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. Cinematic representation depends on lack, on negation, on replacing the real entirelywith a likeness to appear real. For Comolli, 'Any representation is founded on a lack which governs' (Comolli 1986:753). The coexistence of the physically absent reality towhich the image differs and defers and thepresence of thefilm image fuel spectator desire. The spectator is 'doubly racked by disillusion: fromwith itself as machine for simulation,mechanical and earthly reproduction of the living; fromwithout as single image only' (ibid.:760). Bazin too says that realism depends on a separate, neutral space outside of experience: 'There can be no cinema without the setting up of an open space in place of the universe rather than as part of it' (Bazin 1967:110). Its difference from yet deference to physical reality is the source of its representational power:
'First of all the photographic reproduction in projection, cannot pretend to be a substitute for the or original share its identity [...] films start off precisely as the negation of that on which their aesthetic autonomy is based'.
Bazin concludes, 'all thatmatters, is that the spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema' (ibid.: 142-143). Spectatorship then, is always about deferral to reality on the one hand, and a marked distinction to it on the other, thus placing the spectator in a never-ending game of doubt, satisfaction and doubt, and the film is in the business of concealment, revelation and concealment once more. The necessity of film to be both completely real and completely artificial at the same time is similar to theway Heidegger describes the workings of technology in general; that is to say, through the notions of concealment and revelation. Further,when a film shows another filmwithin it, an uncanny moment erupts thatovertly violates this pact within realist representation. Technology forHeidegger is 'no mere means', but rather it is as he puts it, 'a way of revealing' (Heidegger 1977:13). 'It reveals', he says, 'whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turnout now one way, now and another'. Ordinarily, we think of technology as a process of inventing things that did not exist before. Blessed by its association with science, it is novelty with a guarantee. But Heidegger and cinema challenge thisway of thinking about technology as innovation. Technology reveals something already under way. Technology refers not to themanufacture of something, but ratherwhat Heidegger calls the 'bringing forth' a of something (say, ship or a house), which is already, in a sense, a finished thing, envisioned as completed 'but is revealed through technology' (ibid.: 13). In otherwords, a
164
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 thing already is as a conception or a plan, but it ismade manifest through technology. It is thus 'revealed' in tactile form.That revelation or, say, instantiation of a thing that already was as a conception in turn conceals the concept (or in the case of film, the pro-filmic moment) that once was. Technology is the process that reveals anything that cannot do so itself, and it is contingent upon the realities of the concrete (ibid.: 10). This same process occurs in nature as physis, 'the arising of something out of itself when a blossom, for example, bursts into bloom (ibid. :10). Unlike the cultural,mechanical, technological realm, the natural is one inwhich things reveal themselves. But when a movie films nature revealing itself it calls upon itsmost artful devices to capture what could otherwise not be seen with the naked eye. Recall the cinematic mileage thathas been gotten out of stop-action photographs and close-up films of nature now made to charm school children, but which were also quite prevalent in early cinema. We witness not only theprocess of flowers blooming, but cells dividing, bees pollinating, sea horses bursting out theiryoung. Technological and natural physis come together in this cinematic realm, a realm wherein theprocess of revealing, the technological moment, is, not coincidently, themoment thatfeatures film'smost cinematic elements with its extreme close-ups, slow and fastmotion, freeze frames, and reversals.
