<?page no="0"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26 The Visual Culture of Modernism Edited by Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer <?page no="1"?> The Visual Culture of Modernism Edited by Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer <?page no="2"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Lukas Erne Volume 26 <?page no="3"?> The Visual Culture of Modernism Edited by Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer <?page no="4"?> Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. © 2011 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Werkdruckpapier. Internet: http: / / www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren Printed in Germany ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-6673-7 <?page no="5"?> Table of Contents Introduction 11 Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam) Modernity: The Troubled Trope 21 Scott Curtis (Northwestern University) The Efficiency of Images: Educational Effectiveness and the Modernity of Motion Pictures 41 Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt) Body Rebuilding: Tracing the Body at the Dawn of the Cybernetic Age 61 Elisabeth Bronfen (Zurich) Hitler Goes Pop: Totalitarianism, Avant-garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment 85 Johannes Mahlknecht (Innsbruck) Promotion vs. Suppression: Intermedial Relationships between Early Narrative Film and its Fan Magazine Fictionalizations 105 Christian Quendler (Innsbruck) I Am a Camera: The Development of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin across Stage, Screen and Time 119 Viorica Patea (Salamanca) The Poetics of the Avant-Garde: Modernist Poetry and Visual Arts 137 Kangqin Li (Leicester) Presenting the Real: Hopperesque Updike in “In Football Season” (1962) 153 Heike Schäfer (Mannheim) The Cinema and Modernist Innovation: Serial Representation and Cinematic Immediacy Effects in Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 169 <?page no="6"?> Michael Röösli (Geneva) Picturing the Depression: Ambivalent Politics of Representation in FSA Photography 185 Carola Moresche (Innsbruck) Haptic Close-ups and Montage: Surrealist Desire in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou 197 Cornelia Klecker (Innsbruck) Timeand Space-Montage in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 209 Julia Straub (Bern) Pathetic Copycats: Female Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 225 Kimberly A. Frohreich (Geneva) Making the “Monstrous” Visible? Reading “Difference” in Contemporary Fantastic Film and Television 239 Notes on Contributors 255 Index of Names 261 <?page no="7"?> General Editor’s Preface SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE , the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE . Nonsymposium volumes are usually collections of papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE , in particular conferences of SANAS , the Swiss Association for North American Studies and, more recently, of SAMEMES , the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic and - broadly - cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL , including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Prof. Lukas Erne, Département de langue et littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genève, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland, e-mail: lukas.erne@unige.ch. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE , in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at http: / / www.saute.ch. Lukas Erne <?page no="9"?> Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank all those who presented papers at the 2010 conference co-hosted by the Austrian Association for American Studies ( AAAS ) and the Swiss Association for North American Studies ( SANAS ). Particular thanks go to Cornelia Klecker and the researchers involved in the “Framing Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film” project of the Austrian Science Fund ( FWF ) at the University of Innsbruck for sharing their scholarly network and expertise. SANAS gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. We wish to recognize the efforts of those colleagues who graciously assisted in the peer-review process for this volume and to thank them for their contribution. We also thank Keith Hewlett for his meticulous editorial preparation of the essays in this volume and, for their work on the book cover, Erwin Feyersinger and Martin Heusser. <?page no="11"?> Introduction The topic of this volume “The Visual Culture of Modernism” immediately provokes two related questions: why bother with the visuality of a historical period which is separated from our own times by almost an entire century? And, what is the relevance of such an historically informed topic for the present? The recent paradigmatic changes in media culture, which occurred around the turn of the millennium, parallel the media revolution before and after World War I in more than one way. Groundbreaking transitions in modes of communication and representation, epitomized in the new medium of cinema, immediately started to compete with literature’s longstanding status as the accepted cultural leit-medium. While rivaling literature, film also exerted an unprecedented influence on all other cultural fields by testing its supremacy within the arts, communication, education, and science, to mention just a few. A similar landslide of innovation in the field of communication and representation occurred in the last two decades of the twentieth century when new computerized media penetrated all traditional fields of aesthetics as well as material culture. This recent digital turn is still to realize its full potential and invites the wide range of current investigations in which images, film, and literary texts are undergoing a massive reexamination under the auspices of digitalization. It seems, therefore, worthwhile to re-evaluate modernism as a paradigmatic moment of media transformation and treat it as an historical case study for the general shifts which large-scale media changes inevitably entail. Whenever new media replace more traditional ones, central concerns of philosophy and aesthetics surface and have to be renegotiated. Questions concerning what constitutes an “original” and a “representation,” or basic distinctions between what counts as “art” and what belongs to the realm of “nature” lie at the heart of negotiations in the wake of media transformations. The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 11-20. <?page no="12"?> 12 Introduction Triggered by this landslide change in media practice through the digital turn, recent literary debates have gravitated around the status of what constitutes an original work of art and the status of imitation. We are all aware of Helene Hegemann’s 2010 novel Axolotle Roadkill which, in a casual manner, uses digital data from the internet in order to copy-paste them into the text of her acclaimed novel. Hegemann justifies her copying with reference to the cultural practices of our age, namely, “that the production process [of her novel] is connected with this decade and the procedures of this decade, in other words, with the substitution of this excessive right of authorship by a right to copy and transform.” 1 These contemporary phenomena might have their counterparts in the modernist collages of Pablo Picasso, the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, or the intertextuality of T.S. Eliot. Authors and artists in periods of media transition test the boundaries of original and copy, of artifact and imitation. In our field, we must continually come to terms with these questions, specifically with respect to what constitutes original research. Sometimes, as for example, in recent cases à la Hegemann in our discipline, it is quite simple to reach an answer and it does not require a philosopher to judge and reach a verdict. In other cases, as in some of the modernist examples mentioned before, it might need an entire conference and an accompanying volume only to touch upon or scratch the surface of these questions. This SPELL volume on “The Visual Culture of Modernism” is the outcome of a conference jointly organized by the Swiss Association for North American Studies and the Austrian Association for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, 12-14 November 2010. This format of bilateral collaboration has a longstanding and fruitful tradition. For more than two decades the two associations have been holding conferences together, both in Switzerland and in Austria. So when two years ago we considered the possibility of organizing the annual conference at Innsbruck together, we immediately jumped at the opportunity. The choice of the conference theme was also partly shaped by the research traditions of both American Studies Associations. Switzerland has produced a large number of scholars in the field of American modernism and visual culture. A great deal of this interest in the visual in Swiss American Studies is indebted to our dear colleague, friend and mentor, the late Max Nänny who, as Professor in Zurich, was a founding figure of Word and Image Studies in our academic discipline. On the Austrian side, the topic of visuality also seemed a natural choice for the annual conference theme. A very promising group of young scholars have embarked on research projects in this particular 1 Hegemann, “Der Ruhm gebührt den Haaren”; my translation. <?page no="13"?> Introduction 13 field in American Studies departments in Austria. A great deal of this recent “young” interest in the visual aspect of American culture in Austria goes back more than thirty years when the American Studies Department at the University of Innsbruck started the tradition of employing film and film studies, both in teaching and scholarly research. In the intervening years the departmental film archive has grown to more than 20,000 titles. The department also hosts the three-year research project “Framing Modernism” funded by the Austrian Science Fund, investigating the periphery of fiction and film in the modernist period. This research includes frontispieces and dust jackets of novels, as well as posters, trailers, and opening or end credits of films. In the vicinity of this research platform about half a dozen young Americanists in Innsbruck have been working on their doctoral and postdoctoral projects, thus making Innsbruck the ideal venue for this conference theme. The large response to our call for papers makes clear that the topic was not only able to reach numerous Americanists within and beyond our two associations but also to cross different levels of academic hierarchies. We have graduate students sharing their ongoing research for their MA theses, doctoral students publishing the results of their dissertations, and we have post-docs and full professors contributing to the conference theme. Reaching these diverse target groups and thus documenting the state of the research in this field from multiple vantage points was our intention. The present collection of essays assembles a small sample of the over forty papers originally presented at the conference in Innsbruck. Indirections: Cinema and Visuality The keynote address by Thomas Elsaesser, “Modernity: The Troubled Trope,” functions as an overall introduction to the volume by claiming the stakes of this kind of historical inquiry into the visual. In a succinct and simultaneously provocative manner the doyen of European film studies takes us on a grand tour through the intricate repercussions of the visual in modernist aesthetics, film theory, and its legacy in postmodern theorizing. This erudite synopsis of the theoretical essence of the recent visual turn against the background of the modernist situation in the first half of the twentieth century follows two major lines of argumentation: on the one hand, it provides a perspectival bird’s-eye view of modernist visuality in the light of later theorizing; on the other, in an almost programmatic stance, which is reminiscent of modernist manifestos, Elsaesser challenges the entire project of the conference and its proceedings. He questions the validity of confronting <?page no="14"?> 14 Introduction modernism’s preoccupation with the visual in a direct manner. In his conclusion Elsaesser argues for an indirect approach to the topic, treating the phenomenon of the visual as an emerging entity from a variety of discourses which should, at first sight, not directly connect to the visual as such. In other words, the best way to explore modernism’s visuality is via a detour through other fields of inquiry in order to arrive eventually at a better understanding of the visual. Elsaesser’s plea for indirection echoes key patterns of postmodern theorizing which privilege representations or imitations of entities over the alleged real thing. Baudrillardean “simulation,” Derridean “différance,” or the “representationalism” of New Historicism find a common denominator in stylizing reflections over the seemingly unmediated object. Most essays in this volume, consciously or unconsciously, follow Elsaesser’s advice of indirection. Scott Curtis’ “The Efficiency of Images: Educational Effectiveness and the Modernity of Motion Pictures” deliberately puts Elsaesser’s program into practice. As a specialist of early science films, Curtis approaches early filmic iconography via scientific and economic discourses of the 1910s and 1920s, thereby emphasizing the heuristic quality of the filmic medium in laboratory-like settings. Curtis’ reading shows how the visual language of early scientific films mirrors the overall discourse of efficiency in the modernist period at large, including economics, medicine, ergonomics, and philosophy. In a similar vein, Vinzenz Hediger’s “Body Rebuilding: Tracing the Body at the Dawn of the ‘Cybernetic Age’” uses the concept of the human body in post-industrial production processes in order to delineate an age of obsolescence. This effacing of the body manifests itself in medical and anatomical discourses, as well as in modernist filmmaking, including Frank Bunker Gilbreth’s industrial workflow films. Hediger’s analysis of superfluous physicality pays specific attention to on-screen embodiments, which oscillate between the corporeality of the body builder, the body of obese, and the physicality of the cyborg. Elisabeth Bronfen’s “Hitler goes Pop: Totalitarianism, Avant-garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment” starts with Adolf Hitler’s speeches on art in order to isolate kernels of a fascist aesthetics. This aesthetics is, not surprisingly, at work in the propaganda films of the Third Reich director Leni Riefenstahl. However, what comes as a surprise in Bronfen’s close readings of selected American films of the World War II period, including Busby Berkeley’s Dames and Walt Disney’s Bambi, is the indebtedness of these films to an aesthetics of fascism which is structurally analogous to Riefenstahl’s transformations or adaptations of Hitler’s reflections on art. <?page no="15"?> Introduction 15 Adaptations: Word and Image Early narrative film, however, is also very much indebted to even more straight-forward concepts of adaptation. Early experiments in filmic narration try to transcend the pure aesthetics of “attraction” by associating themselves with literary texts. This can mean that a fictional text serves as the basis for a filmic adaptation or that a literary text follows a filmic narrative. The two essays in this section explore these two modes of adaptation from two very distinct but narratologically imbued vantage points. Johannes Mahlknecht’s “Promotion vs. Suppression: Intermedial Relationships between Early Narrative Film and its Fan Magazine Fictionalizations” investigates one aspect of the interdependence between literature and early film. Rather than tracing the mutual interconnectedness of the two media on a structural level, Mahlknecht analyzes the specific historical phenomenon of fan magazine fictionalization, in which film and fiction try to represent the same story line in a parallel way. Fan magazine fictionalization is an early instance in which film as an emerging new medium relies on literature as an older narrative medium in order to compensate for the shortcomings of early film in plot continuity and in order to contribute to the status of film as an accepted new art form. The close readings of two one-reelers and their respective fictionalizations allow Mahlknecht to anatomize key dimensions of the transitional period from the early “cinema of attractions” to the “Hollywood narrative film” from an unconventional word and image vantage point. Christian Quendler’s “I Am a Camera: The Development of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin across Stage, Screen and Time” approaches modernist media adaptations through the trope of the “camera eye.” Using Isherwood’s novel I Am a Camera together with its stage adaptation and film version, Quendler is able to trace the popular concept of the “camera eye” both in literary and filmic texts. His comparison dissects one of the key visual metaphors in early twentieth-century narratology, which fascinated commentators on both literature and film. Sister Arts: Literature and Painting The mutual exchange between literature and visual arts has a longstanding history in aesthetics, going back to classical and early modern dimensions of the paragone or the concept of the sister arts. In the modernist period, however, this mutual exchange between literature and painting as the two leitmedia of western cultural history enters a new and <?page no="16"?> 16 Introduction unprecedented phase of mutual interconnectedness. The two essays in this section approach the sister arts phenomenon in a twofold manner by painting an overall picture of this exchange in modernist movements and by zooming in on one concrete example of this interart indebtedness. Viorica Patea’s “The Poetics of the Avant-Garde: Modernist Poetry and Visual Arts” provides a cursory survey of the interdependence between modernist literary poetics and its repercussions in the visual arts. She examines a large array of key concepts in the oeuvre of the most influential literary modernists by connecting them to the major trends in the visual arts of the period, including Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Kangqin Li’s “Presenting the Real: Hopperesque Updike in ‘In Football Season’ (1962)” addresses the traditional concept of the sister arts of literature and painting in a structural close reading of selected texts by John Updike and paintings by Edward Hopper. Her analyses elicit a particular modernist aesthetic, which is indebted to realism while at the same time overtly subverting some of realism’s key concepts in an original and idiosyncratic way. Li specifically traces subtle defamiliarizations of the Euclidean central perspective in Hopper’s visual oeuvre and their idiosyncratic adaptations in Updike’s fiction. This parallel reading of painting and fiction with respect to two canonical figures in twentieth-century American art and literature provides a very focused yet at the same time conceptual explanation of a particular modernist aesthetics in which the two leitmedia of literature and painting subscribe to an interdependent deep-structure. Framings: Grammars of the Photograph Intricately interwoven with the development of modernist painting in particular and modernist art in general is, of course, photography. The photographic image stands at the beginning of a number of technical innovations in the nineteenth century, all of which are considered to have brought about a revolution in representational thinking. Although no longer a new medium at the end of the nineteenth century, photography underwent radical transformations throughout the modernist period with respect to pre-cinematic scientific experiments, mechanical mass reproducibility, and journalistic applicability. This new status of photography asked for a new mode of imbuing the photographic image with meaning, in the sense that the period had to develop a new grammar of the photograph, which in turn proliferated into other media, including film and literature. <?page no="17"?> Introduction 17 Heike Schäfer’s “The Cinema and Modernist Innovation: Serial Representation and Cinematic Immediacy Effects in Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits” uses precursors to film technology, such as Eadweard Muybridge’s and Etienne-Jules Marey’s photographic experiments with capturing movement, in order to read Gertrude Stein’s early literary portraits. In a number of close readings of Steinean texts as well as on the basis of Stein’s personal comments on the filmic deep-structure of some of her literary pieces, Schäfer offers a stunningly persuasive lever for undoing some of the intricacies of Steinean prose from an intermedial perspective which goes beyond the traditional cubism trajectory in Stein criticism. In his essay “Picturing the Depression: Ambivalent Politics of Representation in FSA Photography” Michael Röösli looks at photography at the moment of its widespread mechanical reproducibility in print media. Using Farm Security Administration photography and its pragmatic instruction discourses for photographers under contract provides an incisive analysis of this watershed in media history. From his example Röösli elicits a dominant visual grammar for the new medium of journalism photography, and yet at the same time he teases out how practitioners of the new medium subvert and undermine the new code for their idiosyncratic purposes. Carola Moresche’s “Haptic Close-ups: Montage and Surrealist Desire in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou” focuses on frame and montage as the photographic building blocks of cinema. Her essay establishes a connection between Surrealist selfdefinitions and modernist reflections on montage techniques in film. On that basis Moresche juxtaposes Buñuel’s paradigmatic Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou with Stroheim’s epic film Greed. What comes as a surprise is that Stroheim’s close-up montage sequences share structural features with a Surrealist aesthetics. What is even more surprising is that both Greed and Un Chien Andalou rely on a predominantly haptic dimension in their close-up montage sequences, which in turn converges with Surrealist self-conceptions. Imitations: Film and Television Modes of mutual imitation are, however, not restricted to modernist phenomena or the historical period of modernism per se. Literary modernism produced a number of model discourses which resurface in a seemingly novel and innovative manner around the turn of the millennium in mainstream film and television. The essays in this section deal with these imitations of the predominant narratological features of <?page no="18"?> 18 Introduction early twentieth-century literature in a number of contemporary filmic formats. Cornelia Klecker’s “Timeand Space-Montage in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours” focuses on montage as a specifically modernist aesthetic principle, both in literature and film. Starting with Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film, Klecker reads modernist stream-of-consciousness techniques in parallel with filmic timeand space-montage. Going back to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway as the literary model for Michael Cunningham’s novel and its film adaptation, Klecker shows how modernist narratological innovations enter contemporary mainstream film in a belated manner. Thereby, she is able to account for some of the historical sources of the fascination for complex or “mind tricking” narratives in recent cinema. Julia Straub’s “Pathetic Copycats: Female Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films” enters visuality via the melodramatic by extrapolating an essentially visual quality in melodrama per se. Straub exemplifies this privileging of the visual with respect to the melodramatic heroines in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo and David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. In both cases the reduplication of a female character in the sense of a copycat-like imitation lies at the heart of the melodramatic. By deliberately choosing figures that are imitations without originals, Straub’s filmic case studies of fetish-driven nostalgic visuality provide a fresh and innovative approach to traditional discussions of the logic of the male gaze in cinema. Kimberly Frohreich’s “Making the ‘Monstrous’ Visible? Reading ‘Difference’ in Contemporary Fantastic Film and Television” selects the highly charged modernist trope of “passing,” which we find at work in Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1928) or in John M. Stahl’s film Imitation of Life (1934), and applies its structural features to contemporary television series. The concept of African Americans passing for white as rendered in modernist fiction and melodrama finds its continuation in homosexual passing, which in turn has recently undergone a transformation in twenty-first-century fantastic television series about vampires and other non-humans. Frohreich pinpoints the mechanism of passing for non-humans in these popular culture media and compares them to structurally analogous concepts in older race and gender discourses. *** The main focus of this volume is to address the concept of visuality in the modernist period as a paradigmatic historical case of media <?page no="19"?> Introduction 19 transition. In doing so, it was possible to isolate some samples of these constants of media shifts in general and to trace some modernist legacies in recent media developments. The essays in this collection approach this topic from a variety of vantage points which, in many cases, do justice to a methodological mode of indirection as pointed out in Thomas Elsaesser’s opening piece. Starting from a variety of discourses outside the traditional dimensions of the visual, they nevertheless focus on media pertinent to visuality, including film, photography, painting, television, or literature. In their attempt to highlight how these media mutually interconnect and sustain each other, the essays contribute to an emergent concept of the visual in the modernist period, which in turn documents the paradigmatic dimensions of media transitions in general. Mario Klarer, Innsbruck <?page no="20"?> 20 Introduction References Hegemann, Helene. “Der Ruhm gebührt den Haaren.” http: / / www.sueddeutsche.de/ kultur/ autorin-helene-hegemannuntermieter-im-eigenen-kopf-1.51981-2. 8 February 2010. <?page no="21"?> Modernity: The Troubled Trope Thomas Elsaesser The essay argues that the term Modernism, since the 1970s, has to be seen within a divided semantic field of force, where Modernism, Modernisation and Modernity connote different approaches and even embody opposed world views in the face of the changes and transformation that the idea of the “modern” wants to signal. In particular, a number of distinct tropes of “modernity” can be identified, such as “the metropolis and modern life” (taking its cue from Walter Benjamin), “the cinematic city” (focused on the impact of moving pictures on urban lifestyles, questions of gender and consumption) and the “history of vision” trope which, following Michel Foucault’s disciplinary regimes, argues that modernity is characterised by the soft, but coercive and regulatory powers of vision. Reviewing these tropes from the perspective of cinema studies, and its renewed investigation of “early cinema” and the pre-history of cinema, the essay comes to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in these particular fields at least, the most exciting aspects of twentieth-century modernity from our contemporary situation are not necessarily visual, while the most pertinent thinking about the visual today leads us beyond the twentieth into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Modernism - Modernisation - Modernity My essay - for whose level of abstraction and lack of specificity I apologize in advance - wants to make an intervention to our volume at the meta-level, where we allow ourselves to look once more at the very terms that underpin our discussion about “The Visual Culture of Modernism.” As the conference prospectus rightly pointed out: “A landslide of innovations in material and media culture brought about . . . new me- The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 21-40. <?page no="22"?> 22 Thomas Elsaesser thods of representation and reproduction. Consequently, ‘the visual’ received multilayered attention in innovative artistic expression, reading, and theorizing.” Before we zoom in on the “visual” in this conjuncture and configuration, I want to pull back a little and challenge this “consequently” in the sentence just quoted, by focusing first on the modernism/ modernisation/ modernity debate, 1 as it impinges on the various discourses of “material and media culture.” 2 At the forefront of this “landslide” have been consumer culture and the lure of the commodity, next to the cinema and life in the metropolis, as well as neurasthenia, trauma, fatigue and other pathologies of the nervous system and the psyche, associated with the modern age, the latter sometimes referred to as “neural modernism” (see Taussig) - in other words, aspects that exceed the visual and encompass not only capitalism and technology, but the history of the body and the senses quite generally. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the first two terms of the triad “modernism, modernisation, modernity” were seen as antagonistic. Modernism designated the high-culture critique and ultimate rejection of what modernisation stood for: the technologically driven, capitalist modes of consumption and leisure, responsible for creating a massculture whose outwardly most striking sign was the cinema, with its immense and near-universal popularity, at least since the end of WW I (see Charney and Schwarz). The sudden introduction of the third term-that of “modernity” - signalled the moment when modernism and modernisation seemed ready for a truce of sorts, prepared to leave behind, not the questions, but some of the answers that these two terms once were meant to provide. 1 Historians tend to mean by modernisation the twin processes of urbanisation and industrialisation, including broadly based improvements in sanitation, hygiene and universal education typical of the late nineteenth century. Sociologists in the tradition of Max Weber see modernisation across the twin processes of secularisation and rationalisation, and see it set in with the Reformation, while for political theory, modernisation has meant the spread of liberal democracy and the application of basic human rights, usually coupled to the consolidation of the nation state. Modernisation thus implies quite divergent time-scales and time-frames (see Black). Modernism, on the other hand, as a literary and artistic episteme, is much more tightly conceived around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associated with a number of distinct but interlocking avantgarde movements, such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, and although benefiting from urbanisation and technologies of communication, is often the declared enemy of rationalisation, rediscovers “magic” and the occult, and tends to be either suspicious of liberal democracy or actually favour versions of dictatorship (see, for instance, Norris). 2 On the concept and emergence of “material culture” in the humanities, as it migrates from anthropology, see Buchli. <?page no="23"?> The Troubled Trope 23 Although “modernism” and “modernisation” are semantic fields that refer to European cultural life roughly between the 1870s and the end of WW II, it is fairly clear that the terms of the debate that pitted them against each other belong primarily to the post-war period. While the etymology of “modern” takes us back to the 1490s, i.e. the beginning of the Renaissance, and tends throughout the subsequent centuries to pit the “ancients” against the “moderns,” the term only acquired its connotations of radicality and rupture in the late nineteenth century (famously, both Baudelaire and Rimbaud used the term in our present sense). On the other hand, the distinction between “modernism” and “modernisation” (and the terms’ increasing polarisation beyond the disciplinary gap between, say, art history and sociology) was promoted inside the academy and put into wider circulation mostly after 1945, while “modernity,” as a separate term, would seem to have been a creation of the 1970s and 1980s, thanks chiefly to the “rediscovery,” in the English speaking world, of the writings of Walter Benjamin, followed by a quasiuniversal reception, re-interpretation and appropriation of his thinking. 3 Thus, the term “modernity” is anything but unambiguous. It came to acquire its present-day meaning and intellectual traction because it was itself a compromise formation, emerging as it did at the end of the post- 68 period, in the struggle over what was critical theory and what was progressive practice in culture, politics and the arts. It offered a solution in the antagonism between modernism and “modernisation,” because it bridged the ideological gap between the “high modernism” of early twentieth-century literary studies and art history (generally technophobe and elitist), and “modernisation” as used by sociologists in the wake of Max Weber, generally acknowledging the technologically driven and bureaucratically implemented changes in industrialised and capitalist societies, which included technology and popular culture. “Modernity” is thus Janus-faced, in that it partakes in the engineering ethos of assemblage and constructivism, it identifies mobility (motor car, train, ocean liner and airplane) as key phenomena of everyday life, and it recognises that mass production has led to the commodity status of all activities and services - including art and entertainment. But “modernity” also still resonates with the countervailing critique of some of these tendencies and developments, by highlighting - be it from a Marxist or phenomenological perspective - the fragmentation, 3 An influential text in the Marxist tradition was Berman. For a definition and broader application of the concept of “modernity” as I use it here in the context of the reception of Walter Benjamin, see Osborne. A more apocalyptic interpretation of modernity can be found in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, e.g. Liquid Modernity. <?page no="24"?> 24 Thomas Elsaesser alienation and anomie of the individual in the crowd, and above all, the shock to the senses and trauma to the body that resulted from perceptual overload. It was to counter and compensate for this overload, so the argument went, that the urban masses preferred sensation, distraction and surface stimuli as provided by the cinema, over concentration, contemplation and introspection as required by literature and the traditional fine art forms. Key thinkers of this Janus-faced modernity were the intellectuals of Weimar Germany, besides Walter Benjamin also Siegfried Kracauer, both philosophically trained intellectuals, who themselves built on a previous generation of sociologists and critics such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Walter Rathenau: all of them rediscovered, and rescued from near-oblivion in the 1970s, not least because they seemed to keep an open mind and have an eye and ear for popular culture. The shift of intellectual pedigree also suited academic politics, as it tried to loosen the grip on academic discourse of two generations of French intellectuals, from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan, freeing the post-68 generation from the harsher strictures of their task masters T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, without becoming entirely unfaithful to their critical legacy. Against the severe negativity of Adorno’s high modernism, Kracauer and Benjamin’s often difficult relationship to this Frankfurt School figurehead gave the latter a certain valuable “outsider” status. But the reliance on Benjamin for this version of modernity had another consequence: it tied modernity to the metropolis. Thanks to Benjamin’s keen sense of place and moment in the observations about his Berlin childhood, his affinity with both Paris surrealism and Moscow futurism, his essays about Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka and Brecht, and his more philosophical-materialist “Passagenwerk” project on Paris in the nineteenth century, that is, thanks to this powerful intellectual, but also political input, the conjunction “modernity/ metropolis” came to signal epoch-defining changes in consciousness and mental life, shifts in perception and sensory attention, which in turn challenged century-old concepts of linearity and temporal succession. By breaking up causeand-effect chains, it introduced - besides the ideas of trauma and shock - notions of chance and risk, of the moment and the instantaneous, but also of the fleeting, the transient and the evanescent. If I am right to argue that modernity came to the fore in the 1970s, then it owes its widespread use to the dominant term of the 1980s, namely postmodernism. Postmodernism felt the need to construct for itself a new genealogy and pedigree, which marked its self-description as “coming after” rather than being “against.” Replacing both modernism and modernisation, “modernity” came to mean what postmodernism <?page no="25"?> The Troubled Trope 25 saw itself as inheriting, or rather - from its own vantage point - what it was coming to terms with was “modernity” rather than modernism. Modernity bridged the old antagonism while not effacing the conflicts and issues that had given rise to them. In particular, the emphasis of sight (where modernity equals visuality, rather than the culture of writing and script), 4 combined with the location of the city (modernity equals mobility and process within a given space and its multidirectional articulations), provided an alternative strategy to also keeping in mind the political tensions between elite and mass-culture, capitalism and socialism, the artist and the engineer, craft skills and techné versus industrial technology and mass production. 5 Modernity, it seems, was able to have this mediating or even transcending role, because the term encompasses the now familiar associations of the city with a whole range of characteristics, including the cinema. The metropolis quickly came to stand for more than an accumulation of people in an urban settlement serving as a centre of commerce and trade. Besides the shifts in perception and sensory attention just mentioned, it even foreshadowed such “digital” concepts as random access and parallel processing. In this fashion, the complex “modernity/ metropolis” helped validate the emergence of different modes of orientation (no longer merely upright and frontal), of a thinking in processes and becomings, of a way of life that requires new perceptual skills and cognitive habits, including the reflexes of improvisation and rapid reaction, which positively register as “the urban experience” and its “attention economy,” or are coded negatively as “urban anomie” and “cultural amnesia.” Modernity, rather than modernism, is in this context associated with the primacy of the eye, with vision as the modern master-sense, across the various scopic regimes of modernity, and accompanied among philosophers by the different anti-Cartesian critiques of ocular-centrism that Martin Jay so painstakingly analysed in his study Downcast Eyes. Across the central perspective projection from Alberti’s open window, to Descartes’ optics; from topographical models in Dutch art to the embedded / embodied eye of the Baroque, from the kinds of somatic perception (which, according to Jonathan Crary, surfaced in the nineteenth century across the different “techniques of the observer”) to Foucault’s revival of the Panopticon, Jay’s book traces a rich history of a 4 . The most detailed historical tracking of the rise of the visual as pre-eminent in the definition of Modernity can be found in Jay and Crary. 5 See in this context the influential article by Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology.” <?page no="26"?> 26 Thomas Elsaesser lustful obsession with and a deep-seated paranoia about vision, that he grounded not in the antagonism between the fine arts and popular culture, but in Western philosophy and thinking. At the same time, the semantic clusters around “visuality and the city” also inspired major revaluations of the historical avant-gardes, especially surrealism (as in the work of Rosalind Krauss on the “optical unconscious,” and in Hal Foster’s Convulsive Beauty), but also futurism (Strauven’s work on the reevaluation of Marinetti), and - in the German context - a renewed interest in Berlin dada, with hitherto neglected figures such as Hanna Höch coming to the fore (see Lavin). The Rise of the Cinematic City It was within this field of inquiry and the concept of the modern metropolis, that the cinema - especially in the paradigm of the cinematic city - found a new respectability. The modern metropolis gave it both its historical ground as primarily an urban phenomenon, as well as its richest metaphorical tissue of references, spreading outward from this or that film to the cinema as an episteme. 6 At the metaphorical level, and thanks again to Benjamin’s reading of Paris as a multi-layered allegory and palimpsest, these references to the cinema refracted in the city, and vice versa, as the new lens of visuality, tended to group themselves around the backdrop provided by the new department stores, like La Samaritaine, and the emergent practice of window-shopping along the new boulevards, created in the wake of the “Haussmannisation” of central Paris. Revolutionary though Haussmann’s creative destruction of medieval Paris proved to be, its language of French neo-classicism was soon challenged by much more radical urbanist designs, if we think of Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris, as formulated in his 1925 Plan Voisin, where he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine, and replace it with his sixty-storey cruciform towers, placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space, much on the model of how US planners had begun to develop American cities from the turn of the century onwards, in order to deal with cramped housing and slum conditions (see Fishman). The historical ground of the cinematic city favoured cities, which were also centres of filmmaking: First it was Paris, then New York; Berlin followed in the 1920s and ’30s, then London during the War, and 6 Three books in particular are helping to mark out the scope and boundaries of this trope: Clarke; Webber and Wilson; Shiel and Fitzmaurice. <?page no="27"?> The Troubled Trope 27 once again, Paris in the 1950s and ’60s, after which came Los Angeles, then Tokyo and since the 1990s, the mega-cities of Asia - Hong Kong, Taipeh, Mumbai - and Latin America - Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, city planners, as well as modernist artists and philosophers divided into those who favoured spatial ensembles of abstract forms and the separation of elements (holding to Baudelaire’s famous dictum from Les Fleurs du Mal: “je hais le movement qui déplace les lignes”), against those eager to implement - whether in the built environment, on canvas or in musical composition - a space of dynamic interaction, of mixture and mingling, of lines dancing and paths crossing. The cinema, on the other hand, did not feel similarly constrained. Predicated on movement, and proud of it, the cinema could as easily take the God’s eye view, from the top of a skyscraper, as it delighted in ground-level strolling and urban dérives. Cinema - the “elephant in the room” for much of twentieth-century art history, literary theory and aesthetics - was given the code name “modernity,” in order to have a place at the table. This place at the table was once more laid out with implements taken from Benjamin, and especially from his re-reading of Baudelaire. As a consequence, many of these metaphoric constructions of cinema around modernity are now referenced back to such archetypal city figures of split subjectivity as Baudelaire’s flaneur turned Hollywood private detective, the prostitute turned femme fatale, the gambler turned gangster and the rag-picker turned street-hustler. These icons of the nineteenth-century city and twentieth-century movies conveniently lead from literary text and painterly motifs, to movies both French and “made in Hollywood.” From the perspective of architecture, the refracting links to the cinema were more diffuse. As already suggested, movies did make palpable and rendered legible some of the key concepts of twentieth-century planning and urbanist designs, and not only in films like The Fountainhead and The Belly of an Architect, or Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and Playtime. Whether inadvertently or not, the cinema has always excelled at highlighting as the ideological battlegrounds of the modern city, such unresolved tensions and dynamic lines of force as those that centre on ground-level face-to-face human interaction (i.e. the Little Italy of New York in Scorsese’s films or Los Angeles’ Chinatown, the Parisian “quartiers” of French cinema, the Berlin “Kietz” films) contrasted with those that take us to God’s eye views of order and control, with helicopter shots over Manhattan or Los Angeles, and Batman’s flights through the skyscraper canyons of Gotham. Hollywood as easily celebrated the geometry of International Modernism’s utopian aspirations, manifest in reflecting glass and soaring concrete and steel, say in Hitchcock’s North <?page no="28"?> 28 Thomas Elsaesser by Northwest, as it glamorised in the noir films from the 1940s to the ’70s, the back-alleys and tenements, the pizza parlours and parking garages - quite accurately reflecting, in the urbanist discourse, the polarities of topographical elevation (highways slicing through residential blocks) and ethnic (or neighbourhood) sedimentation, as one finds them in Jane Jacobs’ diatribes against large-scale developers and urban planners such as Robert Moses, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), or as documented in Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air (1982). In Hollywood movies, on the other hand, the rigid grids of Manhattan looked as majestic and beautiful as the gritty concrete jungle of film noir proved visually beguiling and fatally attractive. Hollywood, as a mode of production, is all order and planning, but in its noir narratives it favoured gambling and risk, chance and contingency as the driving forces of its own kind of libidinal modernity. By the end of the twentieth century, one could note almost a reversal, where Manuel Castells’ idea of “the space of flows” as typical of the network society, and Marc Augé’s “non-spaces of hypermodernity”- as indeed Bernard Tschumi’s architecture - seem more inspired by the movies than the movies taking their cue from architects and city planners. 7 Be that as it may, references to the city, to the metropolis and to urban life have created one of the densest discursive clusters for putting the cinema at the heart of some of the most crucial processes of social transformation, by joining technology and capitalism to the human body and the senses. The Cinematic City as the central conceptual metaphor of modernity and trope of an embodied visuality (as opposed to the disembodied gaze of modernism) has not only had a profound impact on how we have come to view the interrelation between the modernism in the arts and modernisation of life and life-styles. In the case of film studies, it bridged the gap between the “cinema-as-art-and avant-garde” position and the “cinema-as-mass-medium and popular-entertainment” position. The association of modernity with the city, and of the city with the cinema has helped to locate the cinema as an object of study within a broader “culturalist” perspective, extending film studies’ appeal to other disciplines within the Humanities and Social Sciences, such as gender studies, and significantly shifting the terms of debate about the spatial turn in art history, cultural geography, public policy and many other fields, where the physical environment, our collective existence and our cognitive-sensory experiences intersect. Furthermore, the Cinematic City did not only displace the various discourses of self-definition and autonomy across the disciplines. The 7 . Castells; Tschumi; Augé. <?page no="29"?> The Troubled Trope 29 trope also cancelled the residual debt that film studies still owed to literary models and to art-historical assumptions about authors, texts, movements, genres, influence - just as surely as it modified high modernist notions of medium specificity, anti-illusionism and formalism as the sole indices of a progressive film practice. Perhaps the debt now even flows the other way, when we think of how central the cinematic city has become to cultural studies, and how central cultural studies are to the future of literature as a discipline. For instance, the sort of archaeology of the cinema that we now associate with the New Film History, which has tracked the cinema as a popular medium across practices and institutions such as vaudeville and music halls, across event-scenarios such as World Fairs and Hale’s Tours, across technologies of assisted sight such as panoramas, dioramas and stereoscopy, this archaeology of imagined futures usually justifies itself by claiming to offer a better understanding of that core aspect of modernity, namely the “urban experience” and its intertwining with the various image cultures, their distinct gendered spaces and visual displays, mostly based on photographic, projected, printed, but above all moving images. 8 Because of these contending forces, both inside the various academic departments in the Humanities, fighting to preserve their distinctiveness, while having to cooperate with the social sciences as well as the neuro-sciences in order to ensure their survival, the concept of “modernity” has become the big tent for all those forces unleashed in the wake of industrialisation and the rise of an urban middle class between the 1870s and the 1920s. “Modernity” means speed and dislocation, new modes of transport and communication, along with such diverse disciplinary regimes of the body as standardising timetables and regulating working hours, introducing sports as spectacle and fingerprints as forensic evidence. “Modernity” is now the agent that brought an unprecedented expansion of leisure and consumption, and it made women enter the industrial labour force in large and indispensable numbers. It created the masses of the urban poor, but also the whitecollar worker, with upwardly mobile social aspirations. It fostered the proud militancy of the working class, but it also invented the blasé intellectual with an aristocratic disdain for bourgeois self-discipline and the virtues of hard work. Thus the nominalism of the word entailed an all-powerful but also problematic agency, more specific than the 8 . Besides the essays collected in Charney and Schwartz, see also Rabinowitz. For the postmodern in architecture, see Venturi, Izenour and Brown, which celebrates the urban environment as theme-park and the city as spectacle. <?page no="30"?> 30 Thomas Elsaesser “Zeitgeist,” but less precise than capitalism, the class struggle, or any of the other classically determining forces in human history. In an obvious sense, the cinema - where active and passive seem to merge, where the eye is predatory and voracious, where objects and subjects reflexively double each other - fits perfectly into the two-faced physiognomy of modernity. Cinema at once mimetically reproduces the epiphenomena of modernity, like speed, adventure, ephemeral encounters and intermittence, while also therapeutically compensating for these very same epiphenomena, by telling melodramatic stories of men and women in high places and remote locations, or of working class girls abandoned by their city lovers, but redeeming themselves through noble sacrifice. Early cinema’s social melodramas, detective serials, slapstick comedies and chase films all illustrate this conjunction of modernity and the big city, while offering quite old-fashioned moral fables. In many ways, the cinema is not only the extension of these forces, it is also part of the disease, of which it pretends to be the cure. In other words, the trope of “modernity and visuality” correlates urban life with cinematic space, but also suffuses external reality with subjective states of mind and feeling. Among the associations it now carries are the porous boundaries between subjective anxiety and objective threat (as in the film noir city, from Phantom Lady to Heat), the reversal of intimate sign and public gesture (as in so many romantic comedies, from Roman Holiday to Notting Hill), or the mirroring of inside out and outside in (as in Taxi Driver), while redefining a fertile tissue of references around gender and space, ethnicity and the community, memory and architecture, desire and anonymity. The wide acceptance of the term “modernity” as a short-hand for all these aspects did the cinema in general and the new film history concerned with the teens and twenties in particular an invaluable service: it enlarged the scope of the phenomena that could be legitimately studied under the heading of cinema studies (whether or not it was renamed “visual studies”), and it provided an intellectually respectable pedigree of theorists and canonical texts for students to draw on and quote. The Benjaminian frame of reference gave these studies - of movie house architecture and world fairs, of railway journeys and panoramas, of colonial expeditions and modern art primitivism, of wax works and cemetery sculpture, of shopping arcades and forensic photography, of fairground attractions and spiritist séances, of optical toys and taxidermist collections - a philosophically sound, politically progressive and historically informed conceptual framework: sufficiently authoritative and learned to support such disparate lines of inquiry and their objects, sufficiently enigmatic and utopian, to en- <?page no="31"?> The Troubled Trope 31 courage extensive commentary as well as sustained empathy and identification (see Russell). Modernity and Visuality It is at this point that doubts arise, and questions may have to be asked. I come back to my earlier suggestion, namely that we owe the emergence of these tropes of modernity and visuality, of the cinematic city, to postmodernism, which needed it as a compromise formation for its own agenda, at a time when the debate between high culture modernism (art) and popular culture modernisation (commerce) had become obsolete, and even an obstacle to thinking the present productively. 9 So the question arises: what happens to concepts such as “modernity,” the “cinematic city” and “visuality,” if even postmodernism itself - the horizon against which we had come to define them - has in turn become a historical marker of limited shelf-life? As postmodernism joins other terms as a mere period idiom, replaced by a term such as globalisation, a plethora of other locutions has emerged, each covering aspects of what used to be understood by modernization / modernism / modernity: creative industries, conver-gence culture, social networks etc do not just name a specific medium or practice, but like the concepts we are concerned with, they suggest a more encompassing set of values, attitudes and world-views. Are these not equally jeopardised in their validity, becoming problematic in their pertinence as critical categories, once they shrink to time-bound labels, mainly retained for their patina, within the history of ideas? This is reminiscent of Ronald M. Buergel and Barbara Noack’s theme-question for documenta 12, 2007: “Is modernity our antiquity? ” they ask, meaning presumably that “modernity” today is what Greek and Roman antiquity was to the Renaissance, to the French Revolution or to German Romanticism (in Buergel, Schillhammer and Noack, n.p.). It provides both inspiration and pastiche revivals; it is a burden and a legitimating pedigree; it is a retrospective construction for the benefit of those who come after, and also a foundational moment supporting the sense of identity and self-esteem; it can be worn like a mask at the ball of clichés (as Umberto Eco might put it), while its typical characteristics can be repurposed, like spolia, i.e. building materials or decorative elements triumphantly or pragmatically incorporated in new work. A visit to any art show or exhibition today produces this recognition 9 A good overview can be found in Friedberg. <?page no="32"?> 32 Thomas Elsaesser effect, with the ghosts of Duchamp, Warhol, Beuys, Jasper Johns or Nam Jun Paik hovering over almost every artefact. To quote Buergel: It is fairly obvious that modernity, or modernity’s fate, exerts a profound influence on contemporary artists. Part of that attraction may stem from the fact that no one really knows if modernity is dead or alive. It seems to be in ruins after the totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century (the very same catastrophes to which it somehow gave rise). It seems utterly compromised by the brutally partial application of its universal demands (liberté, égalité, fraternité) or by the simple fact that modernity and colonialism went, and probably still go, hand in hand. In short, it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead. (n.p.) On the other hand, if one agrees that the combination of “modernity and visuality” names the cinema without naming it (what I have called “the elephant in the room”), then one also has to ask: which cinema is one referring to? What under the heading of visuality and visual culture has gradually emerged, is not only a vastly expanded repertoire of practices, habits and crafts, based on images and image-making, using iconic modes of representation for the purpose of persuading and commemorating, of documenting and display. Also in progress is the displacement of classical cinema, understood as the narrative feature film, usually originating either in Hollywood or made according to the Hollywood mode of production. There, the term “visuality” registers a shift of emphasis, also away from European art cinema and experimental cinema, towards what was once called “expanded cinema” and now encompasses the moving image in all its forms and manifestations. It includes instructional films and medical films, advertising films and old surveillance footage, vintage pornography and home movies, newsreel and raw reportage - in short, everything somehow recorded and stored on celluloid, if it is lucky enough to have survived. A concerted effort is under way to re-classify and sort, to re-assemble and rehabilitate the vast archive of moving pictures that the twentieth century has bequeathed to us. Small armies of artists and film-makers are consulting the catalogues of national cinematheques or raiding the film museums for “fresh” pictures, that is, for hitherto untouched and unseen source material that can be used in found footage films and compilations, producing both poetic testimony of the wonders of the world caught on celluloid, and documenting the changing status of the visual in relation to both material objects and the immaterality of the image. These found footage films or installations often trace the gradual process, whereby images <?page no="33"?> The Troubled Trope 33 have absorbed the materiality of both place and time, while objects take on the function of signs, or become mere props waiting for their definitive representation, or are left behind as silent witnesses to their transfiguration into image (see Wees). As a consequence, the “visuality” of modernity has itself come under attack or is challenged from at least three sides. I shall leave aside the virulent debates and often highly tendentious arguments that have arisen within art history, in response to some art historians feeling that their venerable discipline has been highjacked by visual studies and needs to be rescued from culturalist generalisations and unwarranted comparisons between art and non-art practices, with renewed attention being given to detail, craft, uniqueness and materiality. More generally, the divide seems to involve a return to the “experiential-perceptual” dimension of the encounter between the viewer and the work of art (often going hand in hand with a revival of phenomenology as the privileged philosophical support), in contrast to emphasising meaning - whether philosophical or ideological. A new-found aesthetic value of “presence” is being promoted, which might seem to echo Walter Benjamin’s lament for the loss of aura, but it is now argued across a different philosophical pedigree, drawing on Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Jean Luc Nancy. Its best-known advocate is, surprisingly enough, not an art historian or visual studies person, but a literary scholar, the German-American Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Within film studies, on the other hand, proponents of a more classic notion of cinema have protested at the idea that the priority now given to vision and visuality (coming after the psychoanalytic paradigm of the look and the gaze), should also attribute such wide-ranging powers of agency to the faculty of sight, not warranted by any serious cognitive study of human perception. Cognitivism and the neuro-sciences suggest that much of our visual data is processed by regions in the brain, whose protocols and schemata are either inborn and “hard-wired,” or have evolved over millennia of human interaction with the environment and the visible world. Film scholars such as David Bordwell thus distrust any suggestion that the increase of visual stimuli since the late nineteenth century - and one of the core tenets of the “Modernity and visuality” paradigm - of which the cinema is both a product and an active contributor, should have led to a significant or measurable change in modes of perception and the human sensorium. If the general argument about human perception being conditioned and adaptable is not in doubt, scepticism arises when it is plotted across a relatively short time span, such as a decade or two Bordwell 140-145). <?page no="34"?> 34 Thomas Elsaesser Bordwell’s objections to what he calls the “History of Vision” approach are well-argued, but only within the frame of reference he has set up for himself over the years. But his muscular language and vivid turns of phrase, such as his proven skill to brand his opponents with a catchy moniker (after “Grand Theory of Everything” and “ SLAB Theory,” it is now his turn to denounce the “Modernity Thesis”), along with the wealth of example and the degree of detail he can draw upon, make Bordwell a formidable combatant. He scores rhetorical points against his colleagues from the University of Chicago, notably Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen, whose locutions - “the cinema of attractions,” “vernacular modernism” - broadly subscribe to a Benjaminian version of modernity, which makes both “shock and trauma” (as a consequence of sensory overload), “attraction and magic” (popular, rather than high culture resistance to realism and narrative) and “mass-production of the senses” (the cinema as training motorsensory responses) key elements of the cinema’s cultural and cognitive impact in the twentieth century. 10 While Bordwell sees only continuity in viewing habits and backs this up with closely argued analysis of industry practice within Hollywood, the other side requires much looser formulations and generalities in order to keep the tent big, while not wanting to forego the (Foucaultinspired) idea of a distinct episteme, of rupture and rapid change for the period in question: the early teens for Gunning, the 1920s and ’30s for Hansen. Looking at broader social processes, such as demographics, and tracking how the cinema absorbed other arts, such as dance, or provided templates for the representation of all manner of staged events, they attributed to the cinema an emblematic role and a distinctive, transformative agency, precisely the one already noted and summarised under the heading of “modernity.” Bordwell, by sticking to a more restricted notion of cinema as a “window on the world,” rather than as the medium which brings the world so close that it enters into our minds and bodies, could afford to argue within classic art-historical premises (in the tradition of Rudolf Arnheim, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky), a strategy which not only had the advantage of demonstrating a high degree of internal intellectual coherence across a vast body of works, authors and styles. He also projects a unified vision of cinema, across successive periods, changing technologies and competing national idioms, which conveys - in his hugely popular weblog - an optimistic and always enthusiastic view of cinema as the art 10 For the context of this debate and the meaning of the term “cinema of attractions,” see Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. <?page no="35"?> The Troubled Trope 35 of the twentieth century: self-confident, self-sustaining and selfsufficient as only a classical art can be - quite different from the “crisis thinking” and “criticality” models which characterise anyone operating with the terms “modernity” and “visuality” (Bordwell, “Observations” n.p.). Bordwell, despite calling himself a neo-formalist, is within the mainstream of art history, and, as far as the cinema is concerned, keeps the Renaissance finestra aperta as the default configuration firmly in place (hence his abiding interest in “staging in depth”), although he is perfectly capable to argue also within a “Modernist” paradigm, such as his demonstrations of “parametric” and “stereometric” film styles and film forms, which however he sees as “deviations” from the norm, rather than as either normative or symptomatic in their own right. Scholars of early cinema are, almost by definition, committed to some version of a rupture model of historiography, and so the issue between Bordwell and Gunning, revolving around the likelihood that new technologies of vision, such as the motion picture camera, via close-ups and editing, can radically change or challenge our way of perceiving the physical world, including the way we experience our bodies in space, may seem a dispute between siblings. Behind this disagreement over “visuality,” however, one suspects a more fundamental disagreement that has traversed the humanities, the hermeneutic, the historical and the social sciences, between “culturalists” and “realists,” i.e. the contending positions in the debates which opposed those who consider human nature “constructed” and historically variable, and those who consider most relevant data determining human behaviour innate, genetic or “hard-wired.” In this respect, the “history of vision” debate is something like the local version of the so-called “science wars,” where similar arguments were being polemically aired between the constructionists (such as Bruno Latour) and those more confident that empirical knowledge even in the humanities and social sciences is impervious to cultural bias (Alan Sokal, Norman Levitt). Yet the debate is also relevant from another perspective, which brings us back to the cinema and the visual. One notable change within film studies over the past two decades has been the quite astonishing attention being paid to sound, along with a new evaluation of its contribution to the cinematic experience as a bodily event and an embodied set of sensations. Usually attributed to technological sound improvements (Dolby, Surround Sound, THX , Sound Design) which are said to have upset many of the hierarchies of traditional cinema, including those between sound and image, the new emphasis on sound has actually cast a completely new light on the so-called silent period of the 1920s, revealing that from its inception, the cinema was rarely silent, and <?page no="36"?> 36 Thomas Elsaesser especially as a cultural phenomenon with mass appeal, its history cannot be written without a much more thorough consideration of the parallel developments in recorded sound, whether one thinks of attempts at synchronisation, which go back to the 1900s, or at the parallel developments in radio and the gramophone industry, with which the cinema - and not only mainstream cinema but also avant-garde cinema - has been intertwined in a common trajectory. If the more recent technological innovations have prepared the ground for a completely transformed articulation of cinematic space in the age of mobile sound devices which is characterised by a new presence and intimacy, but also by a new materiality and plasticity of sound, then it has merely underscored the need to do more research into sound-spaces and sound-scapes in the earlier period. Scholars such as Rick Altman and his student James Lastra, but also the already mentioned Tom Gunning or Richard Abel, have dramatically changed our view of the sound experience of early cinema, and with it, the soundscape of modernity, the title of a study by Emily Thompson, who convincingly argues how much of our understanding of modernity is muted by not fully appreciating the presence of sound: At some point in the early years of the 20th century, the urban public began to view the urban scene as “noise.” Horse hooves, cart wheels, street vendors, all contributed to the sense that the city was unhealthy in its level of noise pollution. In fact, certain New Yorkers sought to enact laws against sound. In 1906, Mrs. Isaac (Julia Barnett) Rice founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise in New York, although admitting herself that most noise was unavoidable. Today, when we overhear all manner of personal conversations shouted through cell phones at the grocery store, while the incessant beep of the check-out scanner forms an ostinato under the Muzak, we may find it difficult to sympathize with the efforts of Mrs. Isaac Rice. We may wonder what the fuss was about in 1927, when outraged New York audiences moaned loudly and waved handkerchiefs in surrender after a performance of American composer George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique that featured real machines. (122) But I want to end these remarks on a slightly different note, by pointing to yet another aspect of the debate within film studies about modernity and visuality. This would relocate the origins of modernity and visuality not in the urban scene or its picture palaces, nor in the sound-scapes either inside or surrounding the movie houses, but in the world of work and the place of machines, that is, in the modern factory. There, the demands on the body and the senses, through piece work and assembly lines, as well as through time and motion studies, would make the cinema the institution which mimetically reproduces the infernal pace and bodily exertion while also compensating the body and the senses, by <?page no="37"?> The Troubled Trope 37 regenerating and replenishing the working men and women’s labour power through laughter and distraction, through thrills and tears. Among the many non-canonical films that are now being excavated from the archives, dating especially from the 1920s and ’30s, one can find a surprising amount of material that deals with the adjustment and synchronisation of the human body and different kinds of machine, as well as with the particular conjuncture of hand and eye, vision, grasp and touch. Some of this material has given rise to one of the more sustained artistic investigations into the history of vision machines, considered under the aspect of hand/ machine, eye/ machine, and eye/ hand coordination. I am referring to the films and installations of Harun Farocki, one of the most prominent and sought after installation artists of the present, whose found footage films constantly return to the drama of the human body and the senses, as they interact with the media technologies of vision and surveillance. Focusing on the sites of work and labour in modernity, Farocki’s films argue that the history of the twentieth century can be divided into two parts, each part typified by the successive obsolescence of first the hand and then the eye. In the first half of the century the hand is replaced by the machine, which in turn is monitored by the eye. In the second half of the century, since the emergence of the computer, it is the eye that is itself replaced, because all the monitoring tasks are now performed by intelligent eyes: eyes that do not need vision in order to “see” (Farocki). This, however, has a most ironic consequence, when we think of the human body and its senses in relation to images. For it would seem that not only are movies once more fully invested in what used to be called “haptic” images, that is, images which try to elicit sensation of physical proximity and surface tactility; the hand itself is coming back as an organ of perception, now that the sense of touch is increasingly one of the chief ways we interact with images. Images viewed on a touch screens are objects to be pinched and stretched, in order to be acted upon, rather than representations to be looked at up close, observed from a distance, or interpreted as to their meaning. If the eye/ hand eye/ machine conjunction, as well as their respective and successive “divisions of labour” at both the work place and the sites of play and leisure, are so important for Farocki, it is because he seems to have discovered in their peculiar asymmetry, but also their mutual interference, a somewhat different archaeology of modernity, now focused on the dialectic of art and labour in the twentieth century, cinema and the factory, explored along the gap that has opened up between hand and eye. He thus examines the pre-history, if you like, of the post-human condition, on the far side of either dystopic technological determinism, or the scenarios of empowerment that used to <?page no="38"?> 38 Thomas Elsaesser go under the name of cyber-culture. Farocki asks the perhaps more selfinterested, yet reflexively doubled question: how does this re-alignment of hand and eye position the filmmaker or installation artist as someone precisely working with his eyes and his hands: separating and joining, cutting and editing the physical movement of human beings and inanimate things, while laying bare the inner motion of thought and feeling, attentive to friction and resistance, to touch and to vision? A rag-picker in the Baudelaire-Benjamin sense, or a merely someone monitoring the images of yet another surveillance apparatus. Farocki’s contribution to the debate of modernity and visuality is that he seems to have identified a major shift in our culture and society towards what he calls operational images, that is, images which do not represent but which enact, command, control and effect actions, and thus have a very different status as images from how we usually understand them, especially in the context of art or the cinema, where images are meant to be looked at, or are objects of contemplation, disclosure and revelation. But one could also say that the history of images has now split into two broad strands: not as we usually think, i.e. to record and register on the one hand, and to represent and to project on the other, but either to lie or to act, that is, to be used for purposes of simulation and for purposes of action, to simulate as present something that is absent, or to carry out actions via a proxy or substitute which would be too complicated or too dangerous to carry out in person. And it is to these latter uses of images, rather than the former, that Farocki had dedicated much of his career and to which we may have to pay more attention in the future, especially if we want to understand our past as part of this future. While I would therefore not wish to suggest that the “Modernity- Visuality” trope has come to the end of its useful life - how could I, in light of the many contributions in this volume, and also when considering the strategic desirability of promoting cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work within the university? - I nonetheless think it may be time to start thinking seriously about revitalising its premises by expanding its parameters - perhaps even to the point where modernity or modernism was no longer seen (primarily) in terms of “visuality,” and where the visuality we find most stimulating today was more properly located in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in the twentieth. But this might require an altogether different paradigm for both “visual culture” and “modernism.” <?page no="39"?> The Troubled Trope 39 References Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. London: Polity, 2000. Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Black, Cyril. The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. . “Observations on Film Art.” http: / / www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/ , last accessed on 20 January 2011. Buchli, Victor. The Material Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2002. Buergel, Roger, Georg Schillhammer, Ruth Noack, eds. Documenta 12 Magazine no. 1-3 Reader. Cologne: Taschen, 2007. www.documenta12.de/ fileadmin/ pdf/ press_kit_02-21-06.pdf, last accessed on 20 January 2011. Castells, Manuel. The Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: California University Press, 1995. Clarke, David, ed. