M. Klaver, r rickey, and L. Howell

Department of English
Universities of Calgary and Victoria
lhowell@mtroyal.ab.ca
rrickey@acs.ucalgary.ca
klaverm@cadvision.co

 

E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge, 1996.

 

Looking for the Other responds to the charge that white feminist film theories, especially psychoanalytic ones, neglect issues of race. In this ambitious project, E. Ann Kaplan defends a psychoanalytic approach to the racialized subject through examinations of gender and race in mainstream and independent film. Targeted at liberal arts students, the text is a useful introduction to these issues within film, women’s studies, and postcolonial/cultural studies. Unfortunately, Kaplan sometimes sacrifices quality of critique for quantity, and subtlety of argument for scope, in an attempt to satisfy her audiences. The result is a text which ultimately surveys and summarizes more than it stakes out new ground in the ongoing debates about whiteness and feminist film theory.

 

The book is divided into two main sections. Part I, “Theories of Nation, Psychoanalysis and the Imperial Gaze,” primarily explores the male and imperial gazes in Hollywood film. Part 2, “Travelling Postcolonialists and Women of Color,” examines the ways in which independent film offers the alternative of “inter- and intra-racial looking relations.” Throughout, Kaplan argues by analogy, risking oversimplification of a number of key concepts. For example, Chapter 1, “Travel, Travelling Identities and the Look” depends on the assumption that race, like gender, operates through internalized binary oppositions. She offers examples from Fanon, DuBois, hooks, and Appadurai which support theories of “a network of diasporic black peoples dislocated around the globe in the late twentieth century who share experiences of the alienating gaze” (10). Kaplan’s theory layers colonialism on top of discourses of the gaze initiated by Laura Mulvey. Thus situated non-dialectically, racial difference becomes little more than another instance of split subjectivity. Combined with the constant deferral of her explanation to later sections in the book plus numerous editing errors, such oversimplifications undermine her argument.[1]

 

Chapter 2, “Theories of Nation and Hollywood in the Contexts of Gender and Race” surveys “male theories” of nations as modern, industrial concepts linked to the rise of literacy and popular culture (29). Kaplan continues her reliance on binary oppositions, countering these male ideas of nation with a feminine sphere of culture. Most significant for her later analysis of Hollywood film is the concept of nation as a fiction, and of America as a construct divided between European cultural allegiances and American national ones. Kaplan relies on Jane Flax to support a claim for a womanly perspective on global history, one in which “problems might not be framed as debates about First, Second or Third Worlds but rather in terms of ongoing struggles to connect or not connect with an Other,” to juggle public and private roles, to link local and global concerns, and “to make oneself a subject within national struggles” (46). These are important questions, and Kaplan offers a sampling of fascinating alternatives to the narrow conception of national identity at work in Hollywood film. However, we wonder why her discussion of these alternatives runs to three pages, in comparison with the eighteen or so pages of “male theory.” If it is because, as she states, “the problematic relation of ‘woman’ to ‘nation’… urgently needs more research” (46), we would add that the binary opposition of male nation to female culture also needs deconstructing.

 

In Chapter 3, “Hollywood, Science and Cinema: The Imperial and the Male Gaze in Classic Film,” Kaplan tackles D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, notably its anxieties about the black man’s rape of the white woman, to illustrate interlocking structures of masculinity and whiteness in the imperial gaze. According to her reading, stereotypes of lascivious black men and pure white women “image forth” white supremacy and male supremacy respectively. Through these stereotypes, the film appeals to Southerners to see themselves as part of an American nation preparing for World War I (68). Similarly, masculinity and imperialism collude in a series of 1930s ape movies–King Kong, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Blonde Venus. Devices such as the map of the “dark” continent penetrated by the explorer/hunter, the sexual objectification of the white woman, and the feminization and oversexing of the black man illustrate Hollywood’s continuing attempts to manage America’s sexual and racial anxieties. Kaplan also notes that these films may be seen as attempts to come to grips with national guilt about slavery, or to console “a generation of white males without sufficient opportunities for heroism” (74).

 

Kaplan also discusses interesting complications of the stereotypical view that the imperial gaze is solely male. In looking at Black Narcissus (1946) and Out of Africa (1985), she notes that “white women become the surrogates for men when there is a need to show male power waning” (81)–in this case British power in India. The white nuns in Black Narcissus are bearers of the imperial gaze on their mission into Nepal, but that gaze is destabilized by the orientalized sensuality of the place: the nuns’ repressed sensuality emerges at the same time that their strength and independence from men begins to crack; a heterosexual narrative asserts itself. Kaplan argues, following Laura Kipnis, that the construction of “colonialism as female megalomania” rationalizes colonialism’s failures (88). Here, Kaplan participates in ongoing critiques of white womanhood and its interlocking privileges as shown in the work of Jane Gaines, Mary Ann Doane, Rey Chow, Donna Haraway, and others.

 

How disappointing then, to read that the main difference between the stereotypes in Black Narcissus and the less offensive depictions in Out of Africa seems to be a matter of characterization: Karen Blixen “cares about [Africans] as individuals” and her “main servant is individualized” and allowed to return her look (89). Kaplan’s assumption that this treatment remains a viable alternative to stereotyping troubles us in its allegiance to liberal humanism. She notes that “something else is going on in these films in regard to images of white women” and wonders “how can [white] feminists enjoy their empowerment” through these images “at the expense of women of other colors?” (92). One answer may be the rewards and pleasures of individualism which structure the major liberation movements of the West, including white liberal feminism. Nevertheless, Kaplan makes an important contribution in Chapter 3 with her understanding that these films forge American identity through European colonial narratives.

 

Chapter 4, “Darkness Within: Or, The Dark Continent of Film Noir” further investigates the effect of psychoanalysis on American film when dealing with issues of “othering” that cross race and gender. The chapter starts by briefly describing the possibilities of psychoanalytic readings of film, especially the value of British transcultural psychiatry, and summarily explaining the racist, sexist, and homophobic origins of psychoanalysis. Kaplan then performs a close reading of Home of the Brave, Pressure Point, Candyman, and Cat People. Oddly, considering the chapter’s title, only the latter falls within the normal definition “film noir.” All four films use psychoanalysis within their plots; especially important to this reading is the claim that psychiatry is a “science,” the authority of which is either supported or destabilized by these films. Kaplan attempts to analyze the psychoanalytic readings both of and within these films, which all blur, or attempt to blur, characters’ race and gender. However, Kaplan’s readings rely heavily on plot and character description, possibly because, as Kaplan notes, these older films are likely not to have been seen by her readers.

 

Black and white interaction in mainstream film sets up Kaplan’s ensuing discussion of independent films. Before Part II, “Travelling Postcolonialists and Women of Color,” she clarifies her use of psychoanalysis and reads its use in film to construct the white subject. Kaplan argues that “the formation of the white subject as white, as it depends upon difference from blackness, is one area for study” (129). Though not theoretically innovative, Kaplan’s readings of film related to this question and her working through the problematics of psychoanalysis facilitate entry into the second part of Looking for the Other.

 

Kaplan asserts that Part II intends “to open a window on how women directors imagine and create fictional worlds about issues of sex, race and the media. And how, in so doing, they dramatically challenge Hollywood male and imperial gaze structures to begin the hard work of moving beyond oppressive objectification within the constraints of inevitable looking structures” (16). Kaplan selects Hu Mei, Claire Denis, Mira Nair, Pratibha Parmar, Alice Walker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Julie Dash, and Yvonne Rainer for discussion in Part II because, though they all deal with sex, race, gender and class in “cinematic forms deliberately in opposition to classical commercial film” (16), they approach their projects differently.

 

Yet Kaplan only partially delivers on her promises for Part II. In Chapter 5 she explores the relationship between white theorists/theories and China. Stressing that cross-cultural exchange is possible both from West to East and East to West, yet not ignoring the power differential, Kaplan uses Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “approaching” to assert that there is a way if not to “know” the Other, at least to “speak nearby.” In her discussion of the relationships between Western and Asian critics and their views toward Western readings of Asian culture, she summarizes the debate between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad regarding the possibility of the West “knowing Chinese or Indian culture and politics (17).” Jameson’s construction of three worlds in which First-World texts are related to the public/private split while in Third-World texts all libidinal desires are politicized, is critiqued by Ahmad who posits only one postcolonial world constructed of economic, political, and historical links. Kaplan rereads this debate to show that both Jameson, particularly in his comments regarding allegory’s inherence in Third-World texts, and Ahmad, in underlining Western critics’ arrogant assumption that they can understand an Other culture through partial knowledge, make valuable contributions to the discourses of “knowing the other.” She locates herself between her readings of Jameson and Ahmad, but directs her criticism more strongly toward Ahmad, whose position she calls an “overreaction.”

 

From her assumed position of subject-in-between, Kaplan’s second focus in Chapter 5 addresses criticism of her 1989 article “Problematizing Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Case of Woman in the Recent Chinese Cinema.” She argues effectively that in this essay she attempted to position herself as an “outsider” whose readings might untangle one of many strands of meaning to be found in Chinese film texts. Included among Western critics censured for perpetuating cultural colonization, Kaplan reads Yoshimoto Mitsuhira’s criticisms as a reconstruction of Asia as feminine or victim. By turning to the complexities of subjectivity, as many feminists do, Kaplan stresses the possibility of showing “how resilient peoples are to such cultural and capitalist ‘invasions,’ and how they find strategies to divert their impacts” (152). Kaplan is constantly aware that histories of colonization and appropriation cannot be ignored. Her consistent attention to the complexities of the history, economics, and politics of intercultural “knowing” creates, at times, an apparently disjointed argument, but one worth teasing out by engaged readers.

 

Kaplan’s selection of Denis’ Chocolat, Parmar and Walker’s Warrior Marks, and Nair’s Mississippi Masala to search for an answer to the question “Can One Know the Other?” is most appropriate. All three non-American films illustrate her desire to explore the possibilities of inter-racial looking and to challenge the dominance of the male and imperial gazes. These challenges contribute to a form of looking which exemplifies a desire to know rather than to dominate. Kaplan astutely explores the processes of looking that occur between spectator and film and between characters within films. In these “looking relations,” Kaplan indicates ways in which women directors alter the subject-object binary; when traditionally subjugated characters look back, stereotypes are challenged, and the gaze, with its inherent anxieties and domination, becomes a mutual process of looking.

 

Kaplan states: “There has surely to be a way between the alternatives of an oppressive Western application of humanism to the Other and surrendering any kind of cross-cultural knowing” (195). She sees that for women travelling outside their cultures, the best way to accomplish cross-cultural knowing is “speaking nearby.” She explores Trinh’s Reassemblage and Shoot for the Contents with emphasis on ideas that inter-racial looking relations should be reconstructed as a meeting of multiple “I’s” with multiple “I’s” in the Other. For Kaplan, the women’s bodies that Trinh presents are not objectified but instead become sites for discussions of subjectivity, nationhood, and transnational feminism. She looks conscientiously at the work of Hu Mei, Denis, Parmar and Walker, Nair, and Trinh, all women “in postcolonialism travelling to foreign cultures” (216), revealing ways in which imperial and male gazes are and can be disrupted, finding new ways of knowing, of seeing, and of looking for the Other.

 

Chapter 8, “‘Healing Imperialized Eyes’: Independent Women Filmmakers and the Look,” continues to explore how women filmmakers rework the “look” in an attempt to redefine colonial images. Kaplan reads two of Julie Dash’s films, Illusions and Daughters of the Dust, as attempts to redefine audience perceptions of blacks in film and films’ assumptions about audience. Kaplan then moves on to examine Mi Vida Loca, a film on Chicana “gang girls,” by white director Allison Anders. Finally, she argues that Yamazaki Hiroko’s Juxta uses themes of generation and immigration to complicate racialized images.

 

Kaplan argues that these films do not confront the imperial and male gazes in an attempt to reverse or undo their effects, but instead involve themselves in an entirely different project: “Other films I call ‘healing’ because they seek to see from the perspective of the oppressed, the diasporan, without specifically confronting the oppressor’s strategies” (221). She suggests that these filmmakers occupy the position of the hybrid, furthering her argument for the subject-in-between. Caught between cultures, their films concern themselves in constructing “‘intra-racial’ looking relations rather than inter-racial ones” (222). Kaplan asserts that while white women suffer from “too much visibility” in Hollywood, black women remain largely invisible or consigned to a narrow range of stereotypes. Her inquiry into Dash’s Daughters exposes the construction of black images that step outside the Hollywood mainstream: Dash creates a strong intelligent matriarch to oppose the traditional “mammy” image. At stake in the idea of healing, therefore, is the possibility that seeing from the perspective of the oppressed produces new points of identification for film audiences.

 

Kaplan also notes that formal devices can be used to challenge imperial and male gazes. From film speed, to narrative structures, to genre mixing, these films often reposition their audiences in order to step outside the hegemony of Hollywood film. Kaplan reads all four of these movies, sensitively drawing out how this feat is accomplished. She also notes that these films do not necessarily share the same tones: some are celebratory while others are melancholic. The importance of these films is that they do not reproduce the imperial gaze, but rather strive to find power in “healing” its alienating effects.

