a mention of Freud’s disavowal (5) and closing with Freud’s notion of interminable interpretation (19). 8. In a typically witty and crushing response to one of his critics, Paul de Man (1982) takes the opportunity to amplify his own account of mistake and error in Nietzsche, noting that he himself could have made clear a distinction between a mistake as voluntary and local, on the one hand, and error is invol- untary and systemic, on the other; de Man notes, however, that it is impossible to keep the mistake and the error separate. See especially the section of Godard and Ishaghpour (2005) entitled “How Video Made the History of Cinema Possible” (31–39); and see also Jean-Luc Godard’s account of the death of cinema in his eight-part film Histoire[s] du cinema (1988–98), released on DVD by Gaumont (2007) on four discs with incomplete English subtitles.