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge, 1997. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. Farocki, Harun. “Controlling Observation.” In Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. 289- 296. Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Gross, Paul R. and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In David F. Krell. ed. Basic Writings. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. 283-318. <?page no="40"?> 40 Thomas Elsaesser Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994. Lavin, Maud. Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993. Norris, Christopher. “Modernism.” In Ted Honderich, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 583. Osborne, Peter, ed. Walter Benjamin: Modernity. London: Routledge, 2005. Rabinowitz, Lauren. “From Hale’s Tours to Star Wars: Virtual Voyages and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real.” Iris 25 (1998): 133-152. Russell, Catherine. “New Media and Film History: Walter Benjamin and the Awakening of Cinema.” Cinema Journal 43.3 (2004): 81-85. Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. Sokal, Alain and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. London: Picador, 1998. Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. . Marinetti e il cinema: tra attrazione e. sperimentatzione. Udine: Campanotto, 2006. Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge, 1991. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004. Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. Venturi, Robert, Steven Izenour and Denise Brown. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1972. Webber, Andrew and Emma Wilson, eds. Cities in transition: the moving image and the modern metropolis. London: Wallflower, 2008. Wees, William C. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993. <?page no="41"?> The Efficiency of Images: Educational Effectiveness and the Modernity of Motion Pictures Scott Curtis This essay places early educational film (roughly between 1900 and 1930) in the context of the impulse toward “efficiency” that swept the industrialized nations after the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on educational literature in the United States and discussions of medical education and training films in France and Germany, the essay describes how educators articulated the efficiency of the (moving) image, especially in terms of the cost of teaching or the psychology of learning. Ultimately, the essay argues that the deployment of visual materials in the classroom during this period is best understood through the rubric of “efficiency.” The visual culture of modernism takes many forms. Thomas Elsaesser’s essay in this volume clarifies film’s place within this culture, and the role of film studies in the modernity sweepstakes. He indicates a new direction in film studies, which this essay will follow. That direction, toward images that are not meant primarily for entertainment or aesthetic purposes, depends on a crucial differentiation between two cultures of modernism. Anson Rabinbach, in his classic tale of energy and fatigue, The Human Motor, makes a useful distinction between “cultural modernity” and “social modernity.” We are most familiar with “cultural” modernity: the responses in science, art, literature, and philosophy to the rapid industrialization of the Western world during the last half of the nineteenth century. From Einstein to Picasso to Proust to Bergson - most surveys of modernism round up the usual suspects and tell a familiar story of cultural products that helped to organize, usually in an aesthetic way, the changes to perception of time, space, and social relations wrought by modernity. But alongside these examples emerged another, The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 41-59. <?page no="42"?> 42 Scott Curtis related response, not necessarily aesthetic, which hoped to apply “new scientific modes of perception to social questions” and to bring “to bear a spirit of utopian and scientific ‘neutrality’” to the class and ideological rifts that came with these transformations in the public sphere (Rabinbach 86). In other words, alongside writing a novel or painting a picture, an equally valid and pervasive response to the ruptures of modern life hoped to bring the fruits of modernity - such as science, technology, and a sense of progress and hope - to bear on real social problems. So we might label “social modernism” the attempts by a different cast of characters - including reformers, scientists, educators, and lawmakers - to come to grips with these upheavals by using the tools that modernity provided. So, for example, workplace reform laws, health and hygiene campaigns, the scientific study of fatigue, reformers working against poverty or alcoholism - all of these might count as “social modernism.” And all of these efforts included a “visual culture” as well, but with a strong utilitarian interest. So this essay will explore a visual culture of modernism that includes what we might call “useful images” - what Elsaesser calls “operational images” - especially educational film. 1 Of all of the strategies to manage the disruptions brought by changing demographics and rapid urbanization, education counted among the highest priorities, not only because it was an obvious means of social betterment and control, but because of its equally obvious value for nation building. Leaders of all the western nations realized that in order to consolidate and modernize their nations, they would need to standardize and modernize their children through education. And if “social modernism” is distinguished by its eagerness to bring scientific approaches to bear on social problems, education was no exception. Early-twentieth-century pedagogical literature is littered with experiments designed to examine the effectiveness of this or that instructional tactic. “Efficiency” became the primary means through which this wish for effectiveness, modernization, and control was expressed in all sorts of disciplines, including education. “Visual instruction” was an equally hot topic in educational circles in Europe and the United States in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, if visual aids to instruction were popular throughout the nineteenth century, the discussion of the educational value of images became even more urgent with the development of motion pictures. So by the 1910s, “efficiency” and “images” decisively con- 1 There is a growing scholarship on “useful film” and educational film. See, for example, Acland and Wasson; Orgeron, Orgeron and Streible; Hediger and Vonderau; or the special issues on “Gebrauchsfilm” in montage/ av: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation. <?page no="43"?> Efficiency of Images 43 verged in pedagogical theory, especially but not exclusively in the United States. Thomas Edison provides an oft-cited example: I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. I should say that on the average, we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today. The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture . . . where it should be possible to achieve one hundred percent efficiency. (quoted in Wise 1) As we know, Edison was not shy of hyperbole when he was selling his hardware, or in this case, his software - his series of films aimed at the educational market. Professional educators were also aware of his rhetorical habits, and viewed his claims of the power of motion pictures with a healthy dose of skepticism: more than one commentator called his prediction that film would replace textbooks “absurd” (“Among the Magazines” 109). Even with our defenses up, however, we can’t help but marvel at his bold and somewhat baffling use of fake precision: textbooks are only “two percent” efficient, but with the motion picture in the classroom, “it should be possible to achieve one hundred percent efficiency”? Really? What could that possibly mean? Did he imagine that motion pictures would channel knowledge directly to the student’s brain? Did he anticipate a Matrix-like scenario in which children were jacked into projectors and information was “downloaded” as easily as flipping a switch? Actually, yes. Not in so many words, but Edison and others, such as the Keystone View Company, which made lantern slides and stereographs, were clearly imagining or selling an educational setting in which the outdated “inefficiency” of words is replaced by the modern “efficiency” of images. (A typical Keystone View Company ad appears in The Educational Screen [February 1923, 67]). And even though educators were quick to scoff at Edison’s exaggerations, their assumptions about the growing role of images in instructional technology had more in common with his wild vision than they cared to admit. Salesmen of all sorts echoed Edison’s rhetoric, but their pitch corresponded to ideas common in the scholarly community as well. On the one hand, this claim about the efficiency of images is simply a modern invocation of the presumed directness of pictures and perception (as opposed to words), a concept dating at least to Descartes and Locke, and invoked every time we claim that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” On the other hand, Edison’s boast carries something more than the usual philosophical baggage: it assumes that images, especially <?page no="44"?> 44 Scott Curtis moving images, are themselves modern, and that they can be implemented with scientific precision and efficiency to solve social problems. So the goal of this essay is to explore what it means, exactly, for an image to be “efficient.” The more I examine the early primary literature on visual instruction, the more I am convinced that this notion of “efficiency,” which combines the wish for scientific precision and modernity with the dream of immediate gains and human perfectibility, is the guiding principle for the deployment of slides, photographs, stereographs, and motion pictures in the classroom. And if we are interested in “the visual culture of social modernism” - or the use of images to solve social problems - then we will find no better example than the educational film. So this essay will examine the varieties of cinematic efficiency by focusing on the early discourse of the educational film in the United States and Europe from 1900 to 1930. It is my contention that the best way to understand the deployment of useful images in social modernity is through the rubric or historical framework of “efficiency.” That is, the visual culture of social modernism is as vast and complex as the aesthetic realm, but one way to make sense of this visual culture is through the idea of efficiency. However, this is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Specifically, I have found that the medical communities in Germany and France were especially intrigued and articulate about the efficiency of the moving image, so this essay will compare those discussions to the mainstream literature in the United States on educational images. The Cult of Efficiency Anyone familiar with modern agendas will recall how widely the concept of efficiency spread through the United States and Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century. 2 “Efficiency” was commonly used in the early and mid-nineteenth century as a technical term referring to the potential of a machine to generate energy with the least amount of fuel and the least amount of heat loss. To be efficient was to eliminate waste - in the case of a machine, it meant eliminating the inevitable waste of energy. This also meant that efficiency was never fully attainable; efficiency was, as Evelyn Cobley has pointed out, “marked by a dynamic totalizing desire intent on achieving an always receding static or perfected totality” (9; see also Alexander). The ideal of efficiency, in other words, was always utopian, and has within it the dream of perfectibility. But this relatively innocuous idea of the perfectibility of ma- 2 On efficiency as a cultural phenomenon, see Hays; Haber; Tichi; Andrew. <?page no="45"?> Efficiency of Images 45 chines eventually slid into the social realm, and through the efforts of reformers, managers, and such, “efficiency” became a vision of human perfectibility. As it seeped into the social realm, this technical ideal became a strong moral value, in danger of functioning no longer as a means, but an end in itself. And just as “efficiency” signaled a utopian hope of human perfectibility, it simultaneously described the darker side of rationalization and a tendency toward dystopian social control. Nevertheless, the idea of efficiency caught on. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1909 that “in this stage of the world’s history to be fearless, to be just, and to be efficient are the three great requirements of national life” (Roosevelt 7261). Between 1903 and 1910, Frederick W. Taylor spread his ideas about shop management, which viewed the factory as a machine and its workers and foremen as cogs to be perfected, thus forming another lynchpin between the technical and social ideals of perfectibility. In 1910, Congress’s Interstate Commerce Commission held a hearing on railroad freight rates. This hearing, during which experts testified that by applying Taylor’s principles they could reduce cost and increase wages, generated an enormous amount of attention in the popular press. Thus “scientific management” was born. 3 Taylor’s disciples and competitors, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, extended his ideas into the visual realm by using motion picture and photographic technology to record, analyze, and perfect worker movements. 4 After 1911, it seemed that every business and institution in America was worrying about how to increase its “efficiency.” Indeed, in just a few years, the rhetoric of efficiency pervaded every aspect of social life, starting with business and institutions, moving to government, to self-improvement, even to Sunday school. 5 No realm of national life was left untouched. Even artists got in on the game: Suzanne Raitt has discussed the rhetoric of efficiency in Ezra Pound’s literary ideals, in which no word was wasted, while Sharon Corwin has shown how the clean lines and standardized geometries of Precisionist painters of the 1920s and 30s recall those of the Gilbreths in their images of efficiency. In fact, these images and others contributed to our sense of what it meant to be modern; it meant to be accurate, stream-lined, and efficient. 3 On Taylor and scientific management, see Calvert; Nelson, Rise of Scientific Management; Nelson, ed. A Mental Revolution; and Kanigel. 4 On the Gilbreths, see Price; Lindstrom; Corwin; Brown; Curtis. 5 For a sampling of the popularization of “efficiency” in American culture, see Bennett; Cope; Taft; or Purinton. <?page no="46"?> 46 Scott Curtis Education did not escape this pressure to be efficient. According to Raymond Callahan, The publicity given to scientific management and the great claims made in its behalf intensified the public’s feeling that great waste existed everywhere, and at the same time offered a means of eliminating it. One result was that a new wave of criticism was directed against many institutions, especially those large enough to be suspected of gross managerial inefficiency and those supported by public taxation. (46-47) Schools met both criteria, of course, and were subject to a near constant barrage of attacks during the early 1910s, which swelled into a public demand to apply the principles of scientific management to public schools. Stories such as “Medieval Methods for Modern Children” in the Saturday Evening Post in 1910, attacked the school system as inefficient and outdated (Warren 11ff). Educators were forced to explore what it meant to be an “efficient” teacher, often by using methods from the still emerging field of social science (see, for example, Monroe and Clark). This is the bandwagon that Edison tried to join with his hard sell of the educational film. The medical community in the United States also came under the spell of scientific management. But in this sphere, the results were more tangible, perhaps because nineteenth-century hospitals had so much to improve upon. Efficiency was a key concept in transforming the turnof-the-century hospital from “a well of sorrow and charity” into a “work place for the production of health” (Starr 146). In the United States from around 1900 to 1920, health officials were increasingly dissatisfied with the duplication of services, the lack of coordination of units, and the general low level of effectiveness in patient care among clinics, dispensaries, and hospitals nationwide. “Efficiency” became an institutional logic to promote standardization of facilities, services, and administration. In fact, in the United States at least, efficiency was the rubric through which the modern hospital adopted business practices in order to establish itself as a desirable place for treatment and to attract paying patients. Modern Hospital, the organ of the American Hospital Association, devoted itself to promoting economy and efficiency in hospital management, while the American College of Surgeons was established initially to focus on the standardization of tools and techniques within surgical practice (Rosen; Arndt and Bigelow). Motion pictures played a small, if interesting role in the standardization of the American hospital, notably through medical training films. For example, we know that the Gilbreths used motion pictures to guide the movements of factory workers. It is not well known, however, that <?page no="47"?> Efficiency of Images 47 between 1912 and 1917 the Gilbreths focused their attention and technologies primarily on surgeons. 6 This move was, in part, a clever publicity strategy; the Gilbreths felt that if they could persuade surgeons of their methods, they could persuade anybody (Nock). In fact, they did have some influence; a number of surgeons considered themselves disciples of Gilbreth efficiency and peppered the journals with articles extolling the benefits of motion study and proper workplace organization (see Dickinson, “Standardization of Surgery” and Dickinson, “‘Efficiency Engineering’”). In their own writings, the Gilbreths focused on standardization of surgical tools and techniques, on one hand, and operating room efficiency on the other (Gilbreth, “Scientific Management”; Gilbreth, “Motion Study”; see also Baumgart and Neuhauser). The Gilbreths made their pitch to a number of hospitals on the east coast, and were successful in bringing surgeons to their home in Providence for “standardization conferences.” There is some question, however, about the role of film in their approach. The films that I have seen - which are by no means the only ones - are inconclusive. In some films, the camera placement is such that it is unclear what help it could be. Other films focus on operating room organization, picturing surgeons and nurses with numbers and letters on their smocks. The Gilbreths urged the establishment of the system whereby nurses hand surgical instruments to the physician during the operation. Indeed, we should note that the Gilbreths were hired as consultants and they used film as part of a larger system for recommending changes in workplace design. In this sense, their use of film as a training device is atypical. Much more typical is the use of films as an educational tool in medical school curricula and in professional settings, such as conferences. Even so, within the discussion of training films the same ideas about efficiency are evident: film can train surgeons to more efficient techniques, and it was considered an especially efficient training tool. I will return to the efficiency of the medical training film, but let’s now turn our attention to more generic versions of the educational film. In both Europe and the United States, film had been used educationally since the beginning, as part of public lectures, for example, or even in theaters. Teachers themselves latched on to the potential of motion pictures around 1905 or so; they used available films - such as travelogues, science films, nature films, etc. - in classrooms or, more commonly in the early period, during special screenings in local theaters. But the lack of titles specifically designed for educational use was a consistent problem. In the United States around 1912 there was something of a movement to produce films for teaching, a bandwagon that Thomas Edison’s 6 I thank Caitlin Gainty, University of Chicago, for pointing me in this direction. <?page no="48"?> 48 Scott Curtis company was happy to join (see Horne). Edison Manufacturing started making a catalog of films for classroom use, and this is when he appropriates a rhetoric of efficiency that was already in place. Varieties of Cinematic Efficiency How can a film be an efficient teaching tool? A survey of the literature on the educational use of film reveals two broad kinds of efficiency: what I will call “administrative efficiency” and “educational efficiency.” The first category refers to statements in which the use of film somehow eliminates the waste of resources. These statements applaud motion pictures - or also simply pictures or photographs - for their ability to reduce the cost per student. It is a category of statement that is therefore concerned primarily with the cost of teaching. The second category comprises statements in which the use of film is championed because it contributes to the ease with which a student assimilates information. These might discuss the “directness” of film, for example: the idea that “images send messages straight through the eye to the brain,” as an ad for the Keystone View Company declares. These are statements that primarily concern the psychology of learning. The rest of this essay will explore this tentative taxonomy. So what is efficient about a motion picture? Jennifer Peterson argues that early educational films, such as Edison’s The Wonders of Magnetism (1915), follow a Taylorist model of efficiency through their judicious use of one shot per idea. That is, early educational films were often structured in a fairly simple, didactic way: we see a title card announcing the phenomenon, then we see a shot demonstrating that phenomenon. Just as Taylor broke down a worker’s job into smaller, component tasks, so this model of educational filmmaking breaks down the idea of magnetism into various, smaller component views. And it is no great leap from a time study sheet, such as those used by Gilbreth, to a shot breakdown of a film. In other words, Peterson suggests that Taylorist task management may be a model for cinematic form, especially the kind of editing patterns common to educational films in the 1910s and 1920s. So in educational film style we have an example of the modernist, efficient dictum that form should follow function. This analogy, intriguing as it is, was not part of the conversation at the time, as far as I can tell; it is a retrospective critical category. Instead, educators discussed cinematic efficiency in other terms, often its contribution to an economy of scale. This refers to the simple claim that more people could see a large projected image than could see a small image. But during a time of rapidly growing enrollments, this was no small ad- <?page no="49"?> Efficiency of Images 49 vantage. One educator asks rhetorically, “Could three thousand high school students be placed in a spacious auditorium and given at one sitting what it would take seventy-five superior teachers to do in that same time? ” (Shepherd 179). The answer is yes, he implies. Film is consistently justified in terms of its ability to serve large numbers of students, either through projection, or through distribution - that is, a film was able to reproduce a teacher’s lesson over and over again, or give the teacher the opportunity to be in more than one place at once. The medical community advocated film for the same reason; not only could it serve research purposes, but also teaching duties. Listen in as one prominent German physician praises the power of cinematography: And how convenient, how effortless! . . . [Cinema] has a persuasive evidentiary power beyond that of any other document, beyond even the most vivid description. . . . The motion picture projector demonstrates its most spectacular educational applications in auditorium demonstrations of microscopic or macroscopic images of movement. In a normal lecture-room demonstration of movement, especially that of small objects (think, for example, of a frog’s beating heart), only a small part of the audience really sees anything, while in a film demonstration everyone present can observe the presentation equally well. Without the assistance of the motion picture projector, almost all X-ray motion pictures and certainly all motion pictures taken from a microscope could be shown to only a small circle or to only one person at a time. (Kutner 250) As medical school enrollments in Europe and the United States grew steadily toward the turn of the century, this claim gained traction - lecturers used projected images more and more from the 1870s onward. 7 A number of famous physicians from the turn of the century, such as Vienna’s Theodor Billroth, collected medical photography and film for precisely this purpose. 8 There were even efforts to create apparatuses for operating room theaters that would allow greater numbers of students to see surgical techniques as they happened (Duncan, “An Apparatus” and “A Further Report”). But in the quotation above, Robert Kutner also hints at another kind of efficiency. When he says “how convenient, how effortless! ,” he is probably not referring to the motion picture apparatus, which was definitely not convenient and effortless at this time. Instead, he is referring to the efficiency of the image itself. It has a “persuasive evidentiary 7 For discussion of the projection of images in medical education, see Stein, Das Licht im Dienste wissenschaftlicher Forschung and Die optische Projektionskunst im Dienste der exakten Wissenschaften; see also Schmidgen. 8 On Billroth’s enthusiasm for new media technologies, see Kern. <?page no="50"?> 50 Scott Curtis power beyond that of any other document, beyond even the most vivid description.” For Kutner and others, that power comes naturally to the image, especially to the photographic image. This points to the power of the moving image, especially, to substitute for the thing itself. In the language of educational film, it was most often referred to as “vividness” or “concreteness”: R. R. Reeder, Superintendent of the New York Orphan Asylum, exclaimed, “[The motion picture] is the closest thing to actual experience that has yet been discovered” (quoted in Lane 685), while James Newell Emery, a District Principal in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, noted that “In the hands of a skillful and sympathetic teacher there is scant limit to the story that pictures may tell, or the vividness with which they may impress their lessons” (quoted in McClusky 124). H. W. Abrams, Chief of the Bureau of Visual Instruction at the New York State Department of Education, offered a similar opinion: “The distinctive merit of motion pictures in education lies in their concreteness” (quoted in McClusky 122). What exactly is this “vividness”? As we know, the clarity, texture, and abundant detail of the photographic image combine with projected movement to give the image a presence unlike any previous representational form. Its level of detail allows the photographic image to reproduce patterns of texture and variation, hence to represent the structure and randomness of the natural world, while the movement of the image presents this world in real time in a particularly striking way. The object “lives” onscreen. This is perhaps obvious, but it is all to say that “vividness” refers to the sense of presence that the moving image gives. For early advocates of educational film, it is as if the thing itself were there in the room, available to direct perception. Film may thus function as an object lesson, an acceptable substitute for the thing itself. Indeed, an avenue for further research might be the precise way that the use of motion pictures in education fits into the long pedagogical tradition of the object lesson. But for now, we can simply note that for many educators, motion pictures were a viable substitute for demonstrations of school subjects, or medical demonstrations, where the use of live patients was always logistically and ethically troublesome. In the rhetoric of the educational film, cinema’s “vividness” was often opposed to a presumed lack of vividness in words and language. Throughout the nineteenth century, in fact, as Pestalozzi’s principles of the object lesson gained currency, words and language were pedagogy’s philosophical bogeymen. Educators, reformers, even heads of state complained about the excessive amount of “book learning” as opposed to direct encounters with nature and the world. This “direct encounter” was often couched in terms of action, masculinity, and modernity; to be close to nature was not only to be manly and direct, but in terms of <?page no="51"?> Efficiency of Images 51 pedagogy, it was to be modern. The motion picture was viewed as “direct,” but also immediate. The rhetoric surrounding the use of motion pictures in education capitalized on these common attitudes: “Children learn through the eye without conscious effort. Dry-as-dust descriptions are replaced with unforgettable living pictures” (“Films Beat Books” 34). R. R. Reeder agreed: “Notwithstanding modern improvement and enrichment of the curriculum, the besetting sin of instruction is still ‘words, words, words.’ How much of this will the motion picture correct and eliminate? ” (quoted in Lane 686). Dr. Walter L. Hervey of New York’s Board of Education went further: “Fifteen minutes of a motion picture should be more valuable than many hours of textbook work even under a good teacher. . . . In general, it may be said that the best teachers are alive to the fact that . . . more effective ‘execution’ can be done, in a shorter time and on a larger scale, by a good motion picture film than by any other known educational agency or instrumentality” (quoted in McClusky 123). All of these share with Edison a disdain for the word, for the textbook as the primary instrument of learning. But they also presume that the image, by contrast, has a direct effect on the mind (we could also discuss the interesting relationship between activity and passivity). This German pundit says it best: The visual perception of the moving image directly elicits the corresponding connection of ideas in the intellect of the observer. . . . Watching moving pictures thus renders unnecessary the active concentration of the will, the kind of concentration required to complete the circuitous intellectual route, to transform visual impressions of letters (or acoustical impressions) into thoughts. . . . The moving image thus caters to the basic principle of all rational thought and rationalistic action: the search to achieve the greatest results with the least possible expenditure. (Demeter 59-61) As we see here, the idea that pictures, especially motion pictures, have direct access to the mind provided, I would argue, the primary support for the rhetoric of efficiency around educational films. What does it mean for an image to be more “direct” than words? I am not concerned to discover whether it is true or not - I am more interested by this idea’s function as a working assumption in the discussion and deployment of pictures in education. Given that, where does the idea come from? I would venture two possible sources: first, long-standing philosophical claims about the isomorphic relationship between images and ideas or mind, and second, equally long-standing dreams of the ideal medium, which would be perfectly passive and faithful to an original. At least since Descartes, many philosophers have defined “ideas” as images. Descartes consistently made the analogy that ideas are “like por- <?page no="52"?> 52 Scott Curtis traits drawn from Nature” (406). Or Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, says that ideas are “Pictures drawn in our Minds” (152) or that the “Idea is just like that Picture, which the Painter makes of the visible Appearances joyned together” (607). Now an important caveat here is that Descartes and Locke are thinking not of concepts, but of sensory ideas - the image that our brain creates from the sensory information gathered by normal perception (see Newman). But the leap to concepts is not too hard to make, and has been made since Plato, perhaps. The point here is that one support for this notion that images are “direct” is the isomorphism between images and the way the mind is thought to work. Another support is the persistent dream of a perfect medium. If Descartes and Locke conceive of ideas as “pictures drawn in the mind,” they evoke not only the act of drawing, but the canvas on which it is drawn. If Nature does the drawing, the mind is a screen upon which these perceptions are etched. Ideally, this would be a blank screen. Lorraine Daston has begun to chart this history of the dream of a blank screen: the tabula rasa of empiricist philosophers, the perfect objectivity of modern scientists - each is an example of the age-old ideal of pure passivity. She asks us to recall the prophet who is the hollow reed through which God speaks, or the fetus upon which the image of the parents is imprinted. Aristotle, for example, understood generation as ideally a literal reproduction, as the active male sperm impressed itself on the passive female matter. As Daston has noted, pure passivity, whether sexual or epistemological, ensured fidelity. The perfect medium was that which was easily “impressed,” so to speak, and which reproduced the original faithfully. So, of course, the photographic plate falls neatly into this ideal, and motion pictures even more - they also faithfully reproduce duration and movement. And we might add to this list the mind of the spectator - especially the child spectator - as a potentially perfect medium of reproduction: the effect of the motion picture on the viewer is often expressed in terms of “impression,” as in this study: If we test these same pupils [slower students] for the same facts some time later, we find that the film seems to have made a more permanent impression. In other words, pupils remember facts better by “seeing” them than by reading about them. This in itself probably substantiates the argument that the film is a time-saving device. (Davis 432) So the “directness” of the moving image depends not only on an isomorphism between image and mind, but also on a dual analogy between the photographic image as faithful impression of nature and the child’s <?page no="53"?> Efficiency of Images 53 mind as a blank screen or malleable surface which, like the photographic plate, retains the image impressed on it. Motion pictures were thought to function, because of this perceived directness, like an ink stamp on blank paper or like a ring on sealing wax, impressing its information on the child’s mind in a quick and efficient manner. And because the motion picture was already a faithful impression of nature, the experience of watching films could be just like an object lesson. I want to press forward this idea with another example: the training film, specifically the medical training film. Like a film such as The Wonders of Magnetism, a training film imparts information, but it differs in asking the viewer to copy it. There is what we might call a “presumption of mimesis” in a training film: take this information, yes, but do as I do, move as I move. Think of an aerobic fitness video, or Gilbreth’s motion studies; they ask the viewers to orient their bodies according to those on screen. Images have always had this didactic option, but when motion pictures demand that you “walk this way,” so to speak, they capitalize on the already existing visceral pleasure of watching a film. That is, the vividness of a film includes not only the clarity, texture, and detail of the photograph, but also the sense of movement that the viewer feels. Surgeons noted this capability right from the very beginning of film history. For example, in Paris in 1897, Eugène Louis Doyen, a maverick surgeon known for his innovative techniques and disdain for the academy, employed two cameramen to film his surgeries. These films were meant to illustrate and publicize Doyen’s tools and techniques, but they were also intended to serve as training films for surgeons and, as we shall see, as a means to improve Doyen’s own performance (Didier; Lefebvre; on the films themselves, see Lefebvre, “La collection des films du Dr Doyen”; Baptista). In 1899, Doyen wrote about his use of motion pictures. Complaining about the inadequacy of the practice of rehearsing surgical techniques on cadavers, he asks, “Do our books fill the gap thus left? Certainly not. The most detailed descriptions, the best diagrams or photographs of the various steps of an operation are inadequate. . . . It is not sufficient to follow the operation, as it were, secondhand; rather, the author of the technique, the master himself, must be seen at work. The surgeon is judged by his work, and no text-books, however wellillustrated, can sufficiently express his personality” (580-581, translation modified). In motion pictures, on the other hand, Doyen found a perfect medium to express vividly the personality of “the master himself.” Movies are not “secondhand”; they allow Doyen to be “present” to the students. This is another cinematic “efficiency”: to be at more than one place at a time. But even more noteworthy is Doyen’s concept of “personality.” Doyen was not publicity shy, by any means, but he is not con- <?page no="54"?> 54 Scott Curtis cerned here to convey via a medical film his charisma and good looks, or not only those things. Primarily, his films are meant to present technique. More specifically, they demonstrate how Doyen holds himself and how he moves in order to accomplish his task. Film provides, better than any other previous medium, a demonstration of the actual movements required in surgery. Doyen’s “personality” is his “posture” or “attitude” - his embodied technique. And to convey that “personality” is to presume that the student will copy it, that while the student watches the film, there may be a kind of kinesthetic empathy taking place whereby the movements seen are somehow felt or incorporated into the student’s own body. This is the mimetic presumption of all training films, it seems; every training film expects us to copy its movements, and that the student will take on the “personality” or “attitude” of the master. But this kinesthetic empathy is also another brand of “directness”: the moving image has an immediate, visceral effect. Doyen also extends this presumption to himself. He has in mind another form of efficiency: the power of film to improve his own technique. Doyen explains, “When I saw for the first time one of my operations reproduced on the screen, I recognized how far I fell short of my ideal. Many of the details of technique that had seemed satisfactory I now saw to be defective, and the cinematograph has thus enabled me considerably to correct and simplify, and to perfect my operative technique” (582). Fifteen years before the Gilbreths, Doyen claimed he used film to study and correct the performance of work in the name of production efficiency. Whether he actually used film in this way or not is unclear, but the rhetoric is intriguing: You will notice that each operation is done methodically. . . . The surgeon is calm; his movements are precise and calculated. When he makes a muscular effort, you can see his biceps harden, his face contract, his whole body place itself in the most favorable position. The cinematograph registers the whole scene as it takes place, faithfully, rapidly, and in detail. Each step can thus be studied, analyzed, critiqued. The surgeon can assist at and calmly study his own operations. (582) The drama of life and death shapes the practiced movements of the surgeon, giving them an urgency we might not encounter in other training film genres. But it is noteworthy that, for Doyen, the cinematograph records details of the surgeon’s “personality”: the posture, the muscular effort, the position, as if the student could be somehow imprinted with this attitude or orientation. Recalling Jean Epstein’s thoughts on the close-up, Doyen here similarly evokes the power of film to literally move us. And recalling Gilbreth and other scientific uses of film, Doyen <?page no="55"?> Efficiency of Images 55 notes the power film gives the analytic eye to examine movement at leisure. Here and elsewhere, the educational film provides fertile ground for early discussions of scientific disinterestedness and embodied spectatorship. There is much more to do: the visual culture of this kind of modernism, which emphasized utility over aesthetics, is vast. But the concept of efficiency, I believe, provides a historical framework for both the practical deployment and philosophical justification of the educational use of motion pictures. Motion pictures were a cutting-edge technology, of course, which also made them appealing for schools trying to modernize, but their rhetorical justification in educational circles depended not merely on its status as a new technology; instead, the concept of efficiency made movies a truly modern method for modern students. <?page no="56"?> 56 Scott Curtis References Acland, Charles R. and Haidee Wasson, eds. Useful Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming. Alexander, Jennifer Karns. The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. “Among the Magazines.” Educational Screen 1.4 (April 1922): 109. Andrew, Ed. Closing the Iron Cage: The Scientific Management of Work and Leisure. Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1999. 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Duncan, Charles H. “An Apparatus for Providing a Large Number of Visitors with a Complete View, and for Securing Photographs and Moving Pictures of Operations.” American Journal of Surgery (September 1908): 274-275. . “A Further Report on the Use of the Photoscope for Demonstrating Operations to a Large Number of Visitors.” American Journal of Surgery (January 1910): 9-11. “‘Films Beat Books,’ Says Edison.” The Mentor 9.6 (July 1921): 34. Gilbreth, Frank B. “Scientific Management in the Hospital.” The Modern Hospital 3 (1914): 321-324. . “Motion Study in Surgery.” Canadian Journal of Medicine and Surgery 40 (July 1916): 22-31. Haber, Samuel. Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959. Hediger, Vinzenz and Patrick Vonderau, ed. 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McBride and Company, 1919. Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Raitt, Suzanne. “The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism.” Modernism / Modernity 13.1 (2006): 835-851. Roosevelt, Theodore. “Special Message,” 22 January 1909. In A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 15. New York: Bureau of National Literature, Inc., 1897-1922. 7261. Rosen, George. “The Efficiency Criterion in Medical Care, 1900-1920.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50.1 (Spring 1976): 28-44. Schmidgen, Henning. “Pictures, Preparations, and Living Processes: The Production of Immediate Visual Perception (Anschauung) in late-19th-Century Physiology.” Journal of the History of Biology 37.3 (October 2004): 477-513. Shepherd, J. W. “The Teaching Efficiency of the Film.” The Educational Film 1.6 (June 1922): 176-180. Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. 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New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939. <?page no="61"?> Body Rebuilding: Tracing the Body at the Dawn of the Cybernetic Age Vinzenz Hediger This essay traces figurations of the body in visual culture at the dawn of the cybernetic age. Through technological and organizational change from the mid-twentieth century onwards work has become increasingly dissociated from the body. In terms of work the body has, in fact, become progressively obsolete, and we have been witnessing, in the twentieth century, a fundamental realignment of body, work and self. Based on an understanding of visual culture as a key element of culture in the sense of a system of symbolization that provides a social semantics to contemporary societies, this essay proposes to read a number of figurations of the body in post-industrial societies as paradigmatic of what may be called the body’s age of obsolescence. Particular attention is accorded to the obese body, the sculpted body of the body builder, and the composite body of the cyborg. The contribution proposes to read all three body types in the light of Georges Bataille’s concept of “dépense” while highlighting the structural melancholia of the performance of the body builder and the problem of the technological self in the cyborg. The contemporary Western personality is itself preponderantly a visible self, its identity is embodied in external performance. Kenneth R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body Work, understood in the broadest sense as useful activity, has been safely ensconced as one of the founding principles of modern democratic societies since the nineteenth century. 1 In antiquity, work was usually 1 For a history of the concept of Arbeit (work) with a particular focus on Germany, see Conze. The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 61-83. <?page no="62"?> 62 Vinzenz Hediger thought of as an onerous task best left to slaves and other providers of dependent labor. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation and an emergent bourgeois culture the idea of work underwent a progressive nobilitation. Much more than merely a useful activity, work became a matter of vocation and spiritual choice, a Beruf, to use Martin Luther’s term, a profession. The emancipated individual that every citizen of a modern society ideally is, defines and expresses herself in important ways through her preferred useful activity. Work is now both a universal duty and a personal privilege, a potential source of pride and dignity. It is in fact only through the idea of dignity derived from professional success that the dynamics of modern capitalism can be properly understood, and it is only against the backdrop of a conception of individuality-as-expression through work that the modern critique of alienation and alienated work, as it was first proposed by Marx in his early writings of the 1840s, makes any sense (see Ollman). 2 For most of its history and even after it entered the spiritual realm of the Protestant profession, work meant, first and foremost, bodily labor (Kocka, Offe, Redslob). 3 In industrialized societies until the midtwentieth century most of the work performed involved an important degree of bodily activity, including in particular assembly-line work. The degree to which, despite all advances in machine technology, industrial production continued to evolve around the body-at-work well into the twentieth century can be gauged from the fact that new fields of scientific research focusing on the body-in-movement and the body-at-work evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century. Physiology, Arbeitswissenschaft and later ergonomics were, to varying extents, all preoccupied with studying and eventually improving the performance of the body as an element of the industrial production process, with fatigue and exhaustion and how to overcome them a primary concern (see Rabinbach). Significantly, the knowledge these disciplines produced evolved around the body as a privileged site of visibility: the site where the transformation of energy into performance could be studied in a field of vision. 4 We have become accustomed to view such practices of positioning the body as an object of knowledge through the sophisticated lens of discourse analysis, and within the framework of Marxist theory most 2 This is the provocative argument proposed by Deirdre McCloskey in her most recent book Bourgeois Dignity. 3 Of particular interest here are the contributions by Wilfried Nippel on labor in antiquity and by Richard von Dülmen on the concept of labor in early modernity. 4 For an exploration of the analogy between factory floor and scientific laboratory spaces in scientific and management discourses after 1860, see Hoof, The One Best Way. <?page no="63"?> Body Rebuilding 63 forms of industrial occupation continue to be seen as examples of alienated labor. Yet for all the discipline and control involved in industrial organization and for all the progressive deskilling of the worker in advanced industrial societies physical industrial labor more often than not proved to be a source of pride and dignity for industrial workers. 5 As late as 2010 a former steel worker (and a key figure in a non-unionized labor struggle) could wax nostalgically about his years of work at Krupp’s legendary Rheinhausen steel plant near Duisburg, Germany, which closed in 1993, highlighting the aspect of physical excitement, now sadly lost, in the performance of an arduous and potentially very dangerous task. 6 This sense of excitement should not be easily discounted. Rather, it should be seen as containing an irreducible core. In a sense, while industrial production and the adjacent scientific discourses have evolved around the visible body as the site of work, modern industrialized societies have pivoted around a dynamic alignment of body, work and self. Once work became an expression of the self, the body emerged as both a potential vessel of expression of the self through work, of individuality linked to a particular profession and hence as a source of dignity, and as a potential site of alienation, a suppression of the self through a mode of work that did not allow for individual expression. These alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the body can oscillate between the two. The former Krupp employee’s account of his professional experience (and one should understand both terms emphatically here) shows that one man’s alienation may well be another man’s specifically modern expression of the self through work, in this case: Through the bodily performance of arduous physical labor. However, particularly in Western industrialized societies, the nature of work has changed dramatically over the last half century. Taking a cue from social historian Philip Sarasin one could frame this shift in Foucauldian terms and speak of a transition from a Thermodynamic age and order of knowledge, marked by a fixation on (physical) energy and the transformation of energy into performance, to a Cybernetic age marked by a focus on information and control (Sarasin). The range of useful activities labeled as work has come to include a wide variety of occupations, progressively marginalizing the role of bodily work as a 5 For a classical articulation of this position, see Braverman. 6 “Helmut Laakmann . . . hat heute einen guten Job. . . , aber so wie früher wird es nicht mehr sein. Er vermisst die Hitze der Hochöfen, die sprühende Glut beim Anstrich. Das waren Monster, diese Öfen, die haben Funken gesprüht wie ein Drache (“Helmut Laakmann . . . has a good job today . . . but it will never be like before. He misses the heat of the blast furnaces, the blaze of the molten iron when they open the furnace. ‘Those were monsters, those furnaces, they sputtered fire like a dragon.’” (Kämper 455, my translation). <?page no="64"?> 64 Vinzenz Hediger result of technological and organizational innovation. In the process, industrial labor of the alienated kind has been replaced as the paradigm of work in Western societies by a variety of activities seemingly more amenable to the idea of self-expression and self-realization, to the point where social scientists no longer ponder the fate and travails of the working class but celebrate the rise of the creative class. 7 In terms of emblematic representations of work, the Promethean figure of the worker who unleashes a gushing flow of molten steel or operates a gigantic hydraulic hammer in the noisy, dark underworld of the factory space - a figure prominently featured in the iconography of both capitalist and communist industrialized societies and the reliable focal point of both corporate and union-produced films about the steel industry - has been supplanted by the figure of the controller/ spectator who sits at a desk, watches a screen and operates a symbolic machine, that is a machine that runs on, and produces, symbols rather than material objects, i.e. the computer. Still at the level of cultural icons, the shift from the thermodynamic age to the cybernetic age is a shift from entrepreneurial figures such as August Thyssen, Alfried Krupp or Henry Ford to the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Both at the level of the factual and at a level of representation then, or both in terms of structure and semantics, at some point in the midtwentieth century work has become dissociated from the body. Work has become invisible, no longer measurable in terms of units of energy transformed into performance in a field of vision, while the body has become largely obsolete, at least in terms of work. 8 Given the long history of work as bodily work, and given the foundational role of the idea of work and particularly of work as an expression of the self in modern societies, this is a momentous development. Accordingly, what happens to the body at this juncture, when the body ceases to be the visible vehicle of work is a relevant question. So what happens to the body as an object of knowledge in a field of vision, and what happens to the alignment of body, work and self? As a scholar 7 This of course refers to the title of a somewhat famous, albeit controversial book by geographer and economist Richard Florida. The creative class in the sense of Florida is a very broad term, meant to include all aspects of the service economy concerned with information goods along with the arts and all kinds of research and development in traditional industries, which amounts to between 30 percent and 40 percent of the economy in any given developed society. More narrow, yet still quite broad definitions of the creative industries, which include the arts, advertising, sports, and the IT sector, set the tally of creative activities in developed economies at around 20 percent of GDP (Florida). Similarly, and ever the gifted aggregator of advances in the social sciences, Jeremy Rifkin pronounced the “End of Work” as early as 1995 (Rifkin). 8 On the relationship between work, innovation and visibility see Hediger. <?page no="65"?> Body Rebuilding 65 of film and media I will obviously try to answer these questions by taking the semantics of the body as my point of departure. I will study visible bodies, or representations of bodies. However, I will not treat these representations as mere reflections of pre-existing realities. Semantics and structure cannot be neatly separated in this case. Generally speaking, if we consider culture to be a system of symbolization that, in a constant feedback loop, provides a semantics of structural change to contemporary societies, and if we consider visual culture to be a key element of culture in this sense, then figurations of the body are of particular significance as both indicators and factors in the shift. More specifically, and with regard to its role in the practices of industrial organization, the body is always already a visible object. In ergonomics, for instance, the body figures primarily as a visible object of study, an imageobject in which image and knowledge are inseparably linked. The realignment of work, body and self which occurs at the dawn of the cybernetic age, then, is not just an event that will be reflected in cinematic, photographic and other types of representation. It is, to an important degree, an image-event: an event that occurs in and through images of the body at work, or no longer at work. This essay, then, deals with the image-event of the body’s obsolescence. Depending on the view point and the theory in play the obsolescence of the body can be seen either as liberating, as the juncture at which the body has finally been liberated from the toil of physical labor to become the vessel of self realization, or as a loss, as the disruption of the unity of body, work and self. In this essay I will explore the scenario of disruption, and I will assume that we are dealing with a moment of crisis in the history of the alignment of body, self and work. First, I will focus on the use of film in ergonomics in the work of Frank Bunker Gilbreth, a pioneer of the management consultancy business in the early twentieth century. Gilbreth used film cameras in an attempt to rationalize bodily movement. Paradoxically, but significantly, Gilbreth’s efforts met with failure but led to the development of one of the basic tenets of robotics. My key point in this essay is that Gilbreth’s work marks a key transitional moment towards the obsolescene of the body in what sociologist Daniel Bell, in an influential book first published in 1973, called the “post-industrial society” (Bell, The Post-Industrial Society). In my conclusion, and with an eye to further research, I will briefly address the fate of the obsolete body in a post-industrial environment through a series of body formations, all of which rose to cultural salience and became image-events in the mid-to-late 1970s: the obese and the anorexic body, the sculpted body of the body builder, and the body of the cy- <?page no="66"?> 66 Vinzenz Hediger borg. What I am interested in here, then, is not so much the posthuman body but the post-industrial body as an image-event. 9 Mostly for reasons of limited space the essay focuses mainly on the male body in developing its basic argument while leaving the framework of analysis open to more detailed evaluation of gender and gender differences. Let me start out, however, by explaining what I mean by “obsolescence.” I Among the distinctive traits of modernity are surplus and the superfluous, and the history of modernity could well be written as a history of the discarded and the obsolete. If we define modernity, as sociologists like Anthony Giddens suggest, by and large as industrial civilization, then modernity can be seen as a process of ceaseless innovation whereby all kinds of things are constantly rendered obsolete, or recognized as obsolete: material objects, social roles, systems of knowledge and belief, even living organisms. In the cultural semantics of obsolescence, living organisms occupy a privileged position. Modernity could in fact be described as the age in which man finally came to understand, through the insights of Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin, that life is neither an eternal cycle nor a timeless essence, but a historical process in which life forms succeed each other and can and do become obsolete, which happens every time an animal species becomes extinct. As recently as the eighteenth century the very idea of extinction was incomprehensible even to the most educated of natural philosophers. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was convinced that the mammoth, which in his Notes on the State of Virginia he calls “big buffalo” and the “American incognitum,” was not an extinct species but alive and well somewhere in the as-yet unexplored outer reaches of the American northwest (Barrow 19). When 75 years later Darwin published The Origin of Species - which is, of course, not about the origin of species but about the fact that, strictly speaking, there are no species but only evolving life forms - the book summed up a latent consensus and furnished a cogent theory that explained, among other things, a fact of life, or a fact about life, that had been quite firmly established since the early nineteenth century. In the wake of the French Revolution, French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) conducted a study of animal fossils that led him to conclude that animal species have a history and do become extinct (Outram). Cuvier summed up his results in a book entitled Recherches sur les ossements fossiles ou l’on rétablit les 9 For the notion of the post-human body see Halberstam and Livingston; Hayles. <?page no="67"?> Body Rebuilding 67 caractères de plusieurs animaux dont les révolutions du globe ont détruit les espèces in 1812. But as early as 1798, Cuvier stated in a paper delivered to an audience of colleagues, “There is no longer anyone who does not know that the world we inhabit shows everywhere clear traces of large and violent revolutions” (Cuvier 35). While the destruction of entire animal species quickly became an accepted fact in the scientific community of the early nineteenth century, the display of animal fossils in the newly established natural history museums made the possibility of extinction an element of common knowledge by the mid-nineteenth century (Sheets-Pyenson; Bennett 19ff). 10 Ideas of evolution had circulated in visual representations since the 1830s, and visual displays such as the dinosaur exhibit at the London Crystal Palace world fair park, which opened in 1853, testify to the fact that the obsolescence of animal species was firmly established in the public mind even before Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1895 (Goodall). The impact of Darwin’s theory both on the further development of the discipline of biology and on culture at large is well known, and the cultural consequences of the theory of evolution continue to be deplored in some quarters to this day, particularly by religious fundamentalists in the USA and in some Islamic countries such as Turkey. In Austria, Darwin found an attentive reader not only in Sigmund Freud, who listed the theory of evolution amongst the three major historic Kränkungen of the narcissism of man, but also in Joseph Schumpeter, an economist, short-term minister of economic affairs of the nascent Austrian republic in 1919/ 1920 and later a Harvard professor. Schumpeter’s life work was the study of the dynamics of capitalism, which he approached by integrating sociology, history and philosophy with economic theory. In his History of Economic Analysis, published posthumously in 1954, Schumpeter denies any direct influence of Darwin’s theory on the economic thought of his time. Rather, he argues that Darwin and Marx were swimming in the same river: “Marx may have experienced satisfaction at the emergence of Darwinist evolutionism. But his own had nothing whatever to do with it, and neither lends any support to the other” (Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis 420). But while Schumpeter’s own understanding of Darwin has been the bone of contention among historians of economic theory (Hodgson), Schumpeter characterizes the dynamics of capitalism as an evolutionary process both in his early work, Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung from 1911, and in his most widely read book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy from 1942 (see in particular 82-85). In an influential critique of the static market models and the equilibrium theories of neo-classical economic 10 On the natural history museum as a source for the study of animal extinction see Shaffer, Fischer and Davidson 27-30. <?page no="68"?> 68 Vinzenz Hediger theory Schumpeter famously argued that markets are never stable and described the dynamics of capitalism as a process of “creative destruction.” Markets and with them economic development, Schumpeter argued, are not driven by a tendency towards equilibrium, but by innovation and the sudden irruption of new products and players which replace and render obsolete, rather than improve upon, previous products. Thus even the most technologically advanced horse carriages quickly became obsolete at the turn of the twentieth century with the appearance of the automobile - except of course, and perhaps ironically, given that it is the city where Schumpeter mostly grew up and attended university, in Vienna where horse carriages continue to contribute to the economy in important ways. 11 If the idea of extinction is at the heart of the biological theory of evolution, the idea of creative destruction provides the key to the dynamics of a capitalism understood as an evolutionary process. Both evolve around obsolescence, of living organisms and material objects, but also of systems of knowledge. Against this backdrop, in terms of the field of vision, the trash heap - that ubiquitous repository of the obsolete - is one of the signature sites of modernity. But if the obsolescence of beings and things is a distinctive trait of modernity so is surplus, the overabundance of objects and knowledge or that which is superfluous. Luxury, of course, is not a modern invention, but the availability of objects and knowledge far in excess of what is strictly necessary (or knowable) counts among the most obvious features of modern industrialized societies. Hegel, in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, was probably the first modern thinker to analyze the dynamics of an economy that produced not only in excess of what was needed, but in the process managed to mold and create needs and desires in excess of what was strictly necessary in terms of subsistence (Hegel 246 ff). Similarly, Durkheim based his analysis of social relations in his 1893 dissertation The Division of Labor in Society on the assumption that man’s social and emotional needs are unlimited, while his physical needs are determined by the body and its functions. Very much along the same lines, for Schumpeter it is the producer who as a rule initiates economic change, and consumers are educated by him if necessary; they are, as it were, taught to want new things, 11 In an often-cited passage in his Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Schumpeter lists five types of innovation: the introduction of a new good, the introduction of a new method of production, the opening of a new market, the conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials or half-manufactured goods, and the carrying out of the new organization of any industry (see Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development 66). The example of the horse carriage is Schumpeter’s own. <?page no="69"?> Body Rebuilding 69 or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using. (Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development 65) Nobody needs a BMW limousine with 520 hp, particularly not in a country like Switzerland where speed limits are 120 km/ h but BMW sells them by the hundreds, if not thousands, in Switzerland alone. With his theory of the commodity fetish Marx attempted to provide an explanation of how this process works: how the superfluous comes to be seen as necessary through the attribution of quasi-magical qualities to products that, in the process, enter and evolve in a realm far beyond mere functionality. But whether it is the commodity fetish or the genius and the ruse of the entrepreneur (as in Schumpeter’s view of the process) in industrial civilization material objects constantly address us with a call of “you need me” not only, to paraphrase an old Ella Fitzgerald song, “more than you know,” but “more than you need me.” The production of surplus might be considered purely a waste of resources, of time and energy. As such, it appears to run counter to one of the guiding principles of modern economic development, namely rationalization. Rationalization can be defined as the increase of output relative to the same input (in terms of raw materials, technology and labor), or the increase of output in combination with a decrease of input. Innovation, the driving force of capitalism according to Schumpeter, consists - among other things - in the development of new products, but also in the rationalization of existing production processes. Rationalization cuts back on waste and unnecessary surplus. It is, if you will, the process of proactively determining which elements of the production process are superfluous and can be eliminated. Rationalization is proactive creative destruction within the firm as opposed to a process that happens between firms through the play of market forces. Yet at the same time the streamlining of production leads to even more surplus on the side of output. Based on an example from agriculture, David Ricardo famously stipulated in the early nineteenth century that an increase in the volume of production leads to a decrease in returns. As the rapid development of consumer product industries in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century showed, Ricardo’s “law of diminishing returns” applied only to a very limited set of circumstances. The more likely standard case of capitalist economic development turned out to be increasing returns on an increase of volume of production driven by malleable consumer demand (Schumpeter, Essays on Entrepreneurs) - particularly in the early and mid-twentieth century, when Western societies reaped the benefits of a number of technological and other innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth <?page no="70"?> 70 Vinzenz Hediger centuries such as the telephone, the automobile, and advances in education, that led to a rapid proliferation of mass-produced goods and services and a steep rise in living standards throughout the industrialized world. 12 In the twentieth century the paradox of growth, of increasing efficiency and growing waste, posed not least a cultural challenge and prompted, among other things, a philosophical rethinking of some of the basic notions of political economy. Beyond the realms of economics per se, French philosopher Georges Bataille, who was a keen reader of Hegel and Nietzsche and no less a polymath and grand theorist than Schumpeter, addressed the dynamics of growth and waste in terms of dépense, dissipation, and accumulation. In his book La part maudite (1943- 1946), published in English as The Accursed Share, Bataille turns classical political economy on its head and develops an economy of surplus and excess rather than an economy based on notions of scarcity. Dissipation, Bataille argues, is built into human societies generally: The dispersion of surplus energy is a marker of the ebullience of life itself. The potlatch, as studied by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, would be an example: a ritual of giving gifts where one tribe shames another into responding to a gift with an even bigger gift until both tribes are essentially ruined. Modern economies, Bataille argues, also evolve around the “part maudite,” the “accursed share,” that part of the accumulated wealth that is not reintroduced in the cycle of production and accumulation but rather spent in apparently senseless and uneconomical ways, i.e. wasted or dissipated. The “accursed share” can take the form of ostentatious luxury, of non-procreative sexuality, but also, and most importantly, the form of war, which Bataille, writing under the impression of two consecutive world wars, views as a quasi-ritualistic collective annihilation of surplus energy. The trick of bourgeois capitalism, according to Bataille, is that it manages to combine, and sometimes even balance, dissipation and accumulation. By mutually recognizing each other’s acts of dissipation and imitating or exceeding them, actors in a bourgeois capitalist system set off a process of accumulation. The telos of accumulation is dissipation, but dissipation sets off further accumulation. It is a cultural logic that much like Schumpeter’s creative destruction is both nefarious and extremely productive, but while for Schumpeter excess, waste and obsolescence are external effects of the dynamics of capitalism, Bataille suggests that dissipation is something like the immanent telos around which the process evolves. 12 Tyler Cowen characterizes these innovations as “low-hanging fruit”: i.e. innovations which could be easily exploited for rapid economic growth. <?page no="71"?> Body Rebuilding 71 Where Bataille adopts a framework of philosophy and anthropology to search for the hidden meaning of the apparently senseless dissipation and distribution of surplus in culture in a broad sense, Schumpeter highlights the dynamics of creative destruction in modern capitalism. Both, however, in their own ways underscore the fact that surplus and the superfluous and the obsolescence of the discarded, are no mere accidents. Obsolescence is, in fact, part and parcel of the economic and social dynamics of modern industrialized societies, or of modernity, for that matter. While he does not address the issue in terms of a Schumpeterian analysis of capitalism nor through Bataille’s economy of excess, W.J.T. Mitchell is certainly on to something when he calls the dinosaur, the obsolete animal par excellence, the “totem animal of modernity.” Just as the extermination of large animal species in particular has been understood as a collateral effect of the rapid expansion of capitalism over the last three hundred years, our knowledge and understanding of life as a historical process and of extinction as an ineluctable outcome of the process of evolution is roughly coeval with a substantial understanding of the dynamics of capitalism. 13 The dinosaur, if you will, swims in the same river that Schumpeter refers to, the river that includes both Marx and Darwin: Not lethe, the river of forgetting in Antiquity, but the modern river of obsolescence. II With this framework in mind let me now return to the question of the body’s obsolescence, or rather to the obsolescence of the body as an image-event. As I argued in the introduction, at a particular juncture roughly in the middle of the twentieth century, the body becomes largely obsolete in terms of its role in industrial production processes. At this juncture, at the dawn of what we might call the cybernetic age, i.e. the moment roughly in the middle of the twentieth century when information technology becomes a fact of life, a realignment of body, work and self occurs. What happens at this juncture in terms of the composition and the character of work in industrial production can best 13 For a zoogeography of the extinction of large animal species in the last three hundred years see Planhol. For the sake of anecdote it should be noted that the conservation of animal species has become a subject of economics as well. The field of mathematical bioeconomics is concerned with the economics of maintaining animal populations. The models developed in this field help, among other things, to understand why, under certain biological and economic conditions of the commercial exploitation of animals, extermination of the entire population may appear as the most attractive policy, even to an individual resource owner (Clark, Profit Maximization). <?page no="72"?> 72 Vinzenz Hediger be described, or rather shown, in the following graph with two curves that combine to form a chiastic pattern. Reproduced by kind permission of Brian Wesbury The falling line indicates the percentage of the work force employed in classical manufacturing jobs in the period from 1950 through 2008; the ascending line indicates the rate of productivity and the industrial output per worker employed in the same time period. What the graph shows, then, is that in the last sixty years productivity has increased by a factor of five, while the percentage of people employed in manufacturing jobs in Western industrialized societies dropped from 33 percent to below 10 percent of the workforce. As Robert Solow showed already in the late 1950s, the explanation for this lies in technological innovation, from the 1960s onwards particularly through the introduction of information technology and robotics into the manufacturing process, and new forms of industrial organization, particularly strategies such as lean production and flexible specialization. 14 What the graph also shows, albeit by implication, is that about two thirds of the manufacturing jobs have migrated 14 Robert Solow’s main contribution to economics was to relate growth to technological innovation in two highly influential papers that earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987 (see Theory of Economic Growth; Technical Change). <?page no="73"?> Body Rebuilding 73 to other industries or, to use the terminology coined by Australian economist Colin Clark in his 1940 book Conditions of Economic Progress, from the secondary to the tertiary sector of the economy. 