 

In Chapter 9, “Body Politics: Menopause, Mastectomy and Cosmetic Surgery in Films by Rainer, Tom and Onwurah,” Kaplan detours from film criticism to medical discourse. Her review of plastic surgery texts reveals how parallel constructions of age or race become associated with disease and deformity. Relying on ideas of nation from Part I, she posits a norm of womanhood: young and white. Though we cannot argue against her notions of this norm, we do note that it relies on a collapse of Western thought into an exclusively American “look.” With this assumption, Kaplan reads Tom’s Two Lies and Rainer’s Privilege in terms of a conflict between an “authentic” immigrant body and the American body assimilated through surgical intervention. Her argument recognizes that the “casualties” of the American look need further attention.

 

Another important contribution is Kaplan’s argument that aging white women either fall into Hollywood’s typecast characters or do not appear at all. Always careful to acknowledge that these women do not lose all their privileges in aging, Kaplan does however point out that aging further complicates women’s positioning by the male and imperial gaze. By drawing affinities between menopausal white women and women of color, Kaplan invites further discussion of generational differences and their implications for women’s studies.

 

Kaplan’s research into plastic surgery and aging reveals intriguing concepts in relation to American film, but her sweeping statements often hinder her arguments. For example, she states, “It is in male interest to keep alive the myth that after menopause women have no particular interest and therefore can be passed over for younger women who still depend on men” (286). Like the “male theories” of Part I, the assumption of “male interest” once again collapses a complex argument into a traditional gender category. Throughout her book, Kaplan attempts not to essentialize various groups while arguing that dominant film does; occasionally she missteps and her statements reinscribe the generalizations which she seeks to critique.

 

The risk of reinscription is addressed in the “Afterword” as Kaplan attempts to negotiate the tricky gaps between white and non-white positions on the emerging field of “whiteness studies.” Cautioning her readers not to conflate varieties of alienation, she insists that it is essential that “one recognizes that whites are not necessarily reinscribing whiteness but taking the lead from the peoples whites have oppressed” (294; original emphasis). Is Kaplan prescribing a point of view here, or offering an anti-colonialist strategy? The ambivalence continues in the statement, “Because of white supremacy, it seems to me that it is the responsibility of whites to start the process of recognition of the Other as an autonomous subject” (299). Does this imply that the process has not yet begun outside of “whiteness studies”? Does the notion of responsibility imply a conferring of subjectivity or authority? We are uncomfortable with the vagueness of such “responsibility” because it implies that if whites do not begin this process of recognition, it will not be done at all. In fact, Kaplan hazards misrecognizing the Other when she concludes her book by asserting a belief “that black women may have an incredibly important role to play at this historical moment…. Hopefully, this is a moment when white women can listen” (301). Having just warned readers not to conflate varieties of alienation she subsumes all non-white women under the term “black women.” In this ostensibly conciliatory gesture, Kaplan falls back on a black-white binary that grounds her global survey in America.

 

Future discussions surrounding Kaplan’s new work will need to complicate its layered relations between race and gender by adding the undiscussed categories of class and sexuality. Her conception of the imperial gaze largely ignores the dynamics of capitalism within patriarchal and racist structures, and discussions of gay and lesbian contributions are cursory. Nevertheless, we applaud Kaplan’s commitment “to the idea… that the level of signification can impact on the imaginary and produce change in subjects reading or viewing texts” (xv). It is through this ability of texts to change subjectivity that Kaplan sees a possibility for prejudices based on race, ethnicity, color, age, sexual orientation, and gender to be deconstructed. For her, perhaps the best route to change is through the work of women directors of all colors (including white). The value of her text lies in the attention she pays to these women directors, their films, and their changing audiences.

Note

 

1. The editing errors are frustrating. For instance, in Chapter 1 Kaplan claims she will discuss six directors, though seven are listed (15-16); likewise, she announces that Anders’ Mi Vida Loca will be discussed in Chapter 6, but it appears in Chapter 8.

 

 

 

The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.

 

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Reader’s Report on Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” (PMC 7.3):

 

“Twelve Blue” reminded me of this excerpt from from Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories:

 

...the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have a magic effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each of a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and the [Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become other stories...

 

These comments are from: Caroline Honig

 

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Michael Joyce replies:

 

Dear Caroline Honig,

 

PMC has passed along your reader’s report and I am grateful for your reminder of Rushdie’s strands and streams which, while not explicitly on my mind when I literally drew out the strands for “Twelve Blue,” cannot have been out of mind either.

 

In his essay “In the Ocean of Streams of Story” (Millenium Film Journal No. 28 [Spring]: Interactivities, 15-30: http://www.sva.edu/MFJ/GWOCEAN.HTML), the interactive cinema artist Grahame Weinbren asks:

 

Can we imagine the Ocean as a source primarily for readers rather than writers? Could there be a "story space"... like the Ocean, in which a reader might take a dip, encountering stories and story-segments as he or she flipped and dived? In these waters, turbulences created by the swimmer's own motion might cause an intermingling of the Streams of Story where the very attempt to examine a particular story-stream transforms it. What a goal to create such an Ocean! And how suitable an ideal for an interactive fiction!

 

The hypertext novelist Carolyn Guyer, whose Mother Millennia project (http://mothermillennia.org) imagines its own sea of “2000 stories of mother by the year 2000” came to hypertext after imagining artist’s books where the connections among characters, themes, images, etc., would literally be threaded through the leaves of the book into cat’s-cradle-like webs of shifting forms.

 

My own favorite memory of story strands is from a session at an educational conference where I asked people in the audience of the final luncheon to create a human hypertext (what else is there?). As they took part in the discussion I asked successive speakers to toss balls of colored yarn across the room to others in the audience with whose ideas they felt a connection. It did not take long before the audience was strewn with trails of brightly colored yarn marking the weave of shared ideas.

 

Your note struck me as one such strand. Thank you.

 

Michael Joyce

 

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Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky, Exchange on Plotnitsky’s essay, “‘But It Is Above All Not True’” Derrida, Relativity and the ‘Science Wars,’” Postmodern Culture 7.2

 

Arkady Plotnitsky 

Literature Program
Duke University
aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu

 

and Richard Crew

Department of Mathematics
University of Florida
crew@math.ufl.edu

 

The following exchange between Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky is in response to Plotnitsky’s essay, “‘But It Is Above All Not True’: Derrida, Relativity and the ‘Science Wars,’” which appeared in PMC (7.2) in January, 1997.

 

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A Response to Arkady Plotnitsky’s “‘But It Is Above All Not True’: Derrida, Relativity and the ‘Science Wars’” (PMC 7.3)

Richard Crew
crew@math.ufl.edu© 1998 Richard Crew
All rights reserved.

 

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I read with great interest Arkady Plotnitsky’s article on the science wars and Derrida’s use of the phrase “Einsteinian constant.” I agree completely with the complaints he expresses on the superficiality with which this and other aspects of the Sokal controversy have been discussed. Nonetheless I have some misgivings about the reading he proposes for this phrase, and in the application of it he makes to that controversy.

 

When he says, for example, that “As used by Hyppolite, the ‘constant’ here may not mean–and does not appear to mean–a numerical constant, as virtually all the physicists who commented on it appear to assume,” I cannot help feeling that his judgement is a little premature. In fact Plotnitsky characterizes his own reading as “tentative,” and admits (in paragraph 18 of his article) that “this alternative interpretation is not definitive, and no definitive interpretation may be possible, given the status of the text.” Actually, he proposes two related interpretations: the “Einsteinian constant,” in Hyppolite’s usage, should be understood as referring to either the Lorentz distance, or to space-time itself. He apparently views these alternatives as “conceptually equivalent,” since they are “correlative to the constancy of the speed of light c in a vacuum.” But if concepts that are “correlative” in this sense can be viewed as “conceptually equivalent,” then why can they not both be viewed as conceptually equivalent to the speed of light itself? Then the reading in which the “Einsteinian constant” is simply “the speed of light”–i.e., a physical constant–would be back in the game.

 

I think Plotnitsky is right in thinking that there can be no “definitive interpretation” of Hyppolite’s “constant which is a combination of space-time” or of Derrida’s rejoinder that “the Einsteinian constant is not a constant, not a center”: there is simply too little physics here to say what might be at issue. But nonetheless the reading “space-time” seems to be excluded by Hyppolite’s choice of language; if all he meant was “space-time,” then why does he use the more complicated phrase “constant that is a combination of space-time”? Perhaps this is why Plotnitsky suggests that Hyppolite is thinking of the Lorentz distance, while Derrida has in mind space-time itself. It might be thought too finicky to point out that there is no explicit textual license to bring in either of the concepts “space-time” or “Lorentz interval” into the discussion (though raising this objection would be consistent with Plotnitsky’s dictum that the reader should construe the meaning of the term ‘constant’ “from the text itself” rather than from one’s general knowledge of physics, c.f. par 12). But whatever Hyppolite may have had in mind, Plotnitsky rightly points out that the sense of Derrida’s assertion, “the Einsteinian constant is not a constant, not a center,” has to be determined from the discussion of the term “center” in the lecture of Derrida that he and Hyppolite are discussing.

 

Let’s now consider Plotnitsky’s reading of the “constant”:

 

...it appears to mean the Einsteinian (or Einsteinian-Minkowskian) concept of space-time itself, since Hyppolite speaks of "a constant which is a combination of space-time" (emphasis added), or the so-called spatio-temporal interval, invariant ("constant") under Lorentz transformations of special relativity. This interval is also both "a combination of space-time" and something that "does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the experience," and can be seen as "dominat[ing] the whole construct" (i.e. the conceptual framework of relativity in this Minkowskian formulation). (par. 17; the emphasis is Plotnitsky's)

 

One could observe that the Lorentz distance, considered as a function on space-time, is invariant under the group of Lorentz transformations, but it is not constant in the usual sense this has for functions (i.e. that of assuming the same value everywhere). But really, this is just a quibble; slightly more serious is the question of the sense in which space-time (as opposed to the Lorentz distance) can be said to be constant. It can’t mean “not varying in time” because time is internal to space-time. It can’t mean “invariant under Lorentz transformations” since space-time doesn’t really undergo Lorentz transformations; these simply describe how certain reference frames in space-time are related to each other. But Plotnitsky’s main point is that space-time, or the invariant distance, somehow illustrates Derrida’s notions of “play” and “center”:

 

The moment one accepts this interpretation, Derrida's statement begins to sound quite a bit less strange. It acquires an even greater congruence with relativity once one understands the term "play/game" as connoting, in this context (it is a more radical and richer concept overall), the impossibility within Einstein's framework of space-time of a uniquely privileged frame of reference--a center from which an observer could master the field (i.e. the whole of space-time). Even if my reading of "the Einsteinian constant" is tentative, the meaning I suggest for Derrida's term "play" [jeu] is easily supportable on the basis of his essay and related works. (par. 19)

 

and later:

 

One might, then, see Derrida's statement reflecting the fact that, in contrast to classical--Newtonian--physics, the space-time of special, and even more so of general, relativity disallows a Newtonian universal background with its (separate) absolute space and absolute time, or a uniquely privileged frame of reference for physical events. (par. 20)

 

In fact, whether or not Derrida really had this in mind, it is an interesting idea that deserves to be examined on its own right.

 

Let’s consider the last quotation first. One has to remark right away that the Newtonian “absolute space” and “absolute time” are not the same thing as a “uniquely privileged frame of reference.” This calls for some explanations. The sense in which space and time are “absolute” in Newtonian mechanics is the following: Newtonian mechanics assumes that it is absolutely meaningful to speak of two events as occurring at the same point of space, or at the same time. This does not imply a choice of a frame of reference. Neither do the laws of Newtonian mechanics single out a particular reference frame; this is all discussed quite clearly in the second chapter of Einstein’s Meaning of Relativity. There is no spatial “center of the universe” singled out by the laws of physics, or any intrinsic meaning to the words “up” or “down.” The laws of physics must be the same at all spatial locations and with respect to all spatial directions; Einstein calls this the “principle of relativity with respect to direction” (Meaning of Relativity 24). One next inquires if there is is a similar principle for observers that are in motion relative to each other. Here it is necessary to single out a particular class of reference frames, the “inertial frames,” and it is required that the laws of physics should be the same for any two observers moving in an inertial reference frame; this Einstein calls the “principle of special relativity” (Meaning of Relativity 25) and it is valid both in Newtonian mechanics and in the theory of relativity.

 

The difference between classical mechanics and special relativity can be seen when we ask how different inertial frames are related to each other. In classical mechanics, as Einstein points out, this problem is solved with the aid of the unconscious assumption that phrases such as “simultaneous” and “in the same location” have an absolute meaning; this is the Newtonian “absolute” space and time. One can then write down formulas for the relation between different inertial frames; Einstein calls these “Galilean transformations” (Meaning of Relativity 26, eqn. 21). For two frames related by Galilean transformations, accelerations are the same, and since the laws of Newtonian physics are expressed as relations between forces and accelerations, they are invariant under Galilean transformations. Now the problem treated by Special Relativity arises when it is observed that Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field are not invariant under Galilean transformations. It would then seem that one could detect experimentally “absolute velocities,” and not just absolute accelerations; in particular, it would make sense to assert that some object in the universe was “absolutely at rest.” And, far from being a fundamental condition of the theory, this was thought of as a surprising prediction, to be tested experimentally.