Love machines
- The technologies thatfeature in these films are nomere means that is to say theirprimary importance is not to function as machines in service of the plot, but rather to produce a magical effect. Thus I have discounted instances in which the telephone, the internet and the like functionmerely as a means of communication. When technologies function smoothly,without frictionor obtrusiveness, theyare notmagical. A scene fromThey Drive byNight (Raoul Walsh, 1940 US Warner Brothers), illustrates the claritywith which the distinction between a functioning apparatus and magical technology obtains, however intuitively.Joe (George Raft), up in San Francisco decides thatCassie (Anne Sheridan), down inLos Angeles, is theone forhim so he calls her up. On the leftside of the frame Joe nuzzles up to thepay phone on thewall, and Cassie, on the right, faces left to coo into her similar telephone and complete the symmetry.Suddenly, from themiddle of the frame, a superimposed image of a vertical wooden pole with fourhorizontal scaffolds holding wires and insulators erupts,Vertov-style. Moreover, ithums loudly. The telephones are merely functional objects, but the towering telephone pole, like a spinal column and rib cage zinging a message through the nervous system, is technology in full form, interruptingthe scene to standmightily and, a littleeerily here, as Cupid's arrow.The eeriness thatfeatures in this example derive from another quality of technology suggested by its representation as both an apparatus and a skeleton suggest: the double sense Heidegger intendswith the word Gestell. GestelU which means frame inEnglish, is theword he uses to name, and thus distinguish, theessence ofmodern technology. For in addition to the concealing-revealing, which characterises all technology,modern technology 'sets upon nature and challenges
165
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 it to yield' (Heidegger 1977:20). The distinguishing feature of modern technology is the fact that itcan control and use nature over time and space. Because itextracts power from nature uses as a resource or one a and it reserve, electricity, to take example, has power over nature that is uniquely modern. Heidegger's objections, recently taken up by environmentalists, understand technology's uniquely modern capacity to sap and to store energy as one that effectively turnsnature into a servant of technology. In the highly stylised moment ofWalsh's film,for example, technology, in the form of the telephone pole is laid over a phone conversation that shifts - from love tomarriage. As such it stands as the energy that takes the natural wild and - erotic love and turns it into love's cultural form:marriage (see Lukacs 1971).4 It is both the armature for and the skeletal remains of erotic love. Joe and Cassie, lovers on the brink of marriage throughout the story,are wedged between two unfortunatemodels for romance. In thismovie, marriage is either deadly (if your partner is Ida Lupino), or dowdy (as with the dull and depressing marriage of Gale Page to Humphrey Bogart). For all the flourish ofWalsh's kinaesthetic gesture, itswizardry in the end merely reifies rather than enchants, for the romance remains stiffand non-erotic. Like a hydroelectric plant thatharnesses a river's power and transforms it intometered current (Heidegger 1977:16), technology here merely churns nature out as second nature. This is no less a magic act, however. Technology's premier feature is the secreting of its transformativepower that makes itappear now frightening,now wondrous, but always as strange. In this, technology shares with the commodity fetish the role of a magical attraction.
166
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 The fairground show
In Max Ophul's movie Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), the lovers visit the Viennese fairground the Prater and take a simulated carriage-ride trip around theworld to seal their romantic fate.Much could be made of the role of carriages and cars that are not moving as vehicles for love, for fromEmma Bovary's tryststo the teenager's flat tire, it is only when something stops working that it reveals itself fully.5To paraphrase Heidegger, themore urgentlywe need what ismissing, and themore trulyit is encountered in its unhandiness, all themore obtrusive does what is at hand become. When it seems - - to lose the character of handiness, a thing technology in this case reveals itself as something objectively present. Technology is an attraction like the amusement park ride, not a means of manufacture. Similarly, the 'cinema of attractions' as opposed to the absorptive pull of narrative-driven cinema rejects its functional element in favour of cinema's magical quality (Gunning 1986:63-70).6 Customarily, when films simulate early viewer's responses to 'new' technology, theyhighlight themagical qualities of cinema by flaunting its technological prowess. Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (1992) deployed the titillation and fear often projected onto firstcontact with the cinema and other related technology in the service of seduction. Count Dracula takesWilhelmina through an arcade of attractions in turn-of-the-century London streets to view the cinematograph because, he says, T understand it is a wonder of the civilized world'. On the screen, two scantily clad women are seated on a man's lap who, much to his chagrin, disappear and are replaced by a fully clothed woman. 'Astounding', says Dracula, 'There are no limits to science'. Mina starts to leave. A film of a trainmoving towards them is on themovie screen in the back of the frame. 'Do not fearme', Dracula says desperately and drags her to a cloistered seat in the rear.He holds her, caresses her,while on the film screen a naked woman faces the screen, turnsaround and walks away. Fascinated and afraid,Mina is utterly seduced. She runs through theback stage of an elaborate shadow play, only to be frightenedby Dracula's white dog (who was black a few scenes earlier) and thus theirfinal seduction scene, lasciviously both caressing the unnatural dog, begins. The classicist and poet Anne Carson's description of Eros's effect could not be more precise:
'Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, to Eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds take control of his body, his mind and thequality of his life.Eros comes out of nowhere,on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness' (Carson 1998:148).
