Baroque, Decadence, and a Cinema of Digital- Animated Liberation

SEEING THE SPELL: BAROQUE, DECADENCE, AND A CINEMA OF DIGITAL- ANIMATED LIBERATION MALCOLM MORTON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN FILM YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO JANUARY 2016 © MALCOLM MORTON, 2016 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation draws on the artistic traditions of seventeenth-century Baroque and nineteenth- century Decadence in seeking to formulate an analytical vocabulary for the aesthetics of digitally- animated spectacle in contemporary cinema. The dissertation seeks to critique binary antinomies of “narrative vs. spectacle,” and instead propose a concept of “narrativized spectacle” whereby digital visual effects have brought about a profound liberation in cinema’s capacity to envision narrative story-worlds, and depict their workings. It takes the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster as its chief subject for this inquiry, insofar as this is the filmmaking idiom most given to the embrace and deployment of digitally-liberated spectacle, and one which is frequently assumed to be largely bereft of formal and narrative sophistication. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that the Hollywood blockbuster’s spectacular nature in fact bears complex utopian implications, and that the crudities which occasionally mar the form in practice are more the result of not being imaginatively hyperbolic enough, rather than being too much so. The dissertation’s invocation of Baroque and Decadent aesthetics provides a conceptual apparatus for describing this contemporary cinematic idiom of digitized blockbuster spectacle. It identifies a Baroque aesthetic in such stylistic traits as verticality, profusion, and the sublime, as well as narrative themes of transgression of limits, reverence before imposing scale and grandeur, and refusal to ennoble passivity and martyrdom. Likewise, it identifies Decadent aesthetics in stylistics which privilege the gaze, the enclosed and aestheticized space, and formal ritual, as well as narratives ordered around principles of perversity, self-consciousness, and interconnectedness. The ultimate intervention which this dissertation seeks to make, however, is to demonstrate the centrality – rather than marginality – of animation to cinema, insofar as cel animation has always possessed the graphic freedom to realize any imaginative vision, which digital effects have only recently extended to live-action cinema. All of the aesthetics of Baroque and Decadent blockbuster spectacle that the dissertation traces could be – and, the dissertation seeks to show, were – deployed in the animated feature years in advance of the liberation of representation that digital effects would bring to live-action. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………….….… ii Table of Contents …………………………………………………………….…………….….... iii Introduction …………………………………………………………………….……………...… 1 Chapter One: Cinema and the “State of the Art” ……………………….……...……………..… 20 Chapter Two: Baroque and Decadent: A New Lingua Franca of Digital Spectacle in the Modern Blockbuster ………………………………………………………………….………..… 81 Chapter Three: Theorizing Unto Oblivion: (Post)modernist Resistances to Narrative, Spectacle, and Cinema ……………………………………………….…………………………… 151 Chapter Four: Baroque and Decadent as “Narrativized Spectacle” ………………..…………. 193 Chapter Five: Baroque and Decadent Animation Histories: The Testing-Ground of Modern Narrativized Spectacle ……………………………………………………………….... 265 Conclusion ……………………………………………….………………………….…..…….. 328 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………….…………..…… 341 1 Introduction Cinema is an art, first and foremost. It is also, of course, a business, a mode of propaganda, a form of media address and, to many, a virtual religion; but cinema’s most basic nature nonetheless remains as an art form – it remediates and transforms reality in accordance with the impulses and needs of the human imagination. As such, the beauties and splendours of cinema as an art can never be wholly reducible to ideological formulae, economic rationales, or scholarly taxonomies. Its visual and affective dimension will always elude and confound such logocentric and schematic approaches. In nonetheless attempting, however, to offer some scholarly account of cinematic art, this dissertation’s approach is unapologetically stodgy – emphasizing cinema’s nature as an art in the longstanding classical sense of the word. I do not seek to exalt the conceptual and intellectual joys of experimental or avant-garde cinema; nor do I emphasize a subversive or emancipating aspect in “good-bad” exploitation fare, or camp, or any other kind of “para-cinema” culture; nor do I find a humanist aspect in the kind of low-budget “indie” or “mumblecore” cinema which has often characterized film festivals and other non-mainstream distribution outlets. Rather, this dissertation seeks to emphasize the artistic vitality and creativity of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster mainstream: the form which – because of the total, liberating, freedom of visual representation granted by digital animation – has the potential to monumentalize onscreen virtually any imaginative vision. In doing so, this dissertation seeks to look at Hollywood blockbuster films as aesthetic objects, and reflect on what they actually show, rather than merely reducing them to grist for an ideological or theoretical agenda. It seeks to appreciate them as containing deep aesthetic implications, which resonate profoundly with older traditions in the arts. As Camille Paglia once observed, behind the trashiest nineteenth-century representational canvas may lie complex Romantic assumptions about nature and society (Paglia 1990, 490). This is an observation wholly in keeping with the spirit of this dissertation, which seeks to critique the – essentially Modernist – anti-mimetic, anti-illusionist assumptions which often underlie so much of Cinema Studies. The terms “cinema” and “modernity” have been juxtaposed with each other with overwhelming frequency in academic publications over the past generation, in the service of a disciplinary premise whereby cinema is essentially a media technology rather than an art form – another 2 innovation of the nineteenth-century surge of modernity that produced photography, the telegraph, the telephone, the broadcast radio, and recorded music. This age of modernity – of exponential increase in media technology – was, incidentally, also the era which produced Modernism in the arts. The two developments are often taken as almost ineluctably intertwined, and indissociable, in academic Cinema Studies. There is, of course, an undeniable logic to this. Coming at the conclusion of the century that had seen the development of the train and the automobile as well as the aforementioned media technologies, cinema was very much a part of the physical and conceptual shrinking of the world, as well as the immense increase in kinesis. Many of the cinema’s earliest practices, therefore – such as actuality documentaries of exotic, far-away places, the Hales Tours train simulations, short films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Girl and Her Trust (1912) that emphasized the telephone and telegraph, and adventure serial such as The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Hazards of Helen (1914) which emphasized ceaseless thrills of speed and mobility – embodied and reflected the changed world of which cinema was part. The historiographical impulse to situate cinema in modernity, therefore, is valid, and may still have much to teach us today, as the digital era continues to conceptually shrink the world. The problem, however – which this dissertation will seek to critique – is the degree to which a valid modernity paradigm for cinema has, in tandem with Modernism in the arts, often seemed to become the dominant, default, only paradigm for understanding cinema. As a result, Cinema Studies has inherited much of Modernism’s self- serving present-ism: the sense that all the numerous centuries of art before its self-declared conceptual enlightenment are now of little more than antiquarian interest, implicitly understandable simply as generalized “classicism” or “pre-modernism.” This dissertation, however, insists upon the far longer history of aesthetics which make up the Western canon, and understands cinema as a present-day avatar of it. This is no mere personal eccentricity, but a counter-history of the medium which has been ignored. It is no accident that in Italy – one of the swiftest countries to embrace the cinema as a genuine art, rather than a commercial amusement – cinema was promptly put to use creating films reimagining the Roman past; nor is it surprising that in virtually every society, cinema soon began to be used to produce films with religious themes. The newest medium of art was readily pressed into service to re-tell human cultures’ oldest and most foundational stories and myths, using its miraculous new imaging powers to draw on the great art of the past, and to make the past live again. To view a 3 film such as Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) is not to gain a look into what Ben Singer has called “the condition of modernity,” but to see a sincere imaginative evocation of medieval sanctity. All this still holds true even in the wholly unselfconscious products of the Hollywood mainstream. To see a film such as Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (Dwight Little, 2004) fluently, and presumably completely unintentionally, redeploy the

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