 

The failure of such experiments led Einstein to abandon Galilean transformations, and to realize that the relations between different inertial frames must leave Maxwell’s equations invariant. By a well-known argument, he shows that the relations are given by transformations which leave invariant the Lorentz distance–the Lorentz transformations. One thus arrives at the concept of an absolute “space-time,” and of a class of inertial frames of reference “in” it, all related by Lorentz transformations. Einstein then showed that a suitable modification of Newtonian mechanics could be formulated in this setting, from which one could recover the usual mechanical laws when velocities were assumed to be small compared with the speed of light. This of course is the Special Theory of Relativity.

 

One can summarize the situation as follows. There is a principle of relativity in both Newtonian mechanics and in Special Relativity theory; neither theory has a “privileged reference frame,” though both theories recognize a privileged class of reference frames, the inertial frames. The difference between the two lies in the relations between the inertial frames; for the Newtonian theory, these are given by the Galilean transformations, which allow an absolute distinction between space and time. In Special Relativity, absolute space and absolute time are replaced by the weaker hypothesis of an absolute space-time, in which different inertial frames are related by Lorentz transformations, and in which there is no longer an absolute distinction between space and time. In General Relativity, finally, the notion of inertial frame is abandoned, though the notion of a physically meaningful space-time is retained.

 

We must now return to Plotnitsky’s assertion that Derrida’s remark refers to the circumstance that Relativity “disallows a Newtonian universal background… with a uniquely privileged frame of reference for physical events,” and that the concept of “play” that Derrida has worked out connotes “the impossibility within Einstein’s framework of space-time of a uniquely privileged frame of reference.” In fact neither classical nor relativistic mechanics singles out a uniquely privileged reference frame, though both of them single out a privileged class of reference frames. Now if, in the context of either theory, a “center” in Derrida’s sense is to be taken as a privileged frame of reference, and if (as Plotnitsky suggests) lack of such a frame is exactly the connotation of Derridean “play” in this setting, then classical mechanics would itself have to be described as a “decentered structure.” But Derrida’s essay makes it clear that a “classical” theory such as Newtonian mechanics has no business being a decentered structure. According to Derrida, decentered play only emerges subsequent to an event, the “rupture” that he evokes at the beginning of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” which he locates at a particular moment of European culture, roughly during decades surrounding the turn of the century, and he mentions the names of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger; this is not the heyday of classical mechanics!

 

At this point a qualification is in order. It is certainly true that many classical physicists, Newton included, assumed it was absolutely meaningful to assert that an object was “at rest” or “in motion.” Doubts about this, however, surface as early as the first decade of the 18th century (Leibniz, in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence). But the historical record is not at issue here: the point is that theory itself does not require such an assumption. Newtonian mechanics functions in the same way, and makes the same predictions, with or without the assumption that “rest” has an absolute meaning. (In fact, one of the predictions is that it is impossible to determine experimentally if an object is “absolutely at rest”; this principle stated as early as Galileo’s Dialogues. In practice, classical physicists used whatever frame of reference seemed convenient for calculations–usually, though not always, the center of mass of whatever system of bodies was being considered. And they could do this, precisely because it was understood that the particular choice of frame didn’t matter. Now it may be that the persistence of the assumption that “rest” is absolutely meaningful, alongside of what is really the operative assumption of classical mechanics (that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial frames, and that no one is particularly privileged) is an example of the ambivalence between centered structure and decentered play that Derrida discusses in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and illustrates his belief (c.f. Languages of Criticism 265) that there is no meaningful choice between the two. But again, if classical physics displays the same “obscure economy” in which the “absolutely irreconcilable” schemes of centered and decentered structure coexist, then it seems that we should have to put, alongside of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, the names of Galileo, Newton, and Leibnitz. Which was probably not Derrida’s intention.

 

The problem, I think, is in the assumption that, at least in the context of physics, “center” must mean “privileged frame of reference,” and that “play” or “jeu” has to do with its absence. Plotnitsky does not really justify this assumption; he only says that it is “easily supportable on the basis of his essay and related works,” and gives no details; it is, however, the key point. In fact, if “center” could mean something else, then is it not possible after all that Relativity has a “center,” an “organizing principle of the structure” which “would limit what we might call the play of the structure”? One thinks, for example, of the representation theory of the Lorentz group, which classifies the various invariant and covariant quantities for the action of the group, and thus the mathematical constructions which are to be allowed as “physically meaningful.” It could therefore be seen as limiting the “play” of the structure, in the sense that it establishes what can be meaningful in the theory and what cannot. We have also seen the role played by the notion of “inertial system” in both classical and relativistic mechanics: could this be a “center,” something limiting the “play”? And if we consider, not Special, but General Relativity, then a host of concepts come in for consideration–the curvature tensor, the Ricci tensor, the scalar curvature, or perhaps the totality of Riemannian geometry–as a “ceenter,” something which limits the play of the structure by determining what is physically meaning, and physically possible.

 

On the other hand, if relativistic mechanics is to be understood as a “decentered structure,” then this must be explained on the basis provided by Derrida in his lecture. I can’t say that I really see how to do this. Consider, for example, Derrida’s introduction of the latter concept:

 

From then on [i.e. after the "rupture"] it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse--provided we can agree on this word--that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. (Languages of Criticism 249)

 

and later:

 

This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite... (260)

 

Is it really clear that the multiplicity of reference frames in Special Relativity constitutes “a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions come into play?” If so, why does this point of view not apply to a “classical” theory such as Newtonian mechanics? And what sense would it have to say that in the Theory of Relativity “everything is discourse”? These quoted passages call for some sort of commentary or explanation, to justify the particular application of these concepts to physics. Plotnitsky does not give any, though he criticizes Weinberg for a similar failure (par. 13).

 

One might object that it is completely misguided to take Derrida’s text in such a literal way. But when Plotnitsky says that “these concepts, such as ‘play,’ are thought through in Derrida in the most rigorous way,” when he says that “interpretations of these statements [i.e. Derrida’s remark about the “Einsteinian constant”] are possible and may be necessary,” and when he appeals to “traditional norms of reading,” then I think that he too wants to take Derrida at his word. This would seem to be all the more necessary if he really wants to distance himself from the position that Derrida’s remarks to Hyppolite were merely “casual” and “offhand.” As far as the latter goes, I think it is perfectly consistent to view those comments as casual, or at best metaphorical, and yet hold that the conceptual scheme outlined by Derrida in “Structure, Sign, and Play” has some application to physics. But Plotnitsky has much more work to do if he wants to take on the latter task; one thing, in particular, is to clear up the meaning of “center”–a question already raised by Hyppolite in the discussion following “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and not, to my satisfaction at least, answered by Derrida.

 

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On Derrida and Relativity: A Reply to Richard Crew

Arkady Plotnitsky
aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu© 1998 Arkady Plotnitsky
All rights reserved

 

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I am grateful to Richard Crew for his thoughtful commentary on my article “‘But It Is Above All Not True’: Derrida, Relativity and the ‘Science Wars.’” While critical of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange on relativity, this commentary offers a welcome contrast to recent debates in the so-called “Science Wars.” No less significantly, Crew meaningfully uses the content of mathematics and science in his argument, rather than merely making them serve as a source of authority, as a number of mathematicians and scientists have done in the “Science Wars.” His discussion of both relativity and classical mechanics has much to offer in its own right and (perhaps contrary to his own view) illustrates the fertility of exploring the relationships between modern science and Derrida’s and related ideas. Crew argues on the basis of a substantive reading of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange and Derrida’s work. This, too, offers a marked and welcome contrast to most recent “criticism” by members of the scientific community. I would, therefore, be glad to use this opportunity to further clarify key questions at stake in my essay, and I offer this response not in the spirit of confrontation but in the spirit of clarification. Hopefully, along with Crew’s remarks, my response will make a contribution to a broad and substantive discussion concerning the relationships between modern mathematics and science, and new philosophy, or contemporary culture as a whole. In following this approach, the best one can do may well be, as Nietzsche said, “to replace the improbable with the more probable, possibly one error with another” (On the Genealogy of Morals 18). This, however, is by far preferable to the “Science Wars.”

 

In this spirit, let me begin by acknowledging that at several points the argument of my essay needs to be clarified and made more precise. Yet, it also appears to me that, however unintentionally, Crew has bypassed some qualifications I did make and that the essay already, in effect, responds to some of his questions. I also think that some of his comments are in fact consistent with my argument and even reinforce it, if against the grain of Crew’s overall argument. It is crucial to keep in mind what arguments and claims–and of what kind–I make in my article. It may therefore be useful to consider the nature of these arguments and claims before proceeding to Crew’s more specific comments. I shall do so in two parts, each reflecting two main aspects of my earlier argument–the ethical and the conceptual–even though these aspects cannot be seen as fully dissociable, which is a significant point in its own right. I shall designate these two parts of my response as “A” and “B.” In a final section, “C,” I will address Crew’s comments specifically.

 

A. Ethics

 

At the core of my argument in my article is the following point: If one wants to offer a meaningful argument concerning the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange this is how one should proceed: a) by taking into account the particular circumstances of the exchange; and b) by examining the exchange itself and, especially, Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (see my par. 22, 24, 26, 27). I consider this point axiomatic–as concerns both a meaningful conceptual engagement with the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange and, especially, the ethics of academic and intellectual discussion. Indeed, this is how Crew proceeds. But, as he points out in his first paragraph above, this is decidedly not what we have seen in the discussions at issue in my essay. The latter is one of my central points. The article and all of its arguments are framed accordingly, as its subtitle, “Derrida, Relativity, and the ‘Science Wars,’” indicates. As I tried to make clear throughout, my article does not offer, and does not claim to offer, a full conceptually substantive argument supporting its readings of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange and “Structure, Sign, and Play.” It only suggests that such readings are possible and offers some corroboration to support this suggestion. It pointedly allows for the possibility that these readings can be challenged, for example, in the way they are by Crew, within the proper protocol, as defined above. That is, my essay is more an argument about how an argument concerning the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange should be conducted than an argument concerning the meaning of any particular statement in this exchange. To a much greater extent it is an argument concerning the relationships between relativity and Derrida’s philosophy as such, on which I sahll comment in more detail presently. When I do argue about the meaning of Hyppolite or Derrida statements in their exchange, I do so tentatively and provisionally; and one must still consider what kind of arguments they are, which I shall do in part “B” of this response. As I say in my initial formulation: “I shall suggest a reading of Derrida’s statement on relativity that might help to develop more balanced and productive forms of interaction between science and the work of Derrida and other authors mentioned above” (par. 2; emphasis added). I also point out that one may be critical of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange or Derrida’s ideas in general, or be skeptical concerning the value or the very possibility of this interaction (par. 13 and 26).

 

I am not saying that I offered no conceptual views, arguments, or claims in my article, on which I shall comment below. My point is that these are framed in a particular way within the overall argument of the article, and that this framing must be taken into account in considering any claim made there, such as those concerning possible meanings of the phrase “the Einsteinian constant.” The reading I provided of that phrase may be plausible or possible, or “at least allowable” (par. 18), or implausible or even impossible and, hence, disallowed. This reading, however, must be considered according to the way its framed in my essay, rather than on its own. This is my only major reservation concerning Crew’s commentary. Even the conceptual, let alone ethical, argument of my article is not, as Crew appears to think, centered or anchored in, or even dependent on, any specific interpretation (there are several) of “the Einsteinian constant” suggested in my article, in particular as the Einsteinian relativistic space-time or the spatio-temporal interval invariant under Lorentz transformations. The argument of my essay would remain largely intact if one maintains other interpretations of this “constant,” including the speed of light c–although the spectrum of such interpretations is, I argue, not unlimited. Indeed, it would remain intact even if this phrase or related statements in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange were in fact meaningless, or uninterpretable. I shall return to this point below. My point at the moment is that conceptual aspects of my argument, including its conjectural interpretations of certain passages from the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange and from Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play,” are not dissociable from its ethical dimensions.

 

I should add that it is not merely a question, as Crew says, of “the superficiality with which this and other aspects of the Sokal controversy has been discussed” (par.1; emphasis added). At stake are serious–and, once unsupported, scholarly and ethically unacceptable–accusations (far from restricted to Derrida), with considerable implications. Often it is a matter of the truth of such accusations (hence the title of my essay), such as those made by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition, on no basis whatsoever, of “Derrida’s eagerness to claim familiarity with deep scientific matters,” of which (this is clearly their point) he is in fact totally ignorant (par. 7; see also Higher Superstition, 79). Beyond being blatantly untrue, this is hardly an innocent and, if believed, inconsequential accusation, found in a book published by a major university press (n.12). Also, at stake is the work of key contemporary thinkers and its impact on the academic and intellectual life, and culture.

 

Given the particular character, as just outlined, of my argument, the absence (which I acknowledge throughout) of a definitive argument concerning relativity and the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange or “Structure, Sign, and Play,” was, I thought, permissible, however desirable such an argument might be in general. Ethically, too, since I did not criticize, let alone attack Derrida or Hyppolite (and I do believe that there is an ethical asymmetry here), I could afford to be more tentative either concerning the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange itself or “Structure, Sign, and Play,”–provided that I made clear to the readers that my claims are tentative. This I think I did, for the most part. At the same time, I thought it important to show that there exists a view of the relationships between modern mathematics or science and new philosophy different from most positions on both sides of the “Science Wars.”