15 Alternatively, if you prefer Daniel Bell’s more supple taxonomy, to the tertiary (transportation and utilities), the quarternary (trade and finances) and the quinary (health, education, arts, etc.) sectors (Post-Industrial Society 121-163). What we see, then, is a striking graphic representation of the principle that economic progress can be “defined as a function of the differential productivity among the sectors” (Post-Industrial Society xiv). More specifically, what we see is the advent of what Daniel Bell called “the post-industrial society.” Coincidentally, the two lines intersect exactly at a point in the mid-1970s, at the time of publication of Bell’s book, a point to which we will return shortly. One could argue that the graph shows the effects of a transition from what may be called the thermodynamic age of industrial civilization to the cybernetic age. In the thermodynamic age industrial organization is concerned with coordinating human bodies with machines in an ordered, rational and productive fashion. In the cybernetic age the focus is on information and control, on the substitution of human operators with machines that can perform the same tasks more cheaply and more reliably, and in the coordination of large systems. At the dawn of the cybernetic age physical labor of the kind typically involved in manufacturing jobs has become considerably less relevant to the economy as a whole, even in classical manufacturing industries such as the automotive and steel industries, where workers now primarily operate robots and other substitutes for manual labor rather than perform the task themselves. At this juncture, bodies become obsolete because, thanks to the effects of rationalization, fewer workers are needed to perform the same tasks and produce the same output, or because new machines replace manual and bodily labor altogether, as in the automotive industry, where robots now perform almost all the work that used to be done by workers, and bodies can become obsolete because new types of production do not require any kind of physical labor and physical presence at all: often, the body is merely a vessel for a capacity to operate symbolic machines. Most importantly, however, at the juncture that the graph describes the body ceases to be the locus where the transformation of energy into performance could be studied in a field of vision. This shift is perhaps best illustrated by the work of Frank Bunker Gilbreth, a notable figure in the field of time and motion study and one of the pioneers of the management consultancy business in the 1920s. 15 Colin Clark who pioneered the use of the term “Gross National Product” is not related to Colin W. Clark, the mathematical bioeconomist. <?page no="74"?> 74 Vinzenz Hediger Gilbreth’s work predates cybernetics and the passage to a post-industrial order by almost half a century. Yet his work-study films presage, and partly help bring about, what is to come. A former entrepreneur in the construction business Gilbreth latched on to Frederick Taylor’s theories of scientific management to devise a method of improving the performance of bricklayers on construction sites (Gilbreth, Bricklaying System). He quickly expanded his field of study to include all kinds of industrial labor and even medical surgery (Gilbreth, Motion Study; Primer of Scientific Management; Motion Study in Surgery; Applied Motion Study). Supported by his wife Lillian, with whom he had twelve children and lived in a household organized according to the principles of scientific management (Gilbreth and Gilbreth Carey), Gilbreth developed a method of using film cameras to record and analyze the movements of workers, and to create visual displays of optimized work procedures (Curtis). After early attempts at filming on factory floors produced disappointing results, Gilbreth devised a proper film studio with prepared backgrounds and timing devices which allowed him to perform detailed measurements both in terms of the spatial and the temporal aspects of the worker’s performance (Novak). Gilbreth quickly became famous, not least because of the striking visuals, both film stills and the films themselves, that accompanied his publications and lectures. Partly because two of Gilbreth’s children, Frank Jr. and Ernestine, wrote a book about their childhood in the Gilbreth household which became hugely popular with US postwar suburban families and was turned into a successful Hollywood film in 1950 with Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy in the leading roles, Gilbreth continued to be viewed as the leading pioneer of time and motion study long after his initial publicity successes. 16 In a similar vein, but with a negative slant, in contemporary critical literature Gilbreth is often associated with repressive disciplinary regimes in capitalist industrial production of the 1920s (see Reichert). As a recent study by Florian Hoof shows, however, the story of Frank Gilbreth as a management consultant is largely a story of failure. In his doctoral research on Gilbreth, Hoof shows that Gilbreth’s methods were very popular with mid-level to senior management but failed to impress and catch on with the workers who were supposed to benefit from his methods. Where Taylor’s methods of scientific management aimed at eliminating what he perceived to be the innate laziness of industrial workers, Gilbreth’s work was not motivated primarily by moral concerns. Rather he wanted to improve both the performance and the working conditions of industrial workers (Sarasin). Nonetheless, his efforts remained largely 16 For a study of the Gilbreth family in popular culture in the United States in the 1950s see Levey. <?page no="75"?> Body Rebuilding 75 fruitless. Workers resisted the implementation of his techniques, even after he had established a star system of sorts in which he personalized the performers in his films in order to allow factory floor personnel to relate to their models in an individual way. In a pattern that was to become commonplace in the consultancy business, however, lack of tangible results did not directly translate into a drop in demand for Gilbreth’s services (Hoof, Film - Labor - Flow-Charting). After Frank’s untimely death in 1924, Lillian Gilbreth, who held a PhD in organizational psychology, as opposed to her husband who only had a high-school diploma, continued their business and expanded into the services sector, re-organizing, among other things, the customer services at Macy’s, a major New York department store (Graham). As for Gilbreth’s time and motion studies, perhaps paradoxically the one area where he did leave an important mark in the long term was robotics. The key problem Gilbreth tried to solve was the problem of the transfer of implicit knowledge. Work place routines as performed by experienced workers imply a type of knowledge that philosopher Michael Polanyi calls “personal knowledge” or “implicit knowledge.” It is a knowledge attained through experience, but it is different from other types of knowledge in that it is not propositional in nature and hence cannot be transferred to another subject. Gilbreth’s entire system of time and motion study constituted an attempt to codify the implicit knowledge of the worker and make it transferable. Through this ambition alone Gilbreth is already representative of an order of industrial production that prepares the ground for the shift to post-industrialism, since the codification of knowledge and the dependence of industrial innovation on scientific research are usually seen as key elements of the development of capitalism in the twentieth century (Bell, Post-Industrial Society xxxix.). It would be interesting to speculate about the philosophical reasons for Gilbreth’s failure to fully transfer implicit knowledge from one body to another, and it is interesting to note that similar ideas are still being pursued in organization research almost a century after Gilbreth’s first experiments. 17 However, to the point that he did succeed his success was not an intended outcome. Gilbreth broke down human movement into a basic set of 17 easily identifiable and repeatable components such as “search,” “find,” “select,” “grasp,” “assemble,” “use,” “disassemble,” 17 Thus in a recent publication three Japanese engineers argue that knowledge acquired by experience can be transferred in the form of automatically generated manuals: “To automate the documentation, we have developed a method of observing a worker’s motion with IC accelerometers and we have built a program that automatically generates a manual from the recorded work process” (Hori, Hirose, Taki). This is a concise summary of Gilbreth’s project, with computer technology taking the place of film. <?page no="76"?> 76 Vinzenz Hediger etc. He then codified these movements with a series of hieroglyph-like ideograms. While factory workers by and large failed to adopt this system, Gilbreth’s table of the basic components of human movement serves as the basis for robotics to this day. To an important degree, then, Gilbreth’s efforts at improving the bodily performance of the worker eventually made the presence and performance of the human body on the factory floor obsolete. The bodies that we see in Gilbreth’s films are already specters of themselves. Precisely in the moment of its most acute visibility the worker’s body is about to be replaced by a technological substitute, and work as bodily performance disappears. Gilbreth’s films resemble salvage ethnology films and films of rare and threatened animal species in that they capture a last chance to see moment: they capture the worker’s body at the threshold of obsolescence, and like much of salvage ethnography, they hasten their object’s demise. Given their subsequent use Gilbreth’s films are both a record of the body and the medium that, in a momentous image event, puts the body literally out of work. III I began this essay by asserting that one of the distinguishing features of modernity is an alignment of body, work and self in which the self finds expression in work and the body, through physical labor, becomes a source of pride and dignity. I further argued that the modern alignment of body, work and self evolves around the visible body and the visibility of the process whereby energy translates into performance. I then proceeded to argue that the transition from the thermodynamic to the cybernetic age, i.e. from an order of production evolving around the visible transformation of energy into performance to one evolving around information and control and of “work as thought” rather than work as bodily performance, involves a re-alignment of body, work and self which amounts to a crucial episode of creative destruction in that it affects, and alters, one of the basic tenets of industrial modernity: to the extent that work continues to be an expression of the self the body no longer figures as an essential conduit in the relation of self to work. Work ceases to be an essentially visible process, and the body as the visible medium of work and the medium of the visibility of work becomes obsolete. I have argued that the work-study film captures this transition, the image-event of the working body’s utmost visibility which marks, at the same time, the tipping point towards the obsolescence of the physical labor in a world of robotics. <?page no="77"?> Body Rebuilding 77 So what happens next? Where does the obsolete body go, since it so obviously does not and cannot cease to physically exist? What shape or shapes does the surplus body take, and how does it figure in the emergent new relation of work and self? One possible answer starts with the observation that in the mid- 1970s, at the dawn of the post-industrial condition, the field of the visual begins to be populated by what we might call bodies in crisis: spent bodies, excessive bodies, bodies that speak of indulgence and waste but also of a self-discipline that is as excessive as it is ultimately useless and hence can only be plausibly interpreted as a form of enjoyment. In particular the series of bodies in crisis that gain cultural salience in the 1970s includes the obese and the anorexic bodies and the sculpted body of the body builder. As I would like to argue, in a brief concluding sketch, that the appearance of the body in crisis in the visual field marks the point where the obsolete body becomes part of the “part maudite,” the accursed share: both the over-indulgence of the obese body and the excessive self-discipline of the anorectic and the body builder are forms of “dépense,” of the enjoyment - however perverse - of surplus. Both obesity and anorexia have variously been treated as “epidemics” since the 1970s, with obesity becoming a major public health issue and the Body Mass Index ( BMI ) a key parameter for the measurement of the relative health of a population (Caballero; Lupton 59-60 and 121 passim), while anorexia has been treated as a social issue rather than a public health issue (see Williams and King; Lucas; Brumberg). In terms of the image-event, the obese body marks a shift from the body as a source of dignity to the body as a source of shame. Shame is as much a socially efficient affect as pride, and if pride and dignity are key drivers of bourgeois capitalism, then the same can certainly be argued for shame and post-industrial capitalism. 18 In the classical industrial era, the body at work - as depicted, for instance, in the famous mural paintings by Diego Rivera in Detroit (Downs) - was an expression of force, selfrestraint and discipline, and a source of the worker’s pride. Once in itself a sign of wealth and hence a source of pride, the post-industrial obese body is a body out of work, a visible expression of selfindulgence, lack of discipline and hence - within the continuing logic of bourgeois pride - a source of shame. Yet at the same time the obese body is also a figure of enjoyment. This double aspect points to one of 18 This is an argument that needs further elaboration along the lines proposed by Deirdre McCloskey in her work on bourgeois dignity. Recently, shame has been a topic of philosophy in the work of Bernard Williams who introduced the problem of shame and necessity into moral philosophy, and in queer theory (see Williams). For an analysis of the dynamics of shame and pride in market situations see Kaneff. <?page no="78"?> 78 Vinzenz Hediger the core contradictions of capitalism. Based not only on discipline and self-restraint, but on the fostering of artificial needs and on supplying them, the success of capitalism depends on the emergence of a culture of self-indulgence that, according to some critics like Daniel Bell, who made this point in his 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, will eventually subvert the discipline of self-restraint and destroy the system. However, more than thirty years after Bell’s analysis we are still waiting for capitalism to collapse under the weight of our collective selfindulgence, which suggests that self-restraint and self-indulgence create a balance, however precarious, that tends towards stability. Within this balance the spectacle of obesity suggests that the body has indeed become a conduit of “dépense” rather than productivity, while productivity now relies on other resources. Along similar lines one could argue that anorexia is both a serious illness and a highly visible, spectacular and existential performance of the body’s obsolescence, a dépense not in the form of an excess of gluttony, but an excess of asceticism. If the shameful spectacle of obesity seems to suggest in an underhanded way that redemption for the body in crisis no longer lies in work, but in the work-out, the sculpted body of the body builder makes the same point more directly. The body builder’s body is an aesthetic body in the sense that the strength and power it projects are surplus to requirement. As Adorno writes of the aesthetic object, “only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value.” 19 The product of countless workouts, the body builder’s body is as much a body out of work as the obese body, and the self-discipline required to build it as much an excess and a “dépense,” an enjoyment, as the self-indulgence of the overeater. It is quite commonplace to treat the body builder’s body in terms of narcissism. Taking work out of the equation (or reducing it to the workout) body building links body and self in a narcissistic bond. However, staying within a loosely psychoanalytic framework, I would argue that the body builder’s spectacle of the almost obscenely useless body is less a case of narcissism than a case of melancholia. 20 Where the obese body and the anorexic body may be seen as linear examples of dépense, that is 19 In his Aesthetic Theory: “only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value. Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (Adorno 298). 20 It is important to note that in Freudian psychoanalysis narcissism and melancholia are intricately linked. Freud made the decisive step towards an understanding of melancholy in his study of narcissism in the 1910s. As Sandór Radó writes about the connection between narcissism and melancholia in 1928: “in melancholia the object which has been renounced is set up again within the ego and . . . thus in his self-reproaches the patient is continuing his aggressive tendencies against that object” (cf. Rado). <?page no="79"?> Body Rebuilding 79 as embodiments of the accursed share - albeit ex negativo in the case of the anorexic body - body building may be understood as the re-building of the obsolete body, a melancholy performance in the sense that it is in itself an ultimately useless and unproductive exercise, a failure to mourn the loss of the body that leads to an exuberant excess of bodily performance. Very much in that sense most of the films featuring Sylvester Stallone, and particularly the Rocky and Rambo films, may be read as narratives of re-entry: they are fantasies in which the discarded body becomes useful again and re-enters the social order at a higher level of dignity, whether Rocky wins the Cold War in the boxing ring or John Rambo single-handedly resolves the conundrums of American post-war foreign policy in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yet not all sculpted bodies in the visual culture of the last thirty years are trapped in a melancholy performance of rebuilding - in the sense of redisplaying and redeploying - the body’s erstwhile thermodynamic prowess. One of the key scenes in The Terminator (USA 1984, James Cameron) shows Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator operating on himself after a violent encounter, trying to piece the human flesh and the mechanical parts underneath back together. 21 Similarly the film’s poster shows Schwarzenegger with half his face missing and a gleaming red electronic eye fixing the viewer. One can argue that these images provide a synthesis of what the work-study films of Gilbreth both show and do not show: the image of the decomposing cyborg reveals the robot lurking beneath the frame of the body. Obviously, the realignment of body, work and self in the post-industrial condition affects not just the body but also the self. While Stallone’s surplus sculpted body haplessly struggles to regain his erstwhile standing, the cyborg’s composite frame points to the real problem: the problem of the technological self. For in the post-industrial realignment of body, work and self, technology renders the body obsolete but also takes the place of the self. What we see when we see the Terminator operating on himself is that it is from this self that body rebuilding must begin. 21 On the philosophical implications of the cyborg operating on himself see also Sobchack. <?page no="80"?> 80 Vinzenz Hediger References Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. New York: Continuum, 2004. Barrow, Mark V. Nature’s Ghosts. Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Bataille, Georges. L’érotisme. Paris: Minuit, 1957. . The Accursed Share. Part I: Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1996. . The Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics. 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How America Ate all the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. Penguin e-books, 2011. Curtis, Scott. “Images of Efficiency. The Films of Frank Gilbreth.” Films that Work. Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 85-99. Cuvier, Georges. Fossil Bones and Geological Catastrophes. New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts. Ed. Martin J.S. Rudwick. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Downs, Linda Bank. Diego Rivera: the Detroit Industry Murals. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. <?page no="81"?> Body Rebuilding 81 Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press, 1997. Dutton, Kenneth R. The Perfectible Body. The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development. New York: Continuum, 1995. Dyer, Richard. “The White Man’s Muscles.” The Masculinity Studies Reader. Ed. Rachel Adams and David Savran. 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Kaneff, Deema. “The Shame and Pride of Market Activity: Morality, Identity, and Trading in Post-Socialist Bulgaria.” Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-Socialism. Ed. Ruth Ellen Mandel and Caroline Humphrey. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002. 33-52. Kocka, Jürgen, Claus Offe and Beate Redslob, eds. Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit. Frankfurt: Campus, 2000. Levey, Jane F. “Imagining the Family in U.S. Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of the Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen.” Journal of Women’s History 13, 3 (2001): 125-150. Lucas, A.R. “The eating disorder epidemic’: more apparent than real? ” Pediatric Annals 21, 11 (1992): 746-751. Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health. Public Health and the Regulated Body. London and Delhi: Sage, 1995. McCloskey, Deirdre. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Mitchell, W.J.T. The Last Dinosaur Book. The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. 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Radó, Sandór. “The Problem of Melancholia.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 420-438. Reichert, Ramón. “Der Arbeitsstudienfilm. Eine verborgene Geschichte des Stummfilms. Medien und Zeit. Kommunikation in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 5 (2002): 46-57. Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work. The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. London: Tarcher, 1995. Sarasin, Philip. “Die Rationalisierung des Körpers. Über scientific management’ und biologische Rationalisierung’. Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Schumpeter, Joseph. The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1934. . Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy [1942]. New York: Harper, 1975. . “The Instability of Capitalism [1928].” Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles and the Evolution of Capitalism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989. 47-72. . History of Economic Analysis [1954]. London: Routledge, 1994. Shaffer, H. Bradley, Robert N. Fischer and Carlos Davidson. “The role of natural history collections in documenting species declines.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 13, 1 (1998): 27-30. Sheets-Pyenson, Susan. “Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums During the Late Nineteenth Century.” History of Science 25 (1987): 279-300. Sobchack, Vivian. “Beating the Meat/ Surviving the Text, or: How to get out of this century alive.” The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science. Ed. Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley. New York and London: New York University Press, 1998. 310-320. Solow, Robert. “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics 39 (1957): 312-320. . “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1956): 65-94. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Williams, P. and M. King. “The epidemic’ of anorexia nervosa: Another medial myth? ” Lancet 24, 1(1987): 205-207. <?page no="85"?> Hitler goes Pop: Totalitarianism, Avant-garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment Elisabeth Bronfen This essay takes Susan Sontag’s concept of fascist aesthetics as its point of departure to explore similar structures and themes in Hollywood films. Reflecting on the murky interface between the totalitarian political projects of the 30s and early 40s and avant-guard aesthetics, this essay proposes a cross-mapping of Riefenstahl’s Olympia with Busby Berkeley’s musical Dames and Walt Disney’s cartoon Bambi. While Hitler’s speeches on art offer a historical context for my discussion, the close analysis of key scenes of these three films serves to illuminate both the analogy in visual form and narratives, even while foregrounding seminal differences. Not only do these three directors differ in their intentions. Rather, both Busby Berkeley and Walt Disney consciously undermine the very fascination for a totalitarian aesthetic, which they also celebrate in their joyous enactment of mass body formations. I claim that it is not only fruitful but critically necessary to bring a film language, which in the case of Leni Riefenstahl explicitly served the purposes of a totalitarian political system, to bear on the films Hollywood produced at the same time, even if American visual culture emerged from a social order that was precisely not totalitarian but rather aggressively democratic. In her essay “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag describes how, in 1939, Leni Riefenstahl, after returning from a visit to Hollywood, where she had been the guest of Walt Disney, accompanied the invading German Wehrmacht into Poland as a uniformed army war correspondent with her own camera team. The photographs she took to document these atrocities seem not to have survived the war, though an image exists of her shocked face while witnessing one of the public executions. The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 85-104. <?page no="86"?> 86 Elisabeth Bronfen Her filming of the National Socialist Party Convention in Nuremberg in 1934, as well as of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, in turn, have influenced a cinematic language Susan Sontag calls fascist aesthetics. At stake in this art form, she explains, is the extravagant staging of “the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/ things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force” (91). Fascist dramaturgy, she goes on to argue, revolves around an orgiastic transaction between powerful forces and those who enact them. It alternates “between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death” (91) . At the same time, Sontag insists that her concept of fascist aesthetics is not confined to art labeled as fascist or produced under an explicitly totalitarian regime. Rather, certain formal structures and themes of fascist art can be found in films such as Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here, or Kubrick’s 2001. The concept can, however, also be applied to the allegedly documentary films made by Leni Riefenstahl, who throughout her life vehemently protested against the charge that she had made propaganda films for the Nazi Party. The fact that one can detect a similarity in cinematic language for such diverse directors as Riefenstahl, Berkeley and Disney, as well as a common narrative about the dissolution of the individual into the technological sign, belatedly sheds light on the way in which German fascism always also understood itself as a cultural movement. Not only political goals were to be perpetrated. A particular concept of what it meant to be a German person was to be disseminated as well, and connected to this the idea that the individual was to become part of a mass body, unequivocally subjected to the will of the political sovereign. Bringing both art and mass entertainment in line with the ideological goals of the Nazi Party was decisive not only for the way in which the new German people were to change the world, but also for the different interpretation of political culture this political party sought to install along with their belligerent actions. At stake, however, was not only the ideology of a people (Volkskörper) united under a charismatic leader, but also the manner in which this collective body, cleansed of all racial and class difference, came to be visualized as a political entity, so as to sustain narrations about the strength and greatness of the new German nation brought into cultural circulation from the early 30s onwards. At the same time, the formal as well as thematic similarities between Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary films, financed by the Nazi government, and the animated films as well as the musicals that were produced at the same time by Disney Studios and Warner Brothers in Hollywood, draw our attention to a somewhat more vexed connection joining together <?page no="87"?> Hitler goes Pop 87 European and American modernism with the cultural praxis of totalitarian movements such as the Nazi Party. In his preface to Hitler’s Speeches on Art and Cultural Politics, Robert Eikmeyer suggests that this relation is too complex for us either to declare that the classic avant-garde ended in 1933 (so as to allow it to resurface untainted by all political events in 1945), or to assume that the avant-garde was seamlessly subsumed into the totalitarian movements of the 30s. Is it a question of intention, of style or of the transported ideologies, which makes this connection noteworthy? Should we address the manner in which culturally pressing issues come to be visualized and aesthetically resolved, and in so doing inscribe themselves into the political imaginary, as Susan Buck-Morss has shown for her comparison of American and Soviet mass utopias in the 30s? (see also Schivelbusch). Or should we rather focus on the political consequences that follow from artistic works, so that at stake is their material usage as propaganda? So as to explore the uncanny interface between aesthetic innovation, pop culture and totalitarian art projects at the acme of modernism, I want to offer a crossmapping of the three film directors Susan Sontag mentions as examples for what she calls fascist aesthetics. All three transpose the spirit of the totalitarian movement into the domain of cinematic mass culture in the period leading up to and moving into WW II. My comparison of the documentary film Olympia (1938), the musical Dames (1934) as well as the animated film Bambi (1942) focuses on the manner in which the cinematic language of all three directors rearticulates some of Hitler’s seminal political concerns within the visual tropes of pop culture: the celebration of the immaculate, triumphant body, able to perform supreme physical feats; the production of a new human as emblem for an intact social body (Volkskörper), immune against decay; the construction of an artificial world, which promises to ward off all dissolution of time and space. However, to draw attention to the analogy both in the visual form and the narratives of these three films necessarily also means foregrounding their seminal differences. Not only do these three directors differ in their intentions. Rather, both Busby Berkeley and Walt Disney consciously undermine the very fascination for a totalitarian aesthetic, which they also celebrate in their joyous enactment of mass body formations. I claim that it is not only fruitful but critically necessary to bring a film language, which in the case of Leni Riefenstahl explicitly served the purposes of a totalitarian political system, to bear on the films Hollywood produced at the same time, even if American visual culture emerged from a social order that was precisely not totalitarian but rather aggressively democratic. At the same time, to insist on a connection that leads from Busby Berkeley and Walt Disney to Leni Riefenstahl not only <?page no="88"?> 88 Elisabeth Bronfen means sharpening our sensitivity for totalitarian analogies, as these came to inscribe themselves in very different political imaginaries. Rather, it also means taking note of the manner in which art and cultural visions triumph along the lines of what Nietzsche called the emergence of moral judgment. A set of values, he argues, gain dominance by reinterpreting the cultural values already in existence, by confiscating them, reformulating them so that they might serve a new purpose, and by virtue of this appropriating, redirecting them. If such diverse directors as Berkeley and Riefenstahl stage the technical mechanization of the human body, we must also ask: how far can one make any analogy between the way in which they re-interpret and re-formulate the relation between the modern subject and her or his reification? At what point must one insist on a decisive difference between these cinematic projects? As Bazon Brock argues, at the heart of totalitarianism lies the claim that it consists in a force, which insists on realizing its ideas by transforming them into political reality (“Kunst auf Befehl? ”). Following this definition, I suggest that the difference between diverse artistic expressions fascinated with totalitarianism might well reside in the way we evaluate the reality they produce on screen, which is to say the reality they transform into a world of visual signs: is it aimed at political consequences, at commercial success, or does it unfold as a self-reflexive play of signifiers. If we turn to the ideas to which Hitler, in his speeches on art and cultural politics, ascribes the force of producing reality, the following schema emerges. Ways of viewing the world (Weltanschauungen) shape cultural life in so far as poets can sing of precursor poets only if heroic times allowed these to emerge. Unheroic times, in turn, force heroes to descend into the lowly ordinary of everyday existence. For this reason a permanence of the heroic (in the sense of a transhistorical energy) must be pitted against the possibility of the decay of the concrete world vision of any particular cultural moment. With this claim for the survival of the spirit of the heroic, Hitler has recourse to a belief in the eternal value of the ideals of antiquity, prevalent in the writings of cultural critics at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Matthew Arnold had already foregrounded the notion of disinterestedness in relation to “all questions of practical consequences and applications” as the quintessential mark of the good critic. According to him, the work of both the poet and the critic should instead consist in knowing “the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” In short: “to produce fruit for the future” (18). <?page no="89"?> Hitler goes Pop 89 What is, however, idiosyncratic in Hitler’s schema of the resilient afterlife of cultural ideals of perfection, is the fact that he locates the permanence of the heroic in the immutability of racial inheritance, using as his example the cultural survival of classic ideals of beauty. The material appearance of paintings and sculpture from ancient Greece testify to the immortality of these past ideals, do so, however, only - and that is the decisive point - as long as people with a similar hereditary predisposition (because they share a similar racial descent) continue to exist. As future spectators they will recognize the sublimity of this art from the past and attest to its eternal value. Hitler’s rhetorical trick consists in the claim that the preservation of the ability to appreciate artistic expressions of the heroic is tantamount to its production in relation both to the past and the future. On the one hand, a contemporary artistic practice based on esteeming heroic values must bridge the gap to the equally heroic times of the past. On the other hand, Hitler’s notion of culture is aimed less at art works themselves. Rather, his concern is for the production of a future spectatorship, which will subsequently recognize the heroic times represented by the Nazi period. The wager of contemporary art and cultural practice is that in retrospect, future spectators will attribute to the art works of the past an ideal perfection, even while, in so doing, they actually come to produce this heroic quality as an aftereffect of belated artistic appreciation. The rhetorical gesture celebrates the future perfect: these art works will have been perfect. In his critical comments on Hitler’s writings on art, Boris Groys notes that the totalitarian art work seeks above all to produce a corporate body of spectators, who as future art consumers will guarantee the survival of a heroic hereditary predisposition adopted from antiquity (in Eikmeyer 25-39). This future audience, which contemporary art is to bring forth, defines itself as a group based on the affective responses it shares with the immortal achievements of antiquity. It identifies with their past ideals, which have, however, survived primarily owing to their externally recognizable and material appearance. The translation of this cultural energy into tangible paintings and sculptures allows the spirit of the past to affect an audience long after the culture that produced these artifacts has ceased to exist. Race, taken to be the innermost, constant kernel of cultural transmission, thus emerges as the cipher for a successful transhistorical transfer of cultural values and cultural knowledge. According to Hitler, hereditary predisposition allows cultural taste to survive genetically, and thus serves as a safeguard that a future body of spectators will retrospectively be able to recognize the cultural achievements that a past people was able to produce (Groys, in Eikmeyer 25- 39). <?page no="90"?> 90 Elisabeth Bronfen In his speeches on art, Hitler is not concerned with the present and its particular economic and cultural demands. In the sense of Matthew Arnold’s disinterestedness he, instead, develops a mythical notion of culture, which explicitly seeks to disengage itself from the inconstancy of real historical times. Contemporary art is to appropriate the immortal spirit, to confiscate and re-interpret it. In the present it is to create for the future an artistic materialization of the immortality of ideal perfection postulated by art critics. It is, thus, only logical that Hitler emphatically rejected all notions of style, declaring all new fashions to be an untenable threat to the healthy development of humanity as he saw it. In contrast to Erza Pound, enthusiastic supporter of Italian fascism, who appealed to his fellow artists to “make it new,” Hitler’s art politics was not concerned with what was novel, innovative and indeed, up to that historic moment unheard of. Unwittingly walking in the footsteps of the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, he sought instead to draw attention to the best that a past culture had always already thought and created. Caught up in a rhetorical short circuit, his totalitarian logic claims that the heroic proves to be a cultural value that has always already been in existence and will always continue to exist, precisely because one and the same racial kernel bridges the past, the present and the future. At the same time, one will only be able to determine belatedly whether a particular historical moment was able to produce immortal heroic achievements, namely when, owing to the persistence of such a racial kernel (which will allow future audiences to recognize past aesthetic ideals) the best that can be thought and created will have been preserved from decay, demise and oblivion. In his speech at a conference on culture during the Nazi Party Convention in Nuremberg on 1 September 1933, Hitler explained, “even if a nation is extinguished and its people fall silent, the stones will speak, as long as there are other people who have a similar understanding of culture” (“Kunst verpflichtet sich zur Wahrhaftigkeit,” Eikmeyer 53). In the temporal loop, in which the present produces the conditions, which will allow the past to have a cultural survival and thus effect the future, the spiritual energia of art meets its pure materialization. Everything depends on the survival of a material artifact, conceived as the bearer of a given set of cultural values, as well as the survival of an aesthetic taste, which will guarantee that this perfection will always be recognized by those who share it. A particular understanding of culture is eternal, because it has survived a catastrophe and is able to resurrect itself out of its ashes. But one could also say, only the catastrophe, which must be outlived, actually allows one to recognize what was beautiful and perfect in the past. The demise of a particular culture emerges as the precondition for determining that its ideals have, nevertheless, survived. The re- <?page no="91"?> Hitler goes Pop 91 silience of a particular cultural effect is predicated on this loss. In his speech on 5 September 1934, also given at a conference on culture in Nuremberg, Hitler proclaimed that the dimensions of a cultural will to power can only be understood belatedly, namely as force “that had been great, because it undertook to create the greatest things possible” (Hitler in Eikmeyer 77). Boris Groys poignantly notes that the eternity Hitler bespeaks is “the eternity of the ruins,” which have remained after a given civilization has been destroyed (in Eikmeyer 27). Leni Riefenstahl begins her opening sequence of Olympia with a cinematic rendition of the time after the demise of one of the West’s most significant cultures, ancient Greece. Her images of a temple in Olympia can be understood as an illustration of Hitler’s theories of art. With the help of her signature montage technique, Riefenstahl enacts the survival of the spirit of antiquity by focusing on the way it has lived on in its material monuments. Her camera captures the spirit of past ideals of perfection, and reanimates what has remained of the great architecture and sculptures of Greek culture, even while documenting the fact that these ruins are eternal. She uses superimposition to move from a close up of the fresco painting of two athletes to the clouds moving across the sky above the temple, then pans along the stony relics of this ancient cult site. So as to foreground the eternity of these ruins, Riefenstahl juxtaposes different visual perspectives of this sacred building. Her montage enmeshes diverse external views of the walls and columns, overgrown with grass and bushes, with views of the interior of the temple, while the panning movement of the camera visually underscores the transhistorical continuity of the space. At times her camera glides along a façade, then again it traverses the interior, circling around a column, only to move outside and depict the external structure of the temple as a long shot. The first longer camera pan ends as Riefenstahl moves into an extreme close-up of one of the columns, thus dissolving this antique cult site of worship into its pure materiality; into the stone that has outlasted all historical changes. After all, her aim is to use her film language to make these stones speak. A second superimposition draws our attention to the sculptured bust of a man, standing in one of the rooms of the temple, as though it had been extracted from the stone surrounding it. Initially Riefenstahl’s camera cautiously approaches this stone head, seemingly standing alone in the open interior. Then the director changes her mise-en-scène and, panning along several columns inside the temple, once more glides her view upwards into the sky, heralding the beginning of a new sequence of images: the superimposition of several close-up shots of statues, meant to illustrate the eternal value of antique ideals of beauty. Once more her camera pans along these externalized embodiments of the spirit of an- <?page no="92"?> 92 Elisabeth Bronfen tiquity, while her montage juxtaposes the individual marble bodies into one visual unity. One has the impression that they all flow together into one image body, produced by virtue of her editing technique. Faded into the background we see clouds moving across the sky, signaling that the nebulous spirit, which eternally envelopes this ruined cult site, has been incorporated into Riefenstahl’s cinematic reanimation of antique stones. As in the first sequence, which captures the external walls and interiors of the temple, the camera once again pans toward the stony materiality of the deceased Hellenic culture, so as to move around the individual statues. Only in contrast to the establishing sequence, the space is no longer filled with sun light. Instead, the individual statues, which owing to the superimpositions used to depict them seem to be dissolving into each other, appear as though exhibited on a dark stage, beyond any real location in time and space. In this artificial exhibition space, where Riefenstahl comes to enact her gothic reanimation of the past, the statues, enveloped by a cloudy fog, appear to have come alive again. They speak to us with a ghostly presence. What the montage calls forth are not individual figures, but an embodied corporation as form, which is to say, a group of figures combined into one cinematically produced image body. At the same time, the effect of the montage is to add spiritual reanimation to the illusion that an arsenal of cultural artifacts has been spared from the inevitable force of transience and decay. The gliding movement of the camera produces the impression that the statues, which its spirit seems to have reanimated, are now themselves moving on the screen. Riefenstahl visually underscores her appropriation of the immortal spirit of the past by virtue of the spatial design of this sequence, namely the dark background, the chiaroscuro lighting, as well as the fact that she continues to superimpose foggy clouds onto the individual statues. Indeed, her reanimation is tantamount to an embodiment of the eternity of a particular cultural value, namely that of ideal beauty and perfection. The internal racial kernel Hitler praises in his speeches on art, meant to guarantee a hereditary predisposition to recognize and create the best and greatest in the future, thus finds its materialization in the sublime statues that, having outlived the downfall of antiquity, are recognized and commemorated by this modern Germanic director. Once her camera has reached the sculpture of a discus thrower, Riefenstahl shifts to a corporeal embodiment of the spirit of antiquity. Seamlessly stone turns into bodies made of flesh and blood, as though the two were interchangeable materialities. After all, decisive is merely the transmission of a hereditary predisposition. Statues draw on the energy of the past to produce the perfect body of the contemporary German athlete, and he, in turn, generates a cascade of images. In the same <?page no="93"?> Hitler goes Pop 93 manner in which, in the previous sequence, one individual statue brought forth the next one, so too, in this sequence, one sport gesture engenders the next: The discus thrower transforms into a spear thrower, who in turn becomes a runner, until these muscular men are replaced by female gymnasts, performing their morning exercises. Out of the rhythmic body movements of these naked women, who in turn come together to form one monumental formal corporation (or totalized body unit), the Olympic fire is finally brought forth, and with it the mass entertainment spectacle of the torch race, which Joseph Goebbels thought up for the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin. The bodies of the German athletes, reduced to their hard corporeal materiality, serve to bridge the lighting of the Olympic fire and the immortal spirit of the past, whose belated recognition makes for any contemporary recognition of the heroic in the present. In Riefenstahl’s popularizing cinematic language, eternity comes to be enacted as the visual transformation of stone into flesh and then fire, which, with the help of montage and superimposition, welds everything into one totalizing image body. What emerges is precisely the synthesis between appropriateness and beauty, which Hitler praised in his speech at the Nazi Party Convention in Nuremberg in 1934: We are happy enough to know that between the Greek alphabet and the runic characters of our forefathers a visual correspondence exists in their great sense of style. Once more we look in admiration upon the great people of antiquity, upon their achievements in the domain of human culture and particularly in art. As a people they are far removed from us, as members of the Indo-Germanic racial community, however, we see them as for ever close. (“Kunst,” in Eikmeyer 77) Riefenstahl’s montage offers a perfect illustration of the compromise Hitler demanded of art between a sober assessment of pertinence and the intimation of perfection. As Boris Groys notes, for Hitler the art work was primarily “a form in the world of forms.” He conceived art “not as a message, but rather as a body, engendered by another body, namely the body of the artist,” only to be appreciated and consumed by yet another body, namely the implied spectator of the future (“Das Kunstwerk,” Eikmeyer 33). *** <?page no="94"?> 94 Elisabeth Bronfen One issue Hitler’s claim for a persistent cultural valorization of perfection raises is the fact that the artificial engendering of bodies is often negotiated over the notion of an eternal feminine beauty. This brings me to my second example, the musical Dames, directed by Ray Enright. A young, ambitious songwriter Jimmy Higgins (Dick Powell) wants to put on his first Broadway Show, with his beloved Barbara Hemingway (Ruby Keeler) playing the lead part. Her uncle, a millionaire, who is to fund this enterprise, is initially against it. Jimmy, however, uses the visually spectacular optical illusion of the final show number “I only have eyes for you,” to beguile him. The ruse works, the millionaire gives the necessary money, the songwriter gets his break on Broadway and can marry his beloved. The show number decisive in bringing about this happy end, directed by Busby Berkeley, begins with Barbara aka Ruby Keeler, picking Jimmy aka Dick Powell up from work. Together they walk to the subway, while his song, explicitly calling his love for her “an optical illusion,” charms the world around them and transforms it into a transhistorical site, divorced of all material transience. It is a virtual space of desire, comparable to the dark exhibition site in the inaugural sequence of Riefenstahl’s Olympia. The singer only has eyes for the woman he loves, even while he is self-consciously aware of the visual enchantment into which he draws his beloved by virtue of his enthusiastic song. After the two lovers have sat down in the subway, all the other passengers disappear. A fantasy scene of uncanny intimacy is about to begin. The two lovers share a world of enchantment, whose charm consists in the fact that it explicitly screens out reality. Barbara, the object of the loving gaze of the singer, soon falls asleep. Jimmy, who continues to sing, moves his charmed eye away from her, and in so doing, transfers the beautiful body of his beloved to the advertisement for a cosmetic article hanging in front of him on the other side of the subway car. As his eye moves from one poster to the next, he repeatedly reproduces her images, even while he uses this illusion to sing the eternal value of his own poetic creativity. Suddenly all the other advertisement posters, which he looks at through his love bedazzled gaze, reveal the only face he has eyes for. From all around him the woman, sleeping at his side, is smiling back at him as a consumer commodity. We must, however, ask ourselves, who is actually dreaming the following show number: Barbara, who has indeed fallen asleep, or Jimmy, staring around himself in utter enthusiasm, as though her spirit had taken over his imagination? <?page no="95"?> Hitler goes Pop 95 What is about to unfold before our eyes is, of course, the birth of the glamour star Ruby Keeler, namely as the commercial fabrication of a thoroughly cosmetic, not natural, beauty idea. The boundary between the young woman and the reproduction the poet’s love for her inspires, has become fluid. We encounter a cinematic enactment of the world of visual forms, in which bodies incessantly engender new bodies, as though they were on a conveyor belt in Hollywood’s image factory. Decisive, however, is the direction which the power of the singer’s idea, seeking to realize itself, takes in Busby Berkeley’s staging of the eternal value of feminine beauty. This musical enactment of an endless reproduction of the feminine body explicitly claims for itself that it is aimed only at a world of aesthetic forms, and at an optical illusion to boot. The advertisement image transforms into a multiple reproduction of Barbara’s (Ruby Keeler’s) face. The enchantment, which unfolds before our eyes as a visual infatuation, goes in tandem with a fragmentation of her body, as well as a screening out of the real models, whose faces were initially on the advertisement posters. Instead one face, recalling Ruby Keeler’s face, turns into many, super sized faces, which suddenly appear in front of a black background, and - staying with the gothic tone - begin spectrally to move on their own. Only after a while do we recognize that a multitude of show girls, whom we don’t initially see, are holding these masks of Ruby Keeler’s face, and are thus the actual motor behind this visual spectacle. Slowly one layer of mask faces, which screens out the actual bodies of the show girls, is peeled away to reveal a second layer, until in one grand movement all masks are tilted forwards, producing a multitude of tulle skirts. Only now do we actually come to see the corporation of show girls, all resembling Ruby Keeler. Each one is now holding a detail of the total glamour image, advertising a star, underneath the front part of her skirt, swinging both the cloth and the image it now covers back and forth. Individualization and reification replace and supersede each other, because all the show girls are part of a totalizing body geometry; materialized image bodies we can only recognize as external figurations. At the same time we are dealing with what Sigmund Freud came to call the uncanny, given that Busby Berkeley explicitly plays with a fluid boundary between the animated and the deanimated woman, between the image and the body, as well as between individual singularity and a mass or corporate totality, drawing all separate bodies into one unity. In the midst of the anonymous show girls we repeatedly see the individual star Ruby Keeler, before she once again dissolves into the total body of all the dancers, as well as the totality of the staging. Busby Berkeley’s brilliantly composed optical illusion thus reveals two sides. On the one hand, his show number elevates the individual actress into a glamour <?page no="96"?> 96 Elisabeth Bronfen star, and in so doing guarantees her immortality. On the other hand this performance reduces the individual woman to a part in his choreographed glamour body machine. The high point of the show number is the moment, in which all the show girls once more raise their skirts, covering their faces with this part of their costume. Busby Berkeley’s camera captures this moment as a top shot, so as to reveal a monumental reproduction of the face of the musical star, for whom alone the singer has eyes. The birth of the glamour star is complete, even while it emerges as a puzzle image, the amalgamation of many different fragments. In this spectacular transformation, a multitude of anonymous show girls engenders the glamour image of the female star. Owing to the uncanny oscillation between musical performer and image body we have seen unfold on the screen, the star Ruby Keeler proves to have a double origin. She is the product of the charmed gaze of the love enthused singer, but she is also the product of the technologically perfect choreography performed by the other show girls. The birth of the glamour star, onto whom everyone’s attention is now drawn - on stage, off stage, and on screen - is revealed to consist in the mechanical transformation of many women, each carrying one detail of the total image in front of their faces, into a super sized image body. These show girls, coming together into a unified body image, collectively engender this glamour image, even while they have also been subsumed by it. They are no longer in the picture, even while their bodies are literally holding the picture. However, not only the individual bodies of the show girls are dissolved into the totalizing gesture Busby Berkeley deploys to celebrate the birth of his glamour star. The star image itself is immediately transformed. Once more revealed to be nothing other than a fabricated picture, it engenders a new cycle of show girls resembling it. Busby Berkeley not only turns the screw of his optical illusion one notch further by self-consciously pointing to his game with commercial media images. After his camera has panned forward into an extreme close-up of the pupil of the puzzle image of his glamour star, a new chain of reanimations sets in. Phallically Ruby Keeler emerges from her own super sized eye, painted on cardboard, only to be immediately transformed again into an image; to be precise a mirror reflection. After we see the back side of the mirror she is holding in her hand, we are suddenly back in the subway with the sleeping beauty, whose face inspired the entire optical illusion. First we see the two lovers from the front, then from behind, shadows on the screen, and thus a cipher for the game of light and shadows, which is the magic of cinema itself. <?page no="97"?> Hitler goes Pop 97 The stylistic similarity to Riefenstahl can hardly be overlooked. A chain of feminine bodies, engendering themselves, formally opens up on the screen, and as a corporation (qua embodied unity) takes on the status of an immortal, explicitly cosmetically produced ideal of feminine beauty. Many bodies come together to form one perfected body, which, because it is declared to be special, rises above them, even while it is incessantly reappropriated by the group. At the same time, the oscillation between totalization and fragmentation seems to have been taken to the extreme. The poet, his art work (the show number), and his audience have also come to be united into an affectively charged incorporated body, which shares its enthusiasm for this optical illusion. The cultural value of the eternal has been confiscated in the sense that with this show number, the song writer is propagating his art form, even while he anticipates his commercial success on Broadway. But the refiguration Busby Berkeley celebrates unfolds an interminable loop, welding together self-advertisement and artistic creation. His art, rather than giving voice to a past ideal of beauty, speaks of the transferral of the beautiful feminine body into a glamour image, which ultimately inundates the entire stage. As such, it serves as propaganda for itself; for the show number promoting the film Dames, as well as for this particular musical film promoting the musical genre as well as mass entertainment in the 30s in general. And it is propaganda for a transhistoric process, resisting the laws of fugacity and transience. In his sonnet 18, Shakespeare claims that his poetry has the power to immortalize his beloved: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” It is this trust in the eternal value of the art form, which Busby Berkeley attributes to the musical genre. As long as there is a cinema audience, willing to enjoy his idiosyncratic formalization of feminine beauty, this scene of the birth of a glamour star will be attributed to his choreographic genius, and as such will survive the ephemeral world that brought it forth. In retrospect, one will recognize the greatness of his idiosyncratic staging of show girls in the fact that the body images he came to design and choreograph have continued to affect our cultural imaginary. If on the level of style, a visual analogy to fascist art theory unfolds, one must nevertheless insist on the following difference. Hitler’s actual politics stood in contradiction to his ideas on art when it comes to precisely the point I have sought to trace in my discussion of Busby Berkeley’s choreography. Stéfani de Loppinot correctly points to the fact that his career with the US military (six years in a military college close to New York City, three years as second lieutenant and trainer in WW I) greatly influenced the way in which he came to direct his female troops on Broadway and in Hollywood after the war. At the same time, she <?page no="98"?> 98 Elisabeth Bronfen emphasizes that “the bodies of the show girls, lined up like tin soldiers, embody a situation of passage, a united body which keeps changing, and which suddenly swerves off in unexpected curves” (33). In short, what Busby Berkeley reveals to us is a gigantic optical illusion, in which an embodiment of the idea of eternal feminine beauty and its mechanical transformation into cinematic “image-bodies” implicate and replace each other. The totalized body that subsumes individual show girls into a united corporation remains in constant movement. The only message Berkeley’s grandiose choreography transmits is one concerned with an untiring pleasure in partaking in the oscillation of seductive feminine bodies and their visual formalization. Fascist politics, by contrast, was acutely concerned with a message, whose consequences were horrifically real. What followed upon the reification of the individual and his dissolution into the united body of the willing subject, which Riefenstahl filmed at the Nazi Party Conventions and transformed into montaged sequences at her editing table, was an irrevocably and unquestionably real dehumanization and extinction of human beings on the battle field and in concentration camps. How these two sites relate to each other remains an open question. To show that the formalization of unified body figurations (where individual bodies become part of one embodied corporation) was one of the seminal concerns of modernism is the heuristic gain of the crossmapping I am proposing. At the same time, by confronting Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics with Berkeley’s choreographies I am equally concerned with drawing our critical attention to the fact that in the arena of politics, the gesture of totalization must be judged to be fundamentally different than in the arena of art. The transferral of bodies into the pure materiality of the artistic sign cannot be seamlessly equated with the dissolution of the human body into an ideological message, as this was performed in sites of mass extinction. Modernism was concerned not only with endowing art forms with materiality. Rather, it was equally concerned in thinking both the dissolution of the body into an aesthetic sign, as well as the extinction of the artistic sign in pure abstraction (such as Malevich’s black paintings) as the logical consequence of an aesthetic project of artistic auto-poesis. For this reason, the vexed interface between avant-garde innovation, popular culture and modernism leads ever more deeply into a self-reflexive mediality, even if there can be no doubt that these virtual sign systems had cultural effects and ideological implications. Hitler, by contrast, held his last speech on art on 16 July 1939, at the opening of the Exhibition of German Art in Munich (Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung). After this he sought to enforce a different, extra-aesthetic reality by transposing his notion of the totalized art work (Gesamtkunstwerk) into his politics of destruction and cul- <?page no="99"?> Hitler goes Pop 99 tural demise. Perhaps this explains why he had nothing more to say about art after 1939. *** Let us, however, return to Walt Disney, whom Riefenstahl left that year, in order to work as a war correspondent in Poland. On 8 December 1941 his studios were taken over by the American war department. During the next four years Walt Disney supported the war effort with countless training, educational and propaganda films for the Armed Forces, made to help raise money for the war and at the same time boost the morale of the American people (see Laqua and Gabler). Indeed, during the war years, he depicted Snow White’s seven dwarves selling war bonds and Donald Duck’s nightmare visit to Hitler’s Reich in The Führer’s Face, with the distorted language of dreams offering a caricature of fascist politics. My interest in exploring the murky interface between entertainment culture, avant-garde film language and totalitarian politics, will however, be played through with a different film, whose morally uplifting sentimentality can also be ascribed to the war effort of the Disney Studios. In Bambi, made one year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, another analogy between Hollywood’s image production in the 30s and Hitler’s speeches on art can be found, precisely because it also makes the claim that a hereditary predisposition serves as a guarantee for the successful transmission of eternal cultural values. The scene, in which Bambi meets his father for the first time, revolves around the idea that a taste, inherent to a racially more perfect creature, will serve as the binding and trustworthy bridge between the generations. As young Bambi and his female playmate watch the more mature deer practicing their athletic jumps in the meadow below, they intuitively recognize the beauty and strength of this display of physical prowess. Without quite knowing why, indeed as though he had instinctively recognized gender difference, Bambi suddenly sends away his female playmate. Propelled by a genetically inherited ability to imitate what is great in others, he in turn tries, albeit timidly, to copy the noble leaps of the older deer. Decisive about this scene, conceived as a rite-de-passage, is, however, the fact that owing to the affective predisposition, which Bambi has inherited from his father, he is also able to instinctively recognize the greatness of the Prince of the Forest, even before he discovers his actual blood relation to the leader of his community. Initially, he had sought protection from the wild leaping of the other deer, hiding inside a hollow trunk of a tree. When, however, they had suddenly stopped in their gleeful exercising, he had followed them onto the meadow. There we <?page no="100"?> 100 Elisabeth Bronfen see a rather frail Bambi, standing next to a small bush, close to but not part of the unity, which the older deer have come to form. All gazes are aimed at the approach of the figure of paternal authority, although, in contrast to the others, Bambi is shown to be astonished. Significant about the scene is, once again, the choreography. While the older deer were exercising, Disney had shown them jumping and running in various individual groups. Once their leader descends from the forest and approaches them, however, they come together to form a closed embodied corporation, recalling the phalanx of a fighting unit of troops. Now, only their heads move in perfect unison, their united gaze tracking the movement of the Prince of the Forest as he passes by them silently. He approaches his son, looks at him intently, as though in recognition, and, without uttering a word, returns to the forest. The movement of the deer, cipher par excellence for the medium of animation film, has come to be arrested into a tableau, in which two figures, who are not part of the group formation, foreground the closed unity of the embodied corporation precisely by virtue of being outside it. Disney thus offers a visual enactment of one of the core themes of the story of Bambi. A taste or affective predisposition, which can instinctively recognize what is beautiful and noble, be it the celebration of athletic prowess or the sovereignty of a figure of authority, testifies to the successful transmission of a racial kernel. When Bambi was born, all the other animals of the forest had immediately recognized in him their future leader. In a meeting between Bambi and the Prince of the Forest later on in the film, the preservation of a political embodied corporation will, in turn, once more be portrayed as the transferral of power from one generation to the next. This political inheritance requires, thus Disney’s claim, a discursive formation of leadership predicated on an embodied group unity of subjects, who accept the authority of their sovereign. Put another way: on the level of biology, the community of deer assure their survival by virtue of a procreation of their race, on the symbolic level, however, by virtue of the difference between phalanx and leader. It is along this line of demarcation that the heroic can be passed on from father to son in a two-fold manner. In the scene in the meadow, Walt Disney conceives of both as figures that are separate from precisely the group, which gains both its visual and narrative meaning only in its relation to them. The leader, for whom alone all those surrounding him have eyes, as though he were the glamour star of this scene, anticipates the position, which Bambi will assume at the end of the film. Owing to the monumental stillness of the other deer preceding the approach of the Prince of the Forest, Bambi, in turn, immediately recognizes his symbolic mandate, even if at this point in his story he can not yet articulate in words that he is destined to be the next <?page no="101"?> Hitler goes Pop 101 leader. After the Prince of the Forest has once again departed, he can merely tell his mother, who has come to him, in awe: “He stopped and looked at me.” Within the first year of the American military involvement in WW II, Walt Disney thus creates an encounter between a leader and his athletic troops (as well as between the leader and his chosen successor), in which the symbolic body of the sovereign comes to be engendered by the unity of his subjects. Only by virtue of individual bodies coming together to form a single, unified political body, can the figure of paternal authority be produced on the screen. Furthermore, Bambi also pits a notion of immortality against the particular death all the animals of the forest are threatened with on the diegetic level of the film. As Bambi discovers from his mother, all the other deer respect the Prince of the Forest, because his courage and wisdom have helped him survive the dangers of the forest longer than any other animal living there. Indeed, it is he who, in a later scene, will help his son escape from the meadow minutes before the hunters begin to unleash their gun fire. At the same time, however, it is the pure materiality of this animated figure, which is to say the fact that it consists only of lines and colors applied to paper and brought into motion by virtue of the film projector, which preserves the cartoon figure Bambi against precisely the inescapable transience of the world his story unfolds and whose affective kernel is the death of his mother. Apodictically put, the drawn lines and colors that appear on screen outlast the fictional world, which the art of animation raises so fleetingly before our astonished eyes; much as the cartoon figure Bambi has been able to sever itself from his film story, so as to become one of the most resilient cultural icons of America. In Walt Disney’s work, the gesture of totalization, which turns individual figures into objects, only to subsume them into a formal unity at whose center we find a figure of paternal authority, thus undergoes a significant refiguration. The survival of this community of deer on the diegetic level of the film, as well as the survival of the cartoon figure Bambi as a star, who will continue to have an audience in the future, is not limited to the transmission of a racially inflected hereditary predisposition. It also involves the transferral of a symbolic mandate of leadership from one generation to the next, which explicitly celebrates a democratization of political power. In the final scene of the film we see the wise old deer sharing his position of power with his son. Together they look down on the meadow, before the father quietly leaves the scene. On the extradiegetic level of the film, however, the eternal cultural resonance of both the Prince of the Forest and his son Bambi, is assured by virtue of the animated line drawing. It is, of course, only logical that all of the animated figures should ultimately dissolve into the <?page no="102"?> 102 Elisabeth Bronfen totalizing formal language, which can only rely on the external, material appearance of the characters it creates and brings to the screen. However, these animated figures are also preserved for any future audience watching this film, precisely because of the animated lines and colors that gave and continue to give body to them. What does it mean that 30s popular culture chose to appropriate totalitarian art concepts so seamlessly, so creatively but also so idiosyncratically? And what does it meant that fascist concepts of art could be confiscated and re-figured so unproblematically? The Marxist literary critic C. L. R. James has suggested that the neuralgic issues in twentiethcentury American culture are not to be found in modern literature, but rather in Hollywood films, jazz and comic strips. According to James, the murky interface between the aesthetic concerns of avant-garde art and modern entertainment culture results from the fact that with the emergence of a commercialization (and thus also a radical popularization) of mass entertainment, a decisive enlargement of aesthetic premises took place. These had to include artistic products, which had been explicitly produced for a mass audience as well as for business people. In Dames, Busby Berkeley explicitly addresses the way in which financial backing influences the Broadway musical shows that can be put on. At the same time, the star body he gives birth to, even while the show uses it to promote itself and make a profit, is radically different from the athletic bodies Riefenstahl celebrates in her film Olympia. While she focuses our attention on the transmission of cultural values by superimposing stone, bodies and fire, Berkeley actually produces a new image body by fusing individual show girls into one unified albeit uncanny body sign, which incessantly oscillates between an animated advertisement image of a beautiful girl and a dissolution of her multiple reproduction into pure visual form. Put another way, Riefenstahl enacts the notion of eternal cultural values Hitler postulates in his speeches on art as a pathos gesture, which can be passed down from antique sculptures to the modern German athlete. The survival of this spirit of ideal beauty is, however, predicated on the actual demise of the culture that produced these artistic artifacts. Berkeley’s choreography, by contrast, opens up a completely ahistorical art site, along with the self-consciously fugacious visual magic he unfolds at this scene. The star body, rendering the spirit of feminine beauty immortal, is not a fixed entity, but rather as much an optical illusion as the love the song writer feels for his beloved. If Ruby Keeler’s appearance as a glamour star arises from an advertisement poster, it turns into a silhouette at the end of the show number, signifying unequivocally that all was but a play of light and shadow. In Walt Disney’s world of animation an ironic appropriation of Hitler’s claim for a he- <?page no="103"?> Hitler goes Pop 103 reditary predisposition for taste, which makes for an intuitive recognition not only of what is great and beautiful, but more importantly of the sovereign leader as well, attributes these eternal values to a cartoon figure; a creature of even less substance than the advertisement poster of a young musical star, because there is no actual reference to this figuration. What in Riefenstahl’s cinematic illustration of Hitler’s notions of the cultural survival of classic ideals comes to reveal itself in the Germanic athlete’s body, is reduced in Disney’s imaginary world to drawn lines, which only the film projector sets into motion. Thrown back to the surface of the film image, we find ourselves affected by mere image effects of the monumental. What moves us are image traces, which flicker on the screen before they disappear again into pure light. Fugacity is inscribed into the medium of film as much as the spectral haunting, which allows us to trust in the survival of cultural values and to speak about the eternal value of ideal image forms. In the arena of the art of cinema, all totalizing unities irrevocably dissolve again before our eyes. To turn our critical attention once more to the murky interface between totalitarian art forms and the avant-garde concerns of modernity means to insist on the decisive differences that are contained in a fascination, which, in the 30s, American popular culture had for the transferral of bodies into monumental formal designs. Perhaps it also means reminding ourselves what we should once more - and always again - pay attention to. <?page no="104"?> 104 Elisabeth Bronfen References Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Essays in Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Brock, Bazon and Achim Preiß, eds. Kunst auf Befehl? Dreiunddreißig bis Fünfundvierzig. München, 1990. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2000. de Loppinot, Stéfani. “Hot Parades.” Exploding. Revue d’analyse de l’experimentation cinématographique (July 2003, no. 19): 27-35. Eikmeyer, Robert, ed. Adolf Hitler. Reden zur Kunst- und Kulturpolitik 1933- 1939. Frankfurt am Main: Revolver Verlag, 2004. Gabler, Neil. Walt Disney. The Triumph of The American Imagination. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Shakespeare based on the Oxford Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. James, C. L. R. American Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Laqua, Carsten. Wie Micky unter die Nazis fiel. Walt Disney und Deutschland. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe Band 5, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: DTV, 1980. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Entfernte Verwandtschaft. Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal 1933-1939. Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2005. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. <?page no="105"?> Promotion vs. Suppression: Intermedial Relationships between Early Narrative Film and its Fan Magazine Fictionizations Johannes Mahlknecht At least since 1977, when the innovative marketing strategy of Star Wars showed film producers how much money could be made with tie-in products, Hollywood studios have come to appreciate movie fictionizations as a lucrative source of added income. Essentially adaptations of screenplays into prose fiction, they are routinely published alongside major cinematic releases, providing easy entertainment while boosting awareness of the films they adapt. Such fictionizations from the early days of cinema, between 1911 and 1915, published as short story versions in monthly magazines, can be seen as having served an additional and more vital function: along with other paratextual phenomena like lantern slides, expository intertitles, and filmaccompanying lectures, they clarified the often crude and obscure narrative techniques employed by the fledgling new medium. This essay draws attention to the variety of ways in which filmmakers relied on the established medium of written narrative in order to explain and promote the new, visual one. By comparing various examples, the essay shows to what degree a concept of textual unity in early film can be understood as extending beyond the boundaries of film itself. Before the release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) showed the world the capacity of film to successfully tackle complex stories, audiences often had difficulty interpreting how the events presented on the screen fitted together to produce a coherent and unified narrative whole. Film’s lack of synchronized sound and filmmakers’ lack of experience in the development of continuity in editing and framing, as well The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 105-118. <?page no="106"?> 106 Johannes Mahlknecht as the attempt to limit the use of intertitles (because they disrupted the continuous flow of the moving images and were thus considered undesirable), required additional verbal assistance from outside the medium itself. Lecturers explained the visual events as they unfolded on the screen; synopses displayed in theaters - in print or as lantern slides - explained key points of the story before the film began; and fan magazines featured short story adaptations of upcoming releases which contained and elaborated plot-relevant details. This essay focuses on the latter of the three strategies, the short story versions or “fictionizations,” which occupy a special position due to their greater temporal and spatial independence from the film experience as well as their comparative multi-functionality. My main point of interest is the dual relationship between the fictionizations and their cinematic counterparts: on the one hand, as an advertising tool designed to promote both individual films and the emerging film industry at large the fictionizations’ potential stand-alone value is sidelined. 1 On the other hand, because they belong to an “old” but fully developed and autonomous narrative medium, they can be viewed as surpassing the capabilities of the still struggling “new” medium of film, thus laying bare the latter’s technical drawbacks. Taking into consideration the theoretical concepts of intermediality and remediation, I will examine two onereelers from the early 1910s - namely The Adventure of the Hasty Elopement (1914, Charles M. Seay) and From the Submerged (1912, Theodore Wharton) - and compare them with their written narrative supplements. By considering both the fictionization and the film stills published alongside it, the essay will shed light on the complex relationships between an established and an emerging narrative medium as well as the ambivalent power relations that exist between the seemingly “new and exciting” and the seemingly “old and outdated.” Before going into detail, however, I will briefly sketch some general features of the fan magazine, its circumstances of production and its origins. 1 The clearly intended subservience of fictionizations to their filmic counterparts is implied in the title of the earliest fan magazine, Motion Picture Story Magazine, as well as in the disclaimer presented in its table of contents: “These stories were written from photoplays supplied by Motion Picture manufacturers, and our writers claim no credit for title and plot” (December 1912 issue, ii). <?page no="107"?> Narrative Film and Fictionizations 107 The Early Fan Magazine The first fan publication, Motion Picture Story Magazine, started its monthly publication in 1911 under the auspices of J. Stuart Blackton, head of the film studio Vitagraph. Photoplay followed the same year, and the two remained the leaders among a multitude of similar periodicals - both monthly and weekly ones - that began to flood the American market in the mid-1910s. Initially each issue featured around a dozen fictionizations, along with photo galleries of famous picture players, interviews and articles about stars, filmmakers and about the film industry in general. Furthermore, magazines included advertisements for screenwriting manuals aimed at would-be scenario writers, as well as for various kinds of merchandise ranging from postcards sporting photographs of famous players to little flags emblazoned with a studio logo. A significant feature was the “Gallery of Picture Players.” The December 1912 issue of Motion Picture Story Magazine, for instance, devotes the first sixteen pages to large prints of photographs of actors who smile into the camera, their pictures often being elegantly framed with drawings of flowery wreaths, butterflies and the like. The gallery alone leaves no doubt as to the promotional intent of the magazine as a whole. Cinemagoers could read the fictionization before watching the corresponding film, thus guaranteeing they could make sense of what they would later see on the screen, or they could read them afterwards, to make sense of what they had seen on the screen. An early editorial in the British fan magazine The Pictures claimed that “whoever has read the story follows the film with vastly increased facility and enjoyment” (qtd. Shail 186), thus admitting, at least implicitly, the deficiencies of film as a narrative medium. Not explicitly, of course, since fan magazines and the film industry quickly became “trusted friends” (Slide 8) that profited far more from complimenting rather than criticizing each other. One element that distinguishes the movie fictionization from conventional short stories is, of course, its highly limited freedom of innovation, the adaptation being strictly bound to the chain of events as related in the filmic source. For the purposes of the early fictionization, however, this was considered an advantage rather than an (artistic) drawback. The editorial of the first issue of Motion Picture Story Magazine, for instance, proudly announced that: <?page no="108"?> 108 Johannes Mahlknecht unlike the dramatic novel, which frequently makes radical departures from the published book, these stories adhere closely to the original tale, and the reader will find no disappointment in the pictured drama thru the violence done to preconceived impressions of the various personages. (qtd. Slide 18) The short story style (and thus “literary” style) of the later fan magazines’ fictionizations can be seen as having developed out of early descriptions or synopses published in film catalogues. Intended as advertisements for exhibitors, who would then acquire or rent from the producing studios the films they believed to be most interesting, these brief synopses passed through three stages during the age of the “cinema of attractions,” which André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion describe. In the period between 1904 and 1908, when films could still draw audiences based on the novelty effect of the moving images alone rather than on well-developed stories (see Gunning 6), the descriptions consisted of simple translations of the cinematic images. This means that the language was minimalist and subservient to the movement on screen, trying to mimic it as much as possible. If shots cut back and forth between two scenes, then each shot would be described, staccato-style. Such subservience, however, did not last long, and the descriptions soon developed into the second stage of transpositions, where the mimicry of describing what happened on screen was abandoned in favor of a focus on the narrative content, briefly synopsizing the events relevant to the development of the plot. As adaptations, in the final stage, the written language was freed further from restrictions and was now able to use all the devices that literature offered in order to provide (ideally) a thoroughly readable and engrossing experience (see Gaudreault and Marion, “Filmico” 26-29). For the exhibitor, this meant that the written text no longer allowed conclusions to be drawn concerning how the film was put together in terms of editing and framing. In their attempt to offset the deficiencies of an arguably still underdeveloped filmic grammar, exhibitors endeavored to satisfy all audience members in order to secure profit. In their choice of added explanatory materials their challenge was to find the right balance between two undesirables: lack of information about story events on the one hand, which could result in the viewer leaving the theater confused and frustrated, and excess of information on the other, which could result in boredom. Concerning the latter, an anonymous contributor to a 1909 issue of The Bioscope gives the following advice: “It is necessary to avoid ‘giving away’ too much of the plot, for otherwise there are no thrills, and the charm of the unexpected has gone” (3). Ben Singer lists this as one reason why in the 1910s, after a brief period of popularity, <?page no="109"?> Narrative Film and Fictionizations 109 short movie fictionizations in the fan magazines became fewer and fewer (495). Fictionizations may have given away all the thrills, but at least the reader was left to decide which version to read/ to watch first, or whether to read it at all. The Adventure of the Hasty Elopement In order to examine the apparent need of early film for accompanying texts, I turn to The Adventure of the Hasty Elopement, the ninth installment of the then popular serial “Octavius Amateur Detective.” The very beginning, namely the second title card, advertises the fictionization: “Read this story of Octavius in PICTORIAL REVIEW for October.” Further promoting the new medium’s dependence on the old is the fact that, in at least one instance in the film, a causal relationship between subsequent events is not readily intelligible for the viewer. Following an intertitle reading “Octavius buys an automobile,” the first shot of the film shows the interior of a dealership, in which we see the detective and the salesman inspect a car. Then they both leave the room. (That Octavius actually buys the car we can only gather from the intertitle, even if a visual cue - as, for instance, an enthusiastic handshake between Octavius and the salesman - might easily have suggested the information.) Then another intertitle appears: “The next morning.” Now we see Octavius reading the newspaper while his butler serves breakfast. The headline is inserted: “ AUTO THIEVES - Many Cars Stolen Recently About Rosedale.” Octavius sports first a concerned, then a determined, look and points offscreen to the butler, who exits and re-enters the frame carrying the detective’s coat. Then we see the intertitle: “I shall investigate this.” What the previous scene should lead us to add is: “Because I bought a car yesterday and do not want it to get stolen.” The synopsis of the film in the Edison trade journal The Kinetogram 2 describes the events thus: When Octavius read in the newspaper that auto-thieves had been making havoc in the vicinity of the Rosedale Country Club, his soul was stirred to extraordinary effort. He had just bought a car himself, and naturally felt a keen interest in anything affecting even remotely his new and cherished possession. Then again, there was of course his Duty to the Public. In his capacity as an amateur detective Octavius was above all else a relentless bloodhound in the public interest. 2 The synopsis of the film can be found in Edison: The Invention of the Movies. <?page no="110"?> 110 Johannes Mahlknecht There are two things to note here: the order of the information about Octavius buying a car and reading about the theft is inverted in the two versions. More crucially, only the written version makes the detective’s motivation for investigating the case explicit, giving not one but two reasons. The film’s opening shot thus apparently has no other function than to provide the detective with a motivation for hunting the thieves: a motivation that (at least as presented in the film) appears weak and does not justify the excessive length of the opening shot. From the amount of information the viewer is given, Rosedale could be miles away from where Octavius lives (although a previous installment of the serial may have made evident that it is the detective’s home town). His having bought a car might then not be enough for the viewer to account for his sudden eagerness to pursue the case. The kinetogram’s synopsis, in short, establishes a causality more easily and more successfully in a few sentences than the film does in its opening three minutes. If we accept the function of fictionizations as a means of narrative clarification as being of significance, then we can say that the dominant new medium depends more on the evidently subordinate and “old” one than the other way round. The film needs the story version, but, ironically, the story version does not need the film, at least not in terms of narrative clarification. Since the medium to which it belongs, i.e. written prose fiction, had enjoyed a long and prosperous tradition, there is little risk that its narrative will be confusing, even if it is a narrative that is badly written. While fan magazines may have helped to make a film’s narrative more intelligible, this was not their only - and certainly not their primary - function. They were also intended to serve as a guide for audiences, helping them to decide which film to watch. In the editorial of the first issue of The Pictures (October 1911) we read: “Knowing beforehand, as fully and clearly as words can tell them, what they may expect to see, they [cinemagoers] have all the materials necessary for making an intelligent choice of those pictures which appeal most to their tastes” (qtd. Shail 190). In a way the function of the synopses to help the exhibitor choose which film to rent is here transferred to the potential viewer. The shift from the brief and largely perfunctory style of the synopses to the elaborate literary style of the fictionizations reflects the interests of the target readership. Due to the exhibitors’ purely commercial interests anything more than basic information in the synopsis would be distracting. Audiences, on the other hand, want to be entertained, and a short story, if well written, can double the entertainment of the film. Commercially, the advantage of coupling the two media of film and prose fiction was highly reciprocal: since both were forms of <?page no="111"?> Narrative Film and Fictionizations 111 entertainment technically independent from but nevertheless explicitly linked to each other the films increased sales of the story magazines (or newspapers, where they were sometimes published) and the story magazines increased public awareness of the films about to be released. One of the chief functions of the stories, then, was simply to advertise the films. Just as the beginning of The Adventure of the Hasty Elopement asked viewers to read the story version, a fictionized installment of The Perils of Pauline (1914, Louis J. Gasnier), featured the line: “ READ it Here Now - THEN See It All in Motion Pictures” (The San Francisco Examiner, 22 November 1914). From the Submerged The narrative of the film From the Submerged is simple enough to suit both the temporal limitations of the one-reeler (with a running time of approximately 15 minutes) and the medium’s limited techniques available at the time. The story, in brief, is this: Charles, the protagonist, is down-and-out and desperate, and wants to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. A woman who happens to be there persuades him not to. Later, while waiting on the breadline where the poor are fed, he reads a newspaper ad placed by his dying father who claims to “forgive all” and asks him to come home. This he does, and by doing so re-enters the world of the rich. Two years later, he tries to propose to a wealthy woman at a party but is repeatedly deterred. Instead the two participate in a “slumming party,” in which the rich visit the slums for their own amusement. He finds himself again on the breadline, and watches with disgust how his chosen one laughs at the misery she sees. Back at home, he tears up the woman’s photograph and has a vision of the poor woman on the bridge who once saved his life. He goes there looking for her, finds her - desperate and miserable - and saves her by marrying her. In terms of continuity, the film does not seem to contain any of the continuity violations that can be observed in other films of the period. 3 This, however, is due more to the comparatively undemanding methods of framing and editing employed rather than to superior craftsmanship. Throughout most of the film one shot (two at the most) equals one scene and setting (the bridge, the breadline, the party, etc.), with enough spatial and temporal distance in between to avoid carefully set-up match cuts or elaborate crosscutting techniques like those perfected by D.W. 3 Except one: the torn-out newspaper ad shown as an insert looks very different in size and shape from that which Charles is holding in his hand in the shot that follows. <?page no="112"?> 112 Johannes Mahlknecht Griffith. As for the temporal distances in From the Submerged, they are sometimes made explicit via expository intertitles 4 (one reading “Later,” another “Two years later”), sometimes not. In any case, the transitions between one shot and the next always follow a clear and unambiguous logic. Furthermore, except for one brief flashback shot towards the end (introduced by the intertitle “From out of the past”), the film strictly follows a single and continuous line of action, with events unfolding chronologically. Given the socially relevant subject matter - poverty - evident claim to realism made by the film is thwarted somewhat by the fact that the actors perform against a number of obviously painted backdrops: most notably, the city street-view that includes several highrise buildings in the breadline scene. In short, while Griffith’s films show powerful signs of cinema’s growing emancipation from earlier media via kinetic (if imperfect) editing and skillful crosscutting, From the Submerged still seems in many instances more like a cinematic “remediation” 5 of the stage drama. If we agree with Gaudreault and Marion’s suggestion that “cinema’s singularity as a medium is the result . . . of a slow process of maturation, despite its historically demonstrable irruption as technology” (“Genealogy” 13), then Essanay’s onereeler is still a step or two away from being “cinematic” in its truest sense. In formalistic terms, John Olden’s fictionization of From the Submerged (which appeared in the December 1912 issue of Motion Picture Story Magazine) remains largely true to the film’s simplistic histoire, 6 but differs vastly in relation to its discours. The information we get (at least that which is most relevant) remains the same, but the order in which we receive it is not. The most striking instance is Charles’s reading of the newspaper ad which is followed, rather abruptly, by several paragraphs that describe the sordidness of Chinatown, here the slumming party takes place two years later, with Charles now wearing a rich man’s clothes. The information about what happened in the interim is revealed by a third person narrator that refers back in time at a relatively arbitrary moment, namely when the woman reveals her callous attitude towards the poor, which climaxes in her statement that “these 4 While dialogue intertitles come from within the story action, their content thus being part of the diegetic environment, expository intertitles summarize the ensuing action or set up a situation (see Thompson and Bordwell 33). 5 The term is borrowed from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s eponymous book, and refers to the tendency of a new medium to take up and refashion techniques specific to older media (273). 6 Overall simplicity, due to the one-reeler’s time constraints and lack of innovative filmic techniques, was one of the industry’s most important and obvious recipes for ensuring narrative comprehensibility (see Keil 53). <?page no="113"?> Narrative Film and Fictionizations 113 people could be decent, if they wanted to.” (65) This incites Charles to pause and reflect on past events: He was thinking of the vast difference between his life tonight and the life he had been living two years ago, when his dying father's message had called him home, to receive his blessing and share in his vast fortune. He felt a sudden impulse to tell this girl all about the follies that had sent him from home; the pride and rebellion . . . abject poverty . . .; the message that had called him back. If he was to marry her, it was her right to know. . . . He had tried to propose to her, first in the conservatory, then, when an interruption came at an inopportune moment, he had led her out to the balcony, to try again. (65) After these musings, we are returned to the slumming party, with the girl stating that the best part of it is yet to come: a visit to the breadline. In the film, all relevant information is, as mentioned before, revealed chronologically: a) Charles reading his father’s message, b) his coming home, c) his newfound wealth, d) his attempts to propose, e) the slumming party. In the fictionization, on the other hand, the order is a), c), e), b), d). What may here look like a hopeless and confusing mix-up between story-time and discourse time is in fact, as the above passage shows, not confusing at all but comes across as a discontinuity that is perfectly continuous, reasonable, readable and coherent, all due to the flexibility of language made possible by the use of the past perfect tense (see Chatman 123). Although to a great extent “only” an accessory to and an advertisement for the main event that was the actual film, in terms of style and rhetoric ficitonizations (as the above example has shown) were often more elaborate than one might expect. As Slide points out: even in the earliest years, the writing in the fan magazines was erudite and often bordering on the heavy-handed. . . . The style was often closer to Charles Dickens . . . than to the type of writing that audiences whose second language was English would be drawn. (10) Because of this “erudite” style, we may doubt the extent to which the masses actually used fictionizations as a means of clarifying narrative causality. After all, the most significant proportion of movie audiences (as Slide himself suggests) was formed by the large number of immigrants in America at the turn of the century, along with the urban poor (see Bowser 61). Films and fictionizations may in fact have catered to two different audiences, with the “heavy-handedness” of the stories thus opening doors to a new class of readership. For a few years at least, fictionizations were printed not only in the special interest fan <?page no="114"?> 114 Johannes Mahlknecht magazines like Photoplay or Motion Picture Story Magazine, but also in more highbrow publications, notably the Sunday editions of newspapers like The Chicago Sun Tribune, which led to a readership of millions around the country. It can thus be argued that, even if they were not of literary quality per se, their presence in the newspapers alone contributed to a gradual increase in appreciation of the new medium among higher social spheres. Via a “retrograde” remediation 7 of the simple narratives developed specifically for the one-reel format, and enhanced in terms of style as befits the short story’s medial specificity, fictionizations can be seen as feeding back into film and to further its constitution as an independent medium for artistic expression. A medium’s own assertion of independence, after all, needs a society’s stamp of approval in order to successfully graduate from the status of a technology to that of a (narrative) “medium.” Gaudreault and Marion’s analysis of the gradual development of the forerunners to fictionizations leads to an interesting “inverted” parallelism (so to speak) when placed alongside the development of film. Early film, as Tom Gunning has shown, slowly graduated from a cinema of attractions to a narrative cinema, and in doing so passed through (at least) two stages of remediation before its “second birth” (Gaudreault and Marion, “Genealogy” 13) as a truly autonomous medium rather than merely a new technology. The first stage, during the cinema-ofattraction phase, is a remediation of late nineteenth-century magic theaters and forms of trompe l’oeil (see Bolter and Grusin 155); the second is a remediation of the dramatic theater (with its lack of camera movement, elaborate editing and with its “stagey” framings the likes of which we sometimes find in From the Submerged). Similarly, the three stages through which film’s written accompaniment passed (from translation via transposition to adaptation) can be seen as a gradual emancipation from the moving images via an inverse or, as Bolter and Grusin call it, “retrograde” remediation. In its final stage of autonomy (with the establishment of the classical Hollywood narrative), film emerged as a proper “new” medium. The fictionization, on the other hand, emerged as a proper “old” one: the short story which, independent of film, had of course existed all along. 7 That is, a kind of remediation “in which a newer medium is imitated and even absorbed by an older one” (Bolter and Grusin 147). <?page no="115"?> Narrative Film and Fictionizations 115 Pictures from the Pictures The complex intermedial relations between film and fictionizations can be observed not only in terms of a word-and-image-, but also in terms of an image-and-image relationship. Apart from offering a more elaborate written transposition from the filmic medium, fictionizations also featured numerous pictures in the form of stills or photograms taken from the films they adapted. These photograms were also frequently adorned with framings reminiscent of those used for paintings. Indeed, in the magazine fictionization of From the Submerged this form of remediation goes even further. Some of the stills themselves have been manipulated in order to resemble more closely paintings than photographs, and thus are doubly removed from their original purpose (namely to provide an illusion of movement and appear “true to life”). Not only are they no longer moving, they are also deliberately transformed into less naturalistic representations of life than they would have been had magazine employees not reworked them in a cross-medial post-production process. It is a phenomenon similar to Bolter and Grusin’s idea of “retrograde” remediation, only in this case the old medium, unable to imitate the new (since pictures printed on paper cannot provide an illusion of movement as films do), does the opposite: it takes one unmoving element of the new medium and refashions it in order to make it look not only older than the photograph (which can be printed on paper), but older than writing itself, since paintings existed long before the development of a written language. In the fictionization, the photograms’ painterly makeover veils what is otherwise the only direct connection to film as a medium - apart from the mention of the production company, Essanay, beneath the title - bespeaking its ambivalent relationship to a medium to which it refers but does not need. It almost feels as if readers are not meant to be reminded of the film which the story adapts. This would run counter to the publishers’ intention (which is evident in other parts of the magazine, like the film ads and actor galleries) to promote the new medium. Promoting film by concealing one of its most appealing properties, the authentic representation of nature, seems like a most unusual marketing strategy. However, if the painterly qualities of the photograms veil the connection to film (or at least to photography) on a technical, mediumspecific level, then on the level of content the connection is maintained. Even if the images are stylized, viewers may recognize an actor’s face from other films they have seen, and the organization of the various <?page no="116"?> 116 Johannes Mahlknecht elements within the frame of the abstracted photograms are reminiscent of the mise-en-scène of films in general. 8 Other than the photographs in the “famous players’ gallery” in the first pages of the magazine, in which actors and actresses smile into the camera, the composition of the photograms bears all the trademarks of the respective film’s diegetic universe. Possessing the quality more of a snapshot, they implicitly evoke a sense of a before and after, and thus of both movement and diegetic-narrative potential that are not present in the static poses for the camera. 9 Film, as Gaudreault and Marion state, remediates photography by “‘subsuming’ . . . the multiple [i.e. a string of photographs as in Eadweard Muybridge’s studies] into the singular [i.e. the illusion of continuous animation], . . . which . . . causes the thing being subsumed to disappear into the thing doing the subsuming” (“Genealogy” 13). The magazine stills, in a sense, simply invert the process by making film disappear into the (made-over) photograph. Conclusion Early film passed through several stages of remediation of older media (most notably perhaps, the theater and photography) before constituting itself as an autonomous medium in its own right. In an analogous process, written descriptions of early films underwent a gradual process before constituting their autonomy as a genre: the fictionization. This autonomy, it must be added, can be understood only in relative terms, since its function as advertisement has remained salient and thus, at least in a commercial sense, has chained the fictionization to its visual counterpart. From the very beginning producers were committed “to construct filmic narratives that audiences could comprehend regardless of the extratextual supports” (Keil 52). Thus Ben Singer’s notion of film and fictionization as “two halves of . . . a larger, multi-media, textual unit” (489) sounds like a happier marriage between media than it could ever possibly have been. Both Singer and Shail link the gradual fading of fictionizations in the late 1910s with the fact that “film’s narrational 8 Furthermore, readers are, of course, aware that they are not looking at illustrations of an original short story but at (manipulated) movie stills, for the simple and obvious reason that the magazine they are holding in their hands is titled Motion Picture Story Magazine. 9 It must be noted, however, that impressionistic paintings like Renoir’s The Oarsmen’s Breakfast have very similar qualities - and they can, in fact, also be seen as retrograde remediations of photography, refashioning the snapshot specific to that medium. <?page no="117"?> Narrative Film and Fictionizations 117 ‘grammar,’ with the aid of motion picture stories and the schemas deduced from trial-and-error film-watching, became generally understood” (Shail 186). Films, they claim, no longer needed the fictionization. While to some extent this may be true (and the example of The Adventures of the Hasty Elopement would support the claim), it can only be part of the answer. Fictionizations, particularly those published in general newspapers rather than in specialist film-related fan magazines, helped to establish film as an independent medium. They did this not by explaining film’s insufficient narrative but, paradoxically, by building a connection to the already well-established medium of literature - by being literature. <?page no="118"?> 118 Johannes Mahlknecht References The Adventure of the Hasty Elopement. Dir. Charles M. Seay. Perf. Herbert Yost, Julian Reed, Viola Dana. 1914. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 2006. Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915. History of the American Cinema, volume 2. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Chatman, Seymor. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa).” Critical Inquiry 7. 1 (1980): 121-140. Edison: The Invention of the Movies. Disc Four. MOMA. 2005. DVD. “Explaining the Pictures.” The Bioscope. 25 February 1909: 3. From the Submerged. Dir. Theodore Wharton. Perf. E.H. Calvert, Ruth Stonehouse, William Walters. 1912. Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. “Dal Filmico al Letterario: I Testi dei Cataloghi della Cinematografia-Attrazione.” Il Racconto del Film - La Novellizzazione: Dal Catalogo al Trailer / Narrating the Film. Novelization: From the Catalogue to the Trailer. XII Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Cinema. Ed. Alice Autelitano and Valentina Re. Udine/ Gorizia: Forum, 2006. 25-38. . “The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media.” Convergence 8. 12 (2002): 12-18. Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition. History, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Motion Picture Story Magazine. December 1912. Olden, John. “From the Submerged.” Motion Picture Story Magazine. December 1912. 61-68. The San Francisco Examiner. 22 November 1914. Shail, Andrew. “The Motion Picture Story Magazine and the Origins of Popular British Film Culture.” Film History. 20. 2 (2008): 181-197. Singer, Ben. “Fiction Tie-Ins and Narrative Intelligibility 1911-18.” Film History. 5. 4 (1993): 489-504. Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson,: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010. <?page no="119"?> I Am a Camera: The Development of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin across Stage, Screen and Time Christian Quendler Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) is often cited as a modernist work that introduces a cinematic idiom to literary fiction. His invocation of the camera as a metaphor for a literary narrative stance has become a well-known example of modernist intermedial exchanges that gauge the limits of verbal and visual regimes. This essay revisits such exchanges from the perspective of historical theories of adaptation. I will begin by situating the novel within an intertextual chain of feedback looping between literature and film that has contributed to innovative forms of literary and filmic writing. The remainder of the article examines two adaptations of Isherwood’s novel. The stage play I Am a Camera (1951) and its subsequent cinematic adaptation (1955) complete what may be called a transmedial circle of artistic interpretation. They serve as explications of what becomes synthesized in the intermedial figure of the camera eye. Since these adaptations were produced over a decade after the novel’s publication, they also present new sets of media-specific assumptions concerning literature and film. Thus the novel’s history of versions helps to trace a historical narrative of the further development of word-and-image relations in late modernism. 1 In his portrait of the German-American artist Georg Grosz, John Dos Passos observes a paradigmatic change in the visual habits among Americans of his generation: “From being a wordminded [sic] people we 1 The research for this article was supported by the project of the Austrian Science Fund “Framing Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film.” I would also like to thank Robin Peery for his helpful comments and suggestions. The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 119-135. <?page no="120"?> 120 Christian Quendler are becoming an eyeminded [sic] people” (Dos Passos, “Satire as a Way of Seeing” 10). His parents, Dos Passos claims, were still likely to “enjoy a view from a hill” within a literary frame “remembering a line of verse or a passage from Sir Walter Scott, before they got any real impulse from the optic nerve” (10). In the first decade of the twentieth century, Dos Passos argues, this began to change with the paintings of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris as well as display advertising and movies. He corroborates his reading of high and low-culture phenomena as symptoms of this epistemic change by drawing upon common tenets in theories of vision and behaviorist assumptions of developmental psychology. However, his account is above all a personal testimony based on what he calls “reminiscences of one pair of eyes” (9). Georg Grosz played a decisive role in his visual literacy. When he first encountered Grosz’s satirical drawings after World War I, Dos Passos found them “a brilliant new weapon”: “Looking at his work was a release from hatred, like hearing a well imagined and properly balanced string of cusswords.” (15). Dos Passos’ comparison to sound rather then sense underscores the effect of visual purity the images had on him: “Their impression is not verbal; (you don’t look at the picture and have it suggest a title and then have the title give you feeling) but through the eye direct, by the invention of ways of seeing” (16). How do these new and immediate ways of seeing arise? For Dos Passos the answer is almost tautological. They come from or, rather, are experiments in the visual arts. In order “to perceive new aspects and arrangements of evolving consciousness,” he points out, it is necessary to break up the processes and patterns that are ingrained in the heavy apparatus of the mind (19). We may still ask, what are the mechanisms at work in such experimental designs? How do we attain such pure visual regimes? This essay will approach these questions by taking up the lead Dos Passos has parenthesized in the previous quotation: the feedback loops between visual and verbal configurations in the processing of pictures, words and feelings. I will do so in consideration of two adaptations of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939): Van Druten’s stage play I Am a Camera (1951) and John Collier’s film adaptation of this play, directed by Henry Cornelius in 1955. 2 Isherwood’s portrayal of social decadence in 1930s Berlin not only represents a literary equivalent to Grosz’s drawings of the time; the novel also became famous for an autobiographical style of fiction that - 2 In her insightful book Rethinking the Novel/ Film Debate, Kamilla Elliot outlines an approach to adaptations that considers visual and verbal dichotomies in their specific historical conceptions. <?page no="121"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 121 like Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. (1930-1936) - introduces the metaphor of the camera eye: 3 I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. (Goodbye to Berlin 9) We can place Goodbye to Berlin and U.S.A. in an intertextual chain that successfully illustrates modernist feedback loops between literature and film. Isherwood’s and Dos Passos’ literary notions of the camera eye were both influenced by the film-aesthetic program of the kino-eye, which the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov developed and propagated in a number of manifestoes and films throughout the 1920s. In his best-known film Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vertov explored the kino-eye as “a truly international absolute language of the cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature” (opening credits). Significantly, Vertov framed his movie as “excerpts from the diary of a camera man.” Thus, his radical emancipatory claims for cinema notwithstanding, his invention of an absolute film language bears the trace of another contemporary literary innovation: the revival of the diary and the memoir as a literary form, which Viktor Shklovsky both practiced (in his memoirs A Sentimental Journey, 1923) and theorized (in Theory of Prose, 1929). A literary model for Vertov’s use of the diary can be found in Vasily Rozanov’s experimental journals Solitaria (1912) and the two volumes of Fallen Leaves (1913 and 1915), which seek out a new form of writing through a clash of a variety of genres (see Crone). 4 We can think of this transpositional loop from literature to film and back to literature as projecting a diegetic notion of the camera eye, which invokes the camera as a means of writing and telling. We can contrast this with a mimetic model of the camera eye that foregrounds the mode of showing as a “more immediate” representation of experience (see Quendler “The Conceptual Integration of Intermediality” and Rajewski 80-113). The classic example is Robert Montgomery’s filmic transposition of literary first-person perspective in Lady in the Lake (1947) which, in turn, had a great impact on experiments by the nouveau 3 The connections between Isherwood and Grosz are showcased in Frank Whitford’s edition of Goodbye to Berlin (1975) illustrated with selected drawings by Grosz. On Grosz’s influence on Dos Passos’ camera-eye conception see Ludington and also Spindler. 4 On the importance of the diary in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera see my essay “Rethinking the Camera-Eye.” <?page no="122"?> 122 Christian Quendler roman authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. The “new thing” about their uses of a literary camera eye combined the depersonalized literary narrative perspective found in hardboiled detective novels and filmic experiments with a subjective camera. As a result, the camera becomes a metaphor of subjectivity that stands in for all kinds of peculiar affective attitudes, such as the cold emotional involvement of the jealous husband in Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957) who, like a voyeur, is at once involved in and detached from the scene he observes. Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin perfectly illustrates how feedback loops between literature and film have contributed to formal innovations in filmic and literary writing; the subsequent adaptations of the book for the stage and the screen also shed light on the historicity of mediaspecific differences between film, theater and fiction. In other words, the novel’s history of versions helps to trace a historical narrative of the development of modernist conceptions of word-and-image relations in late modernism. Van Druten’s play premiered in New York on 28 November 1951. In attendance were both the playwright and the novelist who, during the play, were pacing backstage in opposite directions (Isherwood, “A Writer and the Theater” 88). It nevertheless remains unclear exactly how much Isherwood contributed to the play. In an interview he stated that “[t]he play was entirely conceived and written by Van Druten, but I did have a chance to say my opinion of it later” (Breit 217). Notably, the one line that Isherwood confirmed as having contributed addresses the camera trope at the end of the play: “The camera’s taken all its pictures, and now it’s going away to develop them” (Van Druten, I Am a Camera 84). Though a prolific screenwriter, Isherwood was not involved in the film’s production. He met with Cornelius and expressed an interest in developing a script but was tied to other film commitments at that time (Watts). The evolution of Goodbye to Berlin on stage and screen seemed to move further away from its author’s control. Yet within each developmental stage, in the transition from one medium to the other, there are moments of creative negotiation and opportunities for authoritative interventions. Just as Isherwood was happy to discuss the play with van Druten before it went into production, the latter prefaced the publication of the stage play with his experience and advice before leaving “the CAMERA to the new director as its film developer” (I Am A Camera 8). With the film’s release some three years later, Isherwood’s metaphor of the camera came full circle; it also completed what may be described as a transmedial process of artistic interpretation, bringing about new sets of media-specific assumptions concerning literature and film. In the following three parts, I will trace these assumptions in the <?page no="123"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 123 respective dramatic and cinematic versions and conclude by historically reviewing them. Stage Van Druten characterizes the play as somewhere between literary fiction and narrative feature film. He begins his preface by defending the play against critics who missed a classical dramatic arc in the play. Van Druten found the lack of neat dramatic resolutions in the literary base an irresistible challenge. Isherwood’s autobiographical fiction constitutes a form of writing that, like a diary, is caught up with and against life; it awaits or refuses development. This appealed to Van Druten’s modernist vision of a theater that attempts to transgress the boundaries of life and stage: To finish any story, other than by death, is to lie about life. A marriage is a temporary curtain, at best, promising another play about what it was like for those people to be married to each other. And even death, unless all the major characters are killed, as in Hamlet, is an ending only for the character who dies. (Van Druten, I Am A Camera 5). 5 While this alignment with the diary form partly accounts for the seeming pointlessness of the story, van Druten views this as also “one of the blessings that the movies and television have done for the stage” (5). The city symphony films of the 1920s that inspired Isherwood’s Berlin Stories provide an extreme model where the dimensions of space, time and perspective resist subordination to a story telos. While Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera programmatically created a new cinematic cityspace by blending Moscow, Riga and Kiev, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) blatantly states in an introductory insert: “Toute les villes seraient pareilles si leurs monuments ne les distinguaient pas.” (“All cities would be the same if their monuments didn’t distinguish them.”) This also applies to movies that aim to capture the examplary character of a specfic city such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphonie einer Großstadt (1927) or Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921). Rather than structuring temporal units along a storyline, these films draw on cycles of natural and social life (e.g. intervals of night and day or work and leisure). In a similar way, the perspective of the presentation deviates from the experiential 5 See Isherwood’s ideas on modern theater in “A Writer and the Theater.” <?page no="124"?> 124 Christian Quendler parameters of a narrator. In Joris Ivens’ Regen (1929), as the camera moves through Amsterdam, the rain becomes the focalizer of the city’s changing moods. Although Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures remains closer to the visual parameters of the human eye, he opposes the single and individual views that painters have captured of the city, with the multiplicity of perspectives encompassed in the film’s successive images. Motion pictures multiply the artist’s eye, which for Cavalcanti means both an aesthetic and social advancement of art that captures not only the worldly and elegant but also Paris’ lower-class life. By shifting the focus from action to the particularities of character and setting, television and cinema became influential sources for this theatrical trend. Both van Druten and Isherwood highlighted this point in reference to the unanimous praise Julie Harris received for her performance as Sally Bowles. To further complement Sally’s characterization, we encounter the personage of Christopher, who van Druten calls “almost a feed part” that should be played unselfishly and “with a true valuation of it as a commentator and observer” (I Am A Camera 7). In contrast to the first person narrator of the novel, the theatrical Christopher is a character amongst others. Still his role as mediator and surveyor of Sally’s plotline proves crucial. The opening scene illustrates this function as he reads aloud and edits his own text: CHRISTOPHER. (Reading aloud.) “In the last few days, there has been a lot of Nazi in the streets, her in Berlin. They are getting bolder, more arrogant.” (He stops.) No, that’s all wrong. (He crumples the page and throws it aside.) That’s not the right way to start. It is sheer journalism. I must explain who it is who is telling all this - a typical beachcomber of the big city. He comes to Berlin for the week-end, stays on, runs out of money, starts giving English lessons. Now he sits in a rented room, waiting for something to happen - something that will help him understand what his life is all about. (Rises, pouring beer into a glass, and sits on end of table.) When Lord Tennyson wanted to write a poem, they say he used to put himself into a mystic trance by just repeating his own name. Alfred Tennyson. Christopher Isherwood. Christopher Isherwood. Christopher Isherwood. I like the sound of my name. “Alone among the writers of his generation, Christopher Isherwood can be said to have achieved greatness.” (Drinks.) Shut up, idiot. The only book I ever published got five reviews, all bad, and sold two hundred and thirty-three copies to date. And I haven’t even started this new one, though I’ve been here six months already. (Sits at the table again.) Well, you’re going to start now, this minute. You are not leaving this chair until you do. Write “Chapter One.” (Does so.) Good. Now begin. Create something. Anything. (He writes, then reads) “I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive. Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” (The lights come up on the room. There is a knock on the door.). Who’s that? <?page no="125"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 125 SCHNEIDER. (Off.) It is I, Herr Issyvoo. CHRISTOPHER. Come in, Fräulein (Schneider comes in, she is a large, bosomy, German woman, and carries a lace tea-cloth. [. . .]) (Van Druten, I Am a Camera 9-10) Whether we go so far as to perceive Christopher as a variation upon the traditional literary narrator depends upon whether we are willing to regard Fräulein Schneider’s entry as a flashback representing an embedded level of reality. It is perhaps more rewarding to contemplate Christopher’s mediating function within a theatrical model that resolves such a hierarchical order of story levels as adjacent relations. Christopher’s comments on his own text prefigure his roles as observer and commentator that he assumes throughout the play. In a sense, his “dialogic” relationship with his writing is almost like the relationship he has with the other characters in the play. The opening soliloquy recalls a theatrical space that Isherwood likened to a box: “a place of imprisonment in which the audience is shut up with the actors. The effects are created by means of claustrophobia: you can’t get out” (“A Writer and the Theater” 91). Acting out the roles of the author and the critic, as well as writer and reader, in a conversation with himself, Christopher creates a necessarily claustrophobic atmosphere. We are privy to a conversation in which we do not belong and bear witness to what we perhaps never cared to know about a writer’s workmanship. More importantly, we identify Christopher not only in different roles but also as a role on a par with our own as audience. For Isherwood the theatrical situation, with its basis in a common physical reality across the stage and auditorium, is an essential feature that distinguishes the theater from cinema. His shorthand description for this difference is: “the theater is a box; the cinema is a window” (“Lecture Notes” 229). While the image of the “box” stresses a sense of confinement, heightened tension and excitement that result from the co-presence of actors and spectators, the metaphor of the window foregrounds the effect of detachment that its telemechanism produces: The cinema to me is a window - a magic window which you look out of. You may look into the far world and see events enormously distant in time and place, and you may look over vast areas of landscape, as in extreme long shots, or again you may enjoy a closeness of observation which is quite impossible on the stage. (“A Writer and the Films” 100). <?page no="126"?> 126 Christian Quendler Isherwood’s description of the cinema as a window draws upon the traditional notion of film as a medium of display. Its main virtue lies in its presentational mode, which seems to eliminate spatial and temporal gaps between the event and its representation. The camera as projector is what moves the viewer closer to the characters. In the opening scene of the stage play, Christopher himself performs this function. He begins with a report of the past few days, but immediately rejects it as too journalistic. He then tries to conjure up literary magic by using Tennyson’s trick of putting himself into a “mystic trance.” Chanting his own name he becomes a medium of something else or, as it were, another medium. The invocation of his agency as a published author paradoxically dissolves the same way. In speaking the magic words “I am a camera,” Christopher overcomes his writer’s block and moves the play from the present to the past. According to the theater model of the box this means that the past enters the stage. When quoting the famous opening passage from the book, the stage version notably omits the reference to the vision through the window. By performing as an actor-as-camera, his recordings unfold successively. In contrast to the narrator-as-camera in Goodbye Berlin, whose snapshots gradually develop throughout the book, the actor-as-camera in I Am a Camera re-creates this process in a framing expository scene (see Wilde). Screen The dynamic involved in this transposition becomes particularly evident when the play is compared with the film version. In the critical reception of the movie, this question was marred by the censorship debate. Although Collier attenuated some of the predictably problematic passages of the play, the movie had to be released without a code seal from the Motion Picture Association. 6 In the heat of this moral dispute, critics who saw the film as an improvement upon the play tended to be those who had already condemned the latter. The Chicago Daily Tribune considered the film to be superior to the “the shallow and affected play” but still “consistently overdone” (Mae Tinee). For critics who loathed 6 Originally planned as a Hollywood production, the film was eventually produced in England and released in the USA through the Distributors Cooperation of America. The MPA denied the film a code seal on the charge that it contained “racy dialogue, a discussion of abortion and portrayed promiscuity without punishment” (cited in “‘Camera’ Appeal Fails,” New York Times, 16 August 1955, 18). <?page no="127"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 127 the movie, the comparison between play and film was often beside the point: Whatever it was - if anything - that John van Druten was attempting to say in his stage play ‘I Am a Camera’ is not apparent in the film [. . .] The movie version is no more than a series of snapshots of an amoral and eccentric dame, flinging about in a frenzied, farcical fashion in the gloom of pre- Hitler Berlin. (Crowther, “Screen” 29) For this New York Times critic the film was merely a “Bohemian bedroom farce” that downplayed the story’s historical relevance. The charge of depoliticizing the historical situation was also generally shared by more sympathetic reviewers and confirmed the sense of an overall tendency towards comedy that had already been criticized in the play. While one reviewer argued that the film had “in some aspects an edge on the original through the camera’s mobility,” he criticized omissions in Collier’s play that would have placed the eccentric behavior of the heroine against a richer background (Coe 28). While still in production, Cornelius promised to recreate uncensored the notoriously licentious Berlin of 1930s. To create this atmosphere of social decadence and political corruption he commissioned Grosz for the set and costume design of the film (“Grosz Is a ‘Camera’”). His designs, however, fell short of expectations and lacked the vivacity of his earlier work. 7 Cornelius’ efforts to reconstruct this critical perspective of the 1930s - at once subjective and satirically detached - were lost on his reviewers who found the setting and minor characters shallow and burlesque. For example, consider a party scene in which a hung-over Christopher is being tossed around by a crazy bunch of physical culturalists. Some critics celebrated this scene as a fantastic and comic set piece while others rejected it as a cause for a hangover itself (see Gardner and Tinee). Yet none of the critics related the surreal atmosphere of this scene to the conspicuous double-framing of Christopher’s perspective at the beginning of the film. Curiously enough, Cornelius’ search for a cinematic equivalent of Isherwood’s literary camera eye seems to clash with the author’s ideas about film as an art form where-in contrast to the stage-image and movement take primacy over language and speech (Isherwood, “A Writer and the Films” 100-101). 7 Grosz took on this work on his return to Germany, after he had been living in the USA for more than twenty years. By that time he had not radically distanced himself from his earlier political work and grown considerably pessimistic about the social function of art. <?page no="128"?> 128 Christian Quendler The tension results from a rather straightforward or “literalist” transposition that, in order to illustrate the double function of the camera as memory device and a means of critical detachment, adds another framing narrative to van Druten’s play. The film begins with a hand-held camera shot that, panning from feet to head, closes in on the character of Christopher Isherwood as he is walking down a sidewalk towards the camera. The movement of camera and actor are in perfect synchronicity with the first-person voice-over. When he completes his first sentence “My name is Christopher Isherwood,” the camera panning upwards centers on him as he stops before crossing the street. We then follow Christopher to a party hosted by his publisher where, as he will find out later, Sally Bowle’s memoirs are presented. Meanwhile, the voice-over continues his introduction: I’d like to think that I need say no more. But perhaps I’d better add: I am a novelist, comfortably off, set in my ways, a confirmed bachelor. Sentimental melodies have a profound and moving effect on me. They seem to go to my stomach. They make me feel that maybe I have missed something in life. Unfortunately, I can’t always miss the literary cocktail parties to which I am invited by my publisher. They always stave these things when they are trying to promote the more dubious items on their list. A gaggle of female journalist was an evidence from which I gathered that some lady’s murky memoirs was being foisted on the public. The more worthless the book, the more they need noise and alcohol to launch it. However it’s only civil on such occasions to know at least the name of the unfortunate author. I could hardly believe my eyes . . . [on-screen voice] Sally Bowles. The shots accompanying the voice-over are replete with the kind of word-and-image relationships that have displeased critics. Christopher’s sober self-characterization as a modern man with a low tolerance for sentimentality is illustrated by showing a street musician playing the piano that is mounted on a drawbar trailer. His tune evidently makes Christopher take a stomach pill. When the voice-over mentions his obligation to attend his publisher’s literary event, we see Christopher putting on his glasses to inspect the display case at the entrance of the publishing house. Inside, at the party, his discovery that Sally Bowles is the author of the featured memoir is followed by a close-up of the book. The beginning of the film stands in crass contrast to Isherwood’s own theory of film, which owes much to Soviet montage theory and the critical interventions that, in the wake of sound film, favored a dialectical (or even antithetical) relationship between word and image. Contrasting the differences in the use of language on stage and screen, Isherwood reiterated this position in his lectures at the University of <?page no="129"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 129 California, Santa Barbara. The example he gives to illustrate to his point comes rather close to the voice-over narration in I Am a Camera: The sound in film should always be, as it were, balanced against the image and not go with it. For one thing, the fact that you can see everything on the screen makes it only about one-quarter necessary to let the audience know what is happening. . . . It takes very little, a gesture, a certain relation between two scenes, two shots, the introduction in a rather prominent way of some prop which has already acquired a dramatic significance in the story. . . . On the stage, it’s really quite difficult - and for people in the back almost impossible - to see the finer niceties of gestures and business between two people, and these often have to be backed up by dialogue. On the screen this kind of thing becomes absolutely ludicrous, and never more so than when, as if becoming very fashionable nowadays, a stretch of silent film is backed by a spoken narration. “I felt blue this morning. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I took a tram, I went to a park, I looked at the ducks. Stupid creatures, I thought. Their life is as dull as mine.” Every bit of this narration is absolutely unnecessary. And yet we see film after film in which, by God, the hero gets out of bed, looks blue, looks like he doesn’t know what’s the matter with him, goes downstairs, takes the trolley car and rides out to the park, sits down, sees the ducks. The whole thing is photographed, and yet this voice goes yakking on as though contributing to the situation, and of course it isn’t in the least. This is one of the things that you have to learn when you write for film - you have to try to somehow oppose the words and the image. (“A Writer and the Films” 106-7) Isherwood’s criticism revolves around the common notion that maps the difference between word and image on to the modes of showing and telling. Accordingly, the image must resist being simply an illustration of the word. Techniques of cinematography (e.g. the telescopic function of the close-up) and montage (e.g. the meaning generated by combining shots), on the one hand, and the audience’s long training in interpreting such techniques, on the other, have made it superfluous to explain through language what images can convey more effectively. The aim of this contrapuntal use of sound and image seeks not only to create an aesthetic surplus of meaning but also to defy the dominance of the verbal over the visual. <?page no="130"?> 130 Christian Quendler Time Does this mean that the movie adaptation of Isherwood’s own work is an example of such “ludicrous” and “absolutely unnecessary” approaches to voice-over narration that became “fashionable” in the late 1950s? Such accusations merit a closer look at the “ludicrous” and “absolutely unnecessary” elements of the film in relation to Isherwood’s notion of the literary camera eye as well as his ideas about theater and cinema. And given the significant period of time that passed between the publication of Goodbye to Berlin and its adaptations for stage and screen, it is also useful to re-evaluate what “fashionable” means in the context of film history. To be sure, Cornelius’ opening does not exactly match Isherwood’s example. In both cases, voice-over narration dominates the filmic images. In both examples, the voices shift tense and modulate their relations to the story-world. In Isherwood’s imagined film, the voiceover shifts from reported action and thought to a direct representation of thought which, given this snippet of a scenario, may still be read as non-diegetic. (It could also be the beginning of an interior monologue.) What we are supposed to see on the screen are the protagonist’s actions and emotions correlating with the singular states and events depicted in the narration. In I Am a Camera, too, a shift in the representation of speech and thought occurs when the off-screen voice is continued onscreen and Christopher reads Sally’s name aloud from the book cover. The main difference between the two examples lies in the way aspects of tense interact between visual and verbal planes. In Isherwood’s caricature of a redundant voice-over, the tense aspect of narration coincides with the time of the events depicted on the screen. Put differently, every verbal representation of a singular state or event corresponds to a visual representation of that state or event. By contrast, the voice-over narration in I Am a Camera relates almost exclusively to general states and habitual events: the protagonist’s name, his profession and marital status, his emotional disposition to sentimental melodies, his regular attendance at literary parties, and his experiential rule of assessing the quality of books at such parties. Strictly speaking, the narrativity of this passage is rather low or covert. We can assume from sentences like “Unfortunately, I can’t always miss the literary cocktail parties to which I am invited by my publisher” that he is attending one or is about to do so. Thus, given the expositional character of the opening voice-over, it is in fact quite remarkable how the images manage to configure much of the verbal information into a short and continuous string of action - even if this entails the carting of a piano into the street. The well-placed street musician is certainly the <?page no="131"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 131 most ludicrous gimmick in the opening scene, if “ludicrous” is meant to describe a self-reflexive jest. The pianist is an almost surreal figure. With a stoic mime he turns to Christopher and watches him taking the pill as if he could read his mind. Or is the pianist himself a figment of Christopher’s thoughts, a visual stunt of the voice-over narrator? This narrative play also resonates on the sound level. Not only could he pass as a cinema pianist of the silent era, his tune, which on the verbal cue “sentimental melodies” fades in well before the pianist comes into the frame, may initially be perceived as non-diegetic (or hypodiegetic) music. In a sense, the pianist’s “intrusion” into the frame can be compared to the verbal obtrusion of a redundant voice-over on “a stretch of a silent film” that Isherwood lamented in his lecture. If I Am a Camera is illustrative of those unnecessary voice-over narrations that had become so fashionable, then this fad for obtrusive voice-overs needs to be seen as an ironic and playful approach to this convention, which provides a new twist on well-rehearsed debates between the verbal and the visual towards the end of the classical Hollywood era. In the opening sequence, the traditional pairing of the visual with the descriptive, on the one hand, and the verbal with the narrative on the other hand, is reversed. At the same time, boundaries between an external objective reality and internal mental realities are blurred; or rather, they are reconfigured into a relationship of adjacency. The pianist as a conspicuous symbol of Christopher’s troubled relationship with canned sentimentality has a sonic counterpart in the use of sound as a means of focalization at the end of the expositional voice-over. When Christopher looks at Sally’s book her unmistakable laughter fades in. Since she is celebrating with journalists in the other room, we may process her laughter as part of Christopher’s perceptual focus or interpret it as his sonic memory triggered by reading her name. This ambiguous use of sounds and the montage or juxtaposition of voices that belong to different levels is characteristic of the film’s obsession with interlocking narrative levels. When Christopher arrives at the party and is welcomed by his friends, we hear both the voice-over of Christopher as narrator and - albeit muted - the conversation in which, as a character, he is engaged. Rather than viewing “a stretch of silent film backed up with narration,” we become aware of different diegetic levels of sound and are invited to interpret images belonging to different realms of reality. In the stage play, the different communicative frames (the author’s search for a voice and perspective, the narrator’s stance towards his story and his engagement as character) all seem to be written into one scene and space. The film version disentangles and rearranges these levels in a serial fashion that allows for a greater spatiotemporal mobility. While the (extra-diegetic) voice-over introducing <?page no="132"?> 132 Christian Quendler Christopher gives way to Christopher’s (diegetic) voice talking with his friend at the party, the communicative exchanges are neatly separated. His conversation at the party, in turn, frames another storytelling situation. Asked about his acquaintance with Sally, Christopher walks to a window and begins his story about her. A cross-dissolve takes us back to Berlin in the year 1931 and we see the young Isherwood standing by a window with a glass of beer. This scene not only matches the previous storytelling frame, it also re-inserts the image of the window, which orchestrates the perceptual metaphor of Christopher’s camera vision. As in the previous framing scene, the voice-over is succeeded by direct speech. Introducing the metaphor of the camera as an ethical refuge from the political reality, the voice-over reports, “‘I’ said I to myself” and his on-screen voice continues: “I” am a camera. The remainder of this famous passage is then integrated into a didactic dialogue with Fräulein Schneider, who overhears Christopher as she enters with Fritz. It illustrates once more the director’s overall attempt to assimilate different levels of experience without conflating them. The matching frames of Christopher staring out of the window at the cocktail party and in his room in Berlin align with two different narrative frames respectively. In the first scene, he gazes off into a remote and empty space. This window provides a storytelling frame for his remembered vision. In the second case, the window serves as a frame of focalization. As he witnesses Nazis harassing a Jewish man, the window screen becomes a device of emotional detachment. Both frames are combined as stylistic registers throughout the film. Rather than viewing Christopher’s story as a conventional flashback, the double window-frame draws attention to the active and passive dimensions of perception and memory. Things present or past are at once found and construed. As in Isherwood’s novel, the film’s approach to the metaphor of the camera revolves around this passive-active dichotomy. Similarly, the doubling of visual and auditory information is geared towards an aesthetic that teases out differences in what seems similar. In the film this creates something of a paradox. While Isherwood’s novel aspires to be photographic from the moment of its creative conception, its development and projection on the film screen not only involves two stages of adaptation but also ends up framed twice. The film contains a record of its own history of media versions. This palimpsestuous layering of versions is not an unusual transmedial phenomenon in adaptation practices. In the film I Am a Camera it contributes to the exploration of the cinematic in Isherwood’s literary use of the camera eye, foregrounding differences between modes of representation that - within a specific historical and aesthetic framework - are considered <?page no="133"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 133 analogous. This aesthetic of intermedial difference comes close to what André Bazin describes as a “dialectic between creation and fidelity,” which in the case of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) can be reduced to a “dialectic between literature and cinema” that crosses the conventions of translation and adaptation with “the most insidious kind of fidelity” (Bazin 142, 126). The double framing and the twofold windowing in I Am a Camera are like explications or paraphrases of what is contained in synthetic intermedial figures such as the literary camera eye or its filmic equivalent the camera pen (as conceived of by the French critic and filmmaker Alexander Astruc). I Am a Camera shows the obverse side of the cameraeye narration. Since Christopher’s window of narration and his window of focalization have not yet fully dissolved into another the scope of the camera eye as a form of representation, where experience and mediation fuse, remains to be imagined by the viewer. This does not mean that I Am a Camera is bound to an outdated literalist paradigm. On the contrary, it re-addresses established conventions of adaptation in the wider context of word-and-image relations. It brings together many discursive threads that inform the modernist camera-eye vision concerning relations between self and other, real and imaginary, inside and outside, past and present (see Casetti and North). Yet, the film also reconstructs this vision from a late modernist perspective and, as such, offers an instructive link to a mimetic conception of the camera-eye, where the simulation of a “camera experience” becomes the predominant challenge for literary experiments in cinematic fiction. <?page no="134"?> 134 Christian Quendler References Bazin, André. “Le Journal D’un Curé De Campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson.” Trans. Hugh Gray. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 125-43. Breit, Harvey. “Talk with Mr. Isherwood.” New York Times, 16 December 1951. 217. “‘Camera’ Appeal Fails.” New York Times, 16 August 1955. 18 Casetti, Francesco. Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Cavalcanti, Alberto. Rien que les heures. Paris: Néofilm, 1926. Coe, Richard L. “A Perky Pup; a Deft Julie.” The Washington Post and Times Herald, 28 September 1955. 28. Cornelius, Henry. I Am a Camera. Motion Picture. Romulus Films, 1955. Crone, Anna Lisa. Rozanov and the End of Literature: Polyohony and the Dissolution of Genre in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves. Würzburg: Jal Verlag, 1978. Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: ‘I Am a Camera.’” New York Times, 9 August 1955. 29. Dos Passos, John. “Satire as a Way of Seeing: Reminiscences of One Pair of Eyes.” Georg Grosz, Interregnum. New York: The Black Sun Press, 1936. 9-19. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/ Film Debate. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Gardner, R. H. “Of Stage And Screen.” The Sun, 21 November 1955. 10. “Grosz Is a ‘Camera.’” New York Times, 24 July 1955. SM 12. Isherwood, Christopher. Goodbye to Berlin. London: Random House, 2004. . “Lecture Notes: A Writer and the Film.” Isherwood on Writing, ed. James J. Berg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 232-233. . “A Writer and the Films.” Isherwood on Writing, ed. James J. Berg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 99-113. . “A Writer and the Theater.” Isherwood on Writing, ed. James J. Berg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 84-98. Ludington, Townsend. “John Dos Passos, 1896-1970: Modernist Recorder of the American Scene.” Virginia Quarterly Review 72.4 (1996): 565-72. North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. <?page no="135"?> Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin 135 Quendler, Christian. “The Conceptual Integration of Intermediality: Literary and Cinematic Camera-Eye Narratives.” Blending and the Study of Narrative, ed. Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. . “Rethinking the Camera Eye: Dispositif and Subjectivity.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9.4 (2011), forthcoming. Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002. Scheuer, Philip K. “Julie Has a Field Day but Film Stirs Furor.” Los Angeles Times, 28 August 1955. D1. Spindler, Michael. “John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts.” Journal of American Studies 15.3 (1981): 391-405. Tinee, Mae. “Film of ‘I Am a Camera’ Is a Bit Overdone.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 November 1955. B7. Van Druten, John and Christopher Isherwood. I Am a Camera: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random House, 1952. Watts, Stephen. “On Shooting a ‘Camera.’” New York Times, 23 January 1955. X5. Westerhoven, James N. “Autobiographical Elements in the Camera Eye.” American Literature 48.3 (1976): 340-64. Wilde, Alan. “Language and Surface: Isherwood and the Thirties.” Contemporary Literature 16.4 (1975): 478-91. <?page no="137"?