Copy from DBC Webarchive Copy from: Art Nouveau and the Contemporary Horror Film This content has been stored according to an agreement between DBC and the publisher. www.dbc.dk e-mail:[email protected] 28/6/2017 www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/Art­Nouveau.aspx DU ER HER: KOSMORAMA | TIDSSKRIFT FOR FILMFORSKNING OG FILMKULTUR / ARTIKLER / ART NOUVEAU, PRODUCTION DESIGN, AND THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM ART NOUVEAU, PRODUCTION DESIGN, AND THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM 16 JUNI 2017 / LUCY FISCHER This article explores the relationship between the contemporary horror film and Art Nouveau design, mise­en­scène, and thematic. In the era of Art Nouveau’s ascendancy, around the turn of the 20th century, the style (with its eroticism and whiplash curves) was often seen as troubling and unsettling, and words like “pernicious,” “perverse,” and “horrific” were attached to it in the press. It is this sense of Art Nouveau that contemporary horror film directors revive and evoke in creating their cinematic tableaux of terror. The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears. Choices concerning a film’s production design are made for numerous reasons. Most obvious is authenticity, by which the look of sets and props conforms to the era and culture in which the drama takes place. In movies of the 1930s, set amongst the wealthy leisured classes, for instance, production design was often marked by an Art Deco sensibility, one associated with modern chic and luxury. Alternately, decisions concerning art direction can be made on a largely aesthetic level in an attempt to create arresting screen beauty. This might be said of films like Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) or Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). Often, however, determinations of production design are made for symbolic or thematic reasons linked to the film’s narrative. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), for instance, a sense of the aridity and toxicity of the industrial world is created through a color palette that ranges from putrid yellows, browns and greens to icy antiseptic whites and blues. In most instances, production design can be attributed to a mixture of all three rationales. In the case of the horror film, art direction must primarily invoke generic motifs of perversity and terror. This is true of certain contemporary works that employ an Art Nouveau aesthetic to achieve this effect. In utilizing the design school to signify monstrosity, these films mimic earlier critical conceptions of the movement that regarded it as grotesque, dreadful, and unsettling. In pursuing links between Art Nouveau and cinema, I am one of only a few scholars to note such connections. In fact, if one searches the indices and Tables of Content of countless volumes on cinema, one finds but a scant mention of the term. There are many reasons for this omission. [1] First, Art Nouveau’s popularity was short lived, from the late 19th century to the beginning of the First World War. Second, by the time, films became refined enough to employ sophisticated mise­ en­scene, the heyday of Art Nouveau had passed. Third, Film Studies has not generally paid much heed to the links between cinema and other art forms than literature and theater (favoring instead its connections to politics, social history, and popular culture). Art Nouveau In order to appreciate Art Nouveau’s influence on horror film production design, it is necessary to provide some background. Art Nouveau, was primarily a trend in the applied arts. While the term derives from its French incarnation (and was associated with the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle where it debuted), the movement also had branches in Germany, Austria, England, Belgium Scotland, Spain, Italy, and Russia. Given Art Nouveau’s intent to create new forms indicative of the http://www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/Art­Nouveau.aspx 1/16 28/6/2017 www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/Art­Nouveau.aspx age, it left its imprint on such diverse crafts as: architecture, interior decoration, glassware, pottery, statuary, illustration, fabric patterning, jewelry, metal work, wood carving, set design, and painting ­ – its goal being a Wagnerian Total Art. Art Nouveau had certain favored tropes and subjects. As for the first, it was known for the so­called “whiplash curve” – a sinuous, wavy line that opposed the geometric right angle. As for the second, it was fixated on Nature – seen as an antidote to the new, soulless, industrial world. Here one notes Art Nouveau’s ubiquitous floral and animal imagery as seen in countless glass pieces by Émile Gallé. The movement was also obsessed with the image of Woman – as displayed in the work of Alphonse Mucha. With a focus on the female, came intimations of the Erotic, this, in