 

B. Concepts

 

I shall now explain what were the conceptual arguments and claims in my essay concerning both the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange and (a very different case) the relationships between Derrida’s work and relativity. From the standpoint of my article, and, I would argue, under the circumstances of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange in general, the conceptual content and significance of this exchange lies in the degree to which it reflects the relationships between the philosophical content of modern mathematics and science, here in particular relativity, and Derrida’s ideas, such as that of decentered play [jeu]. That is, it is in relation to these relationships in Derrida’s work, in particular in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” rather than in the exchange itself, that the latter can be meaningfully considered. In short (this view governs my reading of the exchange), the meaning of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange is the possibility of such relationships. It tells us that the philosophical content of Einstein’s relativity overlaps with and might have influenced, however indirectly, Derrida’s conceptuality of decentered play. As I stress throughout, it is only the philosophical content and implications of relativity, rather than physics itself, that is at issue here (see par.11, 14, 19, and 21-22).

 

Accordingly, all that I claim with any definitiveness is the existence of such philosophical relationships between Derrida’s ideas and relativity–and that the possibility of these relationships is reflected in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange. That Hyppolite’s remarks suggest the possibility of such connections is hardly in question, however little he offers to justify such a suggestion and however vague and chaotic his comments may be. Crew clearly shares my view that these factors and other circumstances of the exchange make nearly everything one has to say about his or Derrida’s comments there unavoidably hypothetical.

 

It is in this sense that I argue that no definitive interpretation of their statements on “the Einsteinian constant” may be possible (par. 18). This need not mean that something more definitive was not on Hyppolite’s or Derrida’s mind, although their thinking was obviously far from crystallized. As will be seen, some indeterminacy of meaning at the time of the exchange, or, conversely, the fact that some meaning of certain statements determined at the time is lost now, does not mean that some statements of either type cannot be read (in the sense to be explained below). By contrast, it can be ascertained with a reasonable degree of certainty that Hyppolite suggests the possibility of some connections between Derrida’s ideas and relativity.

 

How viable this possibility is may of course be questioned, as Crew appears to do in his comments. While (I hope) my essay offers more in this regard than Hyppolite’s comments, it does not offer the kind of reading of “Structure, Sign, and Play” and related works that would constitute a full argument in this respect. However, I also do not claim to offer such an argument in full measure but only suggest that it is possible to do so, which is significant for the ethical reasons explained briefly above and in paragraphs 24 and 26 of my essay.

 

While I did not fully develop such an argument in my essay, this type of argument itself has a different status in my essay and entails a very different type of claims than that of claims advanced in my interpretations of passages from the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange. The latter interpretations are strictly hypothetical and the statements and concepts in question, such as “the Einsteinian constant,” may indeed have had a different meaning in the exchange (my article suggests several such possible meanings), or (which is not the same) might be given a different meaning in a reading, or might even be read as meaningless. I do not think that the latter is the case, even though, in part by virtue of their circumstances, some of Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s statements are vague and unrigorous. As a result the role of these remarks may well be restricted to indicating the possibility of some conceptual relationships between relativity and Derrida’s ideas. By contrast, my argument for the latter relationships is not hypothetical in the same sense. This difference is made explicit in my article (par. 21). This is also why, as I said above, even the conceptual argument of my essay is not primarily centered or dependent on any particular interpretation of “the Einsteinian constant.” It is certainly not primarily about this interpretation, as Crew appears to assume in his reading of my article. Such a reading is not preventable, but it runs against the spirit, if not the letter, of my article. By contrast, Derrida’s concept of (decentered) play is indispensable to my argument concerning the relationships between Derrida’s work, such as and especially “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and relativity. Of course, this argument, too, even if made as fully as possible, may be unpersuasive, can be argued against, or disproved, as my article makes clear (par. 26). Crew’s comments do not appear to offer (or aim to offer) a full counter-argument in this respect, however much they undermine (perhaps less than Crew claims) my suggested interpretation of “the Einsteinian constant” or other passages in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange. Although I did not fully develop it there and will not be able to fully develop it here, this argument would in my view stand, regardless of the specific meaning of anything said by Hyppolite or Derrida during their exchange.

 

From this perspective, whatever Derrida and Hyppolite say concerning relativity during their exchange, be it meaningful or meaningless, becomes more or less immaterial, if not irrelevant. Accordingly, questions Crew raises about their statements there are not really that germane to my argument. Crew’s more general (but similarly critical) claims concerning relativity and Derrida’s work itself are of course a different matter, and I shall consider them separately below.

 

Derrida is in a rather enviable position here. On the one hand, he does not mention relativity in his essay (and to my knowledge anywhere in his work in any substantive way) and gives only a brief improvised response to a somewhat muddled question by Hyppolite. He might have had something in mind concerning relativity and his concept of play, quite possibly something vague and induced by Hyppolite’s question. What that was is not easily, if at all, recoverable after thirty years and is found in a text that is itself uncertain. In any event, while, as Crew observes, Derrida might indeed not have said enough or was too vague to be definitive or definitively right, or even meaningful, about relativity, he did not say enough to be (definitively provable) wrong about it either. Even if he were proved to be wrong, it would be unreasonable to make too much of it given the circumstances, as indeed nearly everyone, on both sides of the “Science Wars,” admits at this point, including Sokal, although not Gross and Levitt (Higher Superstition 93). In short, there is little ground for any meaningful criticism, certainly not for the kind of attack to which Derrida was subjected during the “Science Wars.” At most, if one is inclined to criticize, one can see Derrida’s remarks as irrelevant as far as relativity is concerned. Even in this case, however, from the ethical standpoint one has no choice but to acknowledge that in one degree or another the circumstances had contributed to the questionable character of his statement, especially given that Derrida is customarily cautious and circumspect in his statements concerning mathematics and science, and the relationships between them and his own work (par. 1; Derrida, “Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux”). On the other hand, if one does want to suggest connections between Derrida’s work and relativity or establish them rigorously, one is free to do so. If, however, such an attempt is successful, at least some credit would belong to Derrida. In short, on the one hand, the ethics of scholarly and intellectual discussion does not leave one much space for Derrida’s critics here. On the other hand, his remark on “the Einsteinian constant” is what one can make of it by using “Structure, Sign, and Play” and Derrida’s ideas in general and their connections to relativity, which one has to establish on one’s own. One has to extract and indeed to construct a “Derridean” conceptual matrix for relativity out of materials such as the idea of decentered play and related conceptual formations of a more general philosophical nature (par. 19).

 

As I explained above, my primary argument in the article is that there exists or, better, that one can establish–or, again, construct–significant connections between Derrida’s and related work and the philosophical problematics of relativity. My reading of the relevant passages in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange and interpretation of “the Einsteinian constant” was “an exploration of certain possibilities and implications of these connections” (par. 21).

 

The most likely and the most significant possibility for placing Derrida’s comment may well be suggested, perhaps more marginally than it should have been, in par. 24. Let me reproduce this elaboration here:

 

There are further nuances concerning relativity as well, especially those relating to the difference between the centering of "the whole [theoretical] construct"--that is, as I read it, the overall conceptual framework of relativity--around the concept of space-time and the centering of the space-time of special or general relativity itself. Concentrating here on "the Einsteinian constant," Derrida does not appear to address the first question as such (or conceivably, and, again, under the circumstances understandably, conflates both questions). It may well be, however, that he intimates a negative answer here as well. For from the Derridean perspective it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to claim any central or unique concept--the "constant"--defining the Einsteinian framework. It is, therefore, possible that Derrida has this point in mind. Invariance or stability of a conceptual center of a theoretical structure, such as relativity, is, of course, quite different from invariance of a physical constant. One might suggest, however, that in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange a certain concept of decentering defining the space-time of relativity coincides with the idea of decentering the overall conceptual structure of the theory itself. No concept belonging to the latter, not even that of the decentered space-time, may be seen as an absolute center of relativity theory--a center invariant under all theoretical and historical transformations of this theory. That is, such conceptual centering may change from one version of relativity to another (this centering is relative in this sense), and some forms of relativity may be constructed as conceptually decentered in themselves. Indeed, there have been considerable debates among historians of science as to the relative centrality of key experimental facts and theoretical ideas of special relativity, either as originally introduced by Einstein or in its subsequent, such as Minkowskian, forms. (par. 24)

 

I am now inclined to think about this situation in stronger terms than “[i]t may well be… that [Derrida] intimates a negative answer here as well” or “it is… possible that Derrida has this point in mind.” Given Derrida’s argument in “Structure, Sign, and Play” and the Derridean perspective on the structure of theoretical argument in general, this could have been (and would naturally have been) Derrida’s primary meaning of his statement. This meaning also allows for several meanings of “the Einsteinian constant” itself, including the speed of light c, which may indeed have been what at least Derrida, if not Hyppolite, had in mind after all, as both I and Crew suggest (see par. 17 and 20 of my essay; par. 2 of Crew’s response). As I say in paragraphs 24 and note 23, Hyppolite might have also thought of the center in the sense of conceptually centering the framework of relativity around a certain “constant” (however the latter itself is interpreted), when he spoke of the constant as “dominat[ing] the whole construct” (par.16). A certain conflation of both these levels of “(de)centering” is possible and, as the above elaboration indicates, these levels may mirror each other.

 

Is the space-time itself of relativity decentered and decentered more radically than that of Newtonian physics (since there is a certain decentering there as well, via the so-called Galilean relativity)? Would relativity be a conceptually centered or decentered theory? To what degree the latter can be conceptualized via or metaphorized by the former? These are some among the questions posed, or at least provoked, by Hyppolite, in his reaction to Derrida’s concept of decentered play and related ideas in “Structure, Sign, and Play.” Even if not rigorously developed by Hyppolite (under the circumstances understandably), these are philosophically rigorous questions, in part made possible by Derrida’s ideas, although they are not specifically posed by Derrida either. However indirect, these connections are historically significant (par. 25). Questions of this type naturally arise in the philosophy of relativity, even though they may not be addressed by the institutional philosophers of science in the form that Derrida’s work might suggest. On occasion one does find formulations in their work that are close to those that would emerge were one to consider relativity from a Derridean perspective. Indeed, as I indicated above and as I shall further discuss below, even as he criticizes the exchange and “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Crew in effect demonstrates the potential significance of these questions for our understanding of both relativity and Derrida’s framework (see par. 5 – 11). These questions are independent of whatever was said or meant in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange. This is why I said earlier that, in this larger scheme, whatever was said or meant in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange itself, for example, by “the Einsteinian constant,” is nearly irrelevant.

 

However, with these questions and Derrida’s ideas in mind, one can at least read (which, as I shall explain presently, is not the same as finding what Derrida meant or even what he might have meant by his statement at the time) his comment in the following way. Whatever is a constant–numerical, conceptual (an invariant, for example) or other–in Einstein’s relativity is likely to be a manifestation of a Derridean (or analogous) decentering, variability, play [jeu]. Such “constants” may be found either at the level of the structure of the Einsteinian space-time or at the level of the conceptual structure of Einstein’s theory itself. Both may be seen as mirroring each other in this respect, with the qualifications indicated above and keeping in mind the rigorous specificity of the mathematics and physics of relativity. In this reading the meaning of “the Einsteinian constant” itself is left open, although it cannot be seen as arbitrary (and the spectrum of possibilities is in fact not that large). “The Einsteinian constant” will refer to the relationships between many conceivable Einsteinian “constants”–numerical, conceptual, invariants, and so forth–and the irreducible decentering, variability, and play in Derrida’s sense. The former signals the latter: that is, the Einsteinian constants signal the Einsteinian variability as the Derridean or quasi-Derridean play.

 

This is–or might have been–an intriguing insight or a lucky guess (or both) on Derrida’s part, if due primarily to his general ideas rather than his knowledge of relativity. That is, it might be that, provoked by Hyppolite’s remarks, Derrida guessed that something of that type–that is, that “constants” signal decentering, variability, play–must take place in relativity as well. If so, it was a brilliant guess. If not–that is, if this is not what he meant, or even could have possibly meant–this is still how this statement may be read. That is, one might see it as a kind of philosophical or poetico-philosophical (as opposed to strictly scientific) proposition assembled out of freely floating terms and ideas which may be read in the way just described. Even if the statement had a different meaning when produced, once produced, this statement or, more accurately, the field of interpretative possibilities thereby established allows one to interpret it in the way suggested here. This reading, however, is not arbitrary and, I would argue, philosophically rigorous–that is, the statement can be given a rigorous meaning on the basis of both Derrida’s text, specifically “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and relativity. As I said, it was likely only a lucky guess, although such guesses are, I would argue, never purely a matter of luck. At the very least, the history of Derrida’s ideas has some connections to relativity, as well as quantum physics, post-Gödelian mathematical logic, and certain areas of modern biology and genetics. As I suggest in my article, in all these theories one finds the philosophical conceptuality of the kind found in Derrida and thinkers, such as Bataille, Blanchot, and Levinas, who influenced him. Of course, one finds related philosophical problematics in the history of philosophy itself, extending at least from the Leibniz-Clarke debate, as I mention (par. 25) and as Crew suggests as well (par. 10). The Leibniz-Clarke debate must have been on Hyppolite’s mind.