The film that forms the backdrop for the scene's climax and the birth of their romantic bondage is again that image of the trainadvancing from the darkness. Haunting the entire sequence, this film is the 1901 biograph The Ghost Train, inwhich, the trainThe Empire Express is shown in negative form,which makes for the frightfulimage of a white train zooming out of a black world. With its placement here in the smoky arcade, itmarkedly
167
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 echoes cinema's primal scene, the showing of Lumieres' Arrival of a Train in theGrand Cafe (France 1895), which was thengreeted with such 'astonishment' (Gunning 1989:31). The astonishment accorded to the contemporary reception of 'primitive cinema', (of the 'cinema of attractions') unleashes a similar wonder and vulnerability here. The clips of filmCoppola chooses with which to impartEros' presence not only foreground cinema as a - novel attraction, theyare also examples of the specific things like jump cuts and negative - exposure thatonly film can do. The technological aspect of cinema in itsmagical sense, even more than cuddling up in theback row of a movie house, iswhat, forDracula at least, makes romance at the movies.
Such purely cinematic moments, such instances of cinematic physis are precisely those thatsustained bothW. Benjamin and S. Kracauer's interest inmovies. The materiality of the image addresses theviewer as 'corporeal-material being' seizing it,as Kracauer put it 'with skin and hair' (inHansen 1993:4). As with Benjamin's 'innervations', the image grabs the senses, and pulls them into direct contact: 'Thematerial elements thatpresent themselves in film'Miriam Hansen interpretsKracauer tomean, 'directly stimulate thematerial layers of thehuman being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance' (ibid.:452). The material elements of cinema, slow and fastmotion, jump cuts, angles of all directions and frames in all sizes, coloured filters, and the very aging of the film itself, all serve to give technology a ghostly presence in a movie, any movie.
Old movies
The old film one watches on its own draws out a similar enervating effect when the material detritus of time starts to surface in the form of changes in colour, patterns of degradation, and aging's various haphazard scars. These eruptions call attention not only to the grain of the emulsion, but to the passage of time as well. The viewing of old films within films, as inDracula, creates a fertile field formyth and mystery to emerge from between the layers of time in an instant. In addition, such spectatorship calls up at least four layers of time; it includes profilmic moment, the time of the film's original release, themeaning within the context of the film itwas seen, and the viewing of ithere and now. Most amusing, however, is that one is often treated to the supreme voyeuristic pleasure of watching someone watching, or in the case of the following film,watching someone watching someone watching. In the comedy Get Shorty (Sonnenfeld 1995), Chili Palmer (JohnTravolta) chooses a film by a director known for utilising and expanding cinema's formal properties, Orson Welles, to combat Karen Flores' (Rene Russo) romantic scepticism. As inDracula, the movie house love scene is inaugurated by a shot of the film being shown, rather than the spectators watching it, reliving I suspect in both instances, a fleetingmoment of 'first contact' with themoving image.Welles' signature low-angle, close-up renders Charlton Heston with a disproportionately enlarged gun pointed at him saying, 'How could you arrestme here, this is my country'. A high angle close-up of Quinlan (Orson Welles)
168
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 responds for the showdown that transpires.With the sound from the film still audible we finally see Chili, so engrossed in the scene thathe is literallyon the edge of his seat,when Karen ambles into themovie house. She spots him but takes a seat far away so she can watch both Chili and the end of Touch ofEvil (1958). Anticipating thedialogue, Chili says, 'that's the second bullet I stopped for you', echoed immediately on the sound track.Karen smiles inmuch the same way as one does watching a child with an animal at the zoo. A serious movie enthusiast, Chili knows the film by heart and continues his recitation of the lines until he cannot wait anymore, 'you're going down, Orson', while Welles' enormous body hits thewater. Chili beams atMarlene Dietrich's (Tana in the film) gorgeous close-up lingering on the screen and this time the viewer's