> The Poetics of the Avant-Garde: Modernist Poetry and Visual Arts Viorica Patea This essay offers a brief overview of the relationship between modernist poetry and avant-garde art and examines the way in which key concepts of modernist aesthetics - e.g., the ideogram, the vortex, the objective correlative and theories of impersonality - are poetic equivalents of the new experiments in the visual arts. The interaction between poetry and visual arts marked the beginning of the twentieth century and remained the hallmark of postmodernist poetics. Cubist, Dada, Expressionist, Surrealist and abstract painting articulated the technical repertoire that was later adopted by other artistic disciplines. American modernist poets such as Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Stevens and Williams found in the technique of visual arts the key of how to recenter poetic expression on abstract designs that put an end to poetry’s reliance on mimetic principles. In the twentieth century Anglo-American poetry draws on the aesthetic principles of non-representational arts that provide the model of a new poetic language. 1 The aesthetics of twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry is based on the principles and techniques of nonfigurative arts, which it constantly seeks to integrate and translate into its own poetics. This essay considers the interaction between poetry and painting and focuses on the way in which key concepts of modernist aesthetics - the ideogram, the vortex, the objective correlative and the theory of impersonality, for example - 1 This study is part of two larger research projects funded by Consejería de Educación y Cultura de la Junta de Castilla y León (Ref. SA012A10-1) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Ref. FFI2010-15063). The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 137-152. <?page no="138"?> 138 Viorica Patea are the poetic equivalents of the new experiments in avant-garde visual arts, such as painting, sculpture and photography. Prolegomena The two loci classici in the history of interartistic relationship between poetry and painting go back to classical antiquity: Simonides of Ceos’s (6 BC) apothegm evoked by Plutarch, “Painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture,” and Horatio’s famous dictum “Ut pictura poesis” (“As is painting so is poetry”). 2 While the former expresses an implicit impulse to overcome existing barriers in order to achieve a common language, the latter, originally intended to highlight their limitations, has come to be understood as a comparison that bases the two artistic forms on mimesis. From the Hellenistic theorists through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Neoclassical period, the analogy between poetry and painting has been linked to principles of verisimilitude and limited to a mirror-like depiction of reality. Poetry and painting share a joint visual appeal. Both evoke images, yet they address our senses by different means. The history of interartistic comparison centers on similarities - the authority of the “ut pictura poesis” argument of Pope’s “sister arts” - as well as the differences between the two arts. As early as 105, Dion of Prusa noticed that painting addresses our sight and endures in space, while poetry unfolds in time through acoustic effects. He anticipated the major controversy regarding the different modes of representation of each art to be formulated later by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon (1766), a treatise that emphasized the two different modes of artistic expression of reality. Lessing postulated the unbridgeable distinction between visual spatial arts (painting and sculpture) and the temporal verbal art (poetry). The Romantics put an end to the semantics of the mirror and severed the connection with empirical reality, instead privileging imaginative expressive visualizations. Walter Pater’s aphorism “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music” (140) is paradigmatic of the Romantic sensibility and aesthetics. The Romantics rebelled against the neoclassical distinctions between different arts and genres as formulated by Lessing. They were intent on overthrowing and transcending a range of limitations - those of their own art and those separating different art forms. For the Romantic imagination, music was the quintessential art, 2 For a synopsis of the interartistic relationship between poetry and painting see Henryk Markiewicz “Ut Pictura Poesis . . . A History of the Topos and the Problem” and Wendy Steiner “The Painting-Literature Analogy.” <?page no="139"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 139 the master art that all others strived to emulate. In the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner had attempted to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a composite art that synthesized all other arts. Music, especially opera, was the vehicle in which drama, poetry and visual symbolism converged. For Wagner music was “the work of art in which all branches of art could unite in their highest perfection.” “Poetry,” he said, “will recognize its strongest, inmost longing in its final culmination in music” (107). And music had the advantage of being a universal language cutting across different national idioms. Opera combined dramatic representation with the materialization of abstract ideas in a language that “work[s] almost immediately upon the feelings themselves” (Wagner 105). In his analysis of the unity and diversity of different forms of art, Pater concurred with Charles Baudelaire, the first theorizer of modernity, that “the arts do not so much aspire to supplant one another as to lend each other renewed forces” (Baudelaire 116-17). Since the Romantic era the languages of philosophy, poetry and the arts have converged. The modernist aesthetic is characterized by an increasing tendency to transgress and displace the boundaries of different genres and art forms, a tendency conducive to postmodernist forms of intermediality. In order to define their artistic endeavors artists have often resorted to an analogy with another art. The Romantics cherished the nightingale or the Aeolian harp and conceived of poetry in terms of music. W. B. Yeats aspired to the fluidity of dance. Among the modernists, T. S. Eliot conceived of poetry in terms of music, Ezra Pound sought the solidity and dynamism of sculpture and painting, and William Carlos Williams and H.D. resorted to painting, photography and cinema, while Wallace Stevens invoked the eye that paints and the mind that composes. “On or about December 1910, human character changed” If in the nineteenth century, music was the quintessential art, at the turn of the century we can, as Reed Dasenbrock suggests, paraphrase Pater and assert that “all arts aspire to the condition of painting” (5). In the first decade of the twentieth century, painting became the master art, the paradigm of aesthetic theory and the richest source of inspiration to all other arts. Painting set the tempo of the avant-garde, the example all other arts would follow. Poetry was to be modeled on abstract art. 3 To 3 The formulation of abstract artistic principles was greatly influenced by Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) and Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), excerpts of which were published in the Vorticist journal Blast. In surveying the <?page no="140"?> 140 Viorica Patea its original theorizer, Wassily Kandinsky, abstraction “consist[ed] of the endeavor to eliminate, apparently fully, the objective (the real), and . . . to embody the content of the work in ‘unmaterial’ forms” (“On the Problem of Form” 162). Abstract form was predicated on “the outer expression of inner content” (162); it expressed “an inner experience” (165), “a striving of liberation of old forms,” that captured “the inner resonance” of objects (166). This constant process of “shifting of [cultural] barriers” breaks up “the soul-less material life” and envisages “building up the psychic-spiritual life of the twentieth century” (“On the Problem of Form” 170). Modernist literary doctrines are modeled on contemporary philosophical trends as well as theories of painting and sculpture. Poets share the pervasive idea in modernist painting and philosophy that truth is fragmentary, relational and complex. Hence the modern form must embody this multiform, prismatic reality, which can no longer be encompassed in a single unified scheme. Modernism also inherits the rhetorical propaganda of Dada’s “destruction is creation,” while the Futurist exaltation of dynamism and simultaneity shares modernism’s desire to shock the bourgeois and disrupt conventional thinking. The destructive element becomes thus part of the twentieth-century ethos. A forerunner of the modernist convergence of poetry and painting is Guillaume Apollinaire, who used to write poems on the paintings of his Cubist friends and introduced the calligramme and the visual poetry technique. He created poetic equivalents for the theories of painters. His calligrammes, an extension of the concrete poem or painting poem already illustrated in 1897 by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés (1897), drew on the possibilities inherent in the Simultaneism and Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay (Cook 64-85). Apollinaire’s Dadaist concrete poem explored the visual possibilities of words and letters, turning them into images and reproducing the form of objects so as to make a picture. Apollinaire summed up thus the spirit of the avant-garde: “We are moving towards an entirely new art, which will stand with respect to painting as envisaged heretofore, as music stands to literature” (115). Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Pound’s ideogrammatic method, and the Italian Futurists’ dipinti paroliberi (free word-paintings) - for example, Carlo Carrà’s “Festa patriottica” (1914), a collage of painted papers on cardboard with phrases cut out of newspapers, and Francesco Cangiullo’s “Fumatori history of art Worringer distinguished two opposing impulses: the drive towards empathy with nature, exemplified by the organic humanistic art of ancient Greece and the Renaissance, and the drive towards abstraction, caused by a feeling of unrest and fear of the surrounding world, and typical of the stylized geometric art of primitive archaic, Egyptian or Byzantine cultures. <?page no="141"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 141 II,” a poem visually evoking the lengthened form of smoke - began to turn twentieth-century poetry into a hybrid affair, an array of “intermedial text[s] between literature and visual art” (Higgins 206). In the twentieth century the superiority and vitality of avant-garde visual arts is an indisputable fact. The artistic relationship between poetry and visual arts is manifest in the works of the great modernist poets - from Pound’s Cantos, Eliot’s Waste Land and Williams’s Spring and All to the poems of H.D., Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens or E. E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein, who was more interested in painting than in the literary texts for which she is known today. The great revolution in the visual arts occurred between 1908 and 1914. By then Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Constantin Brancusi had already shaped the principles of nonrepresentational art. Painting became the most fertile metaphor for aesthetic theory, which opened the avenue of artistic experimentalism. It articulated the revolutionary language of twentieth-century artistic expression. Three of the earliest abstract artists - the Romanian sculptor Brancusi, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and the Russian Kazimir Malevich - viewed art in visionary terms, as an attempt to discover the reality lying behind the surface of appearances. In an early instance of intermediality, Kandinsky was concerned with the musicalisation of painting. He believed that art could visually express music and named many of his paintings after musical terms and compositions. Artists searched for the essence of things, which could be discovered only once the distracting outward elements - that is, their objective appearance - was stripped away. Reality had to be discovered in its most basic elements: line, color and form. Kandinsky argued, “The ‘artistic’ brought to the minimum, must be recognized here as the most strongly working abstract” (“On the Problem of Form” 162). While Mondrian was reducing everything to a line, Malevich resorted to dashes of color, circles, lines, and tilted rectangles in his desire to bring art to a geometric simplicity and absolute austerity, wanting to free art from “the burden of the object.” Kandinsky endeavored to eliminate the real, the object itself, so as to capture its “inner resonance” and the “life” that exists beyond the physical form (“On the Problem of Form” 155-70). These artists’ autonomous compositions of lines, planes, colors and forms were impregnated with occultism and hermeticism. <?page no="142"?> 142 Viorica Patea The Image and the Vortex To T. E. Hulme, the theorizer of Imagism, whose conception of art was to have a lasting impact on Pound, poetry was analogous to abstract art, in which he discerned an aspiration for immortality and the desire to transcend the flux of nature. He believed that the modernist sensibility was akin to primitive cultures and that the language of concrete geometric shapes adequately reflected the spirit of the modern age. In turn, Pound declared, “The image is the poet’s pigment,” and decided that Kandinsky’s theories on form and color could be applied to poetry (86). He prescribed a new poetic language based on the sort of hardness and clarity of outline found in geometric-abstract art. Significantly, Pound explained his Vorticist aesthetics in a memoir on his sculptor friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound equated spaces and axes with the rushing of ideas and conceived the image in terms of Gaudier’s planes, fields, axes or “the more complex Cubist designs of [Wyndham] Lewis’ ‘Timon’” (26). Influenced by Ernest Fenollosa’s theories on the Chinese written character, Pound found in the ideogram the poetic equivalent of the collage. The ideogram illustrates the pictorial possibilities of Chinese script, rooting abstract notions in concrete elements. It also enables nonlinear readings that evade full narrative and sequential interpretations. Pound turned the ideogram into the structural device of his Cantos, a compositional technique that allows for concision, fragmentation and epic amplitude. In their treatment of the image, modern poets looked to visual arts for inspiration and example. The literary text became a visual object. By means of their association with painting, “poets find a way to break poetry’s reliance on statement and formal convention and to re-center their project on abstract designs” (Costello 167). The modernist quest for a new poetic idiom is premised on the aesthetic of the “image,” the key concept of all poetic programs of the twentieth century. Founded by Pound together with Hulme, F. S. Flint, H.D., Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford in 1912, the first “-ism” of modernism was Imagism, a movement that defined itself as a “school of images,” overtly affirming its visual, concrete and pictorial character. Hulme argued that poetry was “a visual concrete” language that “endeavor[ed] . . . to make you continuously see a physical thing” (131). Imagism (1912) and Vorticism (1914) drastically changed the poetic language of the twentieth century. Imagism initiated a campaign against the mimetic principle of art that was later to be continued by Vorticism. Pound argued that Imagism had “an inner relation to certain modern paintings and sculpture” (82). Defined by Pound “as an intellectual and <?page no="143"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 143 emotional complex in an instant of time” (86), the image violated traditional canons of representation by presenting not an existing reality but a set of relations that lie behind the mere appearance of things. The image was not a mirror reflecting the given world but a lens, a tool with which to refashion the world anew. Imagists shared the common impulse of the avant-garde to dehumanize art, to challenge rational discourse and to frustrate the intellect’s capacity for translating everything into recognizable patterns. The new poetic strategies were those of direct presentation, juxtaposition, breaking of syntax, suppression of connectives, ellipses. Pound claimed, “The image is at the furthest possible remove from rhetoric” (83). Like painting and sculpture, poetry was intent on creating a new metalanguage with a logic of its own. This elliptical style is the poetic equivalent of the suppression of perspective in Cubist painting. This compositional method is based on bringing together disparate elements that do not belong to the same semantic field, and the impact created by their connection is directly proportional to their usual distance from each other; a similar impact was created by the strange, shocking objects, such as pieces of newspaper, statues or bottle racks, that were introduced in the pictorial space of the Cubist collage. Vorticist literature defined and developed its aesthetic in terms of the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Founded in 1914 by a poet (Pound), a painter and novelist (Wyndham Lewis), and a sculptor (Gaudier-Brzeska), the journal Blast became the forum of this interdisciplinary movement, which gathered abstract sculptors such as Jacob Epstein and painters such as David Bomberg and Edward Wadsworth. Vorticism consciously attempted to formulate a “correlative aesthetic” between literature and visual arts and to promote a “sort of poetry where painting and sculpture seems as it were ‘just coming into speech’” (Pound 82). Pound defined Vorticism as “expressionism, neo-cubism” (90), in opposition to Futurism, with which it maintained polemical relations. In fact, Vorticism was an original variant of these three artistic movements. The image developed towards the more dynamic, active and explorative vortex, defined as “a radiant node or cluster . . . from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (Pound 15). In a Vorticist’s hands the image gained in dynamism, simultaneity, intensity. It had to record “the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (Pound 89). The poem was above all an energetic construct that relinquished even more resolutely the mimetic conception of art. Vorticist literary principles stress creative imitation and the fashioning of new art from old. Pound’s Vorticist poems - Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Sextus Propertius, Cathay - became an exploration in other languages and <?page no="144"?> 144 Viorica Patea literatures, a pastiche and reinterpretation of different past traditions, a Cubist collage of diverse cultural alignments. It “Must Be Abstract” The tradition of abstract art draws on the post-Impressionism of Paul Cézanne and his conception of reality “in terms of the cylinder, the cone, the sphere” (Cézanne 18-19). Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse advocated an aesthetics in which color loses its mimetic association. Abstract sensuousness of form, rational geometry and intuitive perception of color lie at the root of the modernist revolt. Through their exposure to visual arts, poets found a way to break their dependence on discursive conventions. The poetry of the modernist avant-garde shows a filial relationship with abstract art, especially with Cubist painting. As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz remarks, the poetic language deforms and reforms itself when exposed to the new pictorial and sculptural aesthetics (531). Roman Jakobson has elsewhere observed that the influence of Cubist painting had a greater impact than atomic physics in the thought of the first wave of structural linguistics, while for Wendy Steiner Cubism is “the master-current of our age in painting and literature” (177-97). Cubism marked the great break with the Western tradition of representational art since the Renaissance. Going against the fixities of the perspectival point of view, it introduced the free association of visual elements into painting. In Cubism, objects are not fixed anymore in a spatial continuum; they are broken apart and distributed freely on the canvas. Perceptual images are recombined in nonrepresentational structures in which profile, frontal or back views, external and internal elements of an object coexist in the same plane. Images recombine in nonrepresentational structures. Reality becomes an arrangement of geometrical forms. Like Cubist artists, Cummings thought of art in terms of “Composition[s] by Angles, and Planes” (Houghton Notes, qt. Cohen 187). In his Notes he formulated thus his aesthetic principles: “The symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is unreality. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains” (Houghton Notes, qt. Cohen 157). The Cubist techniques of fragmentation, multiple perspectivism, juxtaposition and collage were to become standard practices of literary modernism, characterizing works such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land. As Octavio Paz rightly observes, in a Cubist painting as in a Symbolist poem, the visible reveals the invisible, although the revelation operates through opposed methods: the symbol <?page no="145"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 145 evokes without naming, while in a Cubist artwork, forms and color present an object without representing it: “Symbolism (Mallarmé) was a transposition: Cubism is a presentation” (534). By representing an object simultaneously from different angles, Cubist painters replace it with a system of plastic relationships. They create a multiperspectival reality liberated from the limitations of a unique point of view. As with the concurrent experiments in the visual arts, modernist poets also break up the illusion of a one-point perspective and the convention of a single lyric personality. In Prufrock (1914) and Mauberley (1920) Eliot and Pound became the first to do away with the notions of the lyrical “I” as a unitary entity. The Cantos and The Waste Land present a plurality of consciousness, an ever-expanding series of points of view. If Pound pointed the way to the visual possibilities of twentiethcentury poetry, Eliot’s formulations regarding the extinction of personality, the impersonal theory of art, the objective correlative, and the notion of the artistic process as a continual self-sacrifice helped develop an abstract poetic imaginative space similar to that which theorists of abstraction created in modernist painting. By means of this strategy Eliot rescued art from its mimetic representations and invented a new means of rendering the dramatization of psychic forces and inner conflicts. As Charles Altieri (189-209) convincingly argues, Eliot’s notion of impersonality and that of the objective correlative are inseparable from the contemporary experiments in nonfigural visual arts. The strategy of the objective correlative and the theory of impersonality enabled Eliot to create the syntax of a new subjectivity that transforms the poetic text into a Cubist site where complexes of feelings and cultural representations are in play. Eliot recomposes subjectivity into a new geometry of interpenetrating, intersubjective elements that shape the nondiscursive, nonlinear space of interior life. While the objective correlative unites subjectivity with its objects, impersonality allows for a perspectival embodiment of psychic forces and tensions that undermine the ego’s effort to impose a single interpretive strategy onto the flux of reality. Impersonality, or the via negativa, offers the literal representation of the interplay of psychic forces free of the impositions of a univocal interpretive strategy. It is on the grounds of the theory of impersonality that Eliot discards the convention of a stable lyric voice. He conceives of personality as a “zone” or a “field of consciousness” (Kenner 35-36), an assemblage of many psychic registers and historical and cultural identities. The “I” is a collage of voices, masks, registers and points of view. Instead of direct self-exposure he stages the conflicts of a consciousness at odds with itself. <?page no="146"?> 146 Viorica Patea More than any other poem, The Waste Land represents the modernist quest for a new form. Eliot’s technique recalls a Cubist collage depicting different cultures, eras and geographical spaces. The poem is a series of layered planes that defy formal completeness and do away with categories such as plot, narrative sequence and the notion of a single lyric consciousness. Eliot resorts to Cubist aesthetics and privileges a complex mode of ever-shifting temporal dislocations and narrative and rhetorical discontinuities. The poem is an ensemble of fragments, segments, polyphonic variations of interrupted voyages, unfinished sagas and disconnected adventures. Their multiple strands are different phases of a quest that continues in different contexts, time periods and geographical latitudes at the frontier between myth and reality (Langbaum 95-128). Within the framework of these montages, dramatic action loses its linear progression and ceases to relay mere sequences. Eliot tells one story by telling different stories whose arguments have no beginning, no middle and no end. Eliot’s allusive strategies, the poem’s textual and textural suggestiveness, do not advance the narrative thread; rather, they establish a web of new associations. The poem progresses not by way of its dramatic action but by way of its digressions, analogies, allusions and repetitions. As Michael Levenson aptly remarks, the poem proceeds not forwards but “sideways”; it evolves “by enlarging contexts, by situating motifs within an increasingly elaborate set of cultural parallels” (201). Eliot’s world is discontinuous and disrupted, yet his fragments are dynamic elements that seek to find their correspondences in other contexts and cultures, opening new perspectives and setting up bridges between isolated points of view. Eliot’s “mythical method” targets the simultaneity and atemporality of the collage technique, by means of which chronological and consecutive temporality is replaced by a visual spatial form. The Waste Land also presents a quest for the continuum of modern consciousness that encompasses the fragments of its past culture. Moreover, the underlying structure of the collage endows the composing fragments with a dynamic character and preserves the great diversity of the culturally heterogeneous elements it brings together without imposing a uniform order. The Poem and the Machine On the American side of the Atlantic, the close relationship between poetry and painting was emphatically acknowledged from the very beginning. Those poets who, like Williams, Stevens, Hart Crane and Marianne Moore, did not choose to become expatriates proudly claimed that they had modernized their poetic idiom not so much due to the <?page no="147"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 147 influence of Pound and Eliot, the daunting and towering figures of the literary European scene, as to the influence of visual arts and the effervescent artistic milieu of New York, where the works of Cézanne, Brancusi, Picasso and Matisse were first introduced by art collectors in small galleries such Alfred Stieglitz’s at 291 Fifth Avenue. In 1913 the Armory Show was the major event that introduced post-Impressionist and Cubist art to New York. With the outbreak of World War I, the presence of European artists in the United States - Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Jean and Yvonne Crotti, Albert Gleizes, Juliette Roche, Edgar Varèse and Henri-Pierre Roché, among others - was to become another decisive factor in the evolution of modern art. Between 1915 and 1921, Walter Conrad Arensberg, an art collector and a friend and patron of Duchamp, used his New York apartment as a salon where European and American avant-garde artists would meet. Stevens, Williams and Moore were heavily influenced by the experimentalism of the avant-garde; in many instances the distinctive character of their poetry can be traced back to their contacts with and exposure to the latest visual arts developments in New York (MacLeod “Visual Arts” 194-216). Williams was friendly with New York painters like Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler and Marsden Hartley and photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and others associated with the magazine Camera Work. From them and the Precisionist movement he learned how to make his own poetic language visually precise, how to sharply focus on a scene, and how to charge it with atmosphere, narrative and symbolism. He resorted to the technique of visual arts in order “to return to and to renew specifically literary traditions and modes,” such as pastoral lyrics and irregular odes (Schmidt 7). A nativist American movement, Precisionism, comprised painters and photographers who believed in the myth of America as a potential industrial Arcadia. They exalted the new industry and technology in paintings that depict industrial scenes and skyscrapers in an attempt to create a superior nationalistic aesthetic, which transposed Emerson and Whitman’s Adamic notions to a contemporary industrial setting. As Peter Schmidt argues, Precisionist pictures had to present an “equivalent” for emotion. As photographic versions of Eliot’s “objective correlative,” they had to depict the visible as well as the invisible, while the artist’s own presence had to be as impersonal and “objective” as possible, a “selfless lens” (10-47). Williams defined the poem “as a Field of Action” (Essays 280-91). The poetic space becomes a moving field, “[t]he stream of things . . . that move in one fixed direction” and that the poet opposes “at right angles,” cutting across the “current” to achieve tension (Essays 15). In many of his poems the perspective is turned into an abstract field of <?page no="148"?> 148 Viorica Patea form and color patterns. Williams conceived of his poems in terms of an arrangement of planes capable of expressing emotional contents: “I amplify ‘planes’ to include sounds, smells, colors, touch used as planes in the geometric sense, i.e., without limits, except as intersected by other planes” (qt. Dijkstra 57). These were also the elements he appreciated in paintings. He praised Charles Sheeler’s Classic Landscape, a painting about which he wrote a poem with the same title, for its “effectiveness,” which resulted from “an arrangement of cylinders and planes in the distance” (qt. Dijkstra 148). Influenced by experimental concerns with structure and multiplicity of form, the modernist poet seeks to achieve a serial equivalent to Cubist multiple perspectives. This is Stevens’s favorite technique, evident in poems such as “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “Metaphors of a Magnifico” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in which a landscape, a narrative or the portrait of a blackbird is viewed from different angles and rendered by a series of variations and rhetorical riddles. “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” is an experiment in serial landscapes in which the same seascape is presented in a series of metaphors that capture the changing mood of the speaker and the changing aspect of the sea and clouds. Stevens’s and Williams’s poems embraced the experimentation then taking place in modern painting, especially Dada, Cubism and Surrealism. Williams’s compositions are in many ways “visual texts” (Sayre) in terms of their formal design and structure. In Kora in Hell (1919) and Spring and All (1923) he produced his own version of Dadaist or automatic writing. Williams avowed, “I didn’t originate in Dadaism but I had it in my soul to write it. Spring and All (1922) shows that” (I Wanted to Write a Poem 48). Along the same line, many of Stevens’s puns, nonsense words, wordplay and word invention, and the odd conjunction of objects that transgress the limits of meaning, translate into a fascination with the irrational that adumbrate the influence of Dada and Surrealism. In the twentieth century art was no longer to be conceived of as a copy of reality; rather, it was to be regarded “as an independent object with the same degree of thingness as the objects” (Steiner 18). Modern poets do not copy reality, but compose a reality. They no longer represent reality; they only create a portion of it - a “mundo,” in Stevens’s phrase. The more self-sufficient a work of art becomes, the more it resembles the world of objects. Poems are verbal objects made solely of words. For Williams words meant things, objects, facts: “The poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (Selected Essays 256). Whereas Whitman’s chief aim was “to construct a poem on the open principles of nature” (Complete Writings, IX, 34), his romantic conception of organic form being based on the growth of plants and seeds (Preface 1855, 716), <?page no="149"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 149 in the prose passages of Spring and All Williams claimed that the poet not only imitates nature’s creative mode, but produces poetic objects just like “electricity and steam” (Collected Poems 207). Williams’s theories are consonant with Marcel Duchamp’s concept of readymades, which draw not on nature but on industrial technology. Duchamp’s objets trouvés reflect the crisis in the conception of art and its function. Furthermore, they express the artist’s conscious will to elevate ordinary or scandalous objects (bottle racks, urinals) to the category of art, hereby opening the debate into the very nature of art while mounting enigmas against the possibility of revelation. Cubist tropes, readymades, and objets trouvés reappear in modernist poems about humble ordinary objects: the underground train (“In a Station of the Metro”), a wheelbarrow (“The Red Wheelbarrow”), a number (“The Great Figure”), a jar (“Anecdote of a Jar”), a grocery note (“This Is Just to Say”). Hulme argued that “it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things” (131). Like Williams, Stevens believed that vanguard art should have a distinctly nationalistic character, rooted in a sense of place that alone can prevent it from losing its concreteness. Stevens too sharpened his poetic voice through modern paintings, visited art galleries and was himself an art collector. Moreover, painting became an analogy for his artistic endeavor. He imagined the world in aesthetic and compositional terms: to Stevens pictures were worlds and the world conveyed itself as a picture. As Bonnie Costello suggestively argues, Stevens modeled his poetry on analogies drawn from the contemporary art world. In his “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” Stevens postulated that modern art is a substitute for God and “Must Be Abstract” (Stevens 380), as with the spiritual content of Mondrian’s purely geometric paintings (Glen MacLeod Wallace Stevens 103-21). One of Stevens’s major poems, “The Blue Guitar” (1937), is an extended dialogue with Picasso’s pre-Cubist painting “The Old Guitarist” (1904). Stevens also cultivated the nonsensical and the irrational, trends that link him to Dada and Surrealism. There are many ties between Stevens’s poetry and Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. His poems also refer to several genres of paintings, such as the nude, still life and landscape (Costello 169). The close relation between poetry and painting is best exemplified in the person of E. E. Cummings, who produced 950 poems and 1,600 paintings and drawings. Cummings considered himself a “poetandpainter,” an author of pictures and a draftsman of words (qt. Gidley 179); he believed that “The day of the spoken lyric is past. The poem which has at last taken its place does not sing itself” (Kennedy xiv). He applied his perceptual pictorial theories to his poems. Cummings’s poems are based on iconicity. They are poempictures that demand to be <?page no="150"?> 150 Viorica Patea looked at. His poems respond to Poe’s statements regarding artworks’ brevity: most of them are short, contained on a single page, and can easily be visualized at a single glance. In the typographic design of the text Cummings was a visual artist who avowed that his poems “are essentially pictures” (Norman 28-29). Cummings’s verse opens up many perspectives that disrupt conventions and break narrative progression and linearity: sense may move in other directions than horizontal, and in latter from right to left as well as v.v.; and may change its direction at suitable times (e.g. perpendicular down to up, zigzag, right angle (90º) etc. (Houghton Notes, qt. Cohen 187) In short, the interaction between poetry and painting marked the beginning of the twentieth century and became the hallmark of postmodernist poetics. Cubist, Dada, Expressionist, Surrealist and abstract painting articulated the technical repertoire that was to be adopted later by other artistic media and defines the intermedial nature of our postmodern age, marked by the symbiotic relationship of hybrid verbal-pictorial-musicaldigital art forms. Pound’s ideogrammatic method and Eliot’s objective correlative and theory of impersonality, together with Williams’s objects, created the conceptual premises that enhanced the spatial and visual possibilities of the poetic word. They had a bearing not only on the poets of their own generation but also on representatives of many other movements - Objectivists, Projectivists, and New York School and Language poets, to name a few - whose poetry crosses more and more into the fields of visual art, nontraditional media and public settings. Furthermore, the technological advances in domains of communication such as the computer and the Internet and have extended the boundaries of poetry to areas of sculpture, performance, photography, commercial advertising forms, and so on. Computerized language has brought into existence “Digital Poetry,” cyber-poems, and electronic, holographic and hypertext poetry. 4 The incorporation of visual and digital media within the poetic text is contributing to the creation of new forms of artistic intermediality. 4 The Electronic Poetry Center (founded in 1995 and directed by Loss Glazier) and the international E-Poetry Festivals that have been organized since 2001 all around the world are an eloquent example of the intermedial condition of postmodern art forms. <?page no="151"?> Poetics of the Avant-Garde 151 References Altieri, Charles. “Eliot’s Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 189-209. Apollinaire, Guillaume. “Pure Painting.” The Modern Tradition. Ed. Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 112-19. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Life and Work of Delacroix.” Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. New York: Da Capo Press, 1964. 116-17. Bohn, Willard. The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Cézanne, Paul. “Excerpts from Letters.” Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book of Artists and Critics. Ed. Herschel B. Chipp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. 16-23. Cohen, Milton. Poet and Painter: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings’s Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. Cook, Albert. Figural Choice in Poetry and Art. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1985. Costello, Bonnie. “Stevens and Painting.” The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. Ed. John N. Serio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 164-79. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Dijkstra, Bram. A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. New York: New Directions, 1978. Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919). Ed. Haun Saussy et al. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Gidley, Mick. “Picture and Poem: E. E. Cummings in Perspective.” Poetry Review 59.3 (Autumn 1968): 179-95. Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Hulme, T. E. Speculations: Essay on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Herbert Read. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924. Kandinsky, Wassily. “On the Problem of Form” (1912). Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book of Artists and Critics. Ed. Herschel B. Chipp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. 155-70. . Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). New York: George Wittenborn, 1972. Kennedy, Richard. Introduction to E. E. Cummings, Tulips and Chimneys. Ed. George Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1976. <?page no="152"?> 152 Viorica Patea Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1959. Langbaum, Robert. “New Modes of Characterization.” Eliot in His Time. Ed. Walton Litz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. 95- 128. Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. MacLeod, Glen. “Visual Arts.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 194-216. . Wallace Stevens and Modern Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Norman, Charles. E. E. Cummings: The Magic Maker. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Paz, Octavio. “Los Hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia.” La casa de la Presencia. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1991. 401-584. Pound, Ezra. “Vorticism.” A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska. New York: New Directions, 1970. 81-94. Sayre, Henry. The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Schmidt, Peter. William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1993. Wagner, Richard. “Literature as Music Drama.” The Modern Tradition. Eds. Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 101-7. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman. Eds. M. Bucke, T. B. Harned, and Horace Traubel. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902. . “Preface 1855 - Leaves of Grass, First Edition”. Leaves of Grass. Eds. S. Bradley and H. Blodgett. New York: W. W. Norton. 711-31. Williams, Carlos William. I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet. New York: New Directions, 1977. . Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1954. . The Collected Poems. Vol. 1, 1909-1939. New York: New Directions, 1986. Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy. New York: International University Press, 1953. <?page no="153"?> Presenting the Real: Hopperesque Updike in “In Football Season” (1962) Kangqin Li This paper offers a formalist analysis of John Updike’s visual composition in his 1962 short story “In Football Season” by putting him alongside the American Realist painter Edward Hopper. Applying Jose Ortega y Gasset’s perspectivist theory and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Postmodernist definition of Realism, the paper will first look at how “the real” is presented in Updike’s short story and explore Updike’s approach toward Realism as a representational form. With a better understanding of the form of Updike’s short story and the relation between the form and the world beyond, the paper further explores the visual representation of form and space in the short story. The purpose of the paper, therefore, is not to claim how similar Updike and Hopper are in their artistic sensibility, nor to subvert Updike’s status as an American Realist writer. Rather, it is to see Updike’s short fiction in a different light and to understand his “visual” contribution to the short story form. Visual art plays an important role in John Updike’s fiction. In Picked-Up Pieces (1975), Updike remarks that “my writing tends . . . to be pictorial, not only in its groping for visual precision but in the way the books are conceived, as objects in space, with events and persons composed within them like shapes on a canvas” (51). Critics have noticed the painterly techniques in Updike’s fiction too. James Plath compares Updike to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer whose equal treatment of objects and humans and whose “play of light within an interiorized space” are recalled in Updike’s “fictional portraits of upper- The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 153-167. <?page no="154"?> 154 Kangqin Li middle-class domesticity” in the Rabbit tetralogy (209). Robert Detweiler studies Updike’s novel The Centaur (1963) and offers a Cubist approach to the novel’s double narrative (82). However, critics tend to focus on the visual aesthetics in Updike’s novels and little attention is paid to those in Updike’s short fiction. Updike started his literary career as a short story writer for The New Yorker magazine and throughout his life produced several hundred short stories. Though critics acknowledge his talent as a short story writer - indeed according to Rachel Burchard “Updike reaches his highest range of accomplishment in this medium” - little sustained research has been done on Updike’s achievements in the short story form, let alone the visual aspect of it (133). Donald Greiner and Robert Luscher, two critics who devote serious attention to Updike’s canon of short fiction both agree that Updike’s major contribution to the short fiction form is that his stories contain little dramatic action, but at the same time offer “a coalescing network of incidents and images” (Luscher xii; Greiner 62, 164-165). Though they both acknowledge the importance of visual art in Updike’s short fiction, neither of them offers a formalist study to explain how the visual effect is constructed in Updike’s short fiction. This essay will explore visual art in Updike’s short fiction by examining his compositions alongside those of the American Realist painter Edward Hopper. Juxtaposing Updike’s short story “In Football Season” (1962; rpt. The Early Stories) with a series of Hopper’s paintings, a formalist study of the visual structure in Updike’s short story will be given. Hence the essay serves two purposes. First, it will offer a deeper understanding of the form of Updike’s short story and the relation between the form and the outside world it refers to. In other words, we shall look at how “the real” is presented in Updike’s short story and explore Updike’s approach toward Realism as a representational form. Second, considering the notion of a special relationship between the short story form and visual art, the essay will explore Updike’s “visual ”and “formal” contributions to the short story genre and fill the gap of previous Updike short fiction studies. It is for three reasons that Edward Hopper is introduced here to illustrate the visual structure in Updike’s short fiction. In the first instance, Updike loved drawing and drew many cartoons for The Harvard Lampoon, an undergraduate humour magazine. He also studied art at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. While Updike is considered a pictorial writer, Hopper is regarded as a painter with literary insight (Greenberg, Collected Essays 118). Douglas Tallack asserts that Hopper’s use of times of day and night as painting titles “provides a suggestion of narrative elements in an otherwise static scene” (“Edward Hopper” 121). The visual consciousness of Updike and the literary in- <?page no="155"?> Hopperesque Updike 155 sight of Hopper serve together as one basis for the juxtaposition of the two artists. Secondly, both Updike and Hopper are most often considered American Realists. Aside from Updike’s commitment to the “groping for visual precision,” critics, whether agreeing Updike is a Realist writer or not, do not deny that Updike’s writing, novels and short stories, is filled with accurate description of details (Luscher xiii; Versluys 33). Similarly, it is widely accepted that Hopper is a Realist painter of American scenes. His paintings remain “at least superficially, representations of ordinary American scenes” and “are immediately recognizable in the subject matter” (Levin, The Art 7; Tallack, “Edward Hopper” 107). And yet, despite their apparent approach to Realism as a representational form, Updike and Hopper are both conscious of the limitations of the medium. Hopper claims that “just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is” (qtd. in Levin, Complete Prints 19). Updike believes “language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications” (Updike, Picked-Up 34). Their shared consciousness of the gap between the form and the world beyond offers a further basis for a formalist study of the visual structure of Updike’s fiction by putting him alongside Hopper. Thirdly, Updike comments in an essay on Hopper that the painter “seems in his paintings to be on the verge of telling a story” (Updike, Still Looking 180). This acknowledges, as Greenberg notes, the narrative insight of the painter. But I would like to give Updike’s comments a further twist by focusing on the term “on the verge of telling a story.” How is a painting formed to be “on the verge of telling a story”? What is the difference between a painting that is on the verge of telling a story and one that tells a story? Does visual art tell us something special about the short story form? In Updike’s story “In Football Season,” the narrator describes a few symbolic objects and moments and depicts both the atmosphere of Friday night football in small town America and subtly shows the psychology of an adolescent. Updike’s atmospheric descriptions remind us of Hopper’s paintings of American scenes. Indeed, one finds motifs and objects in Updike’s short stories - seasons, times of day, trains, cars, streets, architecture, and couples - similar to those found in Hopper’s iconic American paintings. But what is the typical compositional format of a Hopper painting? How is a Hopperesque atmosphere structured in a short fiction? This essay will look at two Hopperesque effects in Updike’s short story: the “frozen moment” and the “flattened surface.” <?page no="156"?> 156 Kangqin Li Frozen Moment One of Hopper’s distinct compositional features is that he tends to paint from an elevated or lowered point of view “with unusual angles of vision,” introducing more diagonals into the picture plane (Levin, The Art 39). In his 1924 oil painting New York Pavements, the scene is viewed from an elevated viewpoint from an acute angle. 1 The house, the major object of the painting, is not rendered parallel to the picture plane and the diagonal lines in the painting form edges and angles, instead of converging to a vanishing point. A nurse pushing a baby carriage is placed at the lower left corner and only part of the figure and the carriage can be seen. This angular vantage viewpoint challenges the traditional Albertian standard of composition in which a horizon line or vanishing point should be located near the middle of the painting in order to keep the “linear perspective” (Dunning 125). 2 Linear perspective, then, is “a complex and interrelated system for depicting what appears to be a unified, mathematically correct illusion on a two dimensional surface” (Dunning 35). In other words, “linear perspective,” which is typically found in visual Realism, narrows all verticals, horizontals, and diagonals to a compositional point that unifies the space and makes it recognizable, a window on to a world. The world seen through a perspective as such is a static one and offers a “timeless monumentality” (Dunning 127). By reducing the linear perspective, Hopper’s angular viewpoint suggests movement and temporality, and renders the painting “as though seen through a shifting camera lens” (Levin, The Art 58). In New York Pavements, one sees “the real”; that is, one sees the house, the nurse, the baby carriage. Everything inside the painting, together with the painting title, refers to reality. However, that reality is a moment suspended in time instead of a whole sequence of happenings. One may think about the possible context of the painting, that is, the pre-history and the post-history of the nurse pushing the carriage. Our 1 Edward Hopper’s oil paintings and prints referred to in the paper can be found respectively in Gail Levin’s books: Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist and Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints. 2 In 1435, the Florentine painter Leon Battista Alberti formulated the rules of perspective which governed painting for four hundred and fifty years. According to William Dunning, Alberti’s perspective is formed by four principles: “1) Straight lines are not distorted; 2) objects or distances parallel to the picture plane are not distorted; 3) diagonals (orthogonals) converge to a single vanishing point which corresponds to the position of the viewer’s eye; and 4) objects diminish in measured increments in proportion to their distance from the viewer” (40). Alberti’s rationale of perspective can also be found in Samuel Y. Edgerton’s book The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. <?page no="157"?> Hopperesque Updike 157 eyes stay in the moment only because Hopper’s edges and angles freeze and frame the moment and no more context is given. Like Hopper, Updike has an acute consciousness of viewpoint and a “fondness for exploring corners” (Updike, Self-Consciousness 143). In “In Football Season,” one finds more Hopperesque angles and slanted planes than Albertian horizontal planes. The narrator recalls the fragrance that girls acquire in autumn and tries to locate the fragrance: As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent. . . (122) The constant use of positional expressions such as “beside,” “tighten their arms about the books,” “bend their heads forward,” “the little intimate area thus formed,” “carved” and “crescent” offers the geometrical perspective of a painter and forms a basic structure of Updike’s description. There are many edges and angles. The narrator walks beside the girls and the girls are viewed from an angle which can be the equivalent of Hopper’s “angles.” Their “tightened arms” and “forward bended heads” introduce more angles. In the last sentence, with the fragrance being “banked a thousandfold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city,” the readers’ eyes are brought to the stadium slope which is, if in a painting, a slanted horizontal plane. As one reads on, one encounters more angles when the narrator waits for his father “beside half-open doors of varnished wood and frosted glass” (122), when he sees his father “taking tickets at the far corner of the wall, wedged into a tiny wooden booth” (122), and when he escorts a girl to her door and bows his face “into that silent crescent of fragrance” (123). Like Hopper’s angular viewpoint in New York Pavements, angles and edges in Updike’s short story offer temporal dimension in the otherwise static description. Readers are made conscious that there is something going on, but again the “going on” is, like Hopper’s “frozen moment,” framed and frozen within the visual edges. As we continue reading, those who expect a whole sequence of narrative may wonder about the words to which the girls listen by bending “their heads forward” in that “little intimate area”; they may be curious about what is being discussed inside the doors when the narrator waits for the father “beside halfopen doors”; they may want to know what happens between the narrator and the girl before he is allowed to “bow his face into that silent crescent of fragrance.” Indeed, the angles and edges in Updike’s story visually offer narrative edges and clearly frame each moment at the <?page no="158"?> 158 Kangqin Li “verge” of telling a story. Each moment stops short, its pre-history and post-history untold. In other words, each moment offers a miniature narrative which reminds us of the limited space in short story form. “In Football Season” is a short story of only four pages. While reading a short story, a miniature narrative form compared to the novel, obviously enough because there is less “space” in the form, one meets the narrative edges, beginning and ending, sooner than reading a novel. As the result, whereas the “going on” of the novel can “sometimes seem to merge with ‘life’,” the short story as an economic narrative form “may be seen as an acknowledgement of, and defence against, language going on” (Tallack, The Nineteenth-Century 20). Indeed, Updike’s frozen moments in “In Football Season,” like those Hopperesque ones, make us aware of the space in representational form and “the real” beyond it. We see, as a result, a slice of reality instead of reality as a totality which readers of traditional Realist fiction would otherwise expect. Updike’s and Hopper’s consciousness of form and their emphasis on non-linear perspective reflect their original approach toward Realism as a representational form. While still seeking a representational accuracy to depict reality, by introducing angles and temporality, they “prevent a total view of the scene, and equally prevent us from receiving a unified visual impression” (Renner 21). Hence they enter a perspectivist domain. Jose Ortega y Gasset, the theorist of perspectivism, asserts that “the ultimate reality of the world is perspective” (45). According to Ortega, a homogeneous space does not exist; nor does an immutable unified reality. Reality is each individual’s reality seen from each individual’s perspective. Influenced by Einstein’s theory of relativity and Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Ortega notes that “reality . . . can only reach us by multiplying itself into a thousand faces or surfaces” (171). When applying perspectivism to art, Ortega claims that “truth, the real, the universe, life - whatever you want to call it - breaks down into innumerable facets, into countless planes, each one of which slants towards one individual” (171). Updike’s and Hopper’s the frozen moments are those “facets” and “planes.” In a letter to Charles H. Sawyer, Hopper explained: Why I select certain subjects rather than others, I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience. (qtd. in Goodrich 152) Similarly, in the afterword to Rabbit, Run, Updike talks about how he presents reality in his fiction: Rather than arrive at a verdict and a directive, I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human. Readers who expect nov- <?page no="159"?> Hopperesque Updike 159 elists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed. (Updike, Rabbit 269-270) Regardless of whether it is Hopper’s “synthesis of inner experience” or Updike’s “sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human,” it is clear that through the “frozen moment” they present many slices of reality, in Ortega’s words, “innumerable facets and planes.” There is no such thing as one absolute space or reality that can give “a superior standpoint” because there is no absolute perspective. However, is reality a multitude of perspectives? Or above all, is it possible that we locate each perspective and see “the real” through it? Flattened Surface “In Football Season” is a short story about a “season.” One may easily sense the atmosphere of a particular season but find it difficult to describe it as a whole, especially when it comes to the description of the intangible. Olfactory sensation, in the short story, plays an important role in presenting us with the football season atmosphere. To locate the “fragrance girls acquire in autumn,” we may refer to the positional expressions and the geometrical perspective discussed above. But when it comes to the description of the fragrance itself, the use of viewpoints and perspectives appears to be more complicated: As you walk . . . by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city. (122) One component of the fragrance, the “elusive scent that wool . . . seems to yield,” seemingly gives the readers an elevated “bird’s-eye” viewpoint to look at the earth from the sky (Dunning 125). However, when the fragrance “is banked . . . on the dark slope of the stadium,” the readers’ eyes are brought back to the earth from the sky. If one viewpoint gives one surface of viewing, a window on to a world, two different viewpoints offer two viewing surfaces of the fragrance and render the illusion of inaccessible depth. If, through the angular viewpoint, one has a glimpse of the visible, the juxtaposition of two different viewpoints pre- <?page no="160"?> 160 Kangqin Li sents us the invisible of the football season such as fragrance which is intangible and formless. However, the invisible of the football season is not simply the fragrance. It is a synthesis of many unattainable components. In the second paragraph, when the narrator describes the atmosphere of a football game, similar but more complicated visual inaccessibility appears: In a hoarse olfactory shout, these odors ascended. A dense haze gathered along the ceiling of brightness at the upper limit of the arc lights, whose glare blotted out the stars and made the sky seem romantically void and intimately near, like the death that now and then stooped and plucked one of us out of a crumpled automobile. (123) While the “odors ascended,” we encounter words such as “the ceiling of brightness at the upper limit of the arc lights,” “the stars” and “the sky.” We are given a lowered viewpoint, what William Dunning calls “a worm’s eye view” in his study of pictorial art (Dunning 125). But the simile given in the second half of the sentence “. . . like the death that now and then stooped and plucked one of us out of a crumpled automobile” introduces an elevated viewpoint and makes the reader view these human beings and “crumpled automobiles” as if from high above. The juxtaposition of two contradictory viewpoints creates a stretching tension and challenges the illusion of depth in the story. One’s eyes stay on the visual surface of the description stretched by the two viewpoints and the atmosphere of the football game remains invisible. If, according to Ortega, “a perspective is perfected by the multiplication of its viewpoints,” one may wonder whether perspective in this passage presents itself through “lack of perspective,” as obviously enough lowered and elevated viewpoints exclude each other and deny us access to see (45). Indeed, Updike noticed the limitations of Realism as a representational form as well as the awkwardness of being a representational artist in postwar America. Upon acceptance of the National Book Award for The Centaur (1963), he delivered a speech on accuracy, that is, “lifelikeness”: Glancing upward, one is struck by the dispersion of recent constellations, by how far apart the prose masters of the century - say, Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Hemingway - are from one another. It may be partly an optical illusion, but modern fiction does seem, more than its antecedents, the work of eccentrics. . . . Our common store of assumptions has dwindled, and with it the stock of viable artistic conventions. (Updike, Picked-Up 34) <?page no="161"?> Hopperesque Updike 161 It seems modern writers no longer offer realistic writing, through which one sees “the real.” As a result, their work appears to be “the work of eccentrics.” We may think Updike is an eccentric too, considering the two exclusive viewpoints discovered above. However, as Updike himself maintains, this may be “an optical illusion” and modern Realists want to present “the real” as much as did the nineteenth-century Realists. Their work appears eccentric only because presenting “the real” becomes more and more difficult because of the fact that “our common store of assumptions” and “stock of viable artistic conventions” are at stake and are more diffuse. One may have an idea of something, the totality of what it is, but one does not have the capacity to present it in accordance with our, both his and his audience’s, common assumptions. The conflict between “the faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to present something” faced by modern Realists makes us see in their work, what Jean-François Lyotard describes as the ‘‘‘lack of reality’ of reality” (77). Modernity, according to Lyotard, “in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities” (77). Through “the invention of other realities,” modern artists make us see that there is something which can be conceived but can not be presented (77). Every presentation of an object meant to make visible the totality of that thing appears to be painfully inadequate (78). Updike’s “lack of perspective” is an example as such and it makes us see the “unpresentable” atmosphere of the football season (78). Again, Edward Hopper’s work may help us understand better Lyotard’s, and Updike’s, “unpresentable” and “lack of reality.” Apart from paintings with uncanny perspective such as New York Pavements (1924), American Village (1912) and the 1921 etching Night Shadows, many other Hopper paintings play with perspective in a more complicated way. Hopper’s Stairway has a very confusing perspective. Similar to what he does to New York Pavements, traditional rules of proportion are not followed and there is no vanishing point. 3 However, there is something more to say about this painting. Also, the foreground seems flattened. One would expect the steps to be steeper as the viewpoint seems to be floating and is higher than the viewpoint of someone who would stand on the stairs. The position of the wooden beam above the top of the painting is hard to locate too. If it is a beam above the doorframe, it seems too close and too imposing; if it is a beam above the stairway, the 3 A vanishing point in Realist painting is achieved by diagonals (orthogonals) which are parallel to the line of sight but perpendicular to the picture plane. Though parallel to the viewer’s line of sight, the diagonals at mid-height in the painting seem to meet as do the parallel railroad tracks in elementary drawing books (Dunning 40). <?page no="162"?> 162 Kangqin Li view outside the doorframe should have been blocked off a little more. Similar questions can be asked about the dark mass outside. Is it a storm? If so, why does one see the blue sky beyond? In the end, all these questions converge on the question of viewpoint. And the question remains unsolved as whenever we assume one viewpoint, we always find something that contradicts it. Like Updike’s juxtaposition of the “bird’s eye view” and “worm’s eye view,” which keeps the readers’ eyes on the visual surface of the description, the confusing perspective in Hopper’s Stairway makes the painting “visually impossible” and prevents us from looking into the depth of the painting (Tallack, “Edward Hopper” 118). In the end, one sees only the two-dimensional painting surface and wonders whether the representational objects, the walls, the door, the beam, the stairway and the landscape outside, are only painted spaces. Realism as a representational form always has to deal with the relationship between the form and the outside world it represents. Realist writing or painting, as Old Masters see it, should approximate “the real” as much as possible. Artists in modern times, who also present “the real,” approach the issue with more frankness. While Old Masters claim a piece of art that fails to bring us the real is a bad piece of artwork, such as Hopper’s Stairway and Updike’s visual description in “In Football Season,” modern artists and critics, on the contrary, “regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly” (Greenberg 6). This does not mean that modern artists renounce Old Masters or have abandoned the “representation of the recognizable objects” (6). Indeed, Updike and Hopper stay with the traditional medium, at least when viewed at first sight. Rather, they treat the readers/ viewers equally and make them aware of “seeing” and “space.” The readers/ viewers have long taken it for granted that a painting or a descriptive passage is a window onto a world and often forget that it is only a representational form. Modern artists treat form and content equally and make us see both. Updike and Hopper are such artists. As we read on, we discover in “In Football Season” more flattened surfaces in the visual description. After describing the moment when he bows his face into “that silent crescent of fragrance,” we find one passage which brings the narrator’s past and present together: The other day, in a town far from Olinger, I passed on the sidewalk two girls . . . and sensed, very faintly, that flavor from far off carried in their bent arms like a bouquet. And, continuing to walk, I felt myself sink into a chasm deeper than the one inverted above us on those Friday nights during football season. (125) <?page no="163"?> Hopperesque Updike 163 Perspective, again, as in the descriptions discussed earlier, is put into play and has in itself an intrinsic tension. It is impossible for us to picture the narrator sinking into a “chasm” deeper than “the one inverted above” him as the two chasms exclude each other and gravitate toward opposite directions. As a result, the readers/ viewers perhaps perceive nothing but two spaces similar to what is outside the doorframe (or to be more precise, the painted spaces framed by the doorframe's shape) in Hopper’s painting Stairway. Perspective in this description is no longer accepted as a given. It is an invented one, a new presentation, in order to present “the unpresentable,” that is, the “lack of reality” of reality (Lyotard 80). If we take a look at the quoted verses in the earlier text, the meaning of the juxtaposition of the two “chasms” becomes clearer. Oh, you can’t get to Heaven (Oh, you can’t get to Heaven) In Smokey’s Ford (In Smokey’s Ford) ’Cause the cylinders (‘Cause the cylinders) Have to be rebored. (Have to be rebored.) Oh, you can’t get to Heaven (Oh, you can’t get to Heaven) In a motel bed (In a motel bed) ’Cause the sky is blue (‘Cause the sky is blue) And the sheets are red. (And the sheets are red.) (123-124) The original verse is from a Christian song where in the place of “Smokey’s Ford” and “motel bed,” there is a “rocking chair.” The original song carries a moral warning: yielding to temptation prevents one from getting to Heaven. However, by changing “rocking chair” into “Smokey’s Ford” and “motel bed,” two possible temptations for adolescents, the narrator and his friends treat the song in a playful way. The verses, therefore, help us understand the juxtaposition of “a chasm” beneath “the one inverted above.” Knowing that in submitting to temptation one might be damned, just as the adult narrator feels himself “sink into a chasm,” the sixteen-year-old narrator feels he “is permitted” and the “chasm” is an inverted one above appearing “romantically void and intimately near” (125, 123). This interpretation is confirmed by the sentence after the quotation: <?page no="164"?> 164 Kangqin Li Few of us had a license to drive, and fewer still had visited a motel. We were at that innocent age, on the borderline of sixteen, when damnation seems a delicious promise. (124) While the phrase “damnation seems a delicious promise” offers the semantic paradox of the two “chasms,” “on the borderline” offers the visual. Again, due to the lack of a right perspective, readers stay at the visual surface of the passage and can only acknowledge how novel is Updike’s visual writing. In addition, the fact that the verses are placed as independent quotations and each line repeats itself in the parentheses reinforces the flattening effect. While a “frozen moment” gives a window on to a world, a slice of reality which is presentable, a “flattened surface” in Updike’s and Hopper’s work blocks the window and presents “the unpresentable,” which is also a slice of reality. Again, this reminds us of Ortega’s perspectivist view of reality that “reality . . . can only reach us by multiplying itself into a thousand faces or surfaces” (171). Ortega’s definition by no means contradicts that of Lyotard. On the contrary, they are complementary to each other. Lyotard’s “lack of reality” as part of reality is well suited to Ortega’s thousands of “faces or surfaces.” Updike and Hopper’s “frozen moment” and “flattened surface,” therefore, approximate us toward the totality of “the real.” Hopperesque effects, the “frozen moment” and “flattened surface,” in Updike’s short story offer us a deeper sense of the atmosphere of the football season. However, those who expect a narrative may still pose the question: what happens in the story? The question seems superficial, yet it is by no means easy to answer. Trying to answer it brings back the issue of the spatial form in short fiction. In the “frozen moment,” one senses the potential of “going on” and stops short on the “verge” of the narrative because the non-linear perspective gives visual as well as narrative edges. In the case of the “flattened surface,” one is not only denied access to linear perspective, but also non-linear perspective. Therefore, it is hard even to assume the potential of “going on” as there is no proper perspective to start with. Indeed, “In Football Season” does not read like a short story, because it is not a traditional story, which, regardless of the length, should above all include a narrative arc. Rather, Updike’s short story reads more like lyrical prose with anecdotes and descriptions. This makes us wonder whether there exists “a lack of form” in the short story form seen through the “flattened surface,” just as we see limited space and form through the “frozen moment.” <?page no="165"?> Hopperesque Updike 165 Conclusion The position of Updike and Hopper in representational art is not easy to define. On the one hand, they approach the medium traditionally, but their art is different to nineteenth-century Realism, which tries to present an unquestionable reality; on the other hand, unlike their modern contemporaries, Updike and Hopper do not treat the medium “with the swift abbreviated strokes” or simply substitute content with form (Mecklenburg 5). Rather, having a strong consciousness of form and space, Updike and Hopper choose a difficult path, adopting recognizable artistic techniques of Realism in each minute segment, while exploring domains beyond the traditional Realist framework. They search for new presentations and make us see both the presentable and the “unpresentable.” Hopper’s paintings can offer a better understanding of the visual structure in Updike’s short story “In Football Season.” Yet more importantly, Hopper helps us see the visual representation of form and space in short fiction and the special relationship between the short story form and visual art. <?page no="166"?> 166 Kangqin Li References Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Burchard, Rachel C. John Updike: Yea Sayings. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. New York: Twayne, 1972. Dunning, William V. Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Duvall, John N. “Conclusion: U(pdike) & P(ostmodernism).” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 162-177. Edgerton, Samuel Y. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Goodrich, Lloyd. Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. London: Harper and Row, 1982. . “Review of the Whitney Annual.” The Collected Essays and Criticism. 2 vols. Ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 117-118. Greiner, Donald J. The Other John Updike: Poems/ Short Stories/ Prose/ Play. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: The Art and The Artist. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980. . Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Regis Durand. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979. Macnaughton, William R., ed. Critical Essays on John Updike. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Mecklenburg, Virginia M. Edward Hopper: The Watercolours. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Morris, Pam. Realism. London: Routledge, 2003. Ortega y Gasset, Jose. Meditations on Quixote. Trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. <?page no="167"?> Hopperesque Updike 167 Plath, James. “Verbal Vermeer: Updike’s Middle-Class Portraiture.” Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Ed. Lawrence R. Broer. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2000. 207-231. “Realism.” Def. 3a. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edition. 1989. Renner, Rolf G. Edward Hopper: 1882-1967, Transformation of the Real. Trans. Michael Hulse. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1990. Tallack, Douglas. “Edward Hopper, Modernist: The Spaces of Everyday Painting.” American Images. Copenhagen: United States Information Service, 1995. 107-127. . The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1993. Thorburn, David, and Howard Eiland, eds. John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1979. Updike, John. “Accuracy.” Picked-Up Pieces. New York: Knopf, 1975. 33- 34. . “Hopper’s Polluted Silence.” Still Looking: Essays on American Art. New York: Penguin, 2005. 179-193. . “Early Sunday Morning.” Still Looking: Essays on American Art. New York: Penguin, 2005.195-199. . The Early Stories 1953-1975. New York: Knopf, 2003. . The Centaur. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. . Rabbit Run. 1978; rpt, New York: Ballantine, 1980. . Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf, 1989. Versluys, Kristiaan. “ ‘Nakedness’ or Realism in Updike’s Early Short Stories.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 29-42. <?page no="169"?