 

What I tried to do in my article, then, was to suggest such general connections, whether perceived or not by Derrida himself, between Derrida’s ideas and the philosophy of relativity. As I said, one must take the responsibility for this reading and claims, be they ultimately right and wrong, since Derrida makes none of them. I am perfectly happy to take this responsibility and a degree of credit, if any credit is due, for establishing these connections. Indeed, as I suggest in that essay and as I argue elsewhere (in particular, in Complementarity) more radical ideas than those found anywhere in contemporary philosophy (with a possible exception of Niels Bohr’s work) may ultimately be at stake in the problematics of modern physics (par. 22). As I said, if I am right, part of the credit will have to go to Derrida. If I am wrong, the fault, as the saying goes, is all mine.

 

The above considerations are part of what I refer to in my article as “the problem of reading,” the problem that has many dimensions (par. 1). What I have specifically in mind here is a reading of Derrida’s comment (and via that comment, of a certain portion of “Structure, Sign, and Play” and a certain portion of the philosophical structure of relativity) as an engagement of shared and mutually enriching conceptualities between theories in different domains, more or less proximate, or more or less distant. It is out of a combination of Derrida’s conceptuality and that of (the philosophy of) relativity that the above propositions, such as “constants of Einstein’s relativity are manifestations of variability, decentering, and play (in Derrida sense),” are produced.

 

Is the claim of that nature–that is, that Einstein’s relativity is a Derridean theory in this sense–supportable? I think so, even though I cannot further elaborate upon this here. At least this engagement of Derrida’s and other new philosophical ideas in the context of modern or indeed postmodern thought and culture appears to lead to important philosophical questions concerning both. At the very least this suggestion can be put on the table, and it would, I think, be difficult to criticize one for doing this.

 

C. Counterpoints

 

Both my article and this exchange are, in my view, best seen as invitations to a rigorous and sustained investigation of the problematics in question, whatever one’s view of Derrida’s and related ideas about modern science, and whatever the outcome of such an investigation may be as concerns the value and significance of these ideas. With this consideration and the preceding discussion in mind, I shall now comment on some of Crew’s specific points. The title of this section–“Counterpoints”–refers more to the sense in which this term is used in music than in an argument.

 

Crew, par. 2-4

 

I was, I admit, a bit too loose in using the terms “correlative” and “conceptual equivalent” so as to make them appear more interchangeable than they should be. What I meant and what I should have said in my article is that “two Einsteinian constants,” space-time itself and the Lorentz distance (both correlative to the constancy of the speed of light, and to each other), allow for two conceptually equivalent philosophical conceptualities of relativity. This qualification does not appear to me to undermine the substance of my argument. I do think that Hyppolite might have had space-time itself in mind, in spite of his, indeed somewhat odd expression, “a combination of space-time,” correctly questioned by Crew (par. 3). The special circumstances of both the exchange itself and of its translation, transcription, and so forth appear to me to have played a role here.

 

I did indeed suggest that “the Einsteinian constant” may have been c, the speed of light, after all, in part for the reasons just indicated or those (more or less the same) indicated by Crew. This follows from my discussion, especially in paragraphs 19-21, although it may need to have been stated more explicitly there. My point was that conceptual (rather than numerical) interpretations that I suggest are “more plausible” (par. 17). I do not think that reading “the Einsteinian constant” as c undermines my argument in the article either. The particular interpretation of “the Einsteinian constant” as c is clearly more likely than those proposing other numerical constants that can be associated with Einstein’s name (par. 15). When I criticize those who used c in the “Science Wars,” I did not meant to suggest that this interpretation is impossible. I meant rather to emphasize, first, that other interpretations are also possible and perhaps more likely, which decision requires a more careful examination of the text. Secondly, I argue that the treatment of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange by some who used this interpretation is unacceptable on ethical and intellectual grounds. I may overstress the primacy of the conceptual interpretation of “the Einsteinian constant,” and they should have been more nuanced in this respect. However, my overall interpretation of the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange on relativity allows for reading “the Einsteinian constant” as c, since it is primarily about relativity and/as a decentered play (par. 11), which concept easily tolerate this reading, as Crew observes (par. 4). So, if Crew is right that c makes more or even most sense for “the Einsteinian constant” (and this argument is not uncompelling), it would not change my main argument. As I have stressed from the outset, the key aspects of my conceptual, let alone ethical, argument do not fundamentally depend on two particular interpretations of the phrase “the Einsteinian constant,” as Crew appears to think. Crew’s reservations concerning the difference between the terms “constant” and “invariant” are justified, especially as concerns space-time. I have pondered this point myself while writing my article. I do think, however, that the space-time interval, invariant under the Lorentz transformations, could have been assimilated by Hyppolite into his “constant” as referring to something invariant in the sense of remaining constant. In addition, Hyppolite’s propositions in his statement concerning the nature of this “constant” (as the one that “does not belong to any experimenters who live the experience,” or “dominates the whole construct”) appear to me to support my reading.

 

All of the above possibilities would satisfy my suggestion that “constants” of relativity signal its decentered play in Derrida’s sense, whether one considers it in relation to the relativistic space-time or in relation to the conceptual matrix of relativity. This does not mean that one is authorized to say anything about this phrase or other statement on relativity in the Hyppolite-Derrida exchange, for several reasons. Thus, while, as I say in par. 25, Hyppolite had extensive general knowledge of modern mathematics and science, some candidates for “the Einsteinian constant” or, similarly, some of Crew’s elegant suggestions concerning possible conceptual “centers” of relativity (especially once he moves to general relativity) are far too technical for Hyppolite to have had them in mind. Indeed, given the nature of Hyppolite’s and Derrida’s work and their audience (which were for me significant factors in interpreting “the Einsteinian constant”), two conceptual possibilities that I suggest and the speed of light just about exhaust all likely candidates. Even the spatio-temporal (Lorentz) interval may be a bit of a stretch, although it is virtually certain that Hyppolite was aware of the concept. I am less certain about Derrida, who is, however, certainly aware of the concept of space-time, and other general philosophical ideas of relativity, as I indicated (par. 19-20). Mathematically and conceptually appealing as they are, Crew’s suggestions clearly reflect his technical knowledge of relativity, which contributes to the effectiveness and elegance of his commentary, but would not likely be available to Hyppolite or Derrida. Of course, if one has this, more technical, knowledge, one can apply some Derridean ideas to relativity. This is what I had in mind in saying earlier that one can connect more rigorously the philosophy, if not physics, of relativity and a Derridean or related philosophy, although, as I said and as Crew argues (par.13), one needs to do much work in order to adjust both accordingly. Obviously, neither Hyppolite nor Derrida do–nor, importantly, claim to do–so.

 

Crew, par. 4 – 13

 

I find this discussion especially appealing. As I said, in some respects, perhaps contrary to Crew’s intentions, it is richly suggestive of the potential relationships between relativity and the Derridean or (the term one might prefer) quasi-Derridean problematics of decentered play. The original version of my essay contained a discussion of Galilean relativity, along the lines similar to Crew’s. The reference to the Leibniz-Clarke debate (par. 25) is a remnant of this discussion and indicates some of the topics that Crew discusses. I see this part of Crew’s commentary as for the most part consistent with and helping my main argument, as described in section “B” above, rather than undermining it. I have a few counterpoints which I hope will also explain why I think that the latter may be the case.

 

It is clear from the my statement that Crew cites in par. 14 that the question of “a Newtonian universal background with its (separate) absolute space and absolute time” is at least as significant for my argument as that of “a uniquely privileged frame of reference for physical events” (par. 20). These two concepts are indeed different, as Crew says (par. 5). The significance of this qualification is that it indicates that my essay offers a broader field for “centerings” in classical physics than Crew attributes to it. My “or” in the above sentence does not mean equivalence of two configurations, but rather either “one” or “the other,” or possibly both. All three philosophical views are in principle possible interpretations of classical physics. As Crew indicates, although there is no spatial center of the universe even in the Newtonian space, this decentering takes place against the fixed flat background of space and is governed by absolute time. The Galilean relativity does not change the latter feature. In addition, as Crew points out (this is also Minkowski’s point) space and time are absolutely meaningful in the Newtonian picture, at least in the classical interpretation. There was, at least for a long time, no space-time picture for the Newtonian world, although one can recast the Newtonian gravity in this form as well, as Elie Cartan did, in the wake of Einstein’s general relativity. In any event, the Newtonian world cannot in my view–and this was my point–be seen as the world of the radical play in Derrida’s sense (par. 20).

 

Accordingly, I do not think that “classical mechanics could itself be described as a ‘decentered structure,’” which Crew suggests as a possibility (par. 9), at least not in Derrida’s radical sense. This may not be possible even if one recasts classical mechanics along the lines Crew suggests, in more Leibnizian terms, although this recasting poses rather interesting and complicated questions. It may be argued that, once one tries to take this program to its proper limits, one will inevitably arrive at something like Einstein’s relativity, rather than Newtonian physics. As is often observed, one sometimes gets an impression in reading the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence that Leibniz “read” Einstein. These nuances are important, and I refer to the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence myself in this particular form: “Many discussions of the Leibniz-Clarke debate in philosophical literature, known to Hyppolite (or Derrida), consider Einstein’s relativity, both speci[al] [typo in the text] and general theory, as a culmination or at least a crucial point in the history open by this debate” (par. 25).

 

From this perspective, Crew’s discussion may, again, be seen as supporting both my argument and Derrida’s historical point in “Structure, Sign, and Play.” While Derrida does indeed speak of and considers a certain “rupture” in “Structure, Sign, and Play” (par. 11), this “rupture” cannot be seen as absolute. The concept of absolute rupture is itself subject to Derrida’s critique, along with absolute origins, ends, and so forth. This is suggested even by the way in which the very term “rupture” is introduced in Derrida in conjunction with the “event” at issue in “the history of the concept of structure.” (“Event” is already used in quotation marks in Derrida’s opening paragraph.) Derrida writes: “What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture and redoubling?” (Writing and Difference, 278; emphasis added). This would hardly seem to suggest a simple or unequivocal rupture, at most something whose exterior form appears as and has an effect of a rupture, and this effect is important. Overall, however, a much more complex historical model, involving both continuities and rupture, is at stake. On this point I permit myself to refer to my book In the Shadow of Hegel (84-95, 380-88). A very long history of continuities and ruptures (around the idea of structure) is at stake, as the second paragraph of “Structure, Sign, and Play” suggests (Writing and Difference, 278). From this perspective, one should expect some intimations, anticipations, and so forth, of the “event” at issue, sometimes quite radical and striking, as to some degree, in Leibniz or indeed Galileo, and there are much earlier cases, for example, in Plato. “Derrida’s intention[s]” in “Structure, Sign, and Play” were likely of that nature, rather than those that Crew suggests (par. 10).

 

And yet, at the same time, a kind of (“decentered”) understanding of even the Newtonian physics that Crew suggests does not come into the foreground in any significant measure before precisely the historical period suggested by Derrida, in particular around Nietzsche’s time. If there could be a unique designation of the moment of the emergence of the concept of radical play or “the central figure,” it would be the moment and the figure of Nietzsche (Writing and Difference, 292). Derrida’s key concept of “the play of the world,” considered in my essay (par. 20), Of Grammatology, 50) is equally associated with Nietzsche. Nietzsche, however, was a contemporary of Maxwell, and his thought belongs to the period of Maxwell’s physics and other developments which eventually culminated in relativity. True, “these were not the heyday of classical mechanics” (par. 9). The point is, however, that a decentered understanding of classical mechanics, to the degree that it is possible, is also–and decidedly–not what governs the heyday of classical mechanics. Crew seems to locate the decentering possibilities of interpreting classical mechanics, ahistorically, in classical mechanics itself (par. 10). (Let us assume for the moment that these possibilities are viable even if taken in Derrida’s radical sense.) There are reasons for doing so, since already with Galileo certain key features necessary here were in place. However, the history of classical mechanics in this respect is for the most part a history of physically and philosophically centered theory, prior to relativity or developments that led to it, from Maxwell on. So Derrida’s genealogy is on the mark and not at all in conflict with the decentering possibilities of in interpreting classical physics, to the degree such possibilities are available (par.10). Galileo and Leibniz are, to some degree, exceptions, but exceptions consistent with the overall picture just presented. Actually Leibniz did not have (mathematical) mechanics, unlike Newton, which was of course a crucial factor in the history at issue. I have to leave Galileo’s case aside, even though some of his philosophical ideas are in fact rather modern. Overall, then, as I said, Crew’s argument here appears to me in effect in agreement with and reinforces the argument of my essay and “Structure, Sign, and Play,” rather than constituting an argument against them, as Crew seems to see it (par. 9).

 

Conversely, it is not inconceivable (and I do not claim in my article that it is) that relativity is a centered theory after all, in one respect or another, either at the level of the space-time itself or at the level of its theoretical structure. This is what Hyppolite in fact asks, and Crew’s ideas here are most suggestive (par. 12). I do, of course, suggest otherwise, especially in paragraph 24 which in fact addresses the kind of points that Crew raises here. It is true that I have not shown or indeed really justified the assumption, formulated by Crew, that “”center’ must mean ‘privileged frame of reference’” (par. 11). But I also never make this assumption. In fact I argue otherwise, especially again par. 24. In short, there are significant questions here as to what degree and how (scientific, philosophical, and so forth) the “play” of the structure of relativity as theory can be limited. In a way, one can see it as one of the interesting and significant areas of potential investigation arising from a Derridean or Nietzschean philosophical perspective, as is especially suggested by the conclusion of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” where different concepts of play–centered and decentered–and of their irreducible entanglement are considered. Thus, Crew’s elaborations, again, appear to suggest that Derrida’s ideas can be meaningfully applied to relativity.