identification shot ismatched toKaren at full attention to Tana's (Dietrich's) vacuous eulogy: 'hewas some kind ofman'. Tana's 'Adios' is the lastword, the pianola's brittle trills escort her lone walk along the road where monstrous oil rigs foreground deep and dark space. Chili's eyes, utterly besotted, look left to right as if to say, T don't believe it!' Clearly the opposite of his unflappable personae; he even elbows a stranger to extol themovie's greatness. The pianola's refrain fromTouch of Evil's end7 accompanies the two out onto the street as they talk and Karen ends the conversation saying, 'thismay just work out'. The pianola music thatenvelops thefilm with thefilm within thefilm comes fromTana's place where it played when Quinlan called on her in Touch of Evil. Their conversation there began with Quinlan's remark, 'Thatmusic brings back memories'. Putting a cigar dead centre in hermouth, Tana replied, 'Pianola music, the customers go for it. It's so old it's new. We got the television too, we runmovies'. Just as Tana brutally distinguishes themarket charm of the pianola from the nostalgia Quinlan would prefer, old movies are not vague mnemonics of times past now viewed through the scrim of experience. Rather, they are so old, they're new. As ifunwittingly awakening to cinema's firstperformance, a film's oldness instantly invokes its novelty and newness. Old movies, with theirdifferent styles thatnow stand out to us as artifice and theirmore severe surface scars, flaunt their materiality. The newness of the old 'retouches the real with the real' (Bresson 1986:44), 'as dust on a diamond reveals its transparency' as Andre Bazin said in another context (Bazin 1967:131). Touch of Evil is the raunchiest filmWelles, or perhaps anyone else, ever made and hardly a story to elicit the broad smile on Chili's face at its end. Like Flaubert's idea for Salammbo, which Flaubert noted in his letters,Welles' film is pure style.As inFlaubert's novels,Welles' formal gaming works against conventional narrative identification at every turn.Indeed there is a similar sinisterdelight at the stylisticpunishment suchmyopic central characters as Emma Bovary and Heston's Vargas undergo. This is not the amusement-filled gallery of early cinema's crude attractions towhich Dracula subjected Mina. This is the cinema of tape recorders used to supply diegetic sound, the longest take in film history, violently ironic crosscutting, angles so acute a gun dwarfs Charlton Heston's face. Chili is taken in by the audacity of pure style. And Karen is seduced by theway themovie works Chili over. Like love itself, the old becomes new. This subtle and intricate use of
169
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 technology as stylistic prowess to touch off romance is a far cry from cliches of waves breaking, suns setting, or breezes blowing. Those could only be parodic8 for two people that,as defined by the picture, know a scam when they see one. If anything differentiates the technological Eros from natural Eros, it is a degree of guile. The modern figure for trickeryand ingeniousness, revelation and concealment, is tech nology. Technology reveals its cunning and trickerymost clearly when cast against theun modern: those savages who are amusingly mystified by bottle openers, cream separators, telescopes, binoculars, telephones, theodolites, and, of course, the phonograph.9 The last of these has endured from Flaherty's Nanook of theNorth of 1921 to the 1999 version of A Midsummer Nights Dream (Hoffman) for a brief show of primitive wonder at the machine when the Inuit,Nanook, and the fairy examine the phonograph record and then pick up the record as if to bite it. These examples illustrate the projection of a magical status of technology onto theprimitive, which actually more accurately reflects themodern person's attitude. Such instances of theprimitive seemingly outdone bymodern technology are ubiquitous from early cinema to thepresent. Modern advertising continues to call upon theprimitive to show off itsnewness and innovation: Sherpa's with cell phones, Aborigines with satellite dishes, etc. This phenomenon is not merely a product of the well-worn dramatic device whose effect rests on the audience's superior knowledge to those on stage or screen. Rather, theypartake of the double-edged bind to the primitive other that invigorates all representations of contact as well as early theoretical understandings of filmic representation itself. Technology makes the primitive primitive and, at the same time, theprimitive makes technologymagical.10 Thrown into