> The Cinema and Modernist Innovation: Serial Representation and Cinematic Immediacy Effects in Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits Heike Schaefer “Montage structure,” “camera eye perspective”: it is common critical usage to describe the formal innovations of modernist literature in cinematic terms. And, indeed, the cinema provided numerous modernist writers with a model for their break with the conventions of realism. This essay seeks to expand the critical understanding of how early film affected literary practice - and thus also to broaden the scope of what may count as cinematic writing - by addressing an aspect that has received little attention to date: namely, the impact that the immediacy effects of early cinema had on modernist writing. My analysis focuses on an author who began writing during film’s early years and who was particularly invested in modernist experimentation: Gertrude Stein. In her literary portraits of the 1910s, Stein uses a cinematic form of serial variation to develop a performative non-mimetic mode of writing that is able to convey both the presentness and processuality of experience, identity, and signification. Stein’s concern with temporal, perceptual, and representational immediacy, her use of seriality as a compositional method to create the impression of presence and movement, and her recognition that autoreferentiality can be employed to heighten immediacy effects establish a correlation between her portraits and early film. The Critical and Aesthetic Relevance of Immediacy Effects If we want to gauge the influence that early cinema exerted on modernist literature, the study of immediacy effects is of central importance. There are two major reasons for this. First, appeals to immediacy consti- The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 169-183. <?page no="170"?> 170 Heike Schaefer tute a driving force in media history because new media tend to establish themselves by claiming that they possess greater immediacy than earlier media. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue in their study of digital culture, Remediation, the development of new media may best be understood as a reworking of older media with the aim of achieving a higher degree of immediacy. A new medium typically seeks to gain cultural acceptance by promising an enhanced access to “the real or authentic” (65). In the process, it redefines what counts as real in relation to its particular possibilities of representation (65). The classic example of this dynamic are the rival claims to increased verisimilitude that different visual media have made (60). When photography first appeared on the scene, many people thought, for instance, that a photographed horse seemed more lifelike than a painted horse because of the precision and detail of the photographic image. But when film introduced the possibility of representing moving figures in life-sized images, a filmed horse began to seem more real than a still photograph of it. As a central factor in intermedial competition, appeals to immediacy are a prime indicator of how a new medium alters perceptual habits and aesthetic expectations and thus transforms the context in which all media operate. Hence, studying how media texts produce and dissolve immediacy effects enriches our understanding of how modern media culture, including literary practice, changes. Let me briefly clarify my concept of immediacy, then. I define immediacy as an actual or an imagined relation of direct contact between distinct entities. Immediacy means that two or more elements are joined without any intervening or connecting element that bridges the distance (spatial, temporal, ontological, conceptual etc.) between them; or that they are experienced as if there was nothing between them. The OED notes that the word “immediacy” stems from the Latin immediatus and consists of the components im- “not” and mediatus, the past participle stem of mediare, which translates as “to be in the middle,” “to intercede,” or “to act as an intermediary.” With regard to literature and other media this means that immediacy effects are created so that elements which are usually perceived as separate can be experienced as directly connected - a feeling and its verbal expression, a photograph and its subject, a ballgame on TV and the audience at home, for instance. The desire for immediacy signals a wish to reduce the difference or distance between discrete objects, dimensions of reality, or levels of representation. While immediacy seems to presuppose the absence of intervening elements or acts of mediation, our experience of something as immediate frequently depends not on the complete absence of intermediate factors but merely on their conceptual or perceptual backgrounding (Bolter and Grusin 11). Effects of immediacy require that we privilege <?page no="171"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 171 the connection between originally separate elements over the mediation that allows this connection and that determines the shape of this contact. An aesthetic experience of immediacy depends on the capacity of the audience to attenuate its awareness of specific acts of mediation or of the very question of mediality (see Bolter and Grusin 70). When we read a realist novel, for instance, we may become immersed in the fictional world of the narrative and gain a sense of immediacy if we allow our attention to be deflected from the material make-up of the book, the formal composition of the text, or our active collaboration in constituting its meaning. The bracketing of mediation which immediacy effects require can occur intentionally, such as when the lights in a movie theater are dimmed at the beginning of a film screening, or it can happen as the result of processes of habituation. In the latter case, the effect of immediacy depends on the naturalization of the audience’s viewing or reading habits. We become so accustomed to certain representational conventions and our ability to decode them that they disappear from our conscious awareness. We tend to watch movies, for instance, without paying attention to the interpretive procedures that allow us to assemble the individual shots of the film into a coherent narrative. We disregard internal and external processes of mediation as we become caught up in the action. Aesthetic experiences of immediacy, then, hinge on the cultural training of our perceptual, cognitive, and psychological routines (see Bolter and Grusin 73). Accordingly, immediacy is best conceived as a culturally and historically situated effect. The Modernist Pursuit of Immediacy While the study of immediacy effects is a productive lever for intermedial studies in general, it also speaks to the particular concerns of modernist literature. And this is the second reason why a consideration of immediacy effects is key here. If we think of urbanization, mass production, labor movements, changing gender and race politics, the waves of immigration, World War One, or the theories of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, and Heisenberg as some of the central forces forging the development of modernist culture (Bradbury and McFarlane 27; Bell 9-12), then it is easy to see why the search for new forms of immediacy was central to the modernist project. In a world experienced as fluxional and unstable, in which social relations were subject to radical change, and facts and values were considered relative and provisional, the first-hand experience of reality provided a constantly accessible and subjectively reliable source of meaning and identity. In lieu of inherited, <?page no="172"?> 172 Heike Schaefer metaphysically secured, or at least non-subjective systems of order and belief, the authenticity of experiential knowledge was prized (Singal 14- 15). As the modernists turned away from the restrictions of Victorian culture, they concentrated on inventing new representational immediacy effects that could capture the unpredictable flux of experience and thus reinvest reality with (now dynamic forms of) order and meaning. The effort to create new forms of literary immediacy impelled numerous modernist innovations and provides a link between some of the conflicting poetics that fall within the variegated field of modernist literature. To cite a few examples: stream-of-consciousness technique tries to tap directly into the workings of the conscious mind. It manipulates literary and linguistic conventions to create the illusion that the text provides an unmediated record of thoughts, sensations, and feelings as they swirl through the mind, without the imposition of linguistic and logical order by a narrator. The automatic writing of Dada, by contrast, seeks to evade all interventions of consciousness and aims to access the subconscious mind directly. Yet another form of modernist poetics, imagism, tries to bypass both conscious thinking and subjective feeling by centering on objects - “no ideas but in things” (Williams, “A Sort of Song” 55). It tries to tie cognition directly to the object world by collapsing the difference between observer and observed as well as between observation and articulation. The represented thing is to contain and express the ideas connected with its apperception. The mediation of these ideas through processes of perception and signification is backgrounded. The appropriation of cinematic technique was yet another path modernist writers took in search of novel forms of immediacy that did not hinge on the transparency effects of realism. To bear out this claim, this essay will first examine which new immediacy effects were generated by early film. With this media historical framework in place, I will then analyze the significance cinematic immediacy held for Stein’s attempt to create a non-mimetic mode of writing that could represent the present flux of experience. The Immediacy Effects of Early Film How did early film redefine immediacy? And how important were immediacy effects for the cultural impact of film? Although the cinema emerged out of diverse earlier technologies, such as (chrono-)photography and the stereopticon, its makers sought to establish the new medium among competing forms of entertainment by presenting it as a technological marvel that offered a more immediate and hence a more exciting mode of representation than its precursors. It belongs to the <?page no="173"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 173 founding myths of the cinema that its depiction of motion constituted such a radical break with earlier forms of spectacle that viewers were mesmerized or terrified to the point of mistaking the moving images for reality (Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment” 114). The stories about audiences panicking at the first film shows are an established part of cinema lore. Although no historical evidence exists that people actually did more than anxiously squirm in their seats (Musser 118), the fact that they were imagined to run in fear from the screening of such films as the Lumières’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) is highly significant for our consideration of the relations between mediation and immediacy in early cinematic practice and discourse. What those accounts suggest is that an experience of “living moving pictures,” as they were advertised (Musser 98), is preferable to the spectacle of merely lifelike movement - that it is more entertaining for spectators to regard the reality on screen as continuous with the world they inhabit and to believe that a filmed train therefore may burst out of the screen and slam into the audience than to be aware that one is watching a filmed recording of a train that already has pulled into a station elsewhere and some time ago. Clearly, a desire for experiences of immediacy is at work here. It is invoked to promote the appeal of the new medium. Historians of silent film have shown that early film shared with the venues of popular entertainment at which it was screened a common aesthetics: an interest in visual thrills and a self-consciously theatrical style of presentation, which undercut the mimetic realism of the cinematographic image (Musser 3). The set design was often deliberately stylized and syncretic. Real and painted props were combined, for instance (Musser 4). Moreover, the films frequently acknowledged their status as spectacle by allowing characters to look directly at the camera or even to gesture towards the audience (Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions” 57). This presentational style, along with the popularity of explicitly self-reflexive films, which portrayed the response of fictional characters to the movies, such as Edison’s 1902 remake Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Musser 321-22), indicates that early film was intent on reminding viewers that they were watching a show. Unlike the continuity system that Hollywood later developed to obliterate the spectator’s awareness of the filmic medium, the presentational aesthetics of early film invited the viewers both to engage with and to ignore the mediated nature of the moving images and their viewing experience. The oscillation between thrilled immersion and self-reflective distance was expected to enhance rather than reduce the audience’s enjoyment of the cinematic spectacle. What was the advantage of this “particularly complicated” form of entertainment (Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment” 121)? Why did <?page no="174"?> 174 Heike Schaefer early film offer experiences of immediacy in the context of an overt confrontation with the dynamics of display and reception? It is my contention that the contradictory pull of early film towards creating both media awareness and immediacy effects encapsulates the cultural function of early cinema as both a manifestation of and a refuge from the challenges of modern culture. To telescope a long critical debate: from its beginnings, film has been associated with modernization processes and perceived as the medium that could best capture the accelerated pace, compressed space, and fragmentation of modern urban life because it is able to record and visually organize the sensory abundance and confusing chaos of a fast-moving world. 1 Early film served a twofold cultural function: on the one hand, it trained spectators in the new forms of attention necessitated by shifts in modern living conditions that such factors as industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of consumer mass culture had brought about. On the other hand, it offered entertaining moments of respite from these very realities. By combining a presentational style that overtly displayed mediatory processes with representational strategies that rendered the medium transparent, the early cinema reminded the spectators that their perception of the world (both onand off-screen) was inflected by larger forces, such as technology and cultural codes, while the thrill of its immediacy effects also offered them an entertaining escape route from such self-reflexive considerations. What impact did this autoreferential recasting of immediacy effects in early film have then on literary culture? “Making a Cinema of It”: The Immediacy Effects of Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits When Stein toured the United States in 1934 to promote her work, she recommended her experimental literary portraits of the 1910s to her audience by claiming: “I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing” (“Portraits and Repetition” 177). Stein used film as a model to explain to her baffled readers her strategy of using serial variation to create an effect of immediate presence, a method she called “insisting” (“Portraits and Repetition” 166-67). Since the audience was familiar with movies but probably had 1 While early critics linked the emergence of film culture to the modernization processes underway in early twentieth-century Western societies, recent film scholars have begun to debate the critical rewards and pitfalls of this identification (Bordwell 141-46; Singer 101-30). <?page no="175"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 175 not read Stein’s avant-garde work, which had gained a reputation of being mostly unreadable (see Curnett), Stein trusted that the intermedial comparison offered her listeners a familiar framework that would help them relate to her non-mimetic texts outside the constraints of literary tradition. Stein wanted to recreate in her texts the immediacy with which we experience the present moment. To create this effect of temporal presence, Stein invented a serial mode of representation that continually alerts the reader to the text’s temporal unfolding. We can see this at work in her portraits of Matisse and Picasso, which were published together in an issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work in 1912. 2 The portraits are composed as a sequence of successive statements that follow one another as moments do. The textual movement from sentence to sentence enacts the flux of the portrayed life as it continually asserts and transforms itself, while it also tracks the portraitist’s ongoing observation of her subject. In “Picasso,” Stein presents the painter, for instance, this way: This one was one who was working. This one was one being one having something being coming out of him. This one was one going on having something come out of him. This one was one going on working. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. (283) 2 Although Stein had begun writing portraits as early as 1908 and completed “Matisse” and “Picasso” in 1909, the companion pieces were her first portraits to be published. The literary portrait was a format well-suited for Stein’s attempt to represent the “present immediacy” of experience (Stein, “How Writing is Written” 444) because the genre addressed questions of interiority and intersubjective perception in a non-narrative and non-chronological manner. “Literary portraits can be defined as short and condensed prose texts,” Ulla Haselstein explains, “which do not employ narration and ignore chronological time in their identification of psychological traits held to be essential for the represented subject in question” (724). A portrait typically seeks to characterize a person by describing the features and dispositions that seem representative, that is, unique and consistent, about him or her. It condenses the life of its subject, constructing a unified persona that is presented as the summation of the subject’s lived experience. This conceptualization of identity agreed well with Stein’s idea that our identity is fully expressed in our immediate experience of the present moment. Just as portraits distil the lives of their subjects, so our experience of the present moment encapsulates who we are. The way we engage with our present situation carries within it our past experiences and indicates the direction in which we are moving. Hence, for Stein, the best way to represent the traits that define a person is to concentrate on how that person lives through the present moment. For my thinking about Stein’s early portraiture Haselstein’s analysis has been particularly influential. The most extensive study of Stein’s portraits is Wendy Steiner’s Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance. Steiner lists 132 portraits that Stein wrote between 1908 and 1946 (209-15). <?page no="176"?> 176 Heike Schaefer The paragraph describes Picasso, “this one,” as he is in the present moment. The first sentence defines Picasso in terms of the kind of person he exemplifies. Both the specific individual and the type are characterized by their actions: “This one was one who was working.” The use of the progressive form of the verb, “working,” serves to prolong the moment. The present participle lets Picasso’s activity appear ongoing rather than singular or instantaneous. It introduces duration. This representational strategy is semantically motivated since the cited behavior is supposed to be representative of Picasso, a trait that remains consistent over time - he is the kind of person who is working. The next sentence repeats the gesture but stretches the moment even further: The beginning of the first sentence, “This one was one,” is expanded into “This one was one being one.” The attribute that now defines Picasso is his ongoing existence, if we emphasize “being,” or his individuality or integrated character, if we stress “one.” Again, Picasso is characterized not in terms of an inert quality but in terms of an activity that takes shape now and that extends beyond the current moment—the experience of “being one” and “having something.” The object of this experience, just like its subject, is cast as an active entity. It is not a static thing but “something being.” Its action likewise has duration - it is “coming out of him.” The second sentence thus specifies the first sentence. Picasso’s work is creative and shares his vitality or even his ontological rank. It is as he is - “being one having something being.” The unusual syntax suggests that Picasso’s creative work (his art, if we rely on our extratextual knowledge) is produced by means of expressive openness rather than directed will power. It is not made but is “something being coming out of him.” The semantic link between the first two sentences reinforces the effect generated by the use of the progressive tense: the present moment is shown to continue into the next moment. This spreading of the present into the future - which, of course, is not experienced as future but as yet another present that replaces what has gone before - is addressed on the level of content in the third and fourth sentences: Picasso is said to be consistent. He is “going on having” and “going on working.” He continues to create. He persists. Picasso is thus shown to be dedicated to the creative process. There is no doubt that he will continue to create art in the future. He is “one going on.” The next two sentences complete the movement and circle back to the paragraph’s beginning: Picasso enjoys public renown. He is working. While the paragraph presents Picasso’s creative productivity as his central characteristic, the text’s composition strives to portray not merely who Picasso is but how Picasso is continually being who he is. The extension of the moment into a “continuous present” (Stein, <?page no="177"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 177 “Composition as Explanation” 524-25) is effected through the consistent use of present participles. It is also aided by the semantic development of the passage. Because each sentence specifies or adds to the preceding ones we get a sense of accumulating meaning rather than an effect of mere reiteration. The sentences and the moments they address happen consecutively (although there is no narrative progression). They are going on just as the portrayed subject is (and the consecutive nature of language underscores this impression of flow). In which sense can Stein’s technique of serial variation or “insistence” be considered “cinematic”? What does the intermedial comparison to the cinema add to our understanding of Stein’s experiments with literary form? 3 At first thought, the film analogy seems misleading, since Stein’s serial sentence permutations call up a form of photography that precedes the invention of film - the chronophotography or time photography developed by the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s (see Murphet 76). Inspired by the motion study photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, Marey developed a camera which allowed for rapid exposures and enabled him to record the movement of an object or person on one photographic plate (Marien 212). The result were photographs, such as “Demeney Walking” (1883), which represent figures in motion in the form of composite images that display the moving body in a series of consecutive but only slightly different poses (Braun 81). In their emphasis on the successive phases of the body’s movement, Marey’s composite images create an effect of seriality similar to that produced by Stein’s sentence variations. In Marey’s portrait, Demeney walks and walks and walks just as in Stein’s portrait, where Picasso is doing his work now and now and now. Yet Marey refined his innovation in just the opposite direction that Stein was pursuing. He tried to minimize the overlap between the different phases of movement and to separate each moment from the next (Braun 268, Marien 212). For this purpose, he invented another camera in which the film would move with each exposure (Marien 212). This made it possible to isolate the different positions that the moving body passed through. In Marey’s “improved” chronophotographs, such as “Schenkel, Long Jump” (1886), “Soldiers Walking with Packs” (1891), or “Sprinter” (1890- 3 The “cinematic” quality of Stein’s writing has been examined by Susan McCabe (56- 92) and Julian Murphet (67-81). McCabe focuses on questions of embodiment and Stein’s “Mrs. Emerson,” relating the text to the aesthetics of Man Ray’s film Emak Bakia and the comedies of Charlie Chaplin. Murphet contrasts the poetics of The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. He discusses Stein’s style in the context of the capitalist rationalization and industrial standardization of work routines. <?page no="178"?> 178 Heike Schaefer 1900), the blurring effect is minimized (Braun 108, 111). Little overlap between the consecutive positions of the body occurs. Marey’s interest in segmenting a continuous movement into clearly differentiated stages marks a major difference to Stein’s approach, because her insistent style is geared to portray both the perceptual now of the moment and the processual flow of experience. In “Picasso,” time continues to move while the subject of the portrait remains present and consistent - an effect that is emphasized through the constant anaphoric repetition of the phrase “this one was one.” Each sentence attends to a present moment and allows this moment - through the use of present participles, word repetitions, and semantic interrelations - to extend into a following moment. In this way, the portrait conveys both the present and the processual unfolding of Picasso’s life. Stein described her representational strategy this way: You will see that when I kept saying something was something or somebody was somebody, I changed it just a little bit until I got a whole portrait. I conceived the idea of building this thing up. . . . What I was after was this immediacy. A single photograph doesn’t give it. (“How Writing is Written” 448) In her portraits, Stein strove to give a unified expression of her subjects. She aimed to create “a whole portrait.” Yet unlike “a single photograph” or a chronophotographic series, which may present us with the realistic likeness of someone at one or several fixed moments in time, the serial composition of Stein’s early portraits is in orientation temporal and dynamic rather than visual and static. Instead of freezing the flux of time, the texts refuse to rest on any impression. As their sentence permutations “build up,” the portraits accompany the flow of experience rather than fix its meaning. Because of her dual focus on presence and process, Stein contrasted her compositional method with photography and likened it to a time-based medium that could represent continuous movement film. In her early portraiture, Stein asserted, she was “making a cinema of it” (“How Writing is Written” 448). Stein’s film analogy highlights the very feature of cinema that distinguishes it from earlier forms of visual representation, such as chronophotography, and that not only baffled her contemporaries but that neurophysiologically still cannot be fully explained: the medium’s ability to create the illusion of continuous motion. For this is the fundamental paradox of cinematic representation: we perceive a projected sequence of discontinuous static pictures as one continuous moving image (Anderson and Anderson 3). With the insistent style of her early por- <?page no="179"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 179 traits, Stein aimed to create the same effect. As she explained her approach: In a cinema picture no two pictures are exactly alike each one is just that much different from the one before, and so in those early portraits there was . . . no repetition. Each time that I said the somebody whose portrait I was writing was something that something was just that much different from what I had just said that somebody was and little by little in this way a whole portrait came into being, a portrait that was not description and that was made by each time, and I did a great many times, say it, that somebody was something, each time there was a difference just a difference enough so that it could go on and be a present something. (“Portraits and Repetition” 177) Stein’s insistent style is cinematic in the sense that she uses serial variation to create the impression of a continuous movement that possesses temporal immediacy for the beholder. Her words and sentences can be said to function like the individual frames imprinted on a filmstrip insofar as they form sequences of similar, yet constantly changing units that build up into a successive movement through a present that is continuously dissolving and reasserting itself. The serial variation of the text’s syntactic elements produces an effect of both processual motion and temporal presence. Like film frames, the sentences of Stein’s text possess similarity and “difference enough so that it could go on and be a present something” (“Portraits and Repetitions” 177). Texts like “Picasso” advance through a series of repetitions and modifications that keeps the portrait constantly focused on the now while it integrates the successive moments into one continuous movement. In this way, it creates the impression of an ever-expanding moment, of a “continuous present,” that is supposed to carry over into our reading experience: we are to respond to the text’s insistent sentence sequences as we would to the ongoing presentness of projected film images. We are to assume that the statement we are currently reading records the portraitist’s observation of a moment as it is occurring, just as we feel that the filmed scene unfolding on screen happens as we are watching. This is a conceit, of course. Yet the sense of temporal immediacy that Stein’s performative style generates is indeed similar to that which film possesses as a timebased art. Stein’s strategy of highlighting the materiality of her medium to produce effects of immediate presence also agrees well with the presentational aesthetics of early film. As explained earlier, the cinema of attractions prompted its viewers through the deliberate staging of acts of display and reception to remain conscious of the medium. The main “at- <?page no="180"?> 180 Heike Schaefer traction” of Stein’s portraits, to stay with the cinema analogy, is the movement of the text’s word and sentence patterns and the selfreflexive engagement with mediatory processes that this compositional principle inspires in the reader. Like the presentational style of early cinema, Stein’s insistent style is geared to jolt the audience into an intensified awareness of mediality to present them with an experience of temporal and perceptual immediacy. To conclude, the comparison of Stein’s avant-garde texts with the cinema opens up an intermedial perspective that brings into focus the features that define her work as innovative and modernist: Stein dispensed with mimesis and used autoreferential seriality as a means to develop a performative mode of writing that is able to convey both the presentness and the processuality of experience and knowledge. Her early portraits link considerations of temporality (of such polarities as moment and process) to explorations of subject formation (to such polarities as consistency and change) while they test the capacity of the printed word to express states of awareness as well as the development of knowledge and identity over time. Situating Stein’s experimental work in the same media landscape as early cinema qualifies the still common perception of modernism as a form of “high” cultural practice that is divorced from the vicissitudes of everyday life and inherently hostile to popular culture. Stein deliberately placed her work in the context of modern mass culture. She asserted that her time “was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing” (“Portraits and Repetition” 177). Linking an aesthetic and an industrial use of seriality in this comment, Stein suggests that the modernization of American culture made a radical transformation of literary practice necessary if literature was to remain relevant to the lived experience of its authors and readers. If we read Stein’s insistent style as a translation of two central principles of mechanical production - seriality and repetition - into a method of literary composition, as Julian Murphet suggests (72), it is noteworthy that the objective of her early portraits is the qualified affirmation rather than negation of individuality and creative agency. The obsessive repetition of the word “one” in the early portraits, for instance, suggests that singularity continues to represent a desirable quality. In her insistent texts, Stein confronts serial repetition - the procedure that many of her contemporaries identified with the erasure of uniqueness (Steiner, “Introduction” xiv) - and turns it into a means to reconceptualize identity and representation in processual and intersubjective terms. Stein’s serial compositions thus participate in early twentieth-century debates about <?page no="181"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 181 the changing status of the individual and the arts in a society increasingly shaped by technological mass production and its homogenizing effects. By “making a cinema” of portraiture, Stein expanded the repertoire of literary technique. Her work demonstrates that cinematic references and appropriations in modernist literature often serve to promote or propel formal experimentation - and that these film-inflected innovations are part of the modernist effort to create new forms of representational immediacy that can capture distinctly modern forms of experience. Stein’s serial compositions render palpable a dimension of reality that traditional Western thought and mimetic representation cannot grasp - the flux of a continually emerging and dissolving present moment of time, experience, and signification. By employing a cinematic form of serial variation that locates the text’s meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than its mimetic capacities, Stein keeps the readers focused on the workings of language and the temporal unfolding of the text and thus manages to turn an awareness of mediatory processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. <?page no="182"?> 182 Heike Schaefer References Anderson, Joseph, and Barbara Anderson. “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited.” Journal of Film and Video 45.1 (Spring 1993): 3-12. Bell, Michael. “The Metaphysics of Modernism.” Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 9-32. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2000. Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. “The Name and Nature of Modernism.” Modernism, 1890-1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. 19-55. Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Curnutt, Kirk, ed. The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Edison Motion Picture and Sound Recordings. Library of Congress Archive. http: / / memory.loc.gov/ ammem/ edhtml/ ujmps.html. 13 September 2009. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 114-33. . “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: BFI, 1990. 56-62. Haselstein, Ulla. “Gertrude Stein’s Portraits of Matisse and Picasso.” New Literary History 34 (2004): 723-43. Huyssen, Andreas. After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Lumière, Auguste, and Louis Lumière, dir. The Lumiere Brothers’ First Films. DVD. Kino Video, 2003. Marey, Etienne-Jules. “Demeney Walking.” “Schenkel, Long Jump.” Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médicine et d’Odontologie of the Université Paris Descartes. “La Science du Movement et l’Image du Temps: 473 Plaques Photographiques d’Etienne-Jules Marey.” Plaques 31-33, 132. http: / / www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/ marey/ debut2.htm. 24 January 2011. <?page no="183"?> Gertrude Stein’s Early Portraits 183 . “Untitled” [Sprinter]. Museum of Modern Art. “The Collection.” 24 January 2011. http: / / www.moma.org/ collection/ object.php? object_id=50087. Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. London: Laurence King, 2002. McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Murphet, Julian. “Gertrude Stein’s Machinery of Perception.” Literature and Visual Technologies. Ed. Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 67-81. Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 1 September 2009. http: / / dictionary.oed.com. Paech, Joachim. Literatur und Film. Weimar: Metzler, 1997. Schaefer, Heike. “Immediacy and Mediation: The Response of U.S. American Literature to the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television, 1839-1993.” Habilitation thesis. University of Mannheim, 2009. Singal, Daniel. “Towards a Definition of American Modernism.” Modernist Culture in America. Special Issue of American Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1987): 7-26. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” Writings 1903-1932. Ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998. 520-29. . “How Writing is Written.” The Gertrude Stein Reader. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. 438-49. . “Picasso.” Writings 1903-1932. Ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998. 282-84. . “Portraits and Repetition.” Lectures in America. Boston: Beacon, 1985. 165-206. Steiner, Wendy. Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. . Introduction. Lectures in America. By Gertrude Stein. Boston: Beacon, 1985. ix-xxvii. Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. 1939-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. Vol. 2. New York: New Directions, 1991. <?page no="185"?> Picturing the Depression: Ambivalent Politics of Representation in FSA Photography Michael Röösli The genre of photojournalism is situated at a crucial intersection of the Modernist landscape. It took not only technical innovations to capture and distribute photographic images quickly and cheaply among a growing readership of newspapers and magazines: photography as a new medium of communication also required an entirely new paradigm of reading. One of the most rewarding places to look at the development of this conventional apparatus is the Farm Security Administration or FSA, which created an extensive archive of journalistic pictures, and at the same time produced some of the most famous American photographers of the Depression period. The work of Walker Evans - especially the portfolio for his and James Agee s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) - is of particular interest here, because it adopts the strategy of systematically disrupting the generic rules that encompass the fieldwork of FSA photographers. Evans thereby presents the implicit traits of the genre to the viewer s awareness, and at the same time renegotiates several of its problematic implications. In short, his work functions as an indicator of both a new paradigm of reading photographic texts and the need to uproot the same paradigm as a prerequisite to achieve political change. During the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration ( FSA ) produced a considerable corpus of photographic documentary material from all over the United States. This project is situated in a period when new reproduction techniques enabled the mass circulation of photographs, and when these documents needed to acquire a conventional apparatus in order to become readable, and so to serve the purpose of The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 185-196. <?page no="186"?> 186 Michael Röösli communication. Various FSA photographers forged new reading conventions through their work, and thereby invested the medium not only with the power to convey specific information, but also with political leverage. The resulting images were both appealing and accessible to a large and heterogeneous readership. This new mode of conveying meaning and information to readers across the country was attacked by Walker Evans, himself a photographer for the FSA . Indeed, Evans work systematically confronts, negates and short-circuits the hidden assumptions emerging from FSA documentary photography (produced by people like Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, for instance). His work thus renders the emerging visual paradigm graspable by confronting it with a counter-discourse. In the following essay, particular attention will be paid to Evans photo portfolio for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which he researched together with the writer, journalist and film critic James Agee in 1936 and published five years later. The juxtaposition of a new visual practice with Evans immediate attack on it helps to outline the stakes, power and extent of paradigmatic changes in the visual culture of the 1930s, many of which have remained operative to the present day. At the outset, the field of this investigation has to be briefly outlined. The setting is the 1930s, in a United States that was in the throes of the Great Depression. Roosevelt s “New Deal” united various programmes to alleviate unemployment, reform the financial system, and re-boost the economy. One of these programmes was the FSA , founded in 1935, and initially called the “Resettlement Administration.” Although the FSA was dedicated to more direct modes of intervention, photography was a major component of the institution, and its information division archived and provided photographic and textual material for the press in an attempt to draw public attention to the difficult predicament of various segments of society. In short, FSA photography is to be seen as a crucial political tool. It isolates specific problems, renders them accessible and analysable, and thus establishes a basis for action. The means to deploy this power was the emerging genre of photojournalism. For technical reasons, photographic images could not be reproduced on a large scale before the 1930s. Though halftone reproductions were a possible solution, most newspapers and magazines continued to use the cheaper medium of engravings up to the late 1920s. This is when photography caught up with the needs of news transmission, through smaller and portable cameras (like the 35 mm Leica in 1925), and the technique of the wirephoto. These innovations have marked the Great Depression as what is often called the “Golden Age” of photojournalism. <?page no="187"?> Picturing the Depression 187 The entry of photography into the mass media necessitated a new conventional apparatus for reading journalistic pictures. A large interpretive community, to borrow the term Stanley Fish coined in “Interpreting the Variorum” (1973-1975), has to agree on a number of implicit conventions for reading, including the ontological relation between the photographic image and the event depicted. Once established and authorised by consensus, these conventions can be harnessed to the task of communication. Ideally, this process is symmetrical: the exchanged information - coded by the journalist and decoded by the reader of a newspaper - should be as unambiguous as possible. Arthur Rothstein s photograph Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma (1936) is an example of such eloquent photography. It shows a father and his two sons fighting against the power of the wind as they struggle to make their way across bare and dried-up ground toward a run-down cabin. With an affective impact that statistics in a written report could hardly provoke, this picture outlines a number of links between meteorological conditions, the infertile ground of the Dust Bowl, the resulting economic devastation and precarious living conditions. All this is enhanced by the image of the family, and the absence of a female figure further prompts the viewer to extend their reading to a metaphorical level, where the missing mother evokes the lack of fertile ground. In order to grant the coherence of such a reading paradigm, and therefore the readability of documentary photographs, the conventions at the service of a larger community have to be carefully maintained and circulated. Roy Stryker (the head of the documentary project of the FSA ) is famous for the sociological briefings to which he subjected his photographers before specific assignments. He is also frequently discussed for his so-called “shooting scripts”, in which he offered very pragmatic guidelines to his collaborators. Consider the following extract from a letter addressed by Stryker to Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein on 19 February 1942. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Stryker was asking for: [p]ictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens. . . . More contented-looking old couples - woman sewing, man reading (sic). (Tagg, “The Currency of the Photograph” 170) This extract exemplifies the ideological issues that are at stake in such shooting scripts. Furthermore, the consensus aimed at by Stryker appears to be anchored in stereotypical roles for specific categories of <?page no="188"?> 188 Michael Röösli people, such as men, women or the elderly. Such clichés figure here as ready-made codes that stabilise an emerging fundus of reading conventions by anchoring them in familiar ground. Stryker s sociological briefings and shooting scripts may not have been strongly prescriptive, but they clearly outlined what was deemed appropriate information for certain kinds of issues, and how they could be adequately represented. These briefings inevitably had an impact on the scenes that photographers encountered in the field. Take Dorothea Lange s famous photograph Migrant Mother (1936), for instance. This image has become a seminal icon of the Great Depression, which indicates that it involves or isolates conventions central to the exegesis of this historical period. In an article entitled “The Assignment I ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother” for Popular Photography, Lange remembers her encounter with Florence Thompson, the woman in the photograph, as follows: “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” and she continues: “I did not ask her name or her history” (qtd. in Curtis 42-3). Indeed, the prior briefings seem to structure a way of paying attention to certain kinds of potential photographic subjects, rather than to encourage an exploration of an event or situation itself. This preparation of the collaborators of the FSA information division shaped as well as maintained a conventional apparatus for reading visual and composite texts. However, the system thus enforced was a democratic one, which by definition needs to be open to critique, unlike the fascist and Soviet models of the same period. This critical potential is precisely what Let Us Now Praise Famous Men set out to realise. This work of photojournalism by James Agee and Walker Evans outlines the problems and precarious living conditions of three tenant cotton farmer families from Alabama, with whom the two journalists stayed for over three weeks during the summer of 1936. Initially, their work was intended for an article commissioned by Fortune magazine for their documentary series “Life and Circumstances” (Stott 261). It was Agee who chose Evans for the assignment that would be published only five years later and in the form of an autonomous book. As William Stott points out, “The FSA loaned Evans to Time Inc. on condition that the work he did became government property” (261). In other words, while travelling to Alabama on a Fortune assignment, Evans was still officiating as an FSA photographer. The present investigation, in this essay, is limited to Evans pictures in the original publication of the book in 1941, since the photographs he added in the editions of 1960 and later extend their readings in various directions. The discussion that follows will show that Evans portfolio outlines a critique of the rules the FSA loosely prescribed for photojournalistic practice, and at the same time proposes an alternative reading apparatus from within the FSA , drawing on the very <?page no="189"?> Picturing the Depression 189 conventions authorised by this institution. This counter-discourse to prevalent photojournalistic rules will be examined through four traits of the genre that Evans portfolio both crystallises and opens up for modification. The Photograph as a Window on to the World/ Event It is usually assumed that a twofold authority is at work in a news photograph: first, there is a causal link between the photographic image and what it “captures,” and second, the act of taking a picture implies the presence of an eye-witness in the form of the journalist, who provides the guarantee for the truthfulness of the photograph s message. This twofold authority, however, is defamiliarised by Evans portfolio through a complete lack of paratext. The reader opens Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to the 31 photographs that precede Agee s writing. No textual elements whatsoever accompany these pictures: there is no title page, no caption, page number, introduction or preface. This strange opening violates the capacity of the photojournalistic genre to inscribe its object within “the real world.” Without such paratextual structures - especially captions - and without dates or the names of the people and places depicted, the images refuse to be anchored within a specified and recognisable setting in the world outside the book. The first part of the portfolio consists of one single image, the portrait of the landlord to the Burroughs. The three middle sections each present one of the three tenant families (the Burroughs, the Fields and the Tengles), together with their homes. The last part contains photographs of a nearby small town. The portfolio thus constitutes its content through a strategy of difference: the three families emerge next to each other, and their homes on the fields are juxtaposed with the town. They are linked and contrasted by the reader, rather than anchored in a specific spatio-temporal reference point. The resulting meaning is overtly marked as a construction by the beholder, and the photographic medium no longer seems to constitute a window on to an inherently meaningful world. Generalisation The second characteristic of photojournalism that is dissected and transformed by Evans portfolio might be termed the need for generalisation. While the specificities of each individual farmer and his or her predicament are crucial evidence, they are useful only insofar that they permit the photographer to outline the problems of Southern tenant <?page no="190"?> 190 Michael Röösli farmers in general. A report is expected to “portray” their situation, so that political measures can be taken to help them. Roughly two thirds of Evans original 1941 portfolio consist of individualor group portraits, a genre that epitomises these radically opposed possibilities of specification and generalisation: on the one hand, a portrait isolates a person or group of people and presents them in their iconic uniqueness. On the other hand, it may inscribe its subject within more general categories. A bookshelf as the backdrop of a photographed interviewee will signify his or her erudite “background,” and the specificity of a face can be suppressed entirely in favour of a symbolic reading, as in the picture of an Italian chef on a packet of pasta. Like most portraits in Evans portfolio, that of Floyd Burroughs frames its subject very closely. 1 Although his torn (but clean and consciously arranged) clothes, his piercing glance and rather stylish position open up a space for potential meaning, no objects external to his body allow the reader to embed him in a more general context. Burroughs conspicuous posing for the picture and the complete lack of suggestive “props” or working activities render generalisation difficult. Compare his portrait, for instance, with that which Margaret Bourke-White published in You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), and which is entitled Hamilton, Alabama - “We Manage to Get Along” (n.p.). It depicts a woman working in the field using an indistinguishable tool or machine. The specificity of her face is obscured by the shadow of her bonnet, which protects her from the searing sun. The centre of the image shows her breasts and foreshortened hands, which may have shocked the Northern readership through the association of female gender with hard manual labour. Significantly, the closely cropped image does not show what machine or tool she is using; she therefore does not appear as a woman ploughing a field, for instance, but more generally as a woman working hard. In stark contrast to this example, the viewer of all the openly posed portraits in Evans portfolio does not see what the tenants do or who they are through generalisation. The beholder s expectations are thus frustrated and turn from the anticipated message “poverty in the rural South” to the journalistically irrelevant “meet the Burroughs.” This refusal of the possibility of generalisation is further enhanced in Evans pictures by the specific selection of camera angles on the people portrayed. Bourke-White uses an extremely low angle in her abovementioned picture. Such low angles render the person depicted as full of dignity, strength, or superiority; this technique was extensively exploited 1 Hereafter, the shortened titles of Evans photographs will be used. The full titles are listed with the references below, together with a direct link to their digitised copies in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. <?page no="191"?> Picturing the Depression 191 later in Nazi propaganda and in Soviet Social Realism. Depicting the working woman against the sky, the photograph produces an apotheotic glorification of the poor but anonymous worker. She is not a woman, but a representation of labour or poverty itself. Alternatively, portraits in similar journalistic works frequently used high angles, looking down upon their objects of investigation in order to express their status as victims. Evans portraits of the tenants are generally taken from eyelevel, and thus individualise them to the point of disturbing the beholder. These are neither victims nor heroes, but merely people like the reader, positioned on the same “level” in the scopic configuration. Voyeurism and Glorification The glorification and victimisation of the tenants is also closely connected to the third issue to be briefly addressed here. For the popular press, tenant farmers in the rural South constituted an exotic and unexpected Other to be consumed by a Northern readership. The reader of such documents is struck by the tenants difference in class and lifestyle, a realisation that may inspire pity but at the same time confirms the reader s appreciation of his or her own position. Kevin Rozario elaborates on this voyeuristic potential in the context of American Red Cross Magazine in his article “Delicious Horrors” (2003). He argues that humanitarian institutions never could do without the pleasure of cruelty, and investigates how philanthropy became a marketing venture and mass phenomenon precisely at the moment (the period in which Let Us Now Praise Famous Men originated) when donors began to be courted as consumers who had to be entertained (Rozario 419). He emphasises in particular the double sense of the word appealing as either “to call upon” (for help) or “to give pleasure” (422-3). The repression of the pleasure induced by scrutinising photographs of the poor, however, may lead to a pity that does not arise from empathy so much as operate as a form of compensation. The socio-hierarchical “lowness” of the category of the poor can be rechannelled into admiration for the strength of its members in the face of hardship. Evans portfolio short-circuits the voyeuristic dimension of its genre in at least three ways. First, and as already mentioned above, the portraits isolate the tenants from the specific context or sight of their suffering. Also, they are shown in a publicly visible setting (usually outside, in front of the boarded walls of their homes), as if glimpsed by a pedestrian walking by. The pictures do not pry into the private sphere of the tenants. And finally, most of the people portrayed look straight at the camera, whereas voyeuristic pleasure presupposes a hidden or transparent viewer. <?page no="192"?> 192 Michael Röösli The second point is based on the interior shots of the three houses. The tenants living space (a potential site for voyeuristic consumption) indeed appears in several pictures, but just as the tenants homes and work were absent from the portraits, the houses are devoid of their inhabitants (with the exception of the Fields group picture on the bed, which will be addressed below). The people who attribute connotations of property and functionality to the depicted objects and furniture are completely missing. The qualities of sparseness and simplicity are omnipresent in the interior shots of the portfolio; the spaces the photographs depict are extremely clean, orderly, neat, and the choice of photographic parameters gives an impression of symmetry and masterful composition. There is nothing candid about these images. They look like illustrations in a prospectus for an open-air museum: the viewer s attention is drawn towards their formal aesthetic, which isolates these pictures from their surroundings within a sealed and self-sufficient frame. The Washstand in the Dog Run and Kitchen of Floyd Burroughs Cabin is a representative example for this technique. A final strategy by which the portfolio short-circuits the voyeuristic drive was discerned by Peter Cosgrove in his essay “Snapshots of the Absolute” (1995). Cosgrove looks at two different discourses of family that Evans photographs deploy in the portfolio. One arises from the section on the Fields family, with the following three consecutive images: (1) Bud Fields alone sitting on his bed, (2) Bud Fields with His Second Wife and their baby daughter on the same bed, and (3) Sharecropper Bud Fields and His Family all gathered on the bed, including three children, the parents and grandmother (this sequence only appears in the original 1941 version). The second instance is entitled Part of the Bedroom of Floyd Burroughs Cabin, a picture that also shows a parental bed, but with clean, white, neatly arranged and untouched sheets. Cosgrove argues that these respective beds present and juxtapose two stereotypical middle-class beliefs about poverty of the 1930s and 40s: on the one hand the quasianimalistic and restless fertility of the poor, and on the other their nobility and strength in the face of hardship. The sequence of three photographs has the Fields family grow - or almost explode - on the bed in which all their offspring were conceived, while the Burroughs bed remains orderly and distant like all the remaining interior shots. This contrasts the pictures of the Fields bed with the moral impeccability of the romanticised poor. These two modes of consuming the tenants (as animals or heroes) are thus brought into opposition; they force each other on the reader s awareness, and cancel each other out as equally inappropriate. In short, the three examples of the portraits, interior shots, and discourses of family illustrate how Let Us Now Praise Famous Men system- <?page no="193"?> Picturing the Depression 193 atically disrupts the voyeuristic potential inherent in a journalistic approach to the three families. Self-Awareness One might argue that Evans photographs also briefly address the issue of mediation itself. The tenants portrayed facing the camera not only defy voyeurism, but also draw attention to the position of the photographer, who is always implied in these pictorial texts by the conspicuously contrived posing of the tenants. Indeed, one often wonders whether these shots have been staged by Evans or rather by the tenants themselves. One picture in the portfolio, entitled Family Snapshots on Wall of Room in Frank Tengle s Home, assumes a rather peculiar role in this respect. It shows two photographs pinned next to each other on a wooden board wall. The left one shows an elderly woman in front of a field, the right one depicts three children sitting on the grass in front of thick shrubbery. The two pictures almost seem to provide Evans with the aesthetic and compositional guidelines for his own portraits: they equally show people facing the camera, framed closely, and with their eyes on the level of the objective, as if Evans pictures were based on the families own representational conventions. However, the mise-enabyme could also be read as assigning an unexpected position to the reader: if the viewer sees Evans photographs as the Tengles see their own family members in the two pictures on their wall, then the tenants are placed in the position of the reader s family in this particular scopic setup. The portfolio clearly guides the beholder away from objectifying the tenants. This is further emphasised by the picture labelled Cotton Room which shows a note written on cardboard over the Tengles fireplace. The note reads: “ PLEASE BE QUITE - Every body is Welcome” (sic). Similar to the ethical discourse carried by the mise-en-abyme, this image, instead of accusing the photographer of intruding into a private sphere, seems to officially invite him in. Conclusion Evans portfolio defines photojournalism in a negative way: its anchorage of the text in the “outside world” has been emphasised by shortcircuiting the erroneous assumptions that this same world is inherently meaningful, transparently mediated by the journalist, and passively consumed by the viewer. Similarly, the genre s tendency to objectify the tenants emerged from a shift in the portraits from the expected general- <?page no="194"?> 194 Michael Röösli ising mode to an individuating one. The specific functions and modalities of the usually self-effacing genre are thus forcefully brought to the reader s attention. Moreover, what the portfolio reifies as the “problem” is the conventional apparatus itself, rather than the tenants. However, that does not mean that the pragmatic potential within photojournalism has been sacrificed to self-reflexivity here - after all, if journalism resulted in family albums, it would indeed lose all its political power. Instead, the portfolio proposes several concrete alternatives for transforming the more problematic conventions of its genre. It has become apparent in the above discussion that, in the portfolio, the repressed aesthetic appreciation that results in voyeuristic pleasure is channelled into the open by the overly marked composition of the interior shots, and the pitying or romantisation of poverty are counteracted by the choice of camera angle. The tenants are constructed as subjects, rather than consumable objects. In short, the foregrounding of photojournalistic conventions renders these norms malleable and open to concrete change. To conclude, Evans photographs crystallise and modify a genre that plays a significant role in its surrounding political landscape. By doing so, they emphasise two crucial points: first, a palpable and long-term change can only occur on the level of the interpretive community. Second, the trigger for change does not necessarily have to be sought outside the system that is put into question. Indeed, Evans portfolio has such a powerful effect precisely because it does not simply propose an alternative framework. Just as Evans transgresses the representational “rules” of FSA photography while being on the pay roll of the same institution, his attack on photojournalism operates both on and through the genre s conventional apparatus, and draws its energy from the paradigm the latter has authorised and circulated itself. <?page no="195"?> Picturing the Depression 195 References Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Cosgrove, Peter. “Snapshots of the Absolute: Mediamachia in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” American Literature 67.2 (1995): 329-57. Curtis, James C. “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression.” Winterthur Portfolio 21.1 (1986): 1-20. Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. 147-73. Lange, Dorothea. “The Assignment I ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother.” Popular Photography 46.2 (1960): 42-43. Rozario, Kevin. “‘Delicious Horrors : Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism.” American Quarterly 55.3 (2003): 417-55. Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Tagg, John. “The Currency of the Photograph: New Deal Reformism and Documentary Rhetoric.” The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press: 1988. 153-83. Photographs Bourke-White, Margaret. Hamilton, Alabama - “We Manage to Get Along” Caldwell, Erskine and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces. 1937. London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. n.p. Evans, Walker. Bud Fields. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / www.loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ cph.3c05136/ . . Bud Fields with His Second Wife, Lily Rogers Fields and Their Daughter. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ fsa.8c52255/ . . Cotton Room, Formerly Prayer Meeting Room. Frank Tengle s Farm. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ fsa.8c52259/ . . Family Snapshots on Wall of Room in Frank Tengle s Home. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ fsa.8c52261/ . <?page no="196"?> 196 Michael Röösli . Floyd Burroughs, Cotton Sharecropper. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 Dec. 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ ppmsc.00244/ . . Part of the Bedroom of Floyd Burroughs Cabin. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / www.loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ fsa.8c52243/ . . Sharecropper Bud Fields and His Family at Home. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ ppmsca.12880/ . . Washstand in the Dog Run and Kitchen of Floyd Burroughs Cabin. Hale County, Alabama. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ ppmsc.00242/ . Lange, Dorothea. Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California (also known as Migrant Mother). 1936. Library of Congress Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ fsa.8b29516/ . Rothstein, Arthur. Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma. 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. 1 December 2010. http: / / www.loc.gov/ pictures/ resource/ ppmsc.00241/ . <?page no="197"?> Haptic Close-ups and Montage: Surrealist Desire in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou Carola Moresche The Surrealists were fascinated by cinema’s ability to visualize desire. The close-up and montage were taken up by surrealist film critics such as Louis Aragon to hail the medium’s capacity to focus on the hidden details of quotidian reality. In an evaluation of directors based on their surrealist potential the Surrealists gave advice as to which directors’ films to see and which not. Erich von Stroheim is amongst those directors on the to-see list. The frequent use of close-ups in Greed focusing the attention of the viewer on the body and the elaborate montage sequences visualizing internal processes such as fear, longing or anger make it an ideal example for what the Surrealists valued in cinema: the visualization of desire by concentrating the look and “restrict[ing] the field of vision so as to intensify the expression” (52), as Louis Aragon states in “On Décor”. To emphasize the haptic and emotive qualities of Erich von Stroheim’s close-ups I will contrast and compare them with the quintessential surrealist film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel. Walter Benjamin sees the close-up as one of the few truly cinematic techniques that reveals completely new structural formations: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. (Benjamin 13) The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 197-207. <?page no="198"?> 198 Carola Moresche Mary Ann Doane draws on this capacity to reveal new aspects of familiar objects, referring to Benjamin to observe that a close-up is “a significant entrance point to the optical unconscious, making visible what in daily life [goes] unseen” (Doane 90). Furthermore, Doane argues that the close-up can be regarded as an “autonomous entity, a fragment, a ‘for-itself’” (Doane 90) focusing solely on one object or part of an object where its image then forms an entity disengaged from the rest. Doane claims that as a “for-itself” the close-up becomes only an image rather than “a threshold into the world” of the film. I would argue that the object/ part of an object in close-up, by becoming an image, enhances the audience’s craving for the fulfillment of the desire the closeup arouses. So even though the close-up may be taken in isolation, separated from the rest of the film, as an image it nevertheless possesses the ability to function as a threshold since it stirs desire for the projected image/ object. The close-up, in its literal meaning in English, refers to distance/ proximity while in French, gros plan refers to size, and in Soviet cinema it means “larger-than-life” rather than closeness. Thus, the closeup is associated with two ideas: firstly the notion of possession. As Benjamin noted, a close-up signifies a “desire [. . .] to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly [and an] urge . . . to get hold of an object” (qtd. in Doane 92). Secondly, the notion of elusiveness or largeness/ threat in the close-up is denoted by the French term gros plan or the Soviet concept of “larger-than-life.” Again, the close-up as a visual realization of desire has a dual capacity, lure and fear, comparable to the feeling of wanting to see what is beyond the door or window and being afraid of the encounter with the hidden. Béla Balázs also points to the hidden but additionally hints at another important point: the connection between the image/ object in close-up and the character/ audience: When the film close-up strips the veil of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the hidden little things and shows us the face of objects, it still shows us man, for what makes objects expressive are the human expressions projected onto them. The objects only reflect our own selves. (qtd. in Doane 94) The close-up of an object or a face/ body part, according to Balázs, allows us to understand that “we can see that there is something there that we cannot see” (qtd. in Doane 96). Balazs points to the dichotomy of visible and invisible, hidden and revealed, and the appearance and interiority of the close-up. This dichotomy, inherent in the close-up, has the consequence of leaving us with a slightly unsatisfactory feeling. The <?page no="199"?> Haptic Close-ups and Montage 199 object or face/ body parts in close-up can “neither be reached nor renounced” (Barthes, qtd. in Doane 104), and only desire is left: a desire longing to be fulfilled but undermined by the awareness that the actual lure of the desire is its elusiveness. Part of this elusiveness is due to the fragmentary effect of the closeup. The close-up is a cinematic device that guides the viewers’ gaze by delimiting or framing just a fraction of a larger whole. The effect, as Louis Aragon noted in his essay “On Décor,” is the transformation of objects “to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings” (52, my emphasis). This unique cinematic effect of selection and focus, that neither the theater nor the novel can fully attain to, relates to the Surrealists’ principle of dépaysement, or poetic estrangement. This process of breaking down normal associations and endowing images as well as objects with new functions, characteristics and relationships is put into practice in film as montage or editing. Thus, the resulting juxtaposition of distant realities - which was the preferred method of using images in surrealist writing as well as in painting and later in photography - leads both to new meaning and also to a kind of disorientation. Essentially, both close-ups and editing/ montage entail dismemberment and fragmentation, resulting in a visual and semantic disorientation. The menacing and enigmatic qualities that Louis Aragon attributes to these cinematic features challenge viewers to go beyond their customary associations with the objects/ images presented. Philippe Soupault tells of his encounter with the medium of film during a public exhibition of a cinematograph by Pathé, after which he reached the conclusion that “man was endowed with a new eye.” The ability to see more than everyday life, to see the marvelous in quotidian reality, is finally realized, for the Surrealists, in the medium of film and the closeup. However, the close-up’s “extractability from all spatiotemporal coordinates [and] its production of hitherto unknown dimensions” (Doane 105) visualizes the unconscious desires, fears and longings both of the characters in the film, and, in a reciprocal fashion, of the viewers. Thus, we must differentiate between two types of close-ups in the analysis of Erich von Stroheim’s films: firstly, those that provide a magnification of an object, a part of an object or a part of a person to reveal something about the character’s desires and longings; secondly, those close-ups that have the menacing or enigmatic qualities to which Aragon referred, that are less connected to the character than to the viewers’ desires and fears. Certainly, the use of close-ups of the first type also affects the viewers and relates to their hidden or unconscious fantasies; however, the non-diegetic or meta-diegetic quality of these inserts is what relates those close-ups more to the viewers than to the characters. <?page no="200"?> 200 Carola Moresche Hands figure prominently in the close-ups of Erich von Stroheim’s first feature film, Blind Husbands (1919), as do feet. The introductory scene, which establishes the relationship between the three main characters, Lieutenant von Steuben, Doctor Armstrong and his wife Margaret, fetishizes the object of potency in the hands of the Lieutenant (his sword) as well as Margaret’s feet, establishing a sexual context. In Greed, the sexual tension between the two main characters Mac and Trina is established by close-ups of their faces, which then, in the course of the film transform into embodiments of menace and fear. 1 Their first meeting takes place in Mac’s dentist parlor. His best friend Marcus brings his cousin and fiancée Trina to have her teeth fixed. The introduction of Trina to Mac is also the introduction of sexual desire into Mac’s life. Erich von Stroheim does this by juxtaposing close-ups of their faces, in a shot-reverse-shot manner. By means of lighting, Trina’s face appears angelic and her black hair, hat and her high-collar dress emphasize the whiteness of her face even more. Mac’s fascination with her angelic appearance is captured in the close-ups that show him staring right at the camera, that is, at Trina. The angelic effect is again used by von Stroheim to make more striking the close-up in the sequence in which Mac is overcome by his passion for Trina. Trina is lying on the dentist’s chair and is suffering from the pain that Mac causes her by drilling into her teeth. This forceful action - the sexual connotations of penetration, pleasure and pain are obvious - is juxtaposed with Trina’s costuming. Her angelic appearance, from the close-up in the sequence of their first meeting, is transformed into that of a nun, given the cloth wrapped around her head. Thus the forceful passion of Mac acquires a menacing touch. This mixture of desire and menace is the underlying tension of their ensuing relationship and the following closeups enhance this dichotomy. When Trina learns that she has won 5,000 dollars in the lottery, von Stroheim utilizes similar close-ups that recall the dichotomy of desire and menace between Mac and Trina. This time, the lottery man embodies the menacing qualities of the money Trina will soon receive, implying the danger this poses to her and subsequently to Mac. Trina is posi- 1 Throughout this paper, all the scenes I refer to are from the 1999 Turner Classic Movies reconstructed version of Greed by director Rick Schmidlin, which was broadcast by the TV channel Arte on 30 September and 1 October 2005. In an effort to restore Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece as it was intended by the director, Rick Schmidlin used production stills and the original script to fill the gaps left by the rigorous cutting ordered by the Metro-Goldwyn studio. Schmidlin strictly followed the orders for tinting and title cards given in the original script. Thus this reconstructed version gives us a glimpse of the truly artistic vision von Stroheim had in mind when creating Greed. <?page no="201"?