 

As I said, one can, if one so wishes, only extract/construct the Derridean philosophical matrix of relativity by combining Derrida’s ideas and (the philosophy of) relativity itself. It is true that neither my essay nor this response fully or convincingly proves that such a possibility is viable. Much further work is indeed necessary here, as Crew says (par. 13). But, once again, I never claimed otherwise. In this respect Crew’s comment on my comment on Weinberg (par. 12) does not appear to me justified, even leaving aside that, as I have discussed in “A,” ethically, our positions are very different, since, unlike Weinberg, I do not criticize Derrida. All I claim is that “those unfamiliar with Derrida’s ideas would need a more extensive reading of Derrida’s essay [“Structure, Sign, and Play”] and a more comprehensive explication of its terms, and more patience and caution may be necessary before one is ready to agree, with Weinberg’s conclusion. ‘It seemed to me Derrida in context is even worse than Derrida out of context’” (par. 13): This is all that I claim. I do not claim that my essay offers a sufficiently extensive reading of Derrida or a full explication of his terms. Crew, of course, is right that further explanation of some of my own assertions concerning the relationships between Derrida’s ideas and relativity are necessary to give a full argument, and indeed I say so myself (par. 26). The question of the viability of these connections indeed may remain open. However, as is suggested by Crew’s argument concerning the “centering” of the theoretical matrix of relativity in the representation of the Lorentz group and related elaborations (par. 12) or indeed his discussion of centering and decentering in classical physics and relativity as a whole, at least some possibilities appear to be viable and even promising. Crew is finally right: there is plenty of work to do.

 

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• —. “Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux.” Le Monde. 20 Novembre 1997
• Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
• Plotnitsky, Arkady. “‘But It Is Above All Not True’: Derrida, Relativity and the `Science Wars.’” Postmodern Culture. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v007/7.2plotnitsky.html
• —. Complementarity: Anti-epistemology After Bohr and Derrida. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994.
• —. In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History and the Unconscious. Gainesville, Fl.: UP of Florida, 1993.

 

Hassan Melehy

Department of Romance Languages
University of Vermont
hmelehy@zoo.uvm.edu

 

Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.

 

At a time when Hollywood is as formulaic as ever, when the representatives of French cinema we receive in the U.S. seem to be attacking critical thought (Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element [1997] could by itself constitute a Ministry of Anti-Education), it is refreshing to read a book that considers with seriousness and a highly contemporary disposition the work of this enigmatic and brilliant director. Jean-Luc Godard took French and international cinema by surprise in the sixties, yet today may easily be relegated to the status of a quaint intellectual from a bygone era. Wheeler Winston Dixon opens his book with quiet applause for Godard’s relentless pursuit of the social and political implications of cinema aesthetics, convincing this reader that even Godard’s early work is far from exhausted and still poses major challenges to both criticism and cinematic practice. Paradoxically, Dixon also faces with full rigor the French director’s pronouncements, beginning with Le Week-end in 1967, of the death of cinema.

 

This “death” is what makes the cinema impossible as a critical experience, and yet it is precisely such experience that Dixon demonstrates is at the heart of Godard’s filmmaking from first to last. The studios offer “blockbuster films” (1) that aim for the “lowest common denominator”; (2) while at the same time, visual entertainment is given over to the relentlessly expanding worlds of cybernetics, multimedia, and cable TV. Nothing that risks the disturbing, insistent involvement with the image that Godard has continually worked at may make an entrance for more than a moment or two. In this book that very adeptly combines biography, history, description and summary of films, theoretical analysis, and a vast knowledge of the film industry, Dixon situates Godard’s films as both objects and projects in the present situation, through the perspective of how this situation has taken shape over the last forty years. He offers an explanation of capital as it manifests itself in the film industry–a favorite target of Godardian critique–to show how it was in the fluctuations of capital itself that Godard was first able to present his images to the public.

 

The exigencies of 1960s theatrical film distribution constituted a series of paradoxically liberating strictures; for a film to make a profit at all, it had to appear in a theater.... Thus distributors were forced to seek the widest possible theatrical release pattern for even the most marginal of films, and it is this way that Godard achieved and consolidated his initial reputation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such a project would be impossible today. (3)

 

In the well-wrought historical narrative Dixon provides, it becomes apparent that Godard’s work, though perhaps more widely viewed, better funded, and more appreciated by critics in the sixties, is of greater importance today. This would be true of both Godard’s early work–which tends to be better known because of its place in film studies curricula–and his more recent efforts, which bear directly on the contemporary state of cinema and television. Dixon characterizes Godard as an electronic-age prophet who saw the destiny of cinema in a global culture where the visual image dominates, and who, along with his collaborators, “seek[s] to hasten its demise” (xvi)–precisely for the purpose of educating the public as to the role of the image in their culture and its manipulating force in consumer society. “Godard is a moralist–perhaps the last moralist that the medium of cinema will ever possess” (5).

 

Dixon lays out the major themes he wishes to illuminate–the social, political, moral, aesthetic, and pedagogical aspects of Godard’s work–in the first chapter, “The Theory of Production.” The subsequent chapters, “The Exhaustion of Narrative,” “Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group,” “Anne-Marie Miéville and the Sonimage Workshop,” and “Fin de Cinéma,” each elaborate these themes by addressing a period in Godard’s work in which they become prominent. Dixon submits in the first chapter that the challenge to today’s situation may be found even at the beginning of the filmmaker’s career. On A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), Dixon is downright ecstatic, saying that “an opportunity came knocking that would permanently alter the course of Godard’s life, and change the face of cinema forever” (13). One may wonder how the cinema could be changed forever if it is dying or dead, but Dixon’s presentation of the “shattering” effects the film had on cinematic tradition is so compelling that such hyperbole is justified. The following is an example of this presentation; it also illustrates Dixon’s capacity as a film analyst, conversant with theory but not dogmatic in his concepts or vocabulary.

 

Godard called audience attention to the inherent reflexivity of his enterprise, and the manipulative and plastic nature of the cinema. A bout de souffle is everywhere a construct aware of its own constructedness. It is a film which follows the format of the traditional narrative only insofar as this adherence serves Godard's true critical project: the "reactivation" of the people and things he photographs within a glyphic framework of hyperreal jump-cuts, editorial elisions, sweeping tracking shots which call attention to their structural audaciousness, and characters whose entire existence lies in a series of gestures, motions, appearances, and escapes, all to disguise the essentially phantom nature of their ephemeral existence. (22-24)

 

Even though Dixon wishes to demonstrate a thematic coherency running through Godard’s work over four decades, he is careful to mark the major changes in the director’s orientations, especially those concerning his approach to politics. In response to Godard’s 1994 affirmation that “I never read Marx,” Dixon states: “In view of Godard’s total immersion in the highly charged political events of the 1960s, this statement seems disingenuous in the extreme. Godard was, in fact, changing radically as a filmmaker, becoming colder and less romantic” (84-85). From the romances of the early days–notably A bout de souffle and Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963)–Godard turns toward a pronounced political orientation in the mid-sixties, with statements on consumer society, gender politics, class relations, the student movement, and imperialism making their way into the dialogue and images of movies such as Alphaville (1965), Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), and Masculin féminin (Masculine Feminine, 1966). But already with Le Mépris, there is an examination of politics: the politics of image production, of film financing, of the studios, and of the commodification of cinema through, among other things, the imposition of reassuring narrative.

 

Dixon begins chapter 2, “The Exhaustion of Narrative,” with an excellent account of the making of Le Mépris: its status as an international hit with Brigitte Bardot, its funding, the day-to-day events of its production, and the relation between the film’s storyline and Godard’s own work situation. The movie, Dixon states, “is about compromise, the creation of art within the sphere of commercial enterprise, the struggle to hold on to one’s individual vision in an industry dedicated to pleasing an anonymous public” (45-46). One of Godard’s major compromises in this production, funded by French and Italian groups, involved the requirement that versions of the film circulated in Italy, Britain, and the United States be dubbed: so much of the story line has to do with the miscommunication occurring in an international production, when the producers’ interests are completely at odds with the director’s and screenwriter’s. Jack Palance plays Jeremy Prokosch, the American producer whose “monolingual arrogance” suggests the cultural imperialism of Hollywood. Fritz Lang plays Fritz Lang, the director of the film-within-a-film, an adaptation of the Odyssey; he is the “moral center of Le Mépris” (47), exercising an “omni-lingual authority” (45). Many conversations in the movie are in several languages, Lang alone able to converse without the aid of the interpreter Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll).

 

The “end of cinema” is here figured as the death of the megalomaniacal Prokosch, along with that of Camille Javal, Bardot’s character, in a violent car crash. (It was to the criticism of similar bloodiness in Pierrot le fou [1965] that Godard responded by saying very suggestively, “Ce n’est pas du sang, c’est du rouge–it’s not blood, it’s red.” This is one of Godard’s interesting and aphoristic invitations to consider the complex relation between reality and representation.) Dixon remarks that Godard shows only the aftermath of the accident, not the crash itself, and so takes issue with accepted narrative conventions in cinema, to the astonishment of, among others, Lang. Dixon explains, “In many ways, as we have seen, Godard works against audience expectations, showing us not that which we wish or expect to see, but only those actions and results that he deems necessary to create the world as he sees it” (51). Subsequently, with movies such as Une femme mariée and Alphaville, Dixon demonstrates Godard’s increasing focus on politics and pedagogy, as the themes extend from reflection on the cinema itself to the images of consumer society. But Dixon sees limitations in Godard’s vision at the time, which result from the director’s own situation: “Moving in a world of white, middle-class patriarchal privilege, Godard echoes the values of the society he partakes of” (62). It is with Masculin féminin that Godard begins to extend his perspective.

 

Dixon completes his account of this period in Godard’s work, during which the filmmaker realized that his cinematic pedagogy would be most effective only with the disruption and eventual abandonment of narrative, with mention of “the revolutionary narrative of Le Week-end” (88). The following chapter treats the most intensively political work in Godard’s career, the collaborative efforts he undertook with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov group. This is the work Dixon finds the most interesting, even if it is less well-known than Godard’s early projects; at the outset of the book he remarks, “Godard, it seems to me, has always functioned best within the context of a collaborative enterprise, and another critical project of this volume was the acknowledgment of the considerable input both Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Pierre Gorin have had in Godard’s works” (xv-xvi). In chapter 3 we find an excellent account of the making and the significance of Le Week-end, in which Godard criticizes consumer society, the role of the cinema in it, the commodification of women’s bodies, and imperialism. May 1968 moved Godard, along with many other French intellectuals, to a primarily political orientation, from which he represented the activity of students and workers during the upheavals of that month and presented them in a way that had very little commercial viability. Dixon twice notes with a certain admiration that this project, Un film comme les autres (A Film Like All the Others; 1968), almost incited a riot at its New York premiere (95, 104).

 

In the next chapter, on Godard’s collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville and the Sonimage Workshop, Dixon continues his account of a Godard doing what he wishes to do, with little regard for commercial success. Even so, Passion (1982), Prénom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen, 1983), and Je vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary, 1985), some of Godard’s better-known films, belong to this period. The most interesting turning point Dixon notes in this chapter involves Je vous salue, Marie, the notorious retelling of the story of the birth of Christ in a contemporary setting that was widely protested by Christian groups from a number of different sects. Dixon writes that the charge of blasphemy and obscenity (a “porny little flick,” said one bishop who refused to see the movie on that ground alone) “seems difficult to support when one sees the film itself” (154). Indeed, Dixon believes that “Godard, the hard-line Marxist of the late 1960s and 1970s, was now in the mid-1980s re-anchoring his faith in the divine” (154). He notes that Godard undertook this project with “absolute seriousness” and “intensity” (156). A professor lectures in the film, arguing for the notion of a “divine structure to all events on earth” (158); Dixon deems that Godard is speaking through the professor.

 

This makes the furor of the religious right in this matter all the more unfathomable; in Je vous salue, Marie, Godard performs the astonishing feat of bringing religion into the classroom, something that fundamentalist Christians have been attempting to do in recent years with great insistence. Godard here has become their ally in this effort; it seems to me altogether remarkable that so few have noticed this. (158)

 

Dixon is not equating Godard’s attitude with that of fundamentalists, the religious right, or any organized church group, but is rather attempting to examine the ways in which Godard experiments with new perspectives from which to address the problems that have always obsessed him: “it seems that in three decades Godard has worked through the personal and the political to come back to the divine” (162).

