Re-Enchanted Enchantment: Watching Movies in the Movies Author(S): Rachel O
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Re-enchanted Enchantment: Watching Movies in the Movies Author(s): Rachel O. Moore Reviewed work(s): Source: Etnofoor, Vol. 15, No. 1/2, SCREENS (2002), pp. 161-176 Published by: Stichting Etnofoor Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25758030 . Accessed: 21/11/2012 17:33 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Stichting Etnofoor is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Etnofoor. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.65 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:33:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Re-enchanted Enchantment Watching Movies in theMovies* Rachel O. Moore, School of History of Art, London ABSTRACT Mimicking reifyingstructures of modern of life, television,for Adorno could be nothing other than 'disenchanted enchantment'. Following Benjamin's impulse to create dialectical images, this paper argues that the reuse of television and film screens within films is, at times, a form of re-enchantment. Calling on technology's magical transformative power, these scenes have powerfuleffects both within thediegesis of the filmsand for the spectatorwho watches the screen within the screen. They do so, I argue, not so much because of their narrative utility, but because theyhighlight cinema at itsmost technological.The visceral quality of thesemoments is one of the compelling reasons to begin to think that cinema has an important affinity with magical practices. Introduction The irrepressible tear, the bodily spasm, the gasps and even turnings away in themovie theatreattest toperhaps themost salient and certainly themost unnerving featureof cinema: itsability to circumvent conscious cognition and affect the senses directly.Cinema's ability to shock you, elate you, to touch you with no hands comes, no less, from a medium that can not be touched, smelled, nor even seen in the lightof day.With light and shadow as the gums and varnishes of the form,popular film1 is a medium whose making is crowded with technology, but thatemerges without a trace of itsown construction. This defining paradox is certainly one of the reasons it is a commonplace to refer to the 'magic of cinema'. Cinema was well on itsway in 1935 when W. Benjamin wrote his famous essay on film; then, as now, sound and lighting equipment cluttered the shooting set. So much did the 'equipment' invade the space of film production, Benjamin remarked, that therewas no place, except from behind the camera itself, thatoffered a complete, yet unfettered view of the scene as it is filmed. 'The equipment-free aspect of reality', he wrote, 'has become here the height of artifice and the sight of unmediated reality has become the blue flower in the land of technology' (Benjamin 1991:495). A movie then, is just one big trick.Like all tricks, these cinematographic feats provoke curiosity about theirmachinations. ETNOFOOR,XV(l/2) 2002,pp. 161-176 161 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.65 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:33:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions A book entitled Hollywood, wie es wirklich ist, for example showed the studios, the stage sets, the prop rooms, edifices of such structures as Notre Dame appeared in 1930, contemporary with Benjamin (Debries 1930). Much akin to a child peeking behind the stage curtain, a perusal today of any issue of American Cinematographer2 will instantlyshow the full force of Benjamin's observation. The magazine reveals the complex orchestration of lenses, film stock, lighting set-ups thatmake the look of themovie convey thedirector's intentionsand maintain theconsistent reality effect.Spiderman (Raimi 2002) required four different Spiderman costumes to work in different lighting; the intimate scenes in Unfaithful (Lynne 2002), shot on location in a loft in Greene Street, were surrounded by an enormous cantilevered lighting system to create the effect of natural light flowing into the windows. Set photographs abound, revealing how cleverly, how masterfully, we have been fooled. Spiderman is not climbing at all of course and his antics are seen against a green screen, not the New York skyline. The discussion of the film stock for Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) is of particular interest to film theorists still preoccupied by Benjamin's 'blaue Blume', for it turns out that blue is themost fragile of colours: 'During his film-stock tests,Kaminski (the cinematographer)3 found that the Vision 800T responded much better to colder, bluer lighting than itdid towarm sources. - - Under warm lighting, the blue layer notoriously themost delicate layer in an emulsion received less exposure, and the image was much grainier thanKaminski desired. 'Itwas a little too grainy forme inwarm light,but it loves blue light,and I loved the look we got 162 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.65 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:33:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions with it on daytime exteriors,' he notes (in Holbert 2002:36). The blue flower is not only the symbol of theGerman romantic Novalis' ideal, it is also, in the land of technology that is, themost difficult to cultivate from light and emulsions. Serendipity aside, these discussions of grain and lightdo not disenchant. One senses instead the life in theprocess, the nature in second nature. Such revelations make thework of technology all themore marvellous. No sooner is technology so painstakingly disappeared than it reappears, touching the filmwith magic: 'Iwanted to "feel" the emulsion throughout the film', Kaminski reports. The typical slick look of sci-fiwas to be overcome for a film set in the future, a future whose ties to the archaic become increasingly profound in the film. Kaminski puts it this way, 'If you can't see or sense grain in the image, you're not experiencing themagic of movies' (ibid.:35). Albeit subtle, this reinscription of 'grain' works to the same effect, as did a philtre or a wand in pre-modern times. Not by accident, but by design, a trace of the film's materiality, and thus its technological construction, emerges in the finished film.Although all of themachinations required to produce thefilm image are of necessity hidden in popular cinema's final product, time and again another trace of technology is added, just as 'grain' lends 'magic' to this film. Technology has, it appears, become themedium formagic inmodern times. Following the link between magic and technology in popular film, this paper looks at movies that showcase clips from other movies and, in thisway, draw blatantly upon technology's magical power. Once it is so diligently obscured, the 'mode of production' then remerges on screen in the form of television screens, films within films as well as other cinematic attractions.When it flaunts its technological, rather than its narrative heritage, cinema works like a charm, not a dream. And it is in thismagical aspect that cinema reveals its Utopian potential most clearly. One of themost striking powers of manifest technology within films is the visceral is way in which it creates intimacy. An instance from the avant-garde Sadie Benning's pixel vision, which uses a low-tech video image such that the pixels appear to form a visible permeable skin that dissolves the border between the viewer and the film screen fromwithin. From popular cinema, in themovie Gods and Monsters (Condon 1998), the two central characters watch the blurry images of themovie Bride of Frankenstein (Whale 1935), on separate television sets, one in a bar, the other in his living room. Come morning when the twomeet, their friendship has been uncannily cemented. In themovie Central Station (Selles 1998), thewoman sitting in a bus as she is leaving the child, and the child who is leftbehind, each hold up tinyplastic slide viewers simultaneously, and look at a single slide picture taken at a high point along theirjourney, thus bringing their or fraught relationship to a joyful conclusion. These scenes use the charm of outmoded degraded technology to secure an intimacy between characters otherwise out of physical reach. Outmoded or degraded technologies alert us to our own present, but they also carry with them powerful traces of time.With their scratches, blurring and fading crossing the surface of the film, you feel time viscerally. This is not a form of reflexivity,but rather a reinvocation of themagical process of concealment and revelation that lies at the 163 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.65 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:33:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions foundation of film spectatorship no less than in the nature of technology itself.That is to say, first, the truthof thefilm's making is concealed in that the lights and mikes are gone, then they show a clip from a filmwhich reveals, as did thegrain, the essential made-ness of themovie, only to then conceal it again as the frame of the filmwithin the film dissolves. Concealment and revelation are part of the essence of film spectatorship. Even such disparate thinkers as film theoristsAndre Bazin and Jean-Louis Comolli grounded their theories in cinema's uncannily mimetic nature, which requires cinematic space to be discrete, completely distinct from real space in order that itbe perceived as real.