cinema’s doppelgängers Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) cinema’s doppelgängers. Copyright © 2021 by Doug Dibbern. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or for- mat, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2021 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-62-2 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-56-1 (ePDF) doi: 10.53288/0320.1.00 lccn: 2021939314 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book Design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei punctumbooks spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion DOUG CINEMA’S DOPPELGÄNGERS DOPPELGÄNGERS CINEMA’S DIBBERN to The Omega Collective, Whoever, Wherever, and Whenever They May Be Contents Overture. Prolegomenon on the Aesthetics of Non-linearity 17 Interpolation: Unmasking the Fictive 20 Causal Explanation and Counterfactual Speculation: Materialist Historiography’s Aesthetic Demands 23 Part One. Revising the Canon: Outline for an Alternative History of the Cinema 33 Andromeda (d. Cesar Vallejo, France, 1935) 42 Autumn Overture (d. Mordecai Rothenberg, Germany, 1959) 45 L’Avventura (d. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1960) 49 Bike Repair (d. Simon Balimwezo, Uganda, 2001) 56 Butcher (d. Guillermo Pilar, Mexico, 1972) 61 Cab Driver (d. Mikhail Iossenovich, Russia, 1948) 64 California (d. Henry Dawes, USA, 1947) 70 Charlie Chan in Los Angeles (d. Robert Florey, USA, 1943) 74 Christiane (d. Marie Lebrun, France, 1981) 81 Chronicle of the Years of Embers (d. Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Algeria, 1975) 85 Comancheria (d. John Ford, USA, 1956) 92 The Dawn Light Is Harsh But Bright (d. Praew Tanitwanantrith, Thailand, 1978) 99 Decline and Fall (d. Arsenii Belyakov, Russia, 1935) 104 Disco Giraffe (d. Khadija Chishuli, Tanzania/USA, 1989) 110 Distant Star (d. Obonye Mosweu, Botswana, 1933) 114 The Elevator (d. Rimachi Alvarado, Peru, 1993) 118 Father’s Diary (d. Park Gon-woo, Korea, 1966) 123 Faust (d. F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1926) 127 Fear on the Street (d. Derrick Hampton, USA, 1955) 133 Gangster Film (d. Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland, 1998) 139 Grand Prix (d. Louis Belfont, France, 1934) 146 Gunned Down (d. Lloyd Collins, USA, 1941) 152 Harakiri (d. Kobayashi Masaki, Japan, 1966) 157 Heimat (d. Otto Preminger, Germany, 1960) 163 Helene Jaussner (d. Renata Gombrowicz, Germany, 1977) 168 In the Courtyard (d. Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1954) 172 In the Shadows (d. Im Chang-yul, Korea, 1965) 179 LAPD (d. Robert Altman, USA, 1973) 184 Late Spring (d. Ozu Yasujiro, Japan, 1949) 188 The Maltese Falcon (d. Raoul Walsh, USA, 1942) 195 Manila Neon (d. Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1977) 198 The Michael Douglas Show; Or, the Performance of the Self in the Messianic and Wounded Eyes of Orson Welles (d. Shirley Jacobs, USA, 1975) 202 Mountain Retreat (d. Dao Han-lin, China, 1956) 207 Only Angels Have Wings (d. Howard Hawks, USA, 1940) 214 Paper Flowers (d. Guru Dutt, India, 1959) 219 Paris in the Evening (d. Marcel L’Enfant, France, 1932) 226 Phoenix (d. Li Bo, China, 1998) 234 Prize Fight (d. Randall Jennings, USA, 1912) 239 Reeds at the Water’s Edge (d. Jules Dassin, USA, 1962) 244 Retards (d. Kimberly Zaichek, USA, 1986) 250 The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny (d. Ritwik Ghatak, India, 1970) 255 Sally the Sewing Machine Operator (d. The Omega Collective, USA, 2008) 259 Spider Web (d. Koda Yukichi, Japan, 1935) 266 The Three Musketeers (d. Allan Dwan, USA, 1913) 272 Under the Docks (d. William Chesterton, USA, 1935) 277 The United Nations (d. Orson Welles, 1974, USA) 282 Vaci Street (d. Mihály Kertész, Hungary, 1952) 287 War Photographer (d. Chondrak Sridripranandra, Thailand, 1963) 292 Wet Pavement (d. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1946) 296 Part Two. Networks of Origins: Outline for an Alternative History of the Cinema 303 1936: The Voice of Industrial Collapse — The Talkies, the Publix Theaters Decision, and the Dawn of Television 306 1970: Invasion of the Intellectuals — The Academic Study of Film 320 1923: Zukor’s Controlling Vision — The Vertically Integrated, Collusive Oligopoly 326 1913: Experimental Cinema — Allan Dwan, Randall Jennings, and the Language of Film 336 1965: Re-Mapping Aesthetics — Democratic Revolutions in the German and Japanese Spheres 341 2021: The Past as the Product of the Future — Virtual Reality and the Death of the Art Form 350 1895: Against Ontology 354 Bibliography 365 Tlön may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men. — Jorge Luis Borges “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius” OVERTURE Prolegomenon on the Aesthetics of Non-linearity Ozu Yasujiro found himself pacing through the dark. It was De- cember 12, 1936 and it seemed that the world was shifting. The director hardly ever worried, his lead actor Ryu Chishu recalled, but that morning he looked as he if were “drifting, like a frag- ment of a cloud, along an ever-widening spiral,”1 first circling around the camera, then around the dining room table where he’d arranged the shoot for that day, and finally along the perim- eter of the soundstage itself, his hands clasped behind his back, head down in contemplation, no longer aware of the set he’d so painstakingly designed the night before with teacups, flow- ers, and sake bottles arranged methodically across the table and floor to provide a sense of depth to the image and to display his authorial style to the intellectual critics in Tokyo who’d already heralded him as the leading filmmaker of his generation. Ozu wasn’t troubled by the scene, Ryu said; he’d always planned every shot in a day’s work long in advance, after all. Acting on an Ozu set was like “being a salaryman — perhaps more like working at a flower shop than a bank, but a simple job 1 Ryu Chishu, I Know Nothing, trans. Kyoko Hirano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2001), 101. 17 CINEMA’S DOPPELGÄNGERS like any other.”2 No, the director’s perambulations were unusu- ally anxious that morning because of the meeting he’d just had with Shochiku president Kido Shiro, who’d finally confirmed what everyone at the studio had quietly expected but also qui- etly feared for several months. Soon after Gerhard Mannheim’s The Rhineland premiered as the world’s first all-talking picture, earning windfall profits in Germany earlier that year, Holly- wood’s three major studios had announced that they’d follow suit with a slate of movies recorded entirely with spoken dia- logue. And that morning, Kido had finally told his favorite di- rector the inevitable: that the company would soon be joining the American and German film industries in making the transi- tion to a production schedule consisting entirely of recorded, synchronized sound, and that the movie that Ozu was then di- recting — Tokyo Winter, to be released in 1937 — would there- fore be his final silent film. Perhaps because the sensational crowds that thronged to the first talkies had made Ozu nervous about the future of his career, he and his screenwriting collaborator Noda Kogo had written an especially somber script that spring, obsessed with the conjoined themes of birth and death and with what Hara Tatsuki has called “Ozu’s fatalistic analysis of diachronic osmo- sis” — that is, his concern with the past’s tendency to permeate the present and the present’s tendency to continually re-imag- ine the past.3 And in this sense, Ozu’s film can function as the quintessential emblem of the juncture between the silent and the sound eras and thus the quintessential emblem, too, of film history itself, which scholars have similarly defined by the con- ceptions of intertwining deaths and births, by the folding over and permeability of time. Tokyo Winter opens in unexpectedly dramatic fashion for Ozu, with a husband leaning in to listen to his wife as she rises 2 Ibid., 145. 3 Hara Tatsuki, “Ozu’s Anti-Chronology: Tokyo Winter and Time’s Perme- ability,” in Ozu: Formalism, Ideology, Interpretation, ed. David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117. 18 OVERTURE painfully from her deathbed. He cuts from an intense close-up of the woman’s whispering lips to a series of intertitles in which she admits to her husband that she’d been married once before she met him, that her first husband had died in the 1923 earth- quake, that she’d been pregnant at the time, and that she’d given her baby daughter away to a childless couple because she had been too ravaged by grief to take care of her on her own.