 

In the fifth and last chapter, “Fin de Cinéma,” Dixon makes it quite evident that Godard remains politically committed, especially to the politics of image production in cultures that are increasingly bombarded with all manner of images. Movies are always a matter of money; and if Godard wants to continue his critique of the Hollywood juggernaut and the omnipresence of “video games and CD-ROM interactive programs” (195), he must be willing to risk complete marginalization in the film industry. Dixon presents an amusing anecdote of Godard’s response to the American filmmakers who usually give a small nod to his greatness: for that quality, Godard asks them to give him $10. The only American filmmaker ever to make the contribution was Mel Brooks (207). Dixon also mentions the way that Godard assures himself an income as long as he is working, by building his salary into the budget (206). Finally, “He has transformed the cinema from a bourgeois medium of popular entertainment into a zone of study, reflection, and renewal” (209). The current system of production is one in which large profit margins are required, most if not all movies are seen primarily on video, and interest in them is usually displaced by computerized imagery–in short, in which the cinema has died. Godard nonetheless continues a cinema that reflects on and analyzes this death, looks at the old images in order to bring them into the process of reflection, and so offers a kind of rebirth for the production of the image. Dixon concludes, “Godard thus belongs to both the old and the new, the living and the dead, the sign and the signifier, the domain of the creator and the realm of the museum guide” (210). Godard offers a long and as yet continuing sequence of images through which viewers may come to grips with the functioning of the image, with the death of the cinema.

 

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard is eminently readable and highly engaging. It will be of great interest to those who wish to learn about Godard and much of the aesthetic of the French New Wave, as well as those who are already well versed in these areas. The filmography Dixon appends to the book, covering everything Godard did from 1954 to 1995 in great detail, will be invaluable to anyone wishing to watch or study Godard’s films. The book is illustrated with numerous photos, stills, and frames from Godard’s projects; one of these is the basis for a beautiful cover design using metallic grey and black ink that thus maximizes SUNY Press’s two-color limitation. For the most part the book is well written, but there are notable lapses in copyediting: twice the word “cinematographic” is rendered as “cinema to graphic,” and there are a few overly long and not quite grammatically correct sentences. These small problems are a reflection not so much on the author as on the requirement imposed on many university presses to run on decreased subventions and increased profit margins–a situation that one may reflect on in connection with the vast commodification of artistic and intellectual activity that both Jean-Luc Godard and Wheeler Winston Dixon address so very effectively.

 

Benzi Zhang

The Chinese University of Hong Kong
bzhang@cuhk.edu.hk

 

Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

 

It eludes no scholar’s observation that in recent years the interest in Chinese cinema has increased dramatically. Among recent attempts to offer a theoretical approach to contemporary Chinese films, Rey Chow’s study counts as one of the most extensive and insightful contributions. Wide-ranging in its scope, Chow’s award-winning book addresses itself to a variety of critical, cultural, and aesthetic concerns of contemporary Chinese cinema. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this closely argued and valuable study seeks to examine the significance of technologized visuality for China in relation to discourses of anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and women’s studies. A literary scholar by training, Chow reads Chinese films as cultural texts, and in many places, relates the problematics of visuality to literary issues. One of the major topics that she brings up in Part 1, “Visuality, Modernity, and Primitive Passions,” is the relationship between “the discourse of technologized visuality” and modern Chinese literature (5). Beginning with the story of how Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, was motivated into a writing career by his encounter with a “visual spectacle” in the mid-1900s, Chow goes on to explain in detail how “the sign of literature” is related to the visuality of China’s modern anxiety. Lu Xun’s conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his “intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle” (35). Viewing film as “a new kind of discourse in the postcolonial ‘third world’” (5), Chow also examines “the relationship between visuality and power, a relationship that is critical in the postcolonial non-West” (6). Drawing upon Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, on the one hand, and postcolonial theoreticians like Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell, on the other, Chow explicates the significance of the visual sign, which is different from yet related to the “older” literary sign, for China’s modernity, arguing that “the film’s careful visual structure signals the successful dismantling of the older sign” and therefore functions as a “revolutionary mode” whereby not only “the repressions and brutalities of society are consciously ethnographized,” but also, at the same time, the “practices of ‘primitive’ cultures” are fetishized against a background of “the harsh social realities of modernized metropolises” (26).

 

The chapters that follow the story of Lu Xun are devoted to the issue of “primitive passions” in Chinese cinema and culture. Although theoretically dense, Chow’s well-documented study of the “multiple strands of primitive passions” is clear and thought-provoking. The “primitive” in Chow’s discussion stands for something “phantasmagoric,” “ex-otic,” “unthinkable,” or an “original something that has been lost” (22). Phantasmagoria of the primitive appears at the time of “cultural crisis” when the old sign system of writing is being “dislocated” by the discourse of technologized visuality. As a figure for the origin that “was there prior to our present existence,” the primitive, which expresses a kind of nostalgia that is inclined to view the encroachment of the modern on an ancient culture, has become the “fabrication of a pre that occurs in the time of the post” (22). Chow’s discussion of primitive passions, reinforced by her frequent references to postcolonial theory, provides a new perspective upon twentieth-century Chinese culture which, in Chow’s opinion, is “caught between the forces of ‘first world’ imperialism and ‘third world’ nationalism” (23), and which demands reconsideration of the paradoxical relation between China and the West. “If Chinese culture is ‘primitive’ in the pejorative sense of being ‘backward’ (being stuck in an earlier stage of ‘culture’ and thus closer to ‘nature’) when compared to the West,” Chow explains, “it is also ‘primitive’ in the meliorative sense of being an ancient culture (it was there first, before many Western nations)” (23). Chow’s perceptive observations on the primitive suggest interesting lines of investigation into the distinctive features of Chinese culture in relation to postcolonial politics. In an ironic sense, what we see in China’s anxiety for modernization is a paradoxical primitive passion on the part of China’s modern filmmakers and opinion-makers alike who perceive China as both “victim” and “empire.” And this paradox of primitivism, according to Chow, is characteristic of modern Chinese intellectuals’ “obsession with China” (23). Making excellent use of a range of Chinese films produced from the early 1930s to the late 1980s, Chow illustrates the historical development of obsessive primitivism in Chinese cinema. With modern film technology, as Chow demonstrates, contemporary Chinese cinema continues the “uncanny ethnographic attempt to narrate a ‘noble savagery’ that is believed to have preserved the older and more authentic treasures of the culture, in ways as yet uncorrupted by modernity” (74).

 

Primitive passions are informed as well as complicated by the issue of gender–or rather engendered–representation. In her brief review of Goddess, a silent film made in 1934, Chow associates the primitive with the oppressed woman. One of the points that Chow attempts to make is that the primitive is not necessarily to be found only in backward, pre-modern regions, but is also to be located in industrialized metropolises such as Shanghai where the rapid development of industry and technologization can intensify “our awareness of how primitivism, as the imaginary foundation of industrialized modernity, is crucial to cultural production” (24). As a fascinating drama, Goddess, with the visual power that the new film technology provides, presents a subtle story about a young woman who prostitutes herself in order to support her son’s education. Against a backdrop of modern Shanghai in the early twentieth century, the film illustrates how the spectacularized body of woman “functions as a fetish for the sexuality”–the primitive–“that a ‘civilized’ society represses” (24). What Chow tries to show in her discussion of Goddess is the “affinity” rather than the contrariety between “innovativeness of film” and “primitive passions” (25). This film, which spectacularizes the primitive in the image of the oppressed woman, “articulates this epochal fascination with the primitive in ways that are possible only with the new technology of visuality” (25-26). The tradition of using women as symbols for the primitive, according to Chow, has been revived and developed by contemporary Chinese directors such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Although sharing the same primitive passions, contemporary Chinese directors exhibit different notions of primitives/women and experiment with various visual representations. In Chen’s films, which tend to be symbolic, the primitive “is incorporeal–the real primitive is the ‘goddess’ who cannot be seen or represented and who has no place in this world” (47). What Chen’s films present is the “invisible” cultural tradition that has been buried deep in the past and disembodied as the “absence”; and audiences are encouraged to see through the visualized corporeality to grasp an incorporeal cultural experience. Zhang’s films, different from Chen’s, appeal to the immediacy of experience by drawing audiences’ attention to the image itself, rather than to what is hidden behind it. In Chow’s words, “Zhang’s primitive, also woman, is what can be exhibited. The woman’s body becomes the living ethnographic museum that, while putting ‘Chinese culture’ on display, is at the same time the witness to a different kind of origin” (47).

 

In a sense, contemporary Chinese films are “phoenixes from the ashes” of the crisis of representation that existed in Chinese cinema after the Cultural Revolution. When China re-opened its door to the West in the 1980s, new modes of self-representation were desperately needed. Viewed from a broad perspective, contemporary Chinese cinema can be seen as embodying an autoethnographic attempt to present “China” anew before the West and, therefore, it provides an opportunity to re-examine China’s cultural identity in relation to Western pre-conceptions. As Chow asserts, a third-world nation’s cultural identity is often an overdetermined discourse that has been constructed from the Western perspective. In the case of Chinese cultural identity, Western sinologists and anthropologists have played an important role in setting up an Orientalist epistemological frame in which the intellectual locus of ideological control does not lie inside but outside China. For a long time, the third-world cultures come to be represented by virtue of the first world interpreters who have the privilege as well as the authority over their research subjects/objects. In her discussion of film as (auto)ethnography, Chow, regarding film studies as “an opportunity to rethink other modes of discourse in the twentieth century” (26), presents some important observations on the issue of representation and interpretation between cultures. Reading film as ethnography, as it were, demands an interdisciplinary approach that embraces not only the anthropological methodology and theory, but also a cross-cultural resistance “against the active imposition on the relations between West and non-West of an old epistemological hierarchy” (27). Historically, this “epistemological hierarchy” was established by Western anthropologists who, while studying the primitive cultures of third-world nations, imposed consciously or unconsciously a Western conceptual system upon their “primitive texts.” In terms of visuality, the West tends to see other cultures as “an endless exhibition” in which everything is arranged and interpreted from a Western point of view. What Chow attempts to achieve in her book is to take an anthropological approach to Chinese cinema without falling into the trap of a Western conceptual system. Chow opines that “film–especially film from and about a ‘third world’ culture–changes the traditional divide between observer and observed, analysis and phenomena, master discourse and native informant, and hence ‘first world’ and ‘third world’” (28). In the autoethnographic discourse of Chinese cinema, we find a new subversive and challenging “exhibition,” which is not set by the West, but by the Orient itself, which is conscious of the Western gaze and thus attempts to make use of this gaze for economic, political, or other purposes. “After demonstrating the bloodiness of the Western instruments of vision and visuality,” Chow questions, “how do we discuss what happens when the East uses these instruments to fantasize itself and the world?” (13). In Chow’s opinion, “since ‘the other’ has always already been classical anthropology’s mise-en-scène, this necessary dialogue between anthropology and film cannot simply be sought in the institutionally othered space of an oppositional stance toward ‘alternative’ or ‘third’ cinema,” but rather “in the shared, common visual spaces of our postcolonial, postmodern world” (28). In other words, “when the conventional epistemological division between ‘third world’ and ‘first world’ breaks down,” “the mediatized image of an ‘other’ becomes an index to primitive passions not only in the West but in China as well” (28).

 

After laying down theoretical foundations concerning the complex issues of primitive passions and cross-cultural interpretation, Chow goes on to perform the difficult task of reading contemporary Chinese films in an interdisciplinary context of postcolonial, cross-cultural politics. In Part 2, “Some Contemporary Chinese Films,” Chow marshals a wide range of film texts to argue that “contemporary Chinese cinema is fascinating because it problematizes the facile notions of oppositional alterity that have for so long dominated our thinking about the ‘third world’” (57). As we know, since the mid-1980s, Chinese films have enjoyed a phenomenal success in the West, and their success has evoked heated discussions of “Oriental’s orientalism.” These Eastern-flavored films are both criticized for “pandering to the taste of foreign devils” and praised for their defiant spirit in unthinking Eurocentrism. The interpretative conflict, on the one hand, raises some interesting questions about cross-cultural politics of reception, and on the other, reveals a paradoxical correlation between the global and local discourses ironically inscribed and enacted within the technologized visuality of China’s primitive. For Chow, “Chinese films that manage to make their way to audiences in the West are usually characterized, first of all, by visual beauty” (57); this “visual beauty,” however, needs a wide array of unmakings. Chow seems to get most upset by what she views as the naive reading of third-world cinema as “national allegories,” arguing that such readings “cannot sufficiently account for the ‘breaks and heterogeneities’ and ‘multiple polysemia’ of ‘third world’ texts” (57). These “heterogeneities” or “impurity” beneath the surface of exotic alterity is what we must pay attention to today. One “way of defining this impurity,” Chow maintains, “is to say that the ‘ethnicity’ of contemporary Chinese cinema–‘Chineseness’–is already the sign of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism” (59). Chow’s discussion raises a series of interesting yet complicated questions: To what extent, do third-world nations have the opportunity to speak and gaze back not as the “Other”? How shall we construct a new global-local dialectic, as both the first world and the third world are rapidly fragmented and diluted? And as the self-conscious “ethnic” filmmakers start to question and negotiate with the imperial, colonial, and capitalist “master discourse,” who would assume the “authority” to produce appropriate discourse about “otherness” in today’s intellectual world market? Caught between two modes of ideological signification–the West and the Chinese–contemporary Chinese films are situated in an awkward in-between zone of global/local interaction where they are subject to the forces of two ideologies which more often than not conflict with each other. Almost all the films made by the so-called “Fifth Generation” directors (who are the focus of Chow’s study) are produced locally, and their subject matters are mainly based on local stories. However, different from the novelistic versions of the stories that are written solely for the domestic readership within China’s home market, the cinematic versions have been made addressing both Chinese and Western audiences; in some cases, the major intended markets are American-Western countries. Therefore, one of the most important features of these films is the “worldwide orientation,” which distinguishes them from the early local-oriented movies made in China. Chow’s illuminating observation highlights the “sharp distinction between the often grave subject matter and the sensuously pleasing ‘enunciation’ of contemporary Chinese film–a distinction we can describe in terms of a conjoined subalternization and commodification” (57-58). This distinction, ultimately, “points to the economics that enable the distribution and circulation of these films in the West” (58).