primitive relief, technology really does not do anything,but instead shares the trickiness and wiliness thatare otherwise leached out of us through technology. Marshall Sahlins once said that themore primitive the technology, themore sophisticated the operator. If this observation reflects something of the modern attitude towards technology (and it is indeed borne out by past and present filmic interest in primitive hunting, craftwork, and the like), our technology today makes us feel a little less than clever. Thus the fear in Heidegger's observation that 'thewill tomastery becomes all themore urgent themore technology threatens to slip from human control' (Heidegger 1977:5). Technology, which we are always trying to get a grip on, is as elusive as it is ubiquitous.
Star fetish
Technological progress insures that the cat-and-mouse game we play, uncovering technol ogy's secrets and with each clever revelation, secreting away still greater power will keep us busy for sometime to come. 'It should be kept inmind', wrote Walter Benjamin, 'that, in the nineteenth century, the number of 'hollowed-out' things increases at a rate and on a was scale that previously unknown, for technological progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation' (Benjamin 1999:466). Here Benjamin refers
170
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 to the reification and fetishisation of objects. Things with no connection to theirmaking become ciphers thatdraw innew meanings. Benjamin's project, put brieflywas to de-reify and reenchant, going thisprocess of commodity fetishism one better.Because the pace of reification and fetishisation was so increasingly rapid, in his eyes, his taskwas made all themore urgent. (It is difficult now, when the enormity of the pace of discarded things unhinges us daily, not to redouble despair.) The process of reification is evident within the film framewhere person and thing alike are levelled to equivalence as images. And it is in the image where metaphor and themythic find a purchase. The cinematic object purloins subjectivity and hands it over to theworld of things.An extreme example of thephantasmagoric process unfolds inMax Ophuls' The Earrings of .. Madame de .(1953). The diamond earrings accrue more value with each of theirmany exchanges, while at the same time they drain the vitality of the lovers to the point of death, such that the once forgettable objects, the earrings, become brilliant fetishes, so powerful theymust be gifted finally toGod. These images, with their thing-like status, in turn function not merely as ciphers, but as glistening fetishes, fetishes reanimated by the very subjectivity lost to theobject.11 What distinguishes these technologically charged - objects frommere commodity fetishism is theway they can bring back themythic in the case of thisfilm, the primordial knowledge of love. Further still, the fetish image of a person, themovie star, can work miracles. Rita Hayworth's role in Steven King's short story, 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' was largely condensed into one explosive scene in the film The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Andy Dufresne, the prisoner played by Tim Robbins, gets a poster of Rita Hayworth forhis cell, which turnsout tobe just the right size to cover thehole he will use for his escape. The prisoners are shown watching Gilda (Vidor 1946), the film that secured Rita Hayworth's sex goddess star status.On the screen they are watching, Glenn Ford enters a room and we see that the object of his gaze is a head of hair hanging down, the face obscured. A moment of cinematic physis erupts, when Gilda (Rita Hayworth), liftsher head and shakes her hair free from her face to reveal her smile, like a blossom bursting into bloom. Often quoted, the bounce of her head is cinema at itsmost magical; 'the seismic shock' Jean Epstein so adored in theAmerican close-up:
I will never find the way to say how I love American close-ups. Point blank. A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized. Now the tragedy is anatomical. The decor of thefifth act is this cornerof a cheek tornby a smile.Waiting for themoment when 1,000 me more meters of intrigue converge in a muscular denouement satisfies than the rest of the film.Muscular preambles ripplebeneath the skin.Shadows shift,tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotionunderlines the mouth with clouds. The orographyof theface vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles tryto split the fault.A wave carries them away.Crescendo. A muscle bridles.The lip is lacedwith tics like a theatrecurtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slitby a scalpel, a keyboard-likesmile cuts laterallyinto thecorner of the lips. (Epstein 1977:9)