> Haptic Close-ups and Montage 201 tioned slightly below the lottery man, who is standing at the top of the stairs, bowing when he greets her. By doing this he moves closer to the camera, suggesting that he moves closer towards Trina. She widens her eyes when the lottery man introduces himself. The huge eyes in her pale face - she is again wearing the black hat and high-collar dress - show both fear and disbelief. In the same way that Trina at first resists the attentions of Mac she tries to question the legitimacy of her lottery win, disbelieving her luck. The lottery win then forms the basis for Mac and Trina’s relationship because it enables them to get married: it emerges that Trina’s initial rejection of Mac was not so much based on her feelings for him, or the lack thereof, but rather on her fear of sinking socially to his level. 2 The fact that by obtaining money this fear is eliminated is taken up by von Stroheim in his focus on hands in many closeups. The connection between hands, money and sexual desire is established in the sequence following the celebration of her lottery win. This is the first time that Trina initiates intimacy between them and for once she does not resist Mac’s kissing her. Significant is her fiddling with the bands of her dress throughout the whole scene. Erich von Stroheim specifically instructed Zasu Pitts to involve a lot of movement of her hands to draw attention to them. 3 In this scene, the movement of her hands has sexual connotations, linking the lottery money with erotic pleasure. This is further emphasized by a title card which has Trina ask Mac what they should do with all that money and whether it does not frighten him that the money was sent to them at just that time. This is the only time that Trina speaks of their money, which has come to them, instead of her money (or later correcting herself to say it is their money). She is clearly excited, yet at the same time scared of the effect it might have. This duality of feelings obviously arouses her so that she actually gives in to Mac’s kiss. Leger Grindon, in his examination of Greed, describes von Stroheim as “a filmmaker ever sensitive to the crossroads of sadism, sexuality, repression, and guilt,” a description that echoes the Surrealists’ obsession with exactly these elements in their works of art (34). Gradually, this multiplicity of feelings connected with hands shifts more towards obsession and fear, replacing passion and erotic desire. The scene after Mac and Trina’s wedding ceremony mirrors the aforementioned scene, though it exaggerates the emphasis on Trina’s hands and Mac’s lust for her. Just as all the wedding guests and Trina’s family are leaving, it seems Trina is suddenly reminded of the obligatory 2 This is explained in a title card shown before Mac and Trina exit the church. 3 Leger Grindon states that von Stroheim added the scene of Trina sitting on the bed and creaming her hands during shooting, illustrating how “together von Stroheim and Pitts built Trina’s character so that the force of her psyche commands the film” (37). <?page no="202"?> 202 Carola Moresche consummation of the marriage. In panic she runs after her mother who tries to console her. When Trina walks back up the stairs to Mac and her apartment, she tries to move as silently as possible so as not to arouse Mac’s attention. She steals into the bedroom but Mac finally notices her. He gets up and walks towards her while Trina raises her hands towards her mouth in anguish. He grabs her, draws her towards him and kisses her violently. Trina’s eruption of fear and Mac’s eruption of lust feed on the repression of their desires, to which von Stroheim has alluded in two previous scenes. While Mac operates on Trina’s tooth, he is torn between his desire to kiss her, his primal sexual instinct, and his awareness that he would trespass a moral, ethical boundary since Trina is his patient and sedated with ether. As for Trina, the scene with her mother following her afternoon with Mac shows her inarticulateness regarding their sexuality and her inability to deal with her emotions and his desires. Nevertheless, before ending this sequence with Mac literally drawing the curtain - a gesture that is repeated later in the film after he has murdered Trina - von Stroheim focuses on Trina’s feet in a close-up, standing on top of Mac’s shoes slowly raising her heels and standing on her toes while he kisses her. The sexual connotation is more than obvious and again combines sexuality, sadism and repression. During the wedding ceremony Trina’s cousin and ex-fiancé and Mac’s supposedly best friend, Marcus Schouler, clenches his hands behind his back, which is shown in a close-up. This not only conveys his anger with Mac’s marriage to Trina and thus his possession of the 5,000 dollars - so he assumes - but also symbolizes threat. This is then embodied in an elaborate montage sequence in which von Stroheim juxtaposes the character of Marcus with the figure of a cat that attacks the love birds in their cage. Instead of conveying the threat that Marcus emanates in close-ups of him, as von Stroheim does with Mac, he represents the cat in close-up. Marcus’s gesture of good luck to Mac and Trina already seems ironic but it develops into sheer mockery during the course of the film. The consequences for the couple of Marcus’s envy are later revealed when Mac receives a letter from the State Dental Board. Mac has been operating his dental clinic without a license, and it seems someone has reported him to the authorities. The Dental Board orders Mac to stop practicing immediately. Mac shows the letter to Trina, who is cleaning the table. While she reads the letter, a close-up shows Trina’s hand clutching the sponge she is holding, spilling water on to the table. This close-up relates to both plot and meaning of the film: it mirrors Marcus’s clenched hands during the wedding ceremony and foreshadows Trina’s job as a cleaning woman scrubbing school floors after Mac has <?page no="203"?> Haptic Close-ups and Montage 203 left her. Regarding meaning, it is a physical display of anger; however, it is also sexually connoted: the spilling of water relates to ejaculation. This reveals a strange mix of danger and sex, placing Trina in the realm of masochism, which develops more and more as the film progresses. During the steady social decline of Mac and Trina, the tense situation between them as well as Trina’s money-obsessed character are visualized through the gestures and motions of her hands and fingers. The gesture of putting a finger to her mouth while narrowing her eyes and twisting her mouth visualizes both her miserliness and greed as well as the satisfaction she gets from acquiring more gold coins. Only after Mac is finally fed up with Trina’s obsession and the limitations she places on his life is he involved with this gesture and her hands, which by now have acquired so much meaning. Up to this point, Trina is the only character who violates her body by mutilating her fingers. Now, Mac also starts biting her fingers whenever he is in need of money. The gesture of putting a finger to her mouth is extended to Mac putting her fingers into his mouth. The violation of her body culminates in a doctor’s advice that she have some fingers of her right hand amputated if she does not want to lose the whole hand. The underlying notion of sadism, the sexual pleasure derived from hurting somebody or being hurt, is spelled out by a title card inserted after Mac has once more obtained money from Trina by biting her fingers. After having given him two bills, she asks him obediently whether he still loves her, to which Mac answers that he surely does, laughing sadistically and then pushing her violently on to the bed. The title card then reads “And yet this brutality in some strange inexplicable way aroused in Trina a morbid, unwholesome love of submission.” Von Stroheim, in drawing attention to hands early in the film, enhances the image with layers of meaning that are then visualized in close-ups. The literal disfiguration is cinematically realized in the closeup, which fragments the wholeness of the image depicted. One purpose of the image or object in Surrealism was to induce bodily sensations, through which the unconscious would then reveal itself. Regarding the medium of film, bodily sensations are mediated through their mechanical reproduction on film stock thus, as Susan McCabe states, producing a “modernist paradox” (3). She concludes that “cinematic montage and camera work often exposed the body’s malleability” (3), in this way contributing to the illusion of haptic bodily sensation and dismemberment at the same time. The question why Trina fusses so much with her hands and the attention that von Stroheim draws to her gestures with the close-ups are connected to hapticity. The haptic sensation of touching the gold coins gives Trina pleasure. She is not interested in spending the money and enjoying the luxuries <?page no="204"?> 204 Carola Moresche that the money could afford her. Instead, the bodily sensations of sleeping on the coins displace the sexual sensations she could enjoy with Mac. This displacement of feelings is analogous to the fracturing of the body through close-ups and montage. In Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel also utilized the image of hands to signify sexual obsession and haptic sensations. The violation of the body figures prominently in Un Chien Andalou with the infamous slicing of the eye at the beginning of the film. The mutilation of the hand displaces the mutilation of the eye. A hole in the palm of the protagonist’s hand oozes ants. The following montage sequence of close-ups of female armpit hair and a sea urchin attributes to the perforated hand the feelings of bodily attraction, repulsion, and pain. The underlying meaning that links these close-ups with those in Greed is physical pain paired with a sexual connotation. This sequence of close-ups creates a transition to the next scene in which Buñuel shows the literal fracturing of body parts by cinematic means and features an amputated hand placed in the street. A woman is poking the cut-off hand with a stick amidst a crowd of bystanders, who seem unsure what to do. One of the men in the crowd is rubbing his own wrist. This gesture is a reaffirmation of the wholeness of his own body in the presence of the mutilated hand before him. This sequence echoes Trina’s obsessive fiddling with her fingers and hands. Both gestures are a comment on the fragmentation of body parts both in the close-up and within the diegesis. The question arises though concerning whose hand has been amputated. One possible explanation can be derived from the balance of opposites, such as female and male, outside and inside, aggression and passion, fear and happiness, cityscape and landscape, which is sustained throughout the film. Consequently, the amputated hand would belong to a man, possibly the protagonist, since it is the female protagonist’s eye that is being slit in the opening sequence. The next scene affirms this possibility as we see a fight breaking out between the two protagonists at the end of which she escapes through a door that she slams, jamming his hand. Preceding these close-ups, the conflict between the two protagonists is seen to arise from the sexual assault of the woman by the man: he grabs her breasts which morph into bare breasts and then into naked buttocks. The jamming of his hand in the door is at once punishment for this act of transgression while at the same time embodying the haptic nature of his gestures. The sequence tying the visual elements together is the last of the interior scenes. The two protagonists face each other and the woman has finally had enough, it seems, of the man’s grotesqueness. He covers his mouth with his hand and, when he removes his hand, his mouth has <?page no="205"?> Haptic Close-ups and Montage 205 vanished. Appalled by this, the woman takes out her lipstick and applies it to her lips - a gesture equally affirmative of the mutilated body part as is the rubbing of the wrist of the man in the crowd mentioned above. When the protagonist’s mouth then transforms into the sprouting hair of her armpit, she storms out of the room on to the beach where her lover is waiting for her. Just as von Stroheim uses the hands as a means of displacement, so does Buñuel displace sexual fantasy into haptic reality. In both Greed and Un Chien Andalou, the diegetic fragmentation and mutilation of body parts is visually translated into close-ups and montage sequences. The result in both is death: Trina dies in the school where she used her hands to earn money, Marcus and Mac (though this is not shown) die in Death Valley fighting over Trina’s gold. In Un Chien Andalou the final shot is a medium shot of the two protagonists buried up to their chests in beach sand. Their arms are half buried too, suggesting a clean cut of their whole body. The similarities to Greed are almost ironic. Mac and Marcus die in a desert; the characters of Un Chien Andalou die on the beach. The hands of all four characters are in some way affected, with their hands buried, perforated or cut off or, in the case of Greed, with their fingers amputated and hands chained together with handcuffs. McCabe maintains that close-ups fracture, while montage both fractures and embodies (5). However, I would suggest that the close-up shares the same ability as montage simultaneously to fracture and embody. The difference between the two techniques is that the embodying capacity of the close-up is symbolic in nature, while in montage it is physical as well as symbolic. Cinema has the capacity to visualize an object in a way never seen before - it is both whole and fractured at the same time. This connects directly with the famous surrealist analogy: “Beautiful like a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Splicing, fragmentation and mutilation are some of the effects produced by the cinematic features of close-ups and montage. In Greed, these features are literally embodied by the biting and finally the amputation of Trina’s fingers. McCabe’s notion that the close-up and montage expose the body’s malleability is transformed into the body’s disfiguration and literal fragmentation in Greed, but this is additionally infused with a Sadean sexuality embedded in Surrealism. The sexualization of the hands, while at the same time attributing to them the significance of threat or obsession, is further emphasized by inserts that show close-ups of hands toying with gold coins and gilded dishes or hands that symbolize looming danger. These close-ups have this aforementioned non-diegetic quality. They emphasize Trina’s growing obsession with the gold coins by focusing on the haptic sensations derived from handling them. The first two close-ups of these inserts <?page no="206"?> 206 Carola Moresche refer to Maria’s treasure of gold dishes about which she fantasizes as well as to the gold coins that Trina enjoys touching. The next nondiegetic insert is actually an entire sequence dealing with Zerkow’s desire for gold and this is different to Maria’s fantasy because it is a daydream. Thus, this inserted sequence is meta-diegetic. The final insert shows a large hand holding two struggling people, either Zerkow and Maria or Mac and Trina, in a tight grip, squeezing them. Though these close-ups are still part of the story line, they are strictly symbolic in nature and it only becomes clear through the montage sequence to which characters these inserts belong or refer. Furthermore, they are distinct from the other close-ups already discussed, as they can be taken completely out of context and still possess the multilayered meaning of displacement, fragmentation and mutilation with violent, sexual and haptic experiences. The first three examples deal with the obsessive nature of the characters related both to their greed for gold and their lust for haptic experiences of that desire. Through the combination of these inserts, the close-ups and the action itself, the centering of Greed on the displacement of sexual desire into the desire for gold coins becomes the visual translation of the surrealist notion of dépaysement, or poetic estrangement. The central aim of the Surrealists was the concretization of the hidden and unconscious. Creating these concrete images, the manifestations of the unconscious, was achieved through the juxtaposition of distant realities resulting in poetic estrangement / dépaysement / displacement. Arising from that is a disorientation caused by fragmentation, which also leads to a disorientation of the mind. The ensuing mental dislocation reflects the topographical dislocation in the narrative. Trina and Mac, on their way down the metaphorical social ladder, move from one lodging to another. After placing Mac on Polk Street, von Stroheim never again gives a definitive location for the couple. Even when, towards the end of their relationship, they move into the house of the dead Zerkow, von Stroheim avoids shots of the surrounding area, thus displacing the house from a definitive area - Polk Street - into a nondefined area. Finally, Mac’s escape into the desert of Death Valley and Marcus Schouler’s search for him epitomize the topographic dislocation built up by von Stroheim as a concrete image of their expulsion from society as well as their disconnection from their own sanity. They are lost in the spatial nothingness of both their physical environment, the desert, and their social environment. Similarly, Buñuel’s fragmented narrative in Un Chien Andalou reflects both the fragmented bodies as well as the mental dislocation of the two protagonists who waver between sanity and madness, passion and aggression, love and repulsion. <?page no="207"?> Haptic Close-ups and Montage 207 References Aragon, Louis. “On Décor.” The Shadow and Its Shadow. 3rd edition. Ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000. 50-54. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” KTH Royal Institute of Technology. www.arch.kth.se/ unrealstockholm/ unreal_webworkofart.pdf. Accessed on 21 February 2011. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.5 (2003): 89-111. Greed. Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Perf. Zasu Pitts, Gibson Rowland, and Jean Hersholt. Reconstructed Version by Rick Schmidlin for Turner Classic Movies, 1999. Arte, 30 September and 1 October 2005. Grindon, Leger. “From Word to Image: Dosplacement and Meaning in Greed.” Journal of Film and Video, 41.1 (1989): 32-41. JSTOR. www.jstor.ord/ stable/ 20687877. Accessed on 9 November 2010. McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Un Chien Andalou. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Simone Marcuil and Pierre Batchef. 3SAT, 30 June 1993. <?page no="209"?> Timeand Space-Montage in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours Cornelia Klecker In the film adaptation of The Hours (2002), director Stephen Daldry employs a kind of montage that was frequently used as the literary device of stream-of-consciousness. For that reason, this essay seeks to apply to the film the model of timeand space-montage that David Daiches established when analyzing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which will help explain the framework of the adaptation. In very plain terms, one could say that Mrs. Dalloway is about one day in the life of a woman. The Hours is, essentially, about one day in the lives of three women. Through these three women, the film provides representations of the writer, the reader, and the protagonist of the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Furthermore, the motivation behind the filmmaker’s choice to draw particularly upon spacemontage will be explained by the basic arrangement of the story and parallels with Mrs. Dalloway will be drawn. Just as Virginia Woolf connected two of her characters - Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus - in her novel, Stephen Daldry interlinks his three protagonists, who all exist in separate, locally and temporally distinct settings, by the two entities of time and space. In 1998, the highly-acclaimed novel The Hours was published. The book earned its author and expert on Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the PEN / Faulkner Award, and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Book Award all in the same year. Unsurprisingly, considering this success, a film adaptation, which was directed by Stephen Daldry and starred among others well-known character actresses and actors Meryl Streep, Julian Moore, Ed Harris, and John C. Reilly, was released in 2002. It received rave reviews and won one of its cast members, actress Nicole Kidman, an Academy Award. The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 209-223. <?page no="210"?> 210 Cornelia Klecker When Michael Cunningham wrote The Hours, his initial intention was to rewrite Virginia Woolf’s famous work Mrs. Dalloway and to place it in a contemporary context. For that reason, he also tried to “imitate” her style of writing. Interestingly, while Cunningham himself did not use the kind of stream-of-consciousness technique that Woolf so famously employed in Mrs. Dalloway, the film repeatedly draws on special devices frequently utilized in modernist novels. These devices are used to create a certain montage of time and space, which often manifests itself in the so-called spatialization of time. The aim here will be to analyze the film adaptation of The Hours according to its timeand space-montage. By closely examining selected sequences of the film, this essay will explore how some features of the stream-of-consciousness technique, which are so typical of certain twentieth-century novels such as Mrs. Dalloway, can be transferred to the screen. To begin, the devices used in stream-of-consciousness literature that are relevant to this discussion have to be examined. One way of controlling the movement of stream-of-consciousness fiction is by using a set of tools that could be called “cinematic” devices. The most basic filmic device is that of montage, or, as Sergei Eisenstein put it: “Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage” (127). Reduced to its very basics, montage can more or less be equated with film editing; in other words, the process of assembling the various shots into a specific order. However, in Eisenstein’s theory of film, montage goes far beyond the mere accumulation of single frames and shots: The shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage. By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell - the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision. . . . From the collision of two given factors arises a concept. From my point of view, linkage is merely a possible special case. (133, original emphasis) As becomes clear from this quotation, Eisenstein argues that a simple accumulation of frames is merely an exceptional instance of montage but not at all its true purpose. Juxtaposition is the key. If two given factors are placed in opposition, a third entity arises. Simply put, the end product is more than just the sum of its parts. To Eisenstein, montage is the mainspring of film. <?page no="211"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 211 If montage is to be compared with something, then a phalanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor: for, similarly, the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film. (134) Unlike a combustion engine, however, montage has the power to change and go beyond traditional time and space barriers. Since human consciousness does not usually follow a chronological order or a rigid time progression, the concept of timeand space-montage is used by authors in order to express this quality of the characters’ thoughts. The stream of consciousness requires chronological freedom and the possibility of intermingling past, present, and future. In his book on Virginia Woolf, David Daiches describes two different methods to achieve this goal in fiction, which Robert Humphrey then titled: “time-montage” (or superimposition of images) and “space-montage” (also referred to as “camera eye” and “multiple view”) (see Daiches 66-75 and Humphrey 50). The first occurs when the space is static and the time changes; i.e. a subject remains in the same place but his or her thoughts or consciousness “travels” in time. To give a practical example, a person is sitting on a park bench while thinking about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The second method is basically a reversal of the first: time remains the same but space changes; in other words, two or more people think about different things at the same time. This device is not necessarily used as a representation of the consciousness but is, nevertheless, frequently employed as an auxiliary technique in stream-of-consciousness literature (see Humphrey 50). The primary purpose of these two methods is the representation of coexistence and movement. Stream-of-consciousness writers seek to express the duality of life, namely the concurrence of inner and outer life. Virginia Woolf’s works are great examples of the utilization of these techniques. In the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway is introduced to the reader by the method of indirect interior monologue. Apart from a few brief paragraphs, the reader stays inside Clarissa’s mind for the entire first eleven pages (5-16). She is leisurely walking around London. The spatial situation can therefore be called static (in the sense that there are no sudden, abrupt changes but a consistent, natural “flow” of scenery). Yet, in her thinking, she arbitrarily and incoherently moves in time (Humphrey 50-51). A short summary of pages 5 to 9 clearly illustrates these time shifts: <?page no="212"?> 212 Cornelia Klecker # Description Time 1 Clarissa thinks about her party. near future 2 She considers what a fine morning it is. present 3 She remembers the nice days she spent at Bourton. past (over twenty years ago) 4 She remembers a conversation with Peter Walsh. past (one specific day) 5 She thinks about his arrival back in London. future (June or July) At this point space-montage, or multiple view, is briefly used as the narrative shifts from Clarissa’s consciousness to that of Scrope Purvis, who observes her crossing the street. 7 Clarissa contemplates her love of Westminster. present 8 She remembers a conversation about the war. past (previous evening) 9 She feels joyful about being in London. present Here, the flow of consciousness is briefly interrupted by a conversation with Hugh Whitbread. Afterwards time quickly shifts as Clarissa thinks about the Whitbreads: 10 Their arrival in London, indefinite past 11 Evelyn Whitbread’s health condition, present 12 Hugh’s coming to her party, immediate future 13 Richard’s and Peter Walsh’s jealousy of Hugh. far past 14 She recalls Peter and Hugh at Bourton. far past 15 Again she contemplates the fine weather. present This brief record of the first few pages demonstrates very clearly how time-montage works and how it influences the movement of the stream. Of course, free association also plays a considerable role in stream-ofconsciousness literature in general and in time-montage in particular. Clarissa’s thinking about the nice weather in the present reminds her of the fine weather she enjoyed at Bourton in the distant past, which trig- <?page no="213"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 213 gers a memory of Peter Walsh, who was also there at the time. Thinking about him, in turn, reminds her of his arrival in the near future. An object in the present can be associated with something in the past which, again, is linked with yet another thing in the future; and all these time shifts occur while the subject, the character, remains in the same space. As for space-montage, it is again Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway that is perhaps the most frequently cited example in modern fiction. In particular, the scene in which an airplane is skywriting illustrates very well the technique of multiple views: Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! every one looked up. [. . .] “Blaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awestricken voice. [. . .] “Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleepwalker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. [. . .] The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater- “That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley - or a dancer - “It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley- [. . .] It had gone; it was behind the clouds. [. . .] Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all the people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park. [. . .] Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband’s side on a seat in Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk, looked up. “Look, look, Septimus! ” she cried. [. . .] So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words. (23-5, my emphasis; see also Daiches 69 and Humphrey 54-5) While the reader remains inside Clarissa’s consciousness for most of the novel, five different perspectives are experienced, in the example above, within the span of only three pages. Mrs. Coates, Mrs. Bletchley, Mr. Bowley, Lucrezia Warren Smith, and, finally, Septimus are all observing the same exciting event trying, more or less enthusiastically, to decipher the plane’s writings on the sky. It is one single event and, therefore, one specific period of time. Yet, the perspective and consequently the space itself, changes from one character to the next, resulting in a prime example of space-montage in modernist fiction. Since, as previously mentioned, this method is not used in the passage of the novel to express the consciousness of a single person, the question arises why it is, nevertheless, often employed by stream-ofconsciousness writers. What Virginia Woolf achieved with her space- <?page no="214"?> 214 Cornelia Klecker montage is not only to provide the reader with a cross-section view of London by having several different characters respond to the same stimulus. She also links two of her central characters by means of time and space. Clarissa and Septimus have a very uncertain relationship and never meet in the novel. Thus, their only apparent connection is their response, i.e. their simultaneous reaction, to the same incident. This assumption is supported by the fact that the plane incident is “framed” by Clarissa’s interior monologue at the beginning and Septimus’s interior monologue at the end. An unlinked “cut” between her consciousness and his would appear rather awkward and, most likely, too abrupt for the reader to tolerate. However, the smooth transition created by a repeated shift of perspectives that are all linked by the same time entity makes the desired switch of consciousness acceptable and, perhaps, almost seamless for the reader (see Humphrey 56). While Virginia Woolf used space-montage in order to accommodate the reader, filmmakers employ similar techniques and this is especially the case in The Hours. Before approaching an in-depth analysis of timeand space-montage in this particular film, however, the basic structure of The Hours has to be explained. The center of this film, as well as Cunningham’s novel, is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In very plain terms, one could say that Mrs. Dalloway is about one day in the life of a woman. The Hours is, essentially, about one day in the lives of three women. These women are Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, who lives in 1923 Richmond, England, and is in the process of writing her famous novel Mrs. Dalloway. Laura Brown (played by Julianne Moore) is a mother and wife in 1951 Los Angeles, who is reading the novel. Finally, there is Clarissa Vaughan played by Meryl Streep. She lives in New York City in the year 2001 and, basically, resembles a modern Clarissa Dalloway. With these three women, the film provides representations of the writer, the reader, and the protagonist of the novel Mrs. Dalloway. The challenge that the filmmakers had to face in the adaptation of Cunningham’s novel was that the audience would be confronted with three different women living in completely different times and locations. Their individual stories happen miles and decades apart from each other, both spatially and temporally, and have no immediate connection to each other. Consequently, Stephen Daldry, the director, had to find ways to interrelate these three narratives in order to create some kind of unity. One technique that he employs is that of timeand spacemontage, which is extensively used throughout the film. Space-montage is used in a manner so artistic and effective that it has rarely been seen before - at least, in a mainstream Hollywood production. Even though this method is used repeatedly, perhaps the most striking example is the opening scene of the film right after the prologue where the viewer <?page no="215"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 215 watches Virginia Woolf writing her suicide note and drowning herself. Within a matter of eight minutes, Stephen Daldry manages to introduce all three stories and to accustom the viewer to frequent and drastic changes of seemingly unrelated characters as well as temporal and spatial settings. Before analyzing how this is achieved, the shift in space in this sequence has to be closely described: # Scene Description Space 1 title credit: The Hours (non-diegetic music starts) 2 a suburban street, Dan Brown gets out of the car, insert: Los Angeles, 1951; he enters the house carrying flowers, Laura is still in bed Los Angeles 3 Leonard Woolf is walking home, insert: Richmond, England, 1923; he enters home, talks to a servant, Virginia is still in bed England 4 subway station, insert: New York City, 2001; Sally Lester is walking home, enters the apartment, goes to bed, Clarissa is still in bed New York City 5 Laura in bed, alarm clock goes off Los Angeles 6 Virginia in bed, bells chime England 7 Clarissa in bed, alarm clock goes off, she goes into the bathroom, stands in front of a mirror, fixes her hair New York City 8 Virginia stands in front of a mirror, fixes her hair England 9 Clarissa looks in the mirror New York City 10 Virginia goes to the mirror, looks in it, bends forward to wash her face England 11 Clarissa straightens up after washing her face New York City 12 Laura reaches for a book - the title Mrs. Dalloway is clearly visible, Dan prepares breakfast, opens and closes all the cupboards in the kitchen Los Angeles 13 Clarissa opens the curtains New York City 14 Laura is still in bed Los Angeles 15 Clarissa stands in front of the window New York City 16 Virginia looks in a full-length mirror England 17 Laura sits in bed thinking Los Angeles 18 Virginia is thinking England 19 Clarissa is thinking, takes a vase with flowers New York City 20 Dan takes flowers Los Angeles 21 Virginia’s maid arranges flowers in a vase, England <?page no="216"?> 216 Cornelia Klecker Virginia talks to her husband (at this point the non-diegetic music stops), the narrative remains with Virginia for a while, she goes to her office and opens her notebook 22 Laura opens the book Los Angeles 23 Clarissa holds a notepad in her hand New York City 24 Virginia says, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” England 25 Laura reads, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Los Angeles 26 Clarissa says, “Sally, I think I’m gonna buy the flowers myself.” New York City (The Hours 00: 03: 27 - 00: 11: 18) In this opening sequence the audience has the chance to watch Clarissa nine times and Virginia and Laura eight times each. This makes a total of twenty-five shifts in space, and, in turn, in perspective, within only eight minutes. Under the premise that, even though the three protagonists live decades apart, their actions happen simultaneously (i.e. time is static) Daldry uses the same kind of space-montage that Virginia Woolf used in the skywriting scene. However, the argument that events that take place in 1923, 1951, and 2001 can, in fact, occur simultaneously has to be explained before the employment of space-montage can be further elaborated. While many critics argue that the novel is mostly a temporal medium since it can change the tense of verbs, cinema is usually considered to be an eminently spatial medium. Since film is made up of images, it has the freedom to move in space but is, at the same time, confined to the impression of “presentness,” as critics such as Seymour Chatman, David Bordwell, Brian McFarlane, and Roland Barthes have stated. Jakob Lothe points out in his Narrative in Fiction and Film that the source of film’s distinct presentation of time is essentially a paradox: while film presumes a spatial dimension as each single image is literally a spatial print, it simultaneously and instantly inflicts temporality on this very space by setting these prints in motion (62). This “presentness” of film versus the “pastness” of the novel is analogous to the often-discussed narratological opposition of “showing” versus “telling.” While in the novel time is narrated, temporality in film is presented. In his discussion of the manner of descriptions of visual details (in literature as well as in film), Chatman comes to the conclusion that film is incapable of describing but always presents, or, in his own words, “depicts” (408, original emphasis). Film, however, cannot depict action in the past since the story literally unfolds in front of our eyes during viewings: “[P]ictures have no tenses,” claimed Béla Balázs. “They show only the present - <?page no="217"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 217 they cannot express either a past or a future tense” (120). Georges- Albert Astre agrees: “[F]ilm necessarily exists in a continual present [. . .] it confers on the past (indeed, on the future) the authenticity of the actual moment in the present” (143). The same holds true for The Hours. Although the 20s and 50s seem to be far in the past when compared to the year 2001, the stories of Virginia and Laura are not presented as flashbacks or memories: their day unfolds presently in front of the viewers’ eyes. Even Clarissa’s time setting, which would most likely be regarded as “present,” is in fact also already past in relation to whenever the film is viewed. Considering this, the innate immediacy of film or the “impression of presentness” as Balázs calls it, becomes very obvious. So, when Clarissa, Laura, and Virginia get up in the morning, they do so at exactly the same time regardless of the year they live in. In view of that, the technique Daldry uses in the opening sequence is clearly that of space-montage or multiple view. Time is static but space moves from England to Los Angeles to New York City and, thus, the perspective shifts from Virginia’s to Laura’s and Clarissa’s, respectively. If a period in time is paused for an exploration of various perspectives and different elements, time has been spatialized. Joseph Frank describes this phenomenon as follows: For the duration of the scene, at least, the time-flow of the narrative is halted: attention is fixed on the interplay of relationships within the limited time-area. These relationships are juxtaposed independently of the progress of the narrative; and the full significance of the scene is given only by the reflexive relations among the units of meaning. (44) This juxtaposition, which is of course employed in montage, enables the film-maker to spatially organize events in time. Through this process they lose their inexorable, chronological, and irreversible qualities and can, thus, if the director so desires, take on the appearance of simultaneity. In his fourth volume of The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser explains this feature of film as follows: It is the simultaneous nearness and remoteness of things - their nearness to one another in time and their distance from one another in space - that constitutes the spatio-temporal element, that two-dimensionality of time, which is the real medium of the film and the basic category of its worldpicture. (154) Daldry reinforces this sense of simultaneity by having the three different stories begin rather alike: the husband (or girlfriend) comes home, the <?page no="218"?> 218 Cornelia Klecker female protagonist is still in bed, some kind of bell rings, the three women get up. Furthermore, the brushing of hair, the washing of the face, the image in the mirror, flower arrangements - all those features are repeated. The Hours creates the same effect onscreen that Mrs. Dalloway creates on the page. Similar to the way Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus were interrelated by space-montage, Clarissa, Virginia, and Laura are linked by the two entities of time and space. Moreover, the viewer will be, for the rest of the film, much more comfortable with the frequent interand crosscuts between the three stories. Although this type of space-montage occurs frequently throughout the film, it is most importantly used right at the beginning. The audience needs to be prepared for the fact that they are dealing with three, more or less, separate stories. Had Daldry kept the structure of the novel (i.e. twenty-three chapters, each chapter dealing exclusively with only one character), the film would have turned out rather differently. After the prologue in which Virginia’s suicide is described, the movie would go on, perhaps, for about ten minutes setting up Clarissa’s life in New York. Only then would the camera eye cut back to Virginia, but to a different time than before, establishing her living conditions in England. Finally, quite some time into the film, the audience would encounter the third character, Laura, for the very first time. If the film had been edited that way, viewers would probably be comparatively confused by the shifts in time and space and wonder how the three stories are related to one another. They might even be bothered by the sudden changes and fail to identify with any character. However, due to Daldry’s skillful utilization of space-montage, the three characters, their time and place settings, and a connection (if only superficial) between their stories is established immediately. Thus, the viewer is ready to accept the shifts in the three narratives later on and will not question them. Having been introduced to this concept, the audience will likely start looking for and noticing even more subtle similarities and parallels more frequently themselves. Apart from space-montage, Stephen Daldry also used time-montage in The Hours, but much less frequently. One of the very few examples is the sequence where Richard, played by Ed Harris, remembers his mother: <?page no="219"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 219 # Scene Description Time 1 close-up of Laura (Richard’s mother) in a wedding dress, Richard sits in his apartment and looks out of the window, voice-over: a boy screaming, “Mummy! ” present 2 Richard (as a boy in 1951) bangs against the window screaming, “Mummy! ” (same voice as in the voice-over before) past 3 big close-up of Richard (back in 2001) crying present (The Hours 01: 28: 27 - 01: 28: 59) The type of time-montage that is used in this sequence resembles exactly the kind that comprises most of Mrs. Dalloway. Similar to the way Mrs. Dalloway travels to the past by recalling Peter Walsh, Richard moves years back due to his memories of his mother. Time changes, yet space is static: Mrs. Dalloway remains in London just as Richard stays in his apartment. What was done here in the film is a typical “flashback.” Instead of reading or “hearing” the thoughts and memories of a character, as happens in a novel, the movie can show these thoughts and memories. Nevertheless, both types of media use the same kind of montage in order to express stream-of-consciousness. While the time and space concepts in the two scenes analyzed above are rather clear-cut and obvious, there is one sequence in the film in which these lines become blurred. This sequence, in which the audience sees frequent crosscuts between Laura in the hotel room with the initial intention of killing herself, and Virginia thinking about the destiny of the protagonist of her novel while with her sister, niece, and nephews, could be considered the climax of the film, or at least one of the high points. The decision about the life and death of two (theoretically even three) characters is taken within a very short period of time - Laura Brown’s, Mrs. Dalloway’s (the fictional character of Virginia’s novel), and, since her life resembles Mrs. Dalloway’s, also Clarissa Vaughan’s: <?page no="220"?> 220 Cornelia Klecker # Scene Description Time Space 1 Laura is in the hotel room, unpacks her prescription drugs present Los Angeles 2 cake on the kitchen table past (some hours before) Los Angeles 3 Laura takes her book out of the bag, reads, voice-over (Virginia’s voice) reads some lines of the book present and past Los Angeles 4 Virginia sits in her office, the voice-over continues present or past (? ) England 5 Laura reads, still the same voice-over present or future (? ) Los Angeles 6 Virginia says a line that is a continuation of the voiceover present or past (? ) England 7 close-up of Laura reading present Los Angeles 8 close-up of Virginia thinking, her sister starts talking, asks, “What are you thinking about? ” present England 9 Laura turns the page, closes the book, takes the drugs into her hands present Los Angeles 10 Virginia is still lost in thought, her little niece sits on her lap present England 11 Laura lies on the bed, the hotel room is flooded present Los Angeles 12 Virginia says, “I was going to kill my heroine but I’ve changed my mind.” present England 13 Laura wakes up and cries present Los Angeles (The Hours 01: 05: 02 - 01: 07: 53) At first, the device used is once again time-montage. Similar to the way Mrs. Dalloway remembers Peter Walsh and Richard remembers his mother, Laura thinks about the cake she made only a few hours before. Space stays the same (Laura remains in the hotel room) but time changes as she contemplates the past. Because film is a visual medium, the viewer can actually see the cake but is naturally aware of its remoteness in time. However, the subsequent montage of Laura’s and Virginia’s narratives appears to be much more complicated and difficult to classify as either timeor space-montage. The main reason for this is that, for the first time in the film, one spatio-temporal entity interferes with another, i.e. Virginia’s rare voice-over is not restricted to her own narrative set- <?page no="221"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 221 ting but continues through Laura’s as well. This diegetic transgression opens the possibility of interpreting the sequence and its time levels in different ways. Without the voice-over, the montage in this scene could be clearly analyzed as an instance of multiple perspectives. Time remains the same while Virginia, presumably, is thinking about the same lines that Laura is reading, and space shifts between the two characters. Oddly enough, however, the very fact that Virginia’s voice is present throughout Laura’s shots appears to emphasize its happening in the past. Seeing the reader while hearing the writer is a device frequently used in film and it always implies the coexistence of two time levels - the present and the past. The same holds true for the film version of The Hours. Even though viewers have been experiencing Virginia’s narrative as occurring in the present, in this particular scene a fact that is obvious in real life but was previously ignored or circumvented in the film becomes abundantly clear; namely, that the novel was written before it is read. When the narrative changes from Laura’s space to Virginia’s, the time level can be interpreted in two ways. One possibility is that Virginia remains in the past as experienced in the shots before. That would suggest that Laura occupies the present level and that due to her reading, time shifts to the past - all the way back to the time when the novel was written. The other possibility is basically the reverse. In this case, Virginia’s setting would be defined as present and time would shift with her thoughts - the lines of her book that would be read by Laura - to the future. Either way, only due to the voice-over, the filmic device employed changes from spatialization of time to time-montage, where space remains with one of the characters and time shifts with the other. Only when the voice-over stops do the two time levels appear to be parallel again, as they are throughout the rest of the film. Perspectives shift from Virginia to Laura; it almost seems as if the one thinks what the other experiences. Consequently, Stephen Daldry has used spacemontage again. In conclusion, in the film adaptation of The Hours, director Stephen Daldry employed the kind of montage frequently used in stream-ofconsciousness literature. Therefore, the model of timeand spacemontage that David Daiches established when analyzing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway can be successfully applied to the film and help to explain the framework of the adaptation. While both time-montage and multiple view are employed, the latter is used much more extensively throughout the film. The motivation behind the filmmaker’s choice to draw upon space-montage can be explained by the basic arrangement of the story. Just as Virginia Woolf connected two of her characters, Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus, in her novel, Stephen Daldry interrelated his three protagonists, who all exist in separate, locally and temporally dis- <?page no="222"?> 222 Cornelia Klecker tinguished settings, by the two entities of time and space. Furthermore, by spatializing time almost from the beginning of the film, Daldry accomplishes two objectives: he introduces at once three characters and three different stories that are seemingly unrelated and he prepares the audience for future crosscutting between those narratives, thereby making it easier for the audience to follow and accept these constant shifts. However, the last sequence-analysis illustrates that the lines between timeand space-montage are sometimes blurred and cannot always be clearly distinguished. As soon as one timeand space-level overlaps and interferes with another, more than one interpretation is possible. Furthermore, in this discussion of three different works - a novel, its adaptation into another novel and the filmic adaptation of the latter - it becomes apparent how fruitful an intermedial as well as transmedial approach can be in the present theoretical landscape. Moreover, a sideby-side analysis of a canonized classic and a contemporary mainstream film helps to defamiliarize and, thus, renegotiates traditional sources. <?page no="223"?> Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours 223 References Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. Trans. Edith Bone. London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1952. Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Ed. Raymond Williams. Glasgow: Fontana/ Collins, 1977. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. 1985. London: Routledge, 1995. Chatman, Seymour. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa).” Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 403-19. Daiches, David. Virginia Woolf: The Makers of Modern Literature. Norfolk: New Directions Books, 1942. Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 4th edition. Ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 127-39. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in the Modern Novel.” Critiques and Essays in Modern Fiction: 1920-1951. Ed. John W. Aldridge. New York: Ronald Press, 1952. 43-66. Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art: Naturalism, Impressionism, the Film Age. Trans. Stanley Godman. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. The Hours. Dir. Stephen Daldry. Scr. David Hare. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Julian Moore, and Meryl Streep. Paramount Pictures, 2002. Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel: A Study of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, William Faulkner, and Others. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Lothe, Jakob. Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction. 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Spencer, Sharon. Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Penguin, 1996. <?page no="225"?> Pathetic Copycats: Female Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films Julia Straub This essay explores the representation of copied victims in David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Two characters, Twin Peaks’ Madeleine Ferguson and Vertigo’s Judy Barton, are the focus of my discussion. They are referred to as “copycats” since they temporarily adopt the identity of a dead original victim: “Laura Palmer” and “Madeleine Elster” respectively. Victimhood seems to be an attractive option for them because it gives them, in various forms, emotional gratification. However, both Judy Barton and Madeleine Ferguson copy originals that do not exist: the original victims are ultimately constructs which are reflective of other people’s desires and projections. The more prominent claim this essay makes is that the copied victim represents the postmodernist radicalization of the victim stereotype that is common to traditional melodrama. Melodrama thrives on the pathos it generates with the help of visual means of expression. The copied victim doubles this effect of visualizing meaning and embodies the close link between melodramatic affect and the visual as it has shaped melodramatic cinema in the twentieth century. Two commonly held assumptions about melodrama are the starting point for this essay. First, the genre of melodrama - films, plays and texts alike - puts the victim centre-stage by focusing on the victim’s point of view (Elsaesser 185). Second, melodrama is a “mute” genre, because it is based on texts whose expressive value language by itself cannot satisfactorily deal with (see Brooks 56-57). This means that melodrama targets the eye: it operates with expressive strategies that are not verbalized and it aims to cause a strong visual effect. In this essay, I will enlarge these observations and elaborate on victimhood, more spe- The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 225-237. <?page no="226"?> 226 Julia Straub cifically female victimhood, as an attractive option in melodramatic films: an option attractive to the extent that it invites reduplication. The examples upon which I will draw, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91), suggest that the transformation into a copy of the victim endows the female characters with a momentum otherwise unavailable to them. It becomes rather desirable to be in the victim’s shoes, if just for a moment. As a matter of fact, melodrama does not require highly individual forms of characterization: identification with the victim “depends to a large extent on the aptness of the iconography (‘the visualisation’) and on the quality (complexity, subtlety, ambiguity) of the orchestration for what are trans-individual, popular mythological . . . experiences and plot structures” (Elsaesser 176). The copied victim thus satiates a visual hunger. This appears to be a logical response to the genre’s excess of expressive content: after all the act of doubling a body also means a doubling of its immanence. In literature, the reduplication of (female) characters is obviously not a phenomenon that is exclusive to modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Romantic writing and the genre of the Gothic novel abound with such Poe-esque doubling effects. In terms of cinema history, one would probably think of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) along with Vertigo as classical works establishing this theme and making it available for postmodernist appropriation (Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys [1995]), for example, pays homage to Vertigo, and Laura is an important intertext for Twin Peaks). In several respects we can think of melodramatic films as products of modernist aesthetics that were carried over into postmodernism. My hypothesis is that the female copy-victim takes such typologizing strategies, which are inscribed into the genre, to extremes. This can be seen as the most radical version of the victim stereotype. The copy-victim exhausts the visually expressive and affective potential of melodrama and both literalizes and visualizes the prominence of the body as a site of meaning, especially in this genre. Having a copy of a possibly lost, dead or otherwise unattainable “original” return - and the same applies to doubles, twins, revenants, etc - duplicates both the physical presence (respectively confirms the absence) of the victim and our emotional response. Neither the effect nor the affect that such copies or doubles create emerges from a verbal discourse. Quite the contrary: clear visual signs and codes are required in order to ensure recognizability, to confirm identity or respectively detect difference, and to elicit the kind of empathy both from characters and the audience on which melodrama feeds. The two film examples I will discuss are not purely melodramatic works. In fact, Vertigo would count for most as a psychological thriller or a film noir, while Twin Peaks, the series, is a complex, multi-layered <?page no="227"?> Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 227 and highly intertextual take on various TV and film formats, a “carnival of genres” (Chion 108), “combining the situations of a film noir and a melodramatic television series” (Chion 107), and refracting these genres through the lens of postmodernist parody (see Richardson 79). In Twin Peaks, Lynch even parodies the genre of the soap opera specifically by including a series within the series, entitled “Invitation to Love.” This shows how difficult it is in the context of postmodernism to account for the uses of melodrama, but this is a point to which I will return below. All in all, it seems advisable to think of melodrama as a mode as well as a genre. Viewed as a mode, one can acknowledge significant melodramatic elements on the level of plot and character development as well as that of expressivity, especially when genre boundaries are blurred and genre conventions challenged. Twin Peaks, not all the episodes of which were directed by Lynch himself, was first shown on US television in the early 1990s and reached immediate cult status. It was followed up by a film, conceived as a prequel, entitled Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me in 1992. The plot of the series unfolded from the death of a pretty young woman called Laura Palmer. Laura Palmer became an iconic victim, “dead, wrapped in plastic” (a reference to her beautiful water corpse which is discovered in the pilot film) circulated as a standard quotation, and Angelo Badalamenti’s film music, most notably “Laura’s Theme,” an unmistakable marker of the victim, evoked the presence of the dead Laura at moments of heightened emotional suspense (see Richardson 85-87). The discovery of Laura’s dead body by the lakeshore leads to an FBI investigation conducted by the charismatic special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan), who travels to the small Northwestern town of Twin Peaks. What begins as a shocking, yet still routine, murder investigation turns into a journey into the heart of small town American darkness, suggesting that behind the Lynchian picket fence one finds a world of corruption, drug abuse, domestic violence, incest and prostitution, with no prospect of moral redemption. Laura’s death leaves her family and friends devastated. Her cousin Madeleine Ferguson arrives in Twin Peaks to offer comfort to her aunt and uncle. There is a strong physical resemblance between Laura and her cousin, even though Laura is the shining blonde and Madeleine Ferguson the bespectacled brunette; in fact, both were played by the same actor, Sheryl Lee. Madeleine is eventually killed by Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), Laura’s father, because she looks too much like Laura. Leland, it will become clear at the end of Season Two, was possessed by an evil demon called “ BOB .” In Season One, though, Madeleine appears as the sober and sweet version of Laura’s twisted character. In episode six, Madeleine meets two of Laura’s friends, Donna (Moira Kelly) and James (James Marshall), to <?page no="228"?> 228 Julia Straub listen to secret audiotapes that Laura sent to her psychiatrist Dr Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), who is at this point a potential suspect. It is a notable scene because her friends listen in on her secret thoughts, completely unsettled by the disturbing revelations that destroy their fond idea of their friend. Laura talks freely about her irresistible impact on men, which only reinforces the contrast between her and the more modest Madeleine. This scene then paves the way for a trick the three play on Jacoby, who is lured out of his house so they can search for possible clues, and for two noteworthy scenes of recognition. The shy and rather lustreless Madeleine is the bait: she dresses up as Laura and puts on a blonde wig. Due to her transformation, she is able to live for a moment the magnetic radiance of her beautiful cousin. Her identification with the victim turns her into the center of attention, allowing her to receive the kind of male admiration she is not used to, and which her cousin Laura monopolized. Her effect on James and Dr Jacoby, who both had been in love with Laura, is one of entire bewilderment. Both their encounters with Laura’s double are brief, but orchestrated by Lynch in interesting ways. When James meets her in episode six, Madeleine walks towards him slowly, gradually emerging into visibility, accompanied by Laura’s theme music. Soft-hearted James’ first reaction is to dispense with his disbelief, his facial expression betrays that he is being duped for a fraction of time, but then he reminds himself of the masquerade of which he is an initiate. Dr Jacoby’s spotting of Laura is arranged differently: this scene, which takes place in episode seven, includes different levels of observation and is a veritable cat-and-mouse game, with Jacoby watching Laura while he himself is being watched by - supposedly - the possessed Leland Palmer. Jacoby’s secret observation of Laura is driven by mistrust: he sneaks up on her because he believes that he is being set up. The encircling, unsteady movement of the camera adds to this stalking effect. When Laura turns around to meet his eye, Jacoby’s response to the copy-victim is the inverse of James’: his initial incredulity gives way to complete rapture on his beholding and recognizing Laura. In both cases the gaze of the beholder feasts on the spectacle that the copy provides. The director indulges the affective quality of these moments by prolonging the sequences of seeing, understanding and emotional response that follow. Laura Palmer was the American “über-victim,” mainly because she was so readily readable as such. “Moral legibility” has been identified by Peter Brooks (5) and Linda Williams (52) as essential to the genre. It refers to the interpretability of victimhood, which is ensured by the use of certain moral codes. These codes need to be easily decipherable and, importantly, reflected by certain visual means: Laura is the dutiful daughter, the Meals-on-Wheels volunteer, the exemplary student and <?page no="229"?> Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 229 friend, and she is also the soft-featured, angelic blonde whose looks symbolize innocence. Melodramatic victimhood depends on theatricality, which in this case is, according to Linda Williams, “a public testimony to an elusive virtue” (81). However, unsurprisingly for anybody familiar with his work, Lynch undermines this equation between victimhood and innocence, villainy and guilt, throughout Twin Peaks, as well as in many of his other works. The grand narrative of virtue and innocence rewarded is deconstructed in Lynch’s world, where the detective work that we witness does not set right and wrong apart, but brings about a gradual ambiguation. The viewer does not receive the gratification of seeing vice punished and virtue, if not compensated, then at least glorified. “Lynchtown” is the “base camp for an adventure of the imagination,” “a façade with nothing to hide” (Chion 78). There is a clear line of descent that runs from Twin Peaks to my second example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In Vertigo, Madeleine Elster becomes the love interest of policeman Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart). Ferguson is hired for private investigations by a friend, who wants him to keep an eye on his wife: Madeleine being allegedly suicidal. On one occasion, Scottie saves her from drowning and eventually falls in love with Madeleine, given her beautiful looks, her somewhat enigmatic background and her apparent need of protection. However, Madeleine’s death wish, supposedly inspired by her obsession with her greatgrandmother’s suicide, is stronger and, at her second attempt, Scottie fails to come to her rescue. He suffers a mental breakdown following her death. He then encounters and befriends a woman called Judy Barton, who strongly resembles Madeleine. What he is unaware of at this point is that all along Judy Barton has been the Madeleine Elster he loved. His friend Gavin Elster killed his real wife, and Judy Barton stood in as a fake Madeleine Elster who was designed to catch Scottie’s attention and was meant to “die” in a way credible enough to cover up her husband’s killing of the real Madeleine Elster. Only when he sees Judy Barton wearing Madeleine’s necklace does it dawn upon Scottie that he himself is a victim: the victim of a scam and his own emotions. This is Scottie’s moment of melodramatic recognition. Judy’s moment of revelation happens when Scottie takes her out, early on in their courtship, to the restaurant where he had first seen her in the role of Madeleine. Scottie ogles a blonde woman who walks past their table and who resembles his Madeleine, wearing the kind of grey two-piece suit that he admired on the latter. It is a fascinating, melodramatic scene. Judy now understands what lies at the heart of Scottie’s detachment from her, of which she had a painful premonition: his desire for somebody else, who is paradoxically herself. <?page no="230"?> 230 Julia Straub She immediately gauges her loss. Melodrama thrives on exactly this moment of epistemic transferral and the way it seizes the body and the face. The whole drama of love denied is readable in Judy’s facial expressions. The look on Judy’s face presages an internal conflict between love and self-renunciation whose expressiveness requires no single spoken word. Subsequently, and ever so reluctantly, Judy yields to Scottie’s desire and adopts Madeleine’s looks, from tip to toe, thereby reverting to a role she had excelled in before. After her makeover is completed, each detail of her looks adapted, each strand of her bleached hair put into its right place, she appears as a fuzzy half-light epiphany to the bedazzled Scottie in a way that leaves no doubt as to which model Lynch had in mind when resurrecting Laura for her admirers. For Scottie, who at this point does not know that Judy Barton is an actress who has been leading him on, she becomes the double of the “original” Madeleine Elster, and thereby confirms the existence of the lost original. Yet, for the actress Judy Barton, this reversion to the role of Madeleine is not so much an act of copying, but one of repetition: she repeats her own previous enactment of this figure to the point that over-precision is being produced, which culminates when Judy dies the same death as the real Madeleine (see Bronfen 12-13). Judy’s willingness to become the copy of the Madeleine that Scottie craves may appear pathetic to us. “Pathetic,” as used in the title of this essay, can obviously have two meanings in contemporary usage. We can refer to somebody as pathetic, when we think of him or her as acting in a way that is emotionally or morally feeble. Judy’s decision to forsake her individuality, to become a mere copycat for the love of a man, certainly appears pathetic in this sense. Yet there is also a “pathetic” quality about Judy that inspires a feeling of empathy or fellow-feeling, brought about by the spectacle of somebody else’s suffering. Here “pathos” needs to be seen as an expressive mode used to depict feelings. As Franco Moretti states in his “Kindergarten” article, the moments that make us cry when we read a book or watch a film are those when awareness of the irreversibility of time kicks in. Finally we understand that somebody’s desire is futile, finally we understand that people’s misfortune may be the merely contingent result of bad timing (Moretti speaks of a “rhetoric of too late,” 159). Add to this the feeling that somebody is being wronged and an injustice is being done, and you can account for the emotional impact of melodramatic pathos. Judy’s unconditional love for Scottie (which is tainted by her involvement in acts of deceit carried out behind his back) versus his Pygmalionesque desire to sculpt her (the cold-heartedness of which is mitigated by the sincerity of his feelings for Madeleine Elster) can be seen as ironic and pathetic at the same time. Both irony and pathos hover in this precarious gap be- <?page no="231"?> Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 231 tween reality on the one hand and, on the other, the emotional investments that a character is making: melodramatic pathos is derived from the incompatibility of past and present, the asynchronicity or varying intensity of desires. 1 Based on what has been argued so far, I would like to discuss two observations. I thereby hope to forge a connection with melodrama’s visual quality, taking into consideration that its popularity during the twentieth century in different medial forms is owed exactly to this: its capacity to stimulate the (mind’s) eye. The first point I would like to make is that there are no originals in these processes of reduplication. Neither in Madeleine’s nor in Laura’s case is there an “objective difference” between the copy and the copied. Or, as Jean Baudrillard would put it, the “signs do not lean to one side or another” (20). This effect is explicable in terms of the cast: both Laura/ Madeleine and Madeleine/ Judy are played by the same actress. But there is an interesting divergence as regards the copying pattern and the uses to which the copy is put. In Vertigo, the identity of the “original” and fake is made known to the viewer early on, when Madeleine puts her past down in writing; Scottie comes to an understanding of this only later in the film. Yet the film steers towards the climactic moment of Judy’s utter metamorphosis and revels in the exactness of the copy. In contrast to this, Twin Peaks’ Madeleine Ferguson, as she gets out of the car to meet James, is evidently a fake Laura, at least in the eyes of the viewers: her clothes do not fit and it is apparent that she is wearing a wig. Interestingly, despite the obvious resemblance, she does not strike the viewer as a copy at all or, if so, as a bad one. However, on the intradiegetic level, she is a powerful copy and the effect she has on her beholders is one of authenticity. The question of who is the copy, and who the original, is of even greater complexity. As Elisabeth Bronfen has pointed out in her discussion of Vertigo, there is no original lover called “Madeleine” whose identity Judy seeks to adopt (6). Madeleine is a product of Scottie’s imagination, a fictional construct whose sole point of reference is not a real human being but the portrait of a woman long dead, that of Madeleine Elster’s mysterious great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. Very similarly, Madeleine Ferguson copies Laura Palmer. But who is Laura Palmer? She is not a source victim, but a simulacrum in that she “has no relation to any reality whatsoever” (Baudrillard 6). Throughout the Twin Peaks series, Laura exists as a framed portrait, as a woman captured on video 1 As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, pathos “results from non-communication or silence made eloquent” and originates from “highly emotional situations,” where “an ironic discontinuity of feeling or a qualitative difference in intensity” prevails (186-187). <?page no="232"?> 232 Julia Straub and audio tapes and in photographs; she even returns as a name echoed by a bird. Laura “serves as a structuring absence that organizes the desire of the other characters and the spectator (who wants both to understand Laura and to find the solution to her murder)” (McGowan 130). But these mediated signs of her presence only mark her absence. She is a victim who is hollowed out from the inside, endowed with the beautiful looks of a Hollywood star, appearing as the heiress in a tradition of victimized and/ or women and icons. “Laura” itself is a significant name, recalling a long poetic tradition of woman’s veneration. Lynch’s creation of Laura Palmer shows that victimhood in melodrama does not require particularity or psychological depth, but rather a generic appearance, an iconographical resemblance and recognizability, coupled with a moral legibility that allows us to see victimhood without it having to be articulated verbally. 2 Both Laura Palmer and Madeleine Elster - dead, absent and ultimately insubstantial creatures - possess astounding radiance and vitality. Like Aristotle’s unmoved mover, they cause bustling action while remaining invariably inactive. This paradox of activity in passivity tends to obscure the tragedy of their own victimhood: the victim’s ordeal is of less importance than the narrative provided by the investigative work it entails. The victim’s actual life is gradually transformed into an afterlife with its own dynamic. This also explains, at least partly, why victimhood seems so attractive to others. The copy-cats aim to fill the void caused by the absence of the original victim and want to be drawn into this afterlife but, the further they move, the more likely they are to become victims themselves. Both Judy Barton and Madeleine Ferguson lose their lives eventually and pay the full price for becoming agents in the victim’s narrative. Vertigo and Twin Peaks represent victimhood not as static and stigmatic. Instead, it is a shifting state, allied to power and its loss in complex ways. Neither in Vertigo nor in Twin Peaks is it rigidly gendered. Without a doubt, Madeleine Elster and Laura Palmer are conspicuous, iconic female victims towards whom the copy-cats, the other characters and the audience gravitate. But upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that men can be victims, too. 3 Scottie Ferguson and Dale Cooper’s emotional investments and their quests for knowledge 2 It would be interesting to compare the melodramatic dimension of Twin Peaks the TV series with Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me. Whereas the series revolves around Laura, the ever absent and still present objectified victim, the film has been considered one of Lynch’s boldest artistic moves, given its subjectivization of his cult victim, showing her acting in the various roles she played, none of which manage to define or substantiate her (see McGowan 131). 3 I would like to thank Jörg Metelmann for his observations on male victimhood in Vertigo. <?page no="233"?> Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 233 make them vulnerable and manipulable. Positions can shift easily once victimhood exceeds the stereotypical “villainy versus heroism” dichotomy, and comes to be defined more fluidly as a loss of power and (self-)control. It is worth dwelling on the appeal of victimhood, which makes it a state to be aspired to or copied, which brings me to my second observation. 4 Judy Barton and Madeleine Ferguson approximate an experience that would remain unattainable to them if it were not for their transformation into somebody else: the sexual allure of Laura Palmer and Scottie’s love, respectively. In the absence of the “real thing,” the appeal of victimhood seems to lie at least partly in its making available seconddegree emotions. This kind of experience by proxy emblematizes the mimetic principles of drama in general, but very specifically those of melodrama. Just like these copycats, recipients are keen to be moved by emotions destined for or felt by somebody else, on screen and on stage. This may well happen for cathartic reasons, but it may also happen because this second-degree feeling is a rare emotional stimulus. If melodrama is, as Linda Williams has argued, the central mode of American cinema in the twentieth century (42-43), thriving within and catering to the needs of a consumerist society, then its popularity stems perhaps from its capacity to offer us, more so than other genres, goods that money cannot buy. Melodrama has many such appealing goods in store because it functions under the assumption that, behind the surface of reality, we can discern some moral value and integrity. Melodrama retains an atavistic promise of emotional wholeness: its moral legibility allows justice to be done and virtue to be rewarded and, in the absence of such consolation or happy endings, at least restores dignity to defeat and loss. Melodrama reintroduces into modern society narratives of innocence, justice, and moral heroism, which may no longer steer us towards a higher power of transcendent good, but offer the prospect of salvation within the humble sphere of domesticity: “Melodrama represents both the urge towards resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms” (Brooks 16). Melodramatic films catapult us back into an experience of the world where people are still who they are, where names mean something, where values still apply, and where there is a clear line between good and evil. But underlying 4 Melodramatic victimhood obviously needs to be set in a wider frame of injustice: the wrong that is done to people does not have to be romantic. In fact, concern with social injustice is often condensed so as to make it fit into narrower domestic spheres, as Thomas Elsaesser has argued in his work on melodrama and the family. “Primarily ideological conflicts” tend to be interiorized and personalized and microcosmically enacted in family settings (168). <?page no="234"?