 

Among China’s internationally acclaimed “Fifth Generation” directors, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have managed to attract the West’s continuous attention. Different from the locally consumed Chinese movies, their films are much more graphic and photographic so that the power of visuality can provide the opportunity for non-Chinese audiences to naturalize the filmic discourse easily in a cross-cultural context. However, the filmic discourse is at the same time highly figurative, symbolic, and ambivalent; it emphasizes “surface” while suggesting profound and often mysterious depths of ‘Chinese’ culture. In such a hybrid discourse, Chen’s and Zhang’s films can translate and transform unique stories of local culture into globally consumable and marketable experiences. Contextualizing Chen’s and Zhang’s films in the “processes of cross-cultural production,” Chow argues that “the insistence on an original ‘Chinese’ culture is the insistence on a kind of value that is outside alienation, outside the process of value-making” (64). Chow associates “the process of value-making” with what she calls “the labor of social fantasy” that “the Chinese can have part of the West–technology–without changing its own social structure” (73). This “social fantasy” characterizes the “uncanny ethnographic attempt” to present the primitive through the modern film technology. Technology, in a sense, has enabled Chinese filmmakers to translate their local culture into visual products that can be consumed globally. In recent years, almost all Chinese films that have well been received in the West are ethnographic presentations of the remote landscape of China’s primitive. In such films as Yellow Earth and Judou, the audiences are taken to “backward villages in remote mountains” where the primitive–“the older and more authentic treasures of the culture”–is supposed to exist. In these films, as Chow observes, the modern film technology presents not only “visual beauty,” but also, more important, the “other-looking” image of China’s primitive. Chow notes that the primitive has a status of double otherness: It stands for “China’s status as other to the West and the status of the ‘other’ cultures of China’s past and unknown places to China’s ‘present self’” (75). Contemporary Chinese cinema, in Chow’s opinion, reveals a “structure of narcissistic value-writing” that “explains the current interest on the part of Chinese filmmakers to search for China’s ‘own’ others” (65). Films directed by Chen and Zhang, for example, often go back to the materiality of China’s primitive culture to explore the origins of modern China’s problems. Facing a complacent and narcissistic civilization that has produced Confucianism, Taoism and Maoism, one cannot but feel that there must be a historical yet mysterious “origin” inside Chinese culture. Contemporary Chinese films, in a sense, “partake of what we may call a poststructuralist fascination with the constructedness of one’s ‘self’–in this case, with China’s ‘self,’ with China’s origins, with China’s own alterity” (65). The paradox that Chow sees here is that “in the wish to go back to ‘China’ as origin–to revive ‘China’ as the source of original value–the ‘inward turn’ of the nationalist narrative precisely reveals ‘China’ as other-than-itself” (65).

 

In films made by contemporary Chinese directors such as Chen and Zhang, we can find a practice of “self-gazing”–the attempt to see through the surface and to explore what is inscribed/enacted in the mise-en-scène. What these films present, apart from and beyond the exotic surface, is a self-gazing exploration into Chinese culture. This “self-gazing” indicates a modern anxiety to make sense of the obstinate sensibility of Chinese traditional culture by disengaging the symbolic order from the primitive relics and to search for a historical relationship between the Cultural Revolution and something buried deep in Chinese culture. Chen Kaige says, “I’ve always felt that what accounts for the Cultural Revolution is traditional culture itself….The Cultural Revolution repeats, continues, and develops this traditional culture” (qtd. in Chow 92). In this regard, contemporary Chinese cinema inscribes a self-reflexive and self-analytical perspective upon Chinese culture. These films, which present the remote cultural landscape of China, to a certain degree, have “defamiliarized” the primitive “China.” As Chow observes, quoting a native Chinese critic: “To the average urban Chinese, these landscapes are equally alien, remote and ‘other-looking,’ as they presumably appear to a Western gaze” (81). They demand we re-read the hieroglyphs of China’s cultural history and re-examine what kind of impact the misguided forces of an old cultural tradition can make upon modern life. In an age of postcolonial cultural diaspora, Chen’s and Zhang’s self-gazing exploration of Chinese culture is, unfortunately, mistaken for a Westernized gaze, and this superficial cognition generates numerous misunderstandings, which almost exclusively criticizes these directors for “betraying” Chinese culture. Actually, the self-gazing mode interrogates a complicated cultural system by means of a split discourse that both presents and questions what it presents simultaneously. This split discourse, in Scott Nygren’s words, “foregrounds the necessary distorting process of the Imaginary or Other as a means by which difference can be conceived” (182). The interaction between gazing and self-gazing enacts a double writing process in which Chinese traditional culture is both presented and questioned. In Chow’s words, these films have played a “self-anthropologizing” role in their attempt to re-write an auto-ethnographic account of China; and these filmmakers have “taken up the active task of ethnographizing their own culture” (180).

 

When contemporary Chinese cinema started to stage itself in the global cultural market in recent years, conflicts and confrontations between different ideological interpretations seemed to be inevitable. Quoting E. Ann Kaplan, Chow points out that cross-cultural readings are “‘fraught with dangers.’ One of these dangers is our habit of reading the ‘third world’ in terms of what, from our point of view, it does not have but wants to have” (83). Moreover, there seems to be a “tension between the ‘raw material’ of the filmic text and the ineluctability of the Western analytic ‘technology’” (85). It is both natural and ineluctable that Western audiences–including Western scholars–always “gaze” at Chinese culture from a Western perspective, but the problem is that the “gazee” is not always passive. What Chow tries to show in Part 2 is that Chinese culture, which has been aggrandized by the powerful cinematic apparatus, does not merely appeal to the Western gaze, but more important, it also challenges, questions, and displaces the gaze. In a postcolonial age, when Western audiences go to cinemas to watch films made by the West-conscious Chinese directors with “a technology that is, theoretically speaking, non-Chinese” (87-88), the intercultural power relation between the gazer and the gazee has been changed. In other words, Chinese or third-world cinema may purposely offer what the first world “wants it to have” or wants to see. In such a situation, the relationship between the gazer (first world) and gazee (third world) should be re-examined. In Christian Metz’s psychoanalytical terms, when the whole system of knowledge is provided by the gazee-analysand, the gazee may also become the gazer-analyser, which can generate a counter-discourse to the intended spectatorship. “As in political struggles,” Metz writes, “our only weapons are those of the adversary, as in anthropology, our only source is the native, as in the analytical cure, our only knowledge is that of the analysand, who is also (current French usage tells us so) the analyser [analysant]” (5). In this regard, the films made by contemporary Chinese directors do not simply set up an “exhibition” of an exotic culture, but rather, they open up a new space in cinematic discourse in which different kinds of “gazing” and “gazing-back” are re-negotiated. In Chow’s words, by “showing a ‘China’ that is at once subalternized and exoticized by the West,” contemporary Chinese cinema “amounts to an exhibitionism that returns the gaze of orientalist surveillance” (170).

 

The third and the last part, “Film as Ethnography; or Translation between Cultures in the Postmodern World,” offers a perceptive summary as well as a theoretical extension of what Chow has previously discussed, thus completing this triptych volume in a satisfactory way. One of the most fascinating aspects of this part is her discussion of Chinese filmmakers’ struggle with the politics of “translation” and their experience as cross-cultural translators. “In dazzling colors of their screen,” Chow describes, “the primitive…stands as the naive symbol, the brilliant arcade, through which ‘China’ travels across cultures to unfamiliar audiences. Meanwhile, the ‘original’ that is film, the canonically Western medium, becomes destabilized and permanently infected with the unforgettable ‘ethnic’ (and foreign) images imprinted on it by the Chinese translators” (202). Cultural translation, therefore, is not “a unidirectional, one-way process,” but a mutual delivering action–or to borrow Benjamin’s words, “a ‘liberation’ that is mutual and reciprocal between the ‘original’ and the ‘translation’” (188). The tension produced by the paradoxical relation of both conflict and convergence between globalization and localization is an important feature of postmodern cultural diaspora in which various cultural presences constantly translate themselves. In the last part of her book, Chow attempts to refigure some new models for cultural translation in terms of a global/local dialectic. The issue she raises is how the demand for self-translatable cultural products has increased as a consequence of global/local interaction. In Chow’s opinion, cultural translation suggests a kind of global consciousness that undermines the rigid compartmentalization of cultural consumption. In order to share and exchange in a global market, opinion-makers and filmmakers of different cultures must translate their cultural products into terms that are interculturally accountable. Cultural translation will not lead to dissolution of local cultural difference; on the contrary, it demands vigorous re-examination of the changing mechanism of the international flows of various national and local cultures. This re-examination, as Chow has demonstrated, can help us perceive how “the less powerful (cultures) negotiate the imposition of the agenda of the powerful” (201). By linking filmmaking with translation, Chow emphasizes that contemporary Chinese films are cultural translations, which provide a process that “we must go through in order to arrive–not at the new destination of the truth of an ‘other’ culture but at the weakened foundations of Western metaphysics as well as the disintegrated bases of Eastern tradition” (201). Cultural translation, therefore, informs a paradox of global/local interaction in the postcolonial, post-third-worldist critical moment. In order for Chinese local primitive to be understood and accepted, the Chinese filmmakers and opinion-makers alike must fight their battle over its global sense with the same paradigms/technology. What we can see in the battle is the emergence of a new global-conscious localism in film as well as in scholarship that correlates with the current international racing of cultural re-location, in which the ironic “self-anthropologizing” discourse starts to challenge what Arif Dirlik calls “EuroAmericans’ privilege of interpreting China’s past for the Chinese” (38). In this sense, far from being the art of exotic seduction, contemporary Chinese films are self-staged in the world market as a new form of cultural resistance against the Western hegemonic power in the age of cultural diaspora. The primitives that contemporary Chinese cinema presents, in Chow’s final analysis, are translated and translatable “‘fables’ that cast light on the ‘original’ that is our world’s violence, and they mark the passages that head not toward the ‘original’ that is the West or the East but toward survival in the postcolonial world” (201-02).

Works Cited

 

• Dirlik, Arif. “The Global in the Local.” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 21-45.
• Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
• Nygren, Scott. “Doubleness and Idiosyncrasy in Cross-Cultural Analysis.” Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. Eds. Namid Naficy and Teshome H. Gabriel. Langhorne, Pennsylvania: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. 173-187.

 

Mark Welch

Department of Nursing and Health Studies
University of Western Sydney
ma.welch@nepean.uws.edu.au

 

Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.

 
The subtitle of Eric Rentschler’s latest book, The Ministry of Illusion (1996), gives a strong clue to its real purpose. He speaks of the Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, and as well-researched and referenced a work of film history as this book is, it is really about what the Nazi cinema means to us today, and why it has such an enduring allure.

 

It is illuminating but unsurprising that he should open his preface with a confessional note. He would not be the first and will not be the last young student to be grimly fascinated by what was an epoch of major importance for the development of the cinema. What changed for Rentschler, and what can be gained from his book, is a realization that the films he saw as “so reviled and yet so resonant” were profoundly meaningful for our contemporary understandings of the cinema, both as an artistic and a socio-cultural medium. In particular, Rentschler’s work has much that is valuable to say about how cinema helps us to construct a sense of reality, and the role the Other plays in the legitimation of our identity.

 

The figure of Goebbels is absolutely central to Rentschler’s argument and, in one of many extraordinarily detailed footnotes, he cites a report of a closing address given by Goebbels to the International Film Congress in 1933 (239). To a contemporary ear, many of the seven theses on which Goebbels expounded may sound very familiar. It is necessary, he said among other propositions, for film to recognize that it has a language of its own that is different from that of other art forms, and to develop it; while film must free itself from the “vulgar banality of a simple mass entertainment,” it must not lose its strong inner connection with people because mass taste can be educated and film has a crucial role in this; however, no art can exist without material support and the state should ensure this; film must reflect the spirit of the times if it is to speak to them; film gives expression to national identity, and in doing so creates understanding among nations; and film should develop its innermost natural essence and, if it does so, Goebbels suggests, it will conquer the world as a new artistic medium.

 

1933 was a crucial year for German cinema. On March 11th, less than two weeks after the Reichstag fire, the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, RMVP), the eponymous Ministry of Illusion, was created. Two days later Goebbels was appointed as the Minister of Propaganda. Within two weeks of his appointment Goebbels had made important speeches, to both the heads of German radio stations and leading representatives of the German film industry, in which he called for radical reforms and productions with distinctive national contours. On 29 March 1933, Fritz Lang’s Testament of Dr. Mabuse was banned: it was not shown in Germany until 1951. During the next few months Goebbels made tax concessions available to approved sections of the film industry, offered attractive