171
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 While Johnny (Glenn Ford) is completely undone by this vision within Gilda, the hero of The Shawshank Redemption, Dufresne, takes thismoment to slip out of the theatre, as if taking her cue. Moved by the film in another direction, the reigning criminals of the prison follow and trapDufresne in the projection room to rape him. The effect on the spectator is terrifyingbecause one has been so disarmed by the close-up that one is all themore defenceless to endure the brutal scene that follows. Dufresne's resistance to the attackers becomes, in the end, the road to his escape and redemption. It is no accident of course that the film they are watching too is about shady dealings, virtue in unexpected places, and brutal sexual relationships. But it isRita Hayworth's technological viscerality in 'American close-up' that ignites the attempted rape and the hero's redemption. The brightest star fetish of all,Marilyn Monroe, had more than cult status in emergent revolutionary societies likeNicaragua and Cuba. Nearly fifteen years afterher death, the revolutionary poet Ernesto Cardinal published Oracion por Marilyn Monroe (Prayer for Marilyn Monroe), that identifiesher plight with imperialist oppression and ends with the admonition toGod: 'Next time, answer thephone' (Cardinal 1985:53). In an essay entitled 'AdiosMarilyn' Lisando Otero wrote, 'M.M., the onlyMonroe doctrine thatwe Cubans have accepted, became the perfect candidate for suicide'.12 Her appearance in Tomas Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment released in 1968, too has an allegoric dimension. The film begins at themoment inwhich the new government is taking shape (1961) when people are leaving Havana in droves and ends inOctober of 1962 with the 'Cuban Missile Crisis'. After returning from the airport where he has seen his family off bound forMiami, Sergio flips on the TV. 'Baby, I'm throughwith love', sings a downhearted Marilyn Monroe. This brief film clip on the television beckons from the - finale of her performance in Some Like itHot (Wilder, 1959 theyear of theRevolution) through the frame of the television, and quickly the image switches toAmerican soldiers goading the camera with lewd gestures through the fence at Guantanamo. In accord with Adorno's description of television as 'disenchanted enchantment' Sergio turns theTV off again (Adorno 1998:55). But to us, the viewers of the film,Marilyn is speaking from the grave, a grave that ismoreover, stillwarm, to say that she is giving up love's losing game. And unlike other renditions of blondes as symbols of the bourgeoisie, she clearly speaks forCuba too,which is no longer going along in the game ofmisbegotten love with theU.S.A. She whispers thismessage from the past, but, like a message in a bottle, it is uncorked in a quite different (forCuba at least) present.While by themaking and release of the film she surelywas dead, in the diegesis of the film she could be dead or alive, for she died inAugust of 1962, just before the story of the film ends. Gutierrez Alea plays here an uncanny game with time. In the context of her appearance on the living room tv in this 1968 film she is 'not quite dead yet.' By using her alive while dead, the layers of history thicken to create a permanent tension each time thismoment is screened. Though the filmwill be seen again and again and timeswill change, her image will always invoke a moment of temporal torsion between life and death. Nothing was more crucial to the revolution thanmaking its own history,while at the same time continuing its dialectical force. Such dynamism requires images for fuel, the
172
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 sortof imagesWalter Benjamin called 'dialectical images'. Dialectical images are images thatdemystify and reenchant,monads thatflash out of the past into the present, and in so doing set nature and second nature in dialectical tension. Marilyn Monroe's unparalleled kinship with the camera set her apart as an image. No recollection of a photo shootwith Marilyn Monroe fails to describe her almost instinctual affinitywith the camera. Some photographers say that she was themost photogenic person theyhad ever seen. She 'came alive' in frontof the camera; she was at her 'most comfortable' in frontof the camera; before the camera iswhere she showed her 'true self.' The nature girl of all