a period still ruled by Victorian morality. Finally, Art Nouveau borrowed modalities from the Orient (primarily Japan and North Africa). The former can be seen, for instance, in Eugène Rousseau’s “Carp Vase” (1878­84), and the latter in the movement’s architectural use of the Islamic arabesque (as in buildings by Antoni Gaudí). When Art Nouveau was first promoted as a design style, many of the era saw its iconography as profoundly troubling. For some, the whiplash curve was a dizzying, vertiginous form and a refusal of the staid straight line. For others, its intricate, undulating curves communicated a sense of entrapment. As for the movement’s natural imagery, though Art Nouveau often depicted harmless and lovely creatures (like the butterfly or peacock), it also portrayed disconcerting ones – like the bat or snake. And while its vision of Woman was frequently Romantic (as in glass pieces by René Lalique), it could also be disquieting, as in Gustav Klimt’s painting “Pallas Athene” (1898). Furthermore, Art Nouveau’s rampant Orientalism tethered it to the ethnic Other – seen as primitive and inferior in an age of Western Imperialism. Finally, Art Nouveau was not only sensually suggestive, it was often viewed as salacious and risqué, as in the graphic work of Aubrey Beardsley, with its strange androgyny and sadistic sexuality. For this reason, if one peruses newspapers of the period (for instance, The New York Times) one finds the following pejorative adjectives associated with works of Art Nouveau: weird, corrupt, unhealthy, meaningless, fantastical, injurious, inharmonious, and even criminal. Several other negative epithets are hurled at the movement by a writer in 1915 who regrets: “the pernicious and monstrous developments, or rather perversions, which the misguided schools of painting and sculpture have undergone in recent years.”[2] But there is another charge that was hurled at Art Nouveau in the era of its ascendancy that brings us closer to the film genre I will consider. A writer in the New York Times of November 20, 1904 complained about its “horrid forms,” [3] while another of July 17, 1927 referred to its “horrors of bad taste.”[4] A more extensive meditation on the theme was articulated by a writer in the Times of January 1907 in an article about modernist bookbinding. The author speaks of a designer who “has followed the spirit of l’art nouveau, and has created an ignis fatuus (in other words, a horror show). He continues: “[I]n his search for the new [the designer] has found the grotesque. Serpents crawl over human skulls and wriggle in and out of his border lines or with protruding tongues stare out at us from behind foliage or through a crevice in some of his designs.”[5] It is no accident that these writers make reference to horror in describing what they view as an abhorrent design movement – a term that signifies fear, disgust, and fright. Furthermore, some decades later, Walter Benjamin invoked a similar word, phantasmagoria, to describe what he deemed to be the unsavory Art Nouveau interior – thus referencing a type of 19th century magic lantern show that projected eerie images of ghosts, specters, and zombies.[6] Given all this, it should be no surprise that we sometimes find Art Nouveau linked iconographically to the horror genre – be it on stage or on screen. In fact, in Paris, in the same era in which Art Nouveau surfaced, there was a dramatic form of that type, the Grand Guignol, performed at a theater that bore its name. A description of the genre by historian Mel Gordon in fact, might serve as one for Art Nouveau: “A product of fin­de­siècle France, the Grand Guignol managed to outrage its public as it explored the back alleys of unfettered desire, aesthetic impropriety, and nascent psychological trends.”(Gordon 1988: 2) The Grand Guignol Theater was opened by Oscar Méténier in 1897 – only two years after the birth of cinema – so they were contemporary forms. Plays produced there focused on “slice of death” plot lines: “Every social taboo of good taste was cracked and shattered. This formula would attract the French public that slaked its blood and lust fascination with the morbid devouring of pulp novels and unlikely tabloid exposés.”(Ibid.,19) The Grand Guignol’s audience was quite diverse and included members of the Parisian avant­garde – so we can imagine some of the practitioners of Art Nouveau attending.( Ibid.,18) Significantly, the theater was one of the venues used to project films at the 1900 Paris Exposition which introduced the world to Art Nouveau.[7] Art Direction and Cinematic Horror Certainly early cinema shared a lot with the Grand Guignol in its taste for sensationalism, violence, and melodrama. And a British poster from 1920 reveals that the Grand Guignol form soon migrated to the movie screen. Eventually, however, the cinematic Grand Guignol morphed into the horror film, a narrative mode that is still with us today.