> 234 Julia Straub this impulse there has been, ever since its early days in eighteenthcentury Europe, mistrust in verbal communication, a linguistic scepticism avant la lettre. 5 Melodrama’s visual strategies and the figurability of its subjects have always contributed to what Peter Brooks refers to as an “aesthetic of embodiment” (17). Peter Brooks’ study obviously deals with melodrama as a stage form flourishing in nineteenth-century France. Amendments and concessions need to be made when applying his concepts to US cinema. Classical stage melodrama traditionally uses “frozen” moments, such as tableaux and pantomime, especially at moments when language fails: “. . . melodrama so often, particularly in climactic moments and in extreme situations, has recourse to non-verbal means of expressing its meanings” (Brooks 56). 6 It repositions the graphic sign at eye-level with the verbal. 7 Language is de-prioritized and becomes exchangeable or entwined with other forms of expression, such as music, gesture or facial movements. Language can be required to clarify a gesture, but gestures can also be used to clarify linguistic communication. The genre of film has the advantage that its means of production allow more subtle arrangements than those of stage drama, where visual signs ought to be obvious and eye-catching. Still, the visual presence of objects, gestures and actions can have a significant impact of reinforcement or clarification where the orchestration of the plot or characters is concerned. In Vertigo, for example, Scottie and Judy are placed in front of a mirror in the clothes shop to which Scottie has taken Judy in order to dress her up as Madeleine. It is a moment of heightened tension for the two: Scottie’s impatient demand that Judy finish her radical metamorphosis into Madeleine within a single day reveals to her the pathology of his desire, while she herself is too desperate to resist. Their painful encounter in front of the mirror as he urges her to keep to his plan is enacted by a strained pose, which confirms what the audience already knows: that their relationship is deeply flawed, since it is based on wrong assumptions. However, the mirror also becomes a doubling device, which literally reflects the phoniness of the copied emotions hold- 5 Melodrama seems to blithely perpetuate the kind of nostalgia that Baudrillard condemns as a sorry placeholder for “when the real is no longer what it was” (6), and could be - on a more critical note - said to share with political order or ideology the desire to “reinject the real and the referential everywhere” (22). 6 One reason for this overt visual component of melodrama is historical: melodrama emerged in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and, being thought of as a democratic response to the predominantly aristocratic conflicts carried out on the classicist stage, was destined for an audience that was not necessarily literate (see Singer 132). 7 As Caroline Dunant has put it, in melodrama visuality carries the full weight of meaning, to the point that spectacle is more important than speech (83). <?page no="235"?> Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 235 ing these two characters together. More than just a prop, the mirror clarifies their body language and makes their conflict visible: they are just a reflection of a couple that itself was never real. Melodrama is a sensationalist mode, which makes use of easily readable, audience-friendly visual codes and tries to grip the reader through different channels of perception. In fact, its proneness to sensationalism explains its prominence early in the twentieth century, leaving its imprint on modernist and postmodernist culture. The consciousness of people’s vulnerability in the modern city that melodramatic films reflect (Singer 74) feeds into this together with a fascination with the contiguity of (modern and urban) life as an inexhaustible source of pathos (Singer 90). But the overarching reason for its popularity in US popular culture from the late nineteenth century onwards may well be its capacity to team up language with non-verbal expressive means. Lighting, montage, decor, acting style and music are more than accompaniments in melodrama, both on stage and in film, but important compositional devices, adding the “melos” to “drama.” Victimhood in melodrama is thus less a matter of complex verbalized discourse, but rather something that needs to be rendered visible on people’s faces or their bodies. This explains, too, why in melodramatic film scenes the victim’s body parts are frequently shown synecdochically, often coupled with subjective use of the camera, and close-ups of the victim’s face. The copy-victim, as I have shown, is the epitome of this play with bodily, and thus visual, immanence: it doubles the impact of the victim’s body, reconfirming its presence as a site of meaning. In melodrama, meaning tends to be literalized and visualized, and the act of copying the victim’s body means doubling exactly these processes. In a way, these copycats mirror the dilemma that postmodern melodrama incurs. It had been suggested above that an obvious way to interpret figures such as Madeleine Ferguson and Judy Barton would be to see them as simulacra, as copies without an original. However, melodrama stands in a vexed relationship both with modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Given its emphasis on the material and the unambiguous, its antiintellectual quality, it has been viewed as resistant or even averse to postmodernist theory (see Williams 169). There is perhaps more willed unruliness in this genre than is commonly assumed. As Susan Gledhill points out, the melodramatic subject refuses to accept the gap between the self and representation opened up by modernism and widened by postmodernism, and forces its reality on to the audience: “Taking its stand in the material world of everyday reality and lived experience, and acknowledging the limitations of the conventions of language and repre- <?page no="236"?> 236 Julia Straub sentation, [melodrama] proceeds to force into aesthetic presence identity, value and plenitude of meaning” (33). 8 This could well be considered an attitude of “So what! ” as Gledhill goes on to argue (33), a demonstrative gesture which is even doubled in the films I have discussed. In this sense, the copycats I have discussed in this essay are far less “pathetic” than one would expect. In fact, it seems that they ask us to reconceptualize the merits of victimhood and thereby to go beyond the usual patterns of rehabilitation, such as highlighting the moral victory that is sometimes said to belong to the defeated. The impact of the victim’s visual presence and the different ways in which it can be instrumentalized - copying being just one of them - then seem to be less a mere straining after effects, than a means of empowerment. This opens up further avenues of investigation. What is certain is that the complexity of melodramatic victimhood emerges fully when the genre’s intense engagement with visual matters as one of its defining features is understood. 8 Lynch in particular seems to celebrate the gravity and meaningfulness of the everyday object in Twin Peaks: the ceiling fan and the traffic lights become semanticized markers of particular moods; the ceramic figurines standing on mantelpieces and Cooper’s craving for coffee and cherry pie seem to fixate meaning within contexts that in any other regard defy definite interpretation. <?page no="237"?> Victimhood and Visuality in Melodramatic Films 237 References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Die Liebe zu einer Toten: Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” Enzyklopädie des Kriminalfilms. Meitingen: Corian Verlag, 1997. 1-15. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Trans. Robert Julian. London: BFI, 2006. Dunant, Caroline. “Olympian Dreamscapes: The Photographic Canvas: The Wide-screen Paintings of Leighton, Poynter and Alma- Tadema.” Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen. Ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 1994. 82-93. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Drama.” Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Ed. Bill Nichols. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 165-189. Gledhill, Christine. “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.” Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 2002. 5-39. McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Moretti, Franco. “Kindergarten.” Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. 1983. Radical Thinkers 7. London: Verso, 2005. 157-181. Richardson, John. “Laura and Twin Peaks: Postmodern Parody and the Musical Reconstruction of the Absent Femme Fatale.” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. 77-92. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 42-88. <?page no="239"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? Reading “Difference” in Contemporary Fantastic Film and Television Kimberly A. Frohreich Following the trend of the humanized monster in the contemporary fantasy genre, the three X-Men films and the True Blood television series question the visual representation of the monster and the way the figure has been used to stigmatize the racial and/ or sexual other. These narratives use the somatic metaphor of “passing” to highlight the ways in which identity categories are defined through visible “difference,” thereby suggesting that race and sexuality are performative rather than essentialized. Yet while these stories seem to discourage stigmatizing readings of “monstrosity,” or racial and/ or sexual otherness, and encourage the spectator to see and interpret “difference” in new ways, the filmic discourse sometimes represents the humanized monster as complicit with white heteronormativity. In this essay, I argue that the discourse of the X-Men films positions the spectator in such as way as to visually identify the passing monster and ultimately reinforces the binary between the racial and/ or sexual other and white heteronormativity. The discourse of True Blood, however, plays with spectators’ visual expectations and often positions them on the same level as characters, thus destabilizing the distinction between the monster and the human. Tod Browning’s film Dracula, based on the novel of the same name, appeared in 1931, two years after Nella Larsen’s novel Passing and three years before John M. Stahl’s film, Imitation of Life. The latter both portray black characters passing as white, who are ultimately exposed and “pun- The Visual Culture of Modernism. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 239-253. <?page no="240"?> 240 Kimberly A. Frohreich ished” in a similar way as Dracula. 1 Evidently, the concept of passing and the fear that it engendered were prevalent during the modernist period, and more specifically around the 1930s. Undoubtedly, this preoccupation was due to the growing social and legal importance of the One Drop Rule and the need to define as threatening, or even “monstrous,” those who attempted to cross the color line. 2 Whether through novels and films of the fantasy or realism genres, the portrayal of passing and the transgression of racial and/ or sexual boundaries in the modernist period have left a legacy for contemporary literature and film. In this essay, I consider the role of passing characters and the reading of difference in the X-Men film series and the HBO television series True Blood to explore the positioning of the spectator in relation to racial and sexual transgression. These two contemporary fantasy narratives consciously use the figure of the monster to allegorize race and non-normative sexuality, offering to their spectators alternate ways of reading and defining difference - ways that appear not only to counter the manner in which the monster was traditionally represented and subsequently interpreted, but also that might influence the manner in which the spectator then reads racial and sexual “difference.” With its threatening monstrous creatures, the fantasy genre has often been a space in which anxieties regarding the racial and/ or sexual other could be explored. From the depiction of the alien in early science fiction narratives to the vampire of gothic novels and horror films, the figure of the monster has been used to stigmatize the other by incorporating scientific discourses that have surrounded the construction of race and non-normative sexuality. Recently, however, as part of the post-human trend that originated partly in science fiction, the figure of the monster has been humanized. What was once the covert “coding” of the monster as the racial and sexual other in earlier fantasy narratives has now become manifest. Contemporary fantasy narratives follow the African-American civil rights and gay 1 All three narratives end in a death which restores the hegemonic order of the racial binary (and in the case of Dracula the non-normative sexuality versus heterosexual binary). Clare (in Passing) and Dracula, both passing characters, are each “punished” with their own deaths. Peola (in Imitation of Life) is “punished” for passing through the death of her mother which causes Peola to regret her actions and to rejoin the black community. While one could argue that Dracula is killed for reasons other than merely for passing, his seemingly transgressive practice carries other connotations that are used to characterize both Dracula and Clare, such as provocative or “perverse” sexual desire and racial mixing. (For an analysis of the character of Clare in relation to homosexual desire and miscegenation, see Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter.) 2 Throughout the early 1900s, Southern states began adopting the One Drop Rule along with the Jim Crow laws. While the American census maintained the mixed-race categories of “mulatto” and “quadroon” through the turn of the century, by 1930 these terms disappeared from the census forms, forcing people to identify with only one race. <?page no="241"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 241 liberation movements, not only questioning the scientific discourses that have long been used to characterize the “monstrous” other, but also incorporating past and present debates regarding the categorization and social positioning of the racial and/ or sexual other. As such, the monster is sometimes positioned as the “disenfranchised” fighting for equal rights. Such texts then appear as a vindication for the rights of those who are different from the white heterosexual norm. The starting point for this essay is the visual metaphor of passing in the two contemporary fantasy narratives X-Men and True Blood. Passing is one social practice surrounding the categorization of race and nonnormative sexuality that has often been implicit within early narratives of the horror and science fiction sub-genres. Part of what constitutes the threatening and the potentially subversive - part of what is inherent in “monstrosity” itself - is precisely the monster’s ability to escape visible definition as “monstrous” through passing. These narratives then often highlight the importance of visibility linked with the capacity to define and name what is monstrous and threatening, in order to assert power over the monstrous other and eventually to erase the menace. As previously mentioned, Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, provides one example of the transgressive passing monster that is ultimately “punished.” The same can be said of early horror films, such as Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula. Yet, in the case of visual media, the spectator was traditionally given an advantage over the characters’ visual knowledge and identification of the monster through coding in the filmic discourse (such as dark lighting, extravagant costumes, make-up and sets, or even through the audible elements of threatening music and foreign accents). Contemporary fantasy narratives continue to draw on this manner of representing the “monstrous,” often with the intention of playing with these codes. Indeed, passing is an example of a social practice that has been reinscribed in contemporary fantasy texts in a manifest manner, in order to question the stigmatization of the racial and/ or sexual other. X-Men and True Blood present groups or communities of monsters, or mutants and vampires, which have not only made themselves visible to humans, but also attempt to assert their own power through naming and defining themselves. Despite the fact that these mutants and vampires are now socially visible, the questions of how they should be visible and how their visibility should be read (both from within the group and from outside) remain in both these narratives, and are very much at the center of their use of racial and sexual discourses. Passing, or playing with what are considered to be visually-definable categories, is then at the center of these conflicts for control over intelligibility, as it seemingly works against the power to name and define those who are “different.” <?page no="242"?> 242 Kimberly A. Frohreich Arguably, passing is transgressive as it questions the power of visibility to maintain identity categories and also suggests that these categories are performative rather than essentialized. Yet it is also simultaneously (even if unwittingly) complicit with white heteronormativity. Without the racial binary or the dividing color line between black and white, without the heterosexual / homosexual (or queer) binary, passing could not exist. Just as whiteness and heterosexuality depend on the blackness (or the non-whiteness) and the non-normative sexuality of the other to constitute themselves, white heteronormative hegemony relies on the occasional resistance of the other through a practice such as passing. 3 In this essay, I will examine the ways in which each narrative invites the spectator to read “monstrosity” or “difference,” in relation to filmic discursive strategies that visually (and audibly) represent the figure of the monster. Ultimately, each narrative appears to suggest to the spectator a way in which difference should be read (or not), while the filmic discourse is sometimes at odds with this message. Like the two ways in which passing can be interpreted (as either complicit with white heteronormativity or transgressive) the filmic discourse will either position the spectator - in terms of the ability to identify the passer - as superior to the characters or on the same level. The former position gives the spectator the power to name and define the passer, suggesting that passing does not really work, that difference is essential; it is a position that ultimately works with the hegemonic order. The latter position allows the spectator “to be duped” by the passer and suggests the performative nature of identity categories. Indeed, while each story appears to use the figure of the monster to promote “difference,” to denigrate the stigmatization of the racial and sexual other, and thereby to question white heteronormative hegemony, the film’s discourse does not necessarily do the same. As such, I will ask of each text (and it is a question that should also be applied to other contemporary fantasy narratives): if the spectator is to read the non-human in relation to the human with regards to the racial and/ or sexual other, does it follow that the humanized mon- 3 As Gayle Wald writes, “the color line has always required that subjects produce resistance in the context of the narratives that define them” (10). She also highlights that resistance to the category of race is necessarily constructed “out of the material of racial discourse itself” (10). I would add to Wald’s argument that the same comment can be made regarding the queer/ heterosexual binary and the necessity of sexual discourse for producing resistance. Whether it be to have access to social spaces reserved for the white heterosexual (as is the case for Clare in Nella Larsen’s Passing) or to transgress the hegemonic order (like Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel), the practice of passing and the “monster” who passes are ultimately part of the cultural construction of racial and sexual identity categories. <?page no="243"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 243 ster is simply another image of the human, one that is complicit with white heterosexuality? The X-Men films are part of the recent Hollywood trend of comic book superhero films. 4 Undeniably, the first motivation behind the production of these films was to profit from this trend as well as leverage the already enormous success of the comic book series. With the comic books’ status as “the biggest-selling comic of all time” (Sabin 159), the filmmakers hoped to attract and to please comic book fans as well as viewers who were not familiar with the series. 5 An effort was evidently made to reproduce the comic book themes of social and political marginalization in the films’ plotlines and mutant characterization. Roger Sabin writes of the comic series: The X-Men were complete personalities whose mutancy could be viewed as a metaphor for adolescence, race or sexuality. The fact that they fell in love, fell out, got married, gave birth, died and, above all, experienced discrimination from prejudiced humans only added to their appeal. (159) This wide-ranging and appealing metaphor of difference was picked up in the marketing campaign of the second film with the movie poster slogan, “The time has come for those who are different to stand united.” Aside from referring to the film’s story in which all mutants cease fighting amongst each other in order to defend themselves against threatening humans, the slogan might also speak to civil rights activists. As Deborah Madsen notes, the slogan “is resonant of the climate of civil rights struggle which coincided with the first appearance of the Marvel comics” (92). The films thus appear to position themselves in relation to the disenfranchised in the same way that the comic book series has in the past. In addition, the films follow the comic books’ use of focalization primarily through mutant characters which evidently contributes to the spectators’ ability to position the other as subject and to potentially identify with them. Emphasis is thus placed on the suffering that mutants experience due to human prejudices; and these prejudices are clearly aligned with those experienced by the racial and/ or sexual other. 4 The list includes earlier films such as Superman (1978) and Batman (1989), as well as Spawn (1997), Blade (1998), Spiderman (2002), Daredevil (2003), Hulk (2003), Fantastic Four (2005), and Iron Man (2008), and these films’ sequels. The three X-Men films were released in 2000, 2003, and 2006; and one might add to this list the prequel about the character of Wolverine, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, released in 2009. 5 Bryan Singer, the director of the first two films, comments in his DVD commentary of the first film that the film was written in such a way as to introduce the different mutant characters and their powers to an audience that might not be familiar with them. <?page no="244"?> 244 Kimberly A. Frohreich One such example occurs in a heart-wrenching scene which is also the very first scene of the first film. The young Magneto (the future leader of the violent, revolutionary-type mutants, the enemies of the X-Men) is forcefully separated from his parents by Nazis in a World War II concentration camp. Very little color is used in the scene except for the yellow stars that Magneto, his parents, and the other Jewish-identified characters wear, as if to emphasize the labeling (or perhaps even the dividing color line) that the Nazi soldiers used to define and control those believed to be different. In the three films, Magneto then reads the human desire to name and define mutants, to segregate, and even to “cure” them, in the light of his experience as a Jew, recalling the Nazi practice of labeling, segregating, enslaving, experimenting on, and exterminating the Jewish other. 6 As such, the scene evidently asks its spectators to read mutantism as a parallel to the racial/ ethnic other; and as the films’ initial scene, it introduces this as a manner of reading for the spectator to follow. The second film contains a scene in which the mutant boy Bobby, previously passing as human to his family, comes out to them as a mutant. As the scene is staged as a homosexual coming out, mutantism is here meant to be read as a parallel to non-normative sexuality. His parents’ reaction reflects the stigmatization from which homosexuals or queers suffer. Bobby’s mother says, “This is all my fault” (54: 30), as if Bobby’s mutantism were the result of a poor up-bringing in which he did not learn how to be fully human or heterosexual, as if mutantism or non-normative sexuality were immature or degenerative. She also asks, “Have you ever tried not being a mutant? ” (57: 15) The word “gay” could easily be substituted for “mutant” and the question itself recalls psychological and medical experiments which attempted to “cure” homosexuals. Similarly, as previously suggested, a “cure” is produced by humans in the third film, which positions mutantism as a disease, reminiscent of the stigmatization of African-Americans through the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment or the AIDS scare in relation to homosexuals. In scenes such as these, through mutant confrontations with humans, the films suggest the ways in which difference should not be read and “dealt with.” In the same way that the “cure” offered by humans would 6 The scene might approach what Adam Lowenstein terms “the allegorical moment” in modern horror film, “a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2). Lowenstein’s term reflects how the spectator might be shocked at the use of such a historically sensitive event in the context of a comic book superhero film, while at the same time recognizing the “appropriateness” of the use of superhuman powers (which Magneto exhibits in trying to prevent the separation from his parents) as a metaphor for the extreme emotion and trauma of such an experience. <?page no="245"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 245 erase difference, the human strategy in the first two films reflects a desire to erase mutant presence in society. Indeed, the films present very few positive examples of humans and their reading of mutants. As spectators, we are encouraged to follow the X-Men from their point of view of mutant difference; and it is a difference that should not be advocated and displayed with pride, but should rather be hidden through passing. It is through the rejection of passing as other than a transgressive practice that Magneto and his clan attempt to impose their own reading of themselves. A scene in the third film highlights this issue of imposed versus self-imposed identity. A large mutant gathering brings Magneto into contact with possible recruits, all of whom have the same identifying tattoo. For these mutants, the mutant tattoo enables a recuperation and valorization of the human’s negative interpretation of the term “mutant,” in a similar manner that the term “queer” was appropriated and re-signified by queer activists. In addition, the self-imposed “brand” represents a desire to claim ownership over one’s own body, in opposition to the notion of slavery, as well as to be constantly “out” as a mutant. In labeling and “outing” themselves, the tattooed mutants then create their group, their subject position, asking to be read in a certain way and reading other mutants accordingly. However, the spectator is not encouraged to sympathize with this mutant pride as the latter group is villainized. Indeed, those who choose to publicly “out” themselves as mutants (or monsters) are also those who demonstrate the need for humans to classify them as mutant (or monstrous) and thus as dangerous. Their use of passing in order to penetrate human political and military spheres, to threaten human boundaries, adds to their depiction as villains. The character of Mystique is the prime example here, as she is able to morph into any appearance. While she may advocate the importance of NOT passing as a vindication of her right of freedom, the moment when Mystique chooses to reveal her “natural” appearance is rather with the intention of instilling fear in her human adversaries. 7 In addition, the films’ discourse contributes to the danger that transgressively passing mutants represent while also positioning the spectator as able to identify these mutants as threats. Aside from the spectator’s ability to identify Mystique through either the knowledge of her intentions or a brief glimpse of her yellow cat-like eyes when passing, one scene positions Nightcrawler (who is otherwise a “good” mutant - one of the X-Men in the comic book series) as dangerous. The second film opens with a group touring the White House. 7 In the second film, Nightcrawler asks Mystique why she does not use her powers to appear (or pass) permanently as a human, to which she replies: “Because we shouldn’t have to” (1: 11: 28). <?page no="246"?> 246 Kimberly A. Frohreich The camera slowly pans across the tour group and stops with an overthe-shoulder shot of a character in a trench coat, sunglasses, and hat, observing the crowd. While the spectator might not initially recognize the character as Nightcrawler, his position as separate from the group, and as more powerful - watching rather than being watched - signals to the spectator that he is a passing mutant. Menacing music adds to his characterization as threatening. In other words, the scene uses traditional horror film coding, allowing the spectator to identify the dangerous monster before the human characters do, and so ultimately contributes to the former’s position as “all-knowing” and superior to “duped” characters, as well as to the “monstrously-identifiable” mutants. In the end then, the X-Men films present two forms of the monster, the more traditional figure through the portrayal of Magneto and his clan, and the more contemporary figure of the humanized monster through the X- Men. As metaphors for the racial and/ or sexual other, this depiction is indeed problematic as it suggests that those who exhibit pride in their otherness and attempt to reverse the power structure of white heteronormative hegemony are dangerous, while those who choose to hide their difference, to pass as human (or white heterosexual) and ultimately to integrate into the dominant order are the heroes. Evidently, the distinction is not quite so clear-cut as this - the X- Men do display their powers when necessary to defend themselves or humans who are in danger. Yet, undeniably, the X-Men’s manner of passing is complicit with the hegemonic order and coincides with the way in which they are depicted in the films’ discourse. Indeed, the X- Men present a rather normalized view of the other, one that is visibly more human than monstrous, and one that is largely white, middle-class, and heterosexual. First, the mutants that appear in Professor X’s school (which is also a safe house for young mutants and the X-Men) are all in human form in opposition to the more animalistic characteristics of the mutants in Magneto’s clan. With only one non-white character in the X- Men (Storm, played by Halle Berry), it is again Magneto’s clan that represents racial difference for the spectator. The latter two elements “whiten” the X-Men in their move from the comic books to the films. While Storm might remain the only non-white X-Men character in the comic series, the frequent presence of the Beast and Nightcrawler (who only appear in one movie each and never seem to fully integrate into the group), two mutants with blue skin and animal-like characteristics, as well as Wolverine’s and Cyclops’ primary appearance in colorful costumes and masks, contribute to the X-Men’s portrayal in the comics as <?page no="247"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 247 diverse. 8 The films further homogenize the otherwise heterogeneous appearance of the comic book characters through the use of costuming: all X-Men wear the same black leather suit. Second, the rather affluent atmosphere of the school is sharply contrasted with the world of Magneto’s recruits who appear to be part of an underground subculture. The third film’s mutant gathering takes place in an abandoned and dilapidated church; the mutants present are clothed and coiffed in such a way as to suggest poverty and homelessness. That Magneto finds new allies in such an environment coincides with the long-standing link between inner-city poverty and crime. Finally, while Bobby’s “coming out” scene uses a narrative that is proper to non-heterosexual identities, the spectator is assured of his heterosexuality from the previous scene in which he shares an intimate moment with his girlfriend. The second film thereby suggests that homosexuality is acceptable as a metaphor, but not as a visual or literal depiction. In his analysis of the film Addams Family Values, Harry Benshoff writes: In a case such as this, keeping homosexuality within the closet of connotation continues to marginalize and minoritize, even as it allows for other more general notions of queerness to be warmly received by mainstream audiences. (268-269) In other words, while the film argues that prejudice against homosexual individuals is wrong, it also suggests that homosexuality hardly exists, representing the “minoritizing” view that Eve Sedgwick outlines in her work, Epistemology of the Closet. 9 In a sense then, passing in X-Men is similar to early passing narratives - the desire to be read as human is synonymous with the desire to be read as white and/ or heterosexual. The spectator is thus asked to read difference positively as long as it coincides with, rather than confronts, white heteronormative hegemony. Like the X-Men films, the television series True Blood follows a trend, that of the continually growing popularity of the figure of the vampire, in both literature and media. The first season aired at the end of 2008, shortly before the release of the first Twilight film, perhaps profiting 8 See for example pages 2-3 in the episode entitled “The Fate of the Phoenix”, reprinted in Roger Sabin’s Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (159). Of the eight X-Men on the two page spread, only two characters, Professor X and Jean Grey, appear as white humans. Deborah Madsen also points out that the character Bobby in the film (known as Ice- Man in the comic books) is rarely called by his mutant name and never appears in the ice man-shaped form that the comic books depict (93). 9 See pages 1 and 83-86 where Sedgwick discusses the double bind between the “minoritizing” and the “universalizing” views of homosexuality. <?page no="248"?> 248 Kimberly A. Frohreich from the wave of interest in vampires that the Twilight novels and the marketing campaign for the first film created. Indeed, the HBO series does present some similarities to the Twilight films: both narratives center on the “forbidden” love between a male vampire and a human female, both appear to portray “good” vampires versus “bad” vampires, and both are based on a series of novels. Yet while Twilight normalizes the vampire (positioning Edward Cullen as a white heterosexual vampire with family values, who refuses to feed off humans), True Blood does not and seems rather to present a counter-discourse to this newlypopularized figure of the vampire. Although the True Blood series’ plotline remains fairly faithful to the novels on which they are based (Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels), the series’ creator, Alan Ball, emphasizes the position of the vampire as disenfranchised and features characters that highlight racial and sexual tensions, while at the same time problematizing the supposed humanization of the vampire. Like the first scene of the X-Men films, the very first scene of the True Blood series indicates how the spectator might read (or not) the vampire other. In part, it demonstrates that the vampire struggle for equal rights involves a fight to dispel stereotypes, the aprioris that human characters and spectators have alike. The scene takes place in a minimart where there are initially two characters, the store clerk and a customer, one of whom we learn at the end of the scene is a vampire. It opens with a shot of a television screen - the store clerk is watching a vampire activist arguing in favor of vampire rights. As we listen to the activist stating the reasons why vampires deserve the same rights as humans, the camera briefly acknowledges the customer - a paunchy Southern hillbilly who appears to be buying beer - and then spends much more time on the store clerk with a slow pan from his feet to his head, showing his dark clothing, heavy boots, and long black hair, with quick close-ups on his skull rings and talisman-like necklace. A young college-age couple enters the mini-mart after having seen a sign outside the store advertising the sale of Tru Blood, a synthetic blood drink for vampires. The store clerk begins speaking about vampires as if he were one of them, using a thick foreign accent. In this manner, the store clerk tells the young couple what a vampire is through both his speech and his performance, all the while playing with stereotypes. The camera, with its focus on the store-clerk’s teeth, and the soundtrack’s scary music, assist him in this performance. Eventually, he reveals that he was merely playing a joke on the customers. While the young couple begins to relax and laugh with the store clerk, the hillbilly customer appears insulted and asks the young couple to leave. After the college boy makes it clear that the hillbilly has no right to tell him what to do, the hillbilly reveals his fangs, scares the young couple into leaving, and then pro- <?page no="249"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 249 ceeds to threaten the frightened clerk. As the vampire purchases his pack of Tru Blood, he tells the clerk: “You ever pretend to be one of us again, and I’ll kill ya” (Ep. 1 3: 45). This first scene demonstrates the ways in which the show continues to upset and destabilize both vampire (and racial) stereotypes and coding. As Richard Dyer notes: The role of stereotypes is to make visible the invisible, so that there is no danger of it creeping up on us unawares; and to make fast, firm and separate what is in reality fluid and much closer to the norm than the dominant value system cares to admit. (16) Evidently, it is due to vampire stereotypes and the store clerk’s “visibility” as gothic that the couple as well as the spectator are so easily “duped,” while the “invisible” “danger” is indeed “much closer to the norm” and thus able to “creep up on us unawares.” While in early vampire films, the spectator could recognize and identify the vampire more quickly than the human characters, True Blood positions the spectator’s (in)ability to correctly interpret the signs and coding of the vampire on the same level as human characters’. As such, the spectator’s habitually privileged position of knowing who is a vampire and/ or who is passing - similar to what Samira Kawash calls “the (white) need to know” (127) - is compromised. Indeed, if the young couple and the viewer were immediately to assume that one of the characters in the mini-mart were a vampire, it would be the goth dressed store clerk, rather than the paunchy Southern hillbilly with a confederate flag on his baseball cap. It is then up to the “real” vampire to dispel the stereotypes of the vampire dressed in black, with a foreign accent that are reproduced by the store clerk. Arguably, the “real” vampire is not attempting to pass as human as the camera later shows us that he was holding a pack of Tru Blood in his hand rather than a pack of beer. Yet it is not until he displays his fangs and officially “outs” himself to the others that he is able to properly defend himself. In a sense then, he parallels the fight for civil rights that is portrayed on the television at the beginning of the scene; and he also works against it, as he threatens to kill the store clerk and thereby plays into the stereotype of the vampire as dangerous to humans. Furthermore, his image as a Southern racist hillbilly disrupts the notion of the vampire as the disenfranchised, as the one who suffers from discrimination, and demonstrates that the parallel between the racial other and the vampire other does not always work. Similar to the X-Men films, True Blood portrays the humans’ manner of reading vampires as the racial and/ or sexual other as problematic. Convinced that vampires are violent and dangerous, the Bon Temps <?page no="250"?> 250 Kimberly A. Frohreich police attempt to exercise some form of control over vampires and their activities in order to protect humans and the human race (into which one can read the need to protect whiteness and heterosexuality). For instance, Fangtasia, a popular bar for vampires, fangbangers (or humans that are “vampire groupies”) and human tourists, is raided by the police. As an attempt to ensure that no vampire and human blood-drinking (or intercourse) is occurring, the raid can be read as a metaphor for pre- Stonewall raids on gay bars in which the police are positioned as protectors of heterosexuality, and here, of racial purity as well. In addition, Vampire Bill and Sookie, the human heroine of the series, are later stopped in their car by a police officer. Suspecting that Bill might be a vampire, the police officer asks the couple if they have been at Fangtasia. When Sookie replies that they have not, the officer then asks permission to shine his flashlight on Sookie’s neck. Evidently, the officer suspects that Bill is passing for human, and believes that fang marks on Sookie’s neck would expose Bill’s “true nature.” Amy Robinson writes: “In hegemonic contexts, recognition typically serves as an accomplice to ontological truth-claims of identity in which claiming to tell who is or is not passing is inextricable from knowing the fixed contours of a prepassing identity” (122). The officer’s assumption that fang marks on Sookie’s neck would prove that Bill is a vampire demonstrates his presumption that a vampire in the company of a human would necessarily feed off the human; or in other words, that a vampire is animalistic and hypersexual and would be unable to control himself from the illegal activity of feeding from a human. The officer’s presumption of “knowing” what a vampire is also recalls the stigmatization of African- American men and their supposedly uncontrollable sexual desire for white women. As such, the officer positions himself as the controller of racial purity. His request to see Sookie’s neck is then not only to ensure that Bill is not passing, but also to ensure that the two are not engaging in inter-species (or interracial) sex. Knowing that there are no bite marks on Sookie’s neck, and that this does not mean the couple was not at Fangtasia, nor that Bill is not a vampire, the spectator may recognize that the officer’s attempt to define a vampire through visible markings is not only problematic, but also does not work. In opposition to the X-Men films, True Blood is primarily focalized through a human and might thereby suggest that vampires are objectified with regards to the spectator’s gaze. Indeed, the series’ focalization through Sookie in particular contributes to the idea of the spectator as “all-knowing.” Her telepathic ability to read human minds, which does not work on vampires, allows the spectator to identify a vampire through means that are not visible as soon as Sookie is in the company of one. Nonetheless, while Sookie can help the spectator to identify <?page no="251"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 251 vampires, she is often unable to “read” them. Positioned as the defender of vampires to the largely prejudiced human population of Bon Temps, she constantly finds herself confronted with violence, hypersexuality and/ or “perverse” sexuality (or stereotypical vampire behavior) that even her love interest, Bill, occasionally demonstrates. In a sense then, the ability of Sookie to be occasionally “duped,” or horrified, by vampires, allows the spectator to be as well. At the same time, her telepathy places parallels between humans and vampires - showing that humans are sometimes guilty of the same things of which they accuse vampires - as does the series’ discourse. The opening credits are filmed from the vampire point of view and show that vampires have been witness to human sexual deviance, violence and the exertion of power over others, whether it be men over women or whites over blacks. In addition, the narrative of the first season illustrates that it is not necessarily vampires who “dupe” Sookie and the spectator, but rather a human. René, a supposed friend of Sookie, turns out to be a serial killer whose victims are women who have had sex with vampires. Passing, if not to demonstrate the performativity of human and vampire identity categories alike, is used as a tool for guarding racial purity. Of course, True Blood can be accused of using discourses that surround the construction of the racial and/ or sexual other problematically, in the same way as the X-Men films. J.M. Tyree comments, “True Blood’s tones often clash, using the vocabulary of gay rights to serve a central heterosexual love affair” (34). Yet while X-Men does not represent queer relationships, True Blood does, with both humans and vampires. One example of a queer character is the vampire Eddie whose only sexual relationship (with a human) demonstrates the way the series plays with the coding of vampirism: it is Eddie who stays at home and who decides whether or not to allow humans to enter his house. His partner, Lafayette, visits Eddie primarily to take his blood (vampire blood functions as a drug for humans), as do Sookie’s brother and his girlfriend who forcibly enter Eddie’s home and kidnap him. All three humans are positioned as vampires, while the “real” vampire becomes the human, a victim hunted for his blood. In the end, the series effectively destabilizes the binary between the human and the non-human as well as racial and sexual binaries. It does so by showing that vampires are both rightly and wrongly accused and by giving vampires the agency to play with these stereotypes. The unjust human stigmatization of vampires evidently serves to question prejudices against the racial and sexual other. Yet at the same time, it is the vampires’ non-normative practices that continue to destabilize the white, heteronormativity of human society. <?page no="252"?> 252 Kimberly A. Frohreich As texts which consciously use discourses and social practices - such as passing - that have long surrounded the construction of racial and sexual categories, contemporary fantasy narratives appear to question the stigmatization of the racial and sexual other that earlier narratives propagated, while suggesting to the spectator an alternative way of reading the racial and/ or sexual other. Yet this manner of reading is sometimes at odds with the way in which the filmic discourse visibly (as well as audibly) represents “monstrous” characters. Indeed, the visible representation of mutants in the X-Men films plays into binaries and reinforces white heteronormative hegemony. The danger with media narratives like the X-Men and Twilight films is that, rather than use the figure of the monster to question white heteronormativity, the monster becomes another image of normality, one in which difference (or otherness) cannot be visible if it is to be “acceptable.” For the inattentive spectator, they contribute to the “subtle” propagation of racial and sexual binary thinking. True Blood, on the other hand, shows that reading the vampire is difficult, and - as the figure is a metaphor for the racial and/ or sexual other - is sometimes problematic. In other words, True Blood does not attempt to provide any right or wrong way of reading the vampire or the human, but rather de-essentializes identities on both sides of the binary. Of course, True Blood also demonstrates the implacability of binaries. Yet rather than persisting in allowing white heteronormativity to define the other or the “monstrous,” its characters mutually define each other. In other words, it is not merely through humanizing the monster that the norm can be challenged, a “monsterizing” of the human must also be possible. <?page no="253"?> Making the “Monstrous” Visible? 253 References Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: homosexuality and the horror film. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Perf. Béla Lugosi, Helen Chandler, Edward Van Sloan. Universal Pictures, 1931. Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: essay on representations. London: Routledge, 1993. Imitation of Life. Dir. John M. Stahl. Scr. William Hurlbut. Perf. Claudette Colbert, Warren William and Rochelle Hudson. Universal Pictures, 1934. Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: identity, hybridity, and singularity in African-American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1929, rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: historical trauma, national cinema, and the modern horror film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Madsen, Deborah L. “Multicultural Futures: cultural diversity and the desire of belonging.” In Transitions: race, culture, and the dynamics of change. Ed. Hanna Wallinger. Vienna: Lit Verlag GmbH and Co. KG, 2006. 92-107. Robinson, Amy. “It Takes One to Know One: passing and communities of common interest.” Critical Inquiry 20.4 (1994): 715-736. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: a history of comic art. London and New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996. Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897, rpt. New York: Signet, 1986. True Blood. Writ. Alan Ball. Home Box Office, 2009. Tyree, J.M. “Warm-Blooded: True Blood and Let the Right One In.” Film Quarterly 63.2 (2009): 31-37. Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: racial passing in twentieth-century U.S. literature and culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. X-Men. Dir. Bryan Singer. 2000. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. . DVD commentary. 2000. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. X-Men 2. Dir. Bryan Singer. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2003. X-Men 3. The Last Stand. Dir. Brett Ratner. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006. <?page no="255"?> Notes on Contributors THOMAS ELSAESSER is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and since 2006 Visiting Professor at Yale University. In recent years, he has held Senior Research Fellowships in Vienna, Stockholm, Cambridge, Tel Aviv, Berkeley and Berlin. He is general editor of the series Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam University Press), which has published volumes on, among others, film theory and history, European directors, and early cinema. He has received the Jay Leyda Prize and the Kovacs Book Award of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for his New German Cinema: A History (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989) and again the Kovacs Book Award for Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject (Amsterdam University Press, 1996). Among his recent books are: Weimar Cinema and After (Routledge, 2000); Metropolis (BFI, 2000); Studying Contemporary American Film (Hodder, 2002 with Warren Buckland); Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino (Edition Text und Kritik, 2002); European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005); Hollywood Heute (Bertz und Fischer, 2009); and Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (Routledge, 2010 with Malte Hagener). ELISABETH BRONFEN is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, she has also contributed to the fields of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture. Her book publications include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992); The Knotted Subject. Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2004). Her editing work includes a four volume German edition of Anne Sexton’s poetry and letters as well as the essay collections Death and Representation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (Columbia University Press, 2000). Her publications in German include Die Diva. Geschichte einer Bewunderung (Schirmer und Mosel, 2002); Liebestod und Femme Fatale. Der Austausch sozialer Energien zwischen Oper, Literatur und Film (Suhrkamp, 2004); Tiefer als der Tag ge- <?page no="256"?> 256 Notes on Contributors dacht. Szenen der Nacht (Karl Hanser, 2008); Crossmappings. Essays zur visuellen Kultur (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2009). SCOTT CURTIS is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/ Television/ Film at Northwestern University, Evanston (Illinois). He is the President of Domitor, an international association dedicated to the study of early cinema, the founder of Block Cinema, and a cochair of Chicago Film Seminar. His research focuses on the history of film (early and silent cinema in particular) as well as on institutional and scientific uses of movies. His most recent essays include “Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies, and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany” (2009) and “Douglas Fairbanks: King of Hollywood” (2010). KIMBERLY FROHREICH holds a BA in Modern Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz, as well as a BA in French and English and an MA in English from the University of Geneva. She wrote her master’s thesis on enfreakment in the American fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz, and some of its modern reinterpretations, and has published an essay on a similar topic, entitled “Writing, Performing, and Gendering the Wicked Witch of the West” (in Writing American Women. SPELL 23. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 2009). Her most recent conference papers have looked at the use of the “monstrous” other as a metaphor for the racial other in contemporary fantasy film and television. She is currently an Assistant in American Literature at the University of Geneva, working on a PhD thesis which will focus on allegories of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary fantasy literature and film. VINZENZ HEDIGER is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. His books include Nostalgia for the Coming Attraction. American Movie Trailers and the Culture of Film Consumption (Columbia University Press, 2012) and Films that Work. Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam University Press, 2009). He is a coeditor of Montage AV (www.montage-av.de) and the ex-officio founding editor of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de). A co-founder of NECS (European Network of Cinema and Media Studies), he is currently also serving as the president of the German Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft. <?page no="257"?> Notes on Contributors 257 MARIO KLARER is chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Innsbruck and President of the Austrian Association of American Studies. He was professor of English and chair of the English Department at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. For several years he was a visiting professor in the English Departments of Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and University of Regensburg. Mario Klarer was a two-year Erwin-Schrödinger Fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in California and a two-year Mellon and Rockefeller Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. For the past two years he has been directing the research project “Framing Media” supported by the Austrian Science Fund. His published books include Frau und Utopie (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Einführung in die anglistischamerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 7th edition, 2011); An Introduction to Literary Studies (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2003); Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare (Niemeyer-Buchreihe der Anglia, 2001); as well as the business communication handbooks Meetings auf Englisch (Redline-Wirtschaft, 2007) and Präsentieren auf Englisch (Redline- Wirtschaft, 4th edition, 2007). His essays have appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Journal of American Studies, Mosaic, Word and Image and Amerikastudien. CORNELIA KLECKER studied at the University of Innsbruck where she received an MA in English and American Studies (2007) and an MA in Comparative Literature (2008). She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, which explores her so-called “mind-tricking narratives” in contemporary Hollywood film from a narratological as well as a cultural point of view. From July 2008 to June 2009, she was a research assistant for the “Framing Media: Periphery of Fiction and Film” project funded by FWF (the Austrian Science Fund), and since July 2009 she has been an Assistant Professor (pre-doc) in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. KANGQIN LI is a teacher of English at Shanghai International Studies University and a translator of John Updike’s short stories. She is currently a PhD student in the School of English, University of Leicester, working under the supervision of Douglas Tallack and Catherine Morley. <?page no="258"?> 258 Notes on Contributors DEBORAH L. MADSEN is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Geneva and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on issues of modernity, US national rhetoric, and cultural transnationalism. Publications include American Exceptionalism (University of Edinburgh Press, 1998); Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory (Pluto Press, 2003); Diasporic Histories: Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (Hong Kong University Press, 2009); and Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature ( State University of New York Press, 2010). Forthcoming are Louise Erdrich (Continuum, 2011) and Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (University of New Mexico Press, 2011). She is coeditor of the State University of New York Press book series “Native Traces” and the new book series “Companions to Native Literatures” (University of Nebraska Press). Currently she serves as President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies ( SANAS ), as a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association ( ASA ), and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of Publications of the Modern Language Association of America ( PMLA) . JOHANNES MAHLKNECHT studied English and American Language and Literature at the Universities of Salzburg and Glasgow (the latter as an Erasmus student). After a two-year hiatus, during which he worked as a warehouseman for an Italian shoe company, he graduated in 2009 from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where he is currently employed as a junior assistant professor in the Department of American Studies, with Film Studies as his main field of interest. He is writing his PhD thesis on paratexts in American narrative cinema and has taught introductory courses on film studies and film adaptations. CAROLA MORESCHE is a student of English and American Studies at the Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck, Austria, and the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark (the latter as an Erasmus student). She is currently adding the finishing touches to her MA thesis about the Austro-Hungarian director and actor Erich von Stroheim. Her main interests include early American film, film theory and literary theory. VIORICA PATEA is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética <?page no="259"?> Notes on Contributors 259 de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land [La tierra baldía. (Ediciones Cátedra, 2005)]; and a study of Walt Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad (Ediones Universidad de León, 1999). She has co-edited various collections of essays, such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2001) and, in collaboration with Paul Derrick, Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi, 2007). At present she is working on a book project about short story theories. CHRISTIAN QUENDLER is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He was a visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York), the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and he received fellowships from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen. His research on literature focuses on interrelations between publishing history, book design and storytelling in nineteenthand twentieth-century fiction. His interest in cinema and media studies includes the history of film theory and inter-art relations. He is the author of two books: From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction (Peter Lang, 2001) and Interfaces of Fiction (Braumüller, 2010). His current book project examines camera-eye conceptions across different historical periods, disciplines and media. MICHAEL RÖÖSLI currently works as a chargé d'enseignement suppléant in Contemporary English Literature at the University of Geneva, where he also earned a Licence ès Lettres in English, Computational Linguistics and Russian, as well as a complementary degree and a Diplôme d’études approfondies in Computational Linguistics. His research focuses on the process of reading and interactions between different media. It draws mostly on literary, photographic and filmic works, and pays particular attention to theoretical approaches adopting a transmedia perspective. He will defend his doctoral dissertation The Photograph and the Literary Text: A Transmedia Hermeneutics in 2011. HEIKE SCHAEFER is Associate Professor at the University of Mannheim, where she teaches American literature and culture. Her research reflects her interest in the intersections of literary and visual cultures, immediacy effects, the confluence of literature, science, and philosophy, <?page no="260"?> 260 Notes on Contributors theories of space and transculturality, and gender studies. She has published on nineteenthand twentieth-century American poetry, environmental literature, and fiction and is the author of the ecocritical study Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography (University of Virginia Press, 2004). She edited America and the Orient (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006). Recently, she completed the book-length project Immediacy and Mediation: The Response of U.S. American Literature to the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television, 1839-1993. JULIA STRAUB works as a lecturer in North American literature at the University of Berne. Her first book, A Victorian Muse: The Afterlife of Dante’s Beatrice in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Continuum, 2009), looked at the Victorian reception of Dante. Her current research projects focus on transatlantic mobility in the eighteenth century, the canon and early American literature, and contemporary British and American fiction. <?page no="261"?> Index of Names Abel, Richard, 36 Abrams, H.W., 50 Adorno, Theodor W., 24, 78 Agee, James, 186, 188-189 Alberti, Leon Battista, 25, 156n Aldington, Richard, 142 Altieri, Charles, 145 Altman, Rick, 36 Appollinaire, Guillaume, 140 Aragon, Louis, 199 Arendt, Hannah, 33 Arensberg, Walter Conrad, 147 Aristotle, 232 Arnheim, Rudolf, 34 Arnold, Matthew, 88, 90 Astre, Georges-Albert, 217 Astruc, Alexander, 133 Augé, Marc, 28 Badalamenti, Angelo, 227 Balázs, Béla, 198, 216 Ball, Alan, 248 Barthes, Roland, 216 Bataille, Georges, 70-71 Baudelaire, Charles, 23-24, 27, 139 Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 231, 234n Bauman, Zygmunt, 23n Bazin, André, 133 Bell, Daniel, 65, 73, 78 Benjamin, Walter, 23-24, 27, 30, 33-34, 197-198 Benshoff, Harry, 247 Berkeley, Busby, 14, 86-88, 94- 98, 102 Berman, Marshall, 23n, 28 Beuys, Joseph, 32 Billroth, Theodor, 49 Blackton, J. Stuart, 107 Bolter, Jay David, 112n, 114- 115, 170 Bomberg, David, 143 Bordwell, David, 33-35, 216 Bourke-White, Margaret, 190- 191 Brancusi, Constantin, 141, 147 Braque, Georges, 141 Brecht, Berthold, 24 Bresson, Robert, 133 Brock, Bazon, 88 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 14, 231 Brooks, Peter, 228, 234 Browning, Tod, 239, 241 Buck-Morss, Susan, 87 Buergel, Ronald M., 31 Buñuel, Luis, 17, 204-206 Burchard, Rachel, 154 Butler, Judith, 240n Butor, Michel, 122 Callahan, Raymond, 46 Cangiullo, Francesco, 140-141 Carrà, Carlo, 140 Castell, Manuel, 28 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 123-124 Cézanne, Paul, 120, 144, 147 Chaplin, Charlie, 177n Charney, Leo, 22 Chatman, Seymour, 216 Clark, Colin, 73 Cobley, Evelyn, 44 Collier, John, 120, 126-127 <?page no="262"?> 262 Index of Names Cornelius, Henry, 120-122, 127, 130 Corwin, Sharon, 45 Cosgrove, Peter, 192 Costello, Bonnie, 149 Cowen, Tyler, 70n Crane, Hart, 146 Crary, Jonathan, 25 Crotti, Jean and Yvonne, 147 Crowther, Bosley, 127 Cummings, E.E., 141, 144, 149- 150 Cunningham, Michael, 18, 209, 214 Cuvier, George, 66-67 Daiches, David, 211, 221 Daldry, Stephen, 18, 209-210, 214-215, 217-218, 221-222 Darwin, Charles, 66, 67, 71 Dasenbrock, Reed, 139 Daston, Lorraine, 52 David, Ira C., 52 Demeter, Karl, 51 Demuth, Charles, 147 Derrida, Jacques, 14 Descartes, René, 25, 43, 51-52 Detweiler, Robert, 154 Dion of Prusa, 138 Disney, Walt, 14, 85-87, 99-103 Doane, Mary Ann, 198 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 139, 141, 142 Dos Passos, John, 119-121 Doyen, Eugène Louis, 53-55 Duchamp, Marcel, 12, 32, 147, 149 Dunant, Caroline, 234n Dunning, William, 160 Durkheim, David Emile, 68 Dyer, Richard, 249 Eco, Umberto, 31 Edgerton, Samuel Y., 156n Edison, Thomas, 43, 46, 47-49, 51, 173 Eikmeyer, Robert, 87 Einstein, Albert, 158, 171 Eisenstein, Sergei, 210-211 Eliot, T.S., 12, 139, 141, 144- 147, 150 Elsaesser, Thomas, 13-14, 19, 41-42, 231n, 233n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 147 Emery, James Newell, 50 Enright, Ray, 94 Epstein, Jacob, 143 Epstein, Jean, 54 Evans, Walker, 186, 188-194 Farocki, Harun, 36-38 Fenollosa, Ernest, 142 Fish, Stanley, 187 Flint, F.S., 142 Florida, Richard, 64n Ford, Ford Madox, 142 Ford, Henry, 64 Foster, Hal, 26 Foucault, Michel, 25, 63 Frank, Joseph, 217 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 78n, 95, 171 Gainty, Caitlin, 47n Gasnier, Louis J., 111 Gates, Bill, 64 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 142, 143 Gaudreault, André, 108, 112, 114, 116 Gaugin, Paul, 144 Giddens, Anthony, 66 Gilbreth, Frank Bunker, 14, 45- 48, 53-54, 65, 73-76, 79 Gilbreth, Lillian, 45-47, 54, 74- 75 Gilliam, Terry, 226 Glazier, Loss, 150n <?page no="263"?> Index of Names 263 Gledhill, Susan, 235-236 Gleizes, Albert, 147 Goebbels, Joseph, 93 Gombrecht, Ernst, 34 Greenberg, Clement, 155 Greiner, Donald, 154 Griffith, D.W., 105, 111-112 Grindon, Leger, 201n Gris, Juan, 120 Grosz, Georg, 119-120, 121n, 127 Groys, Boris, 89, 91, 93 Grusin, Richard, 112n, 114-115, 170 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 33 Gunning, Tom, 34-36, 114 Hansen, Miriam, 34 Harris, Charlaine, 248 Hartley, Marsden, 147 Haselstein, Ulla, 175n Hauser, Arnold, 217 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, Baron, 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 68 Hegemann, Helene, 12 Heidegger, Martin, 25n, 33 Heisenberg, Werner, 171 Hervey, Walter L, 51 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18, 27-28, 226, 229-235 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 87, 88-91, 93- 94, 97-99, 102-103 Höch, Hanna, 26 Hoof, Florian, 74 Hopper, Edward, 16, 154-165 Horkheimer, Max, 24 Hulme, T.E., 142, 149 Humphrey, Robert, 211 Isherwood, Christopher, 15, 120-133 Ivens, Joris, 124 Jacobs, Jane, 28 Jakobson, Roman, 144 James, C.L.R., 102 Jay, Martin, 25-26 Jefferson, Thomas, 66 Jobs, Steve, 64 Johns, Jasper, 32 Joyce, James, 144 Kafka, Franz, 24 Kandinsky, Wassily, 139n, 140- 142 Kawash, Samira, 249 Keil, Charlie, 116 Kracauer, Siegfried, 24 Krauss, Rosalind, 26 Krupp, Alfried, 64 Kubrick, Stanley, 86 Kutner, Robert, 49-50 Lange, Dorothea, 186, 188 Larsen, Nella, 18, 239, 242n Lastra, James, 36 Latour, Bruno, 35 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), 26 Lee, Russell, 187 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 138 Levenson, Michael, 146 Levin, Gail, 156n Levi-Strauss, Claude, 24 Levitt, Norman, 35 Lewis, Wyndham, 143 Locke, John, 43, 52 Loppinot, Stefani de, 97 Lothe, Jakob, 216 Lowenstein, Adam, 244n Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 173 Luscher, Robert, 154 Luther, Martin, 62 <?page no="264"?> 264 Index of Names Lynch, David, 18, 226-229, 231-233, 235, 236n Lyotard, Jean-François, 161, 164 Madsen, Deborah, 243, 247n Malevich, Kazimir, 98, 141 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 140 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 17, 177- 178 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Emilio, 26 Marion, Philippe, 108, 112, 114, 116 Marx, Karl, 62, 67, 69, 71, 171 Matisse, Henri, 144, 147, 175 Mauss, Marcel, 70 McCabe, Susan, 177n, 203, 205 McCloskey, Deirdre, 77n McFarlane, Brian, 216 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 24 Metelmann, Jörg, 232n Mitchell, W.J.T., 71 Mondrian, Piet, 141 Montgomery, Robert, 121 Moore, Marianne, 141, 146-147 Moretti, Franco, 230 Moses, Robert, 28 Murphet, Julian, 177n, 180 Muybridge, Eadweard, 17, 177 Nancy, Jean Luc, 33 Nänny, Max, 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88, 158, 171 Noack, Barbara, 31 Olden, John, 112 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 158-160, 164 Paik, Nam Jun, 32 Panofsky, Erwin, 34 Pater, Walter, 138-139 Paz, Octavio, 144 Pestalozzi, Johann H., 50 Peterson, Jennifer, 48 Picabia, Francis, 147 Picasso, Pablo, 12, 120, 141, 147, 175-178 Pitts, Zasu, 201 Plath, James, 153 Plutarch, 138 Polanyi, Michael, 75 Pound, Ezra, 45, 90, 139-145, 147, 150 Preminger, Otto, 226 Proust, Marcel, 24 Rabinbach, Anson, 41 Raitt, Suzanne, 45 Rathenau, Walter, 24 Ray, Man, 177n Reeder, R.R., 50-51 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 116n Ricardo, David, 69 Riefenstahl, Leni, 14, 85-88, 90- 94, 97, 102-103 Rifkin, Jeremy, 64n Rimbaud, Arthur, 23 Rivera, Diego, 77 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 122 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 147 Roche, Juliette, 147 Roosevelt, Theodore, 45, 186 Rothstein, Arthur, 186-187 Rozanov, Vasily, 121 Rozario, Kevin, 191 Ruttmann, Walther, 123 Sabin, Roger, 243, 247n Sarasin, Philip, 63 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 24 Sawyer, Charles H., 158 Schmidlin, Rick, 200n Schmidt, Peter, 147 Schumpeter, Joseph, 67-71 Schwarz, Vanessa R., 22 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 79 Scorsese, Martin, 27 <?page no="265"?> Index of Names 265 Seay, Charles M., 106, 109-111 Sedgwick, Eve, 247 Shail, Andrew, 116-117 Shakespeare, William, 97 Sheeler, Charles, 123, 147-148 Shklovsky, Viktor, 121 Simmel, Georg, 24 Simonides of Ceos, 138 Singer, Ben, 108, 116 Singer, Bryan, 243n Slide, Anthony, 113 Sokal, Alan, 35 Solow, Robert, 72 Sontag, Susan, 85-87 Soupault, Phillippe, 199 Stahl, John M., 18, 239 Stallone, Sylvester, 79 Stein, Gertrude, 17, 141, 169- 181 Steiner, Wendy, 144, 175n Stevens, Wallace, 139, 141, 146- 149 Stieglitz, Alfred, 147, 175 Stoker, Bram, 241, 242n Stott, William, 188 Strand, Paul, 123, 147 Strauven, Wanda, 26 Stroheim, Erich von, 17, 199- 203, 205-206 Stryker, Roy, 187-188 Tallack, Douglas, 154 Tati, Jacques, 27 Taussig, Michael, 22 Taylor, Frederick W., 45, 48, 74 Thompson, Emily, 36 Thyssen, August, 64 Tschumi, Bernard, 28 Tyree, J.M., 251 Updike, John, 16, 153-165 Van Druten, John, 120-126, 128 Varèse, Edgar, 147 Vermeer, Jan, 153 Vertov, Dziga, 121, 123 Wadsworth, Jacob, 143 Wagner, Richard, 139 Wald, Gayle, 242n Warhol, Andy, 32 Weber, Max, 22n, 23-24 Wharton, Theodore, 106, 111- 113 Whitman, Walt, 147-148 Williams, Bernard, 77n Williams, Linda, 228-229, 233 Williams, William Carlos, 139, 141, 146-148, 150, 172 Woolf, Virginia, 18, 210-211, 213-214 Worringer, Wilhelm, 139-140n Zuckerberg, Mark, 64 <?page no="267"?> Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG DEZEMBER 2010 JETZT BESTELLEN! Karen Junod / Didier Maillat (eds.) Performing the Self Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 24 2010, 196 Seiten, €[D] 49.00/ SFr 69.50 ISBN 978-3-8233-6613-3 Performing the Self offers a cross-disciplinary dialogue about fundamental issues related to identity construction and identity performance. Written by linguistic and literary scholars, the present collection of essays argues against an essentialist view of the self and demonstrates in various ways how identities - whether they are defined as national, sexual, gendered, cultural, professional, virtual, linguistic or in some other way personal - are the products of multiple constructions and interconnected performances. Indeed, ‘performing the self’ is shown to be an act of constant questioning and staging, a relentless process which one perpetually revises and readjusts. <?page no="268"?> Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de The essays in Writing American Women offer a sustained investigation of what writing has meant for North American women authors from the earliest captivity narratives to Kym Ragusa’s acclaimed recent memoir, The Skin Between Us (2006). By focusing on women rather than the more porous category of gender, contributors offer a meaningful survey of the issues that have shaped women’s writing in America. Some of the questions that emerge with particular force include the fraught relationship of women authors to the institutions of literar y production, their complex geographical and cultural self-definition, and the special place of autobiography in their work. Combining historical, literary, institutional, and theoretical considerations, this volume brings into focus the rich nuances and heterogeneity of contemporar y American studies as well as the vital contributions of women writers to American literature. Writers discussed in this book include Mary Rowlandson, Lucy Larcom, Amy Lowell, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, Nancy Huston and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Thomas Austenfeld Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds.) Writing American Women Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 23 2009, 232 Seiten, €[D] 49,00/ SFr 81,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6521-1 <?page no="269"?> Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This volume sets out to bridge the gap between medieval and early modern literary studies. It contains a selection of essays by both distinguished experts and young scholars in either field, and marks the foundation of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. The contributions address the crucial issue of how texts engage with other texts. They do so in a variety of ways, focusing on pretexts, paratexts, and marginalia. What emerges is an insight into the way texts shape identity - be it that of the author, the readership, or the texts themselves. Indira Ghose Denis Renevey (eds.) The Construction of Textual Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 22 2009, 222 Seiten, €[D] 49,00/ SFr 81,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6520-4 <?page no="270"?> Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This volume contains a selection of papers from the conference on Mediality / Intermediality held at the University of Zurich in May 2007. The essays explore a wide diversity of medial phenomena ranging from Shakespearean drama to contemporar y literature, and from the motif of the Arthurian Round Table to the treatment of a metafictional novel in cartoon form. The core issues discussed include theory and methodology, the practical value of mediality for literary studies, the relationship between the written text and visual representation, and the role of performance and performativity. Collectively, the essays constitute a comprehensive investigation of some of the most pressing concerns in the study of mediality and intermediality. Martin Heusser Andreas Fischer Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) Mediality/ Intermediality Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, Band 21 2008, 170 Seiten, €[D] 49,00/ SFr 83,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6457-3