timewas themost natural photographic subject of all. She was, and this is no small measure of her allure, nature and second nature all in one. At once dead and alive, 'Marilyn' travels like a monad from themythic past to us here and now. So fixed intoMemories of Under development, so wedged as thepast in thehere and now, she - awaits us in the film archive of natural history dialectics at a standstill. Moments of cinematic physis are moments inwhich the enciphered and petrified object reawakens before us (Adorno 1984:111). Alea, themaster revolutionary filmmaker, takes our pre-eminent form of second nature, the cinematic image, and transforms it into a dialectical image. Cinema holds a storehouse of these images, lying dormant, ready to burst forthas dialectical images. The uses towhich clips of film are put within film attest to the existence of what you might call a 'film archive of natural-history'. Pieces of films are brought out from their old surrounding and put into a new film, bringing something mythic from the old towork in transformativeservice of the new. - Just as the cinematographer in 2002 imparts life to the delicate emulsion of film 'it - loves blue light' in themaking of themovie, its final years are hardly inanimate. From theminute they are produced, films change, deteriorate.13 'Let's face it', writes Paolo Usai,
'the most stable medium known by human civilization is ceramic. Glass is all right. Stone may be affected by pollution. Canvas and wood have some problems. Something can be done about paper and frescoes, but the gelatin emulsion of a film has been for a hundred years a thin layer of organic material. Gelatin. Animal bones, crushed and melted into a semitransparent layer interspersed with crystals of silver salts. It won't last. It can't' (Usai 1999:43^14).
Like a living creature, celluloid smells putrid as it decays. In the end it is reduced to a
powder. The film archive of natural history is truly 'a charnel house of rotting interiorities', to cite Lukacs' description of second nature (Adorno 1984:118).14 At once new and old, these images are as unstable as they are potentially magical. These reified strips of time may remain just that,nonetheless cinema remains an archive fromwhich we can retrieve and reinvigorate images to suit our more mythic purposes. The blue flower in the land of technology is indeed the height of artifice,but that artifice, like all trickery,secrets away power, power no filmmaker can resist. They use it tomake people fall in love, tomake people rebel, tomake people think about the past to pry open the present and change the future.While the uses towhich technological re-enchantment is put range from the
173
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 melodramatic to the revolutionary, thepower of technological cinema ismagical, asMauss defined it; 'itdoes things' (Mauss 1975:19).
E-mail: [email protected]
Notes
* I want to thank:Lisabeth During, whose independencefrom and dexteritywith disciplinary borders inspiredand facilitatedwriting thispaper; Stephan Pascher, image help; and Birgit Meyer for editorial rigor. 1. Highlighting 'popular' film is important, because it is key tomany film projects, most notably the structural Avant-Garde to interrogate and often expose themachinations of film production, or as when the yellow filter, for example wafts across Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), the film seems to come off its sprocket in Ken Jacob's Tom Tom the Piper's Son (1969). 2. The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques, published monthly in Hollywood, CA since 1920. 3. Janusz Kaminski, ASC, is Steven Spielberg's longtime cinematographer. 4. 'There is no natural form in which human relations can be cast... without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process. We need only think of marriage, and without troubling to point to the developments of the nineteenth century we can remind ourselves of the way in which Kant... described the situation: 'Sexual community,' he says, 'is the reciprocal use ...... made by one person of the sexual organs and faculties of another marriage it's the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possessions of each other's sexual attributesfor theduration of theirlives'. (Lukacs 1971:100) 5. 'When its unusability is discovered, equipment becomes conspicious' (Heidegger 1962:102-3). 6. Gunning is reviving Eisenstein and his friend Yukevitch's term. 7. The pianola playing here is, unlike most of the sound in Touch of Evil, non-diegetic, and thus free to roam outside the movie hall.
8. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges) has a magnificent parody of such a use of nature when Hopsy (Henry Fonda) looks out to see the mountains and trees and the wind starts blowing Eve's (Barbara Stanwyk) hair wildly, the horses start to bray, and Eve's plot to ruin Hopsy's foolish ideal of romantic love is complete. 9. Cream separator, The Old and the New (Eisenstein, 1929); telescope, Dances with Wolves (Costner 1990); binocular,Robin Hood (Reynolds 1991); theodelite,Dersu Usala (Kurosawa 1975). The latteris a complex example, for it is the surveyorwho marvels, to thepoint of making drawings of it, at the way Dersu Usala uses the theodelite as the structure to build a hut; telephoneMildred Pierce (Curtiz 1945). as as 10. I discuss theoretical first contact well the issue of cinematic primitivism in detail in chapter 3 of Savage theory(Moore 2000). 11. For a detailed example of the image as fetishand itsredemptive potential see chapters5 and 10 of Savage Theory (Moore 2000.) 12. My translation. This complete biography, interview with Paris Match, annotated filmography, and accompanying essay is the most comprehensive and thoughtful volume on Monroe I have read to date. 13. For a thickdescription of such deterioration,see Usai 1994. 14. From Adomo citing Lukacs in 'The Idea of Natural-History': 'This nature [second nature] is not mute, corporeal and foreign to the senses like first nature: it is a petrified estranged complex of meaning that is no longer able to awaken inwardness; it is a charnel-house of rotted interiorities'.
174
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 He goes on to discuss the problem of awakening from second nature 'bringing it back to life' which Adorno then takes as not a theological resurrection, but rather 'what is here understood as natural-history [itself]' Thus begins the discussion of awakening ala Benjamin. 'When as in the case in the German play of lamentation, history comes onto the scene, it does so as a cipher to be read. "History" is writ across the countenance of nature in the sign language of transience' (Adorno 1984:118-119).
References
Adorno, Theodor
1998 Critical Models. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. 1984 The Idea of Natural-History. Telos 60:111-124. Bazin, Andre 1967 What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter 1991 Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Gesammelte Schriften Band 1-2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1999 The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press. 1986 Notes on the Cinematographer. Trans. Jonathan Griffin, London: Quartet Books. Cardinal, Ernesto 1985 Oracion por Marilyn Monroe. Managua: Editorial Nueca Nicaragua-Ediciones Monimbo. Carson, Anne 1998 Eros the Bittersweet. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Comolli, Jean-Louis 1986 Machines of the Visible. In: Philip Rosen et al (Eds.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press. Debries, Erwin 1930 Hollywood, wie es wirklich ist.Zurich & Leipzig: Orell FtissliVerlag. Epstein, Jean no. 1977 Magnification and other Writings. Trans. Stuart Liebman. October 3. [1921] Gunning, Tom nos. 1986 Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. Wide Angle 8, 3-4 (1986): 63-70. 1989 An Aesthetic ofAstonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator.Art & Text 34 (Spring, 1989). Hansen, Miriam 1993 With Skin andHair. Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993). Heidegger,Martin 1962 Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row. 1977 The Question Concerning Technologyand Other Essay. Trans.William Lovitt.New York: Harper and Row. Holbert, Jay 2002 Criminal Intent. American Cinematographer, July 2002. Lukacs, Georg Mass: MIT 1971 History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Press.
175
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 Mauss, Marcel 1975 A General Theory ofMagic. Trans. Robert Brain. New York: Norton. Moore, Rachel 2000 Savage Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Otero, Lisando n.d. Marilyn Monroe, In Memoriam. Havana: Cinemateca de Cuba ICAIC. Usai, Paolo Cherchi 1994 Burning Passions. London: BFI. 1999 A Model Image, iv. Decay Cinema: The art and aesthetics of moving image destruction. Stanford Humanities Review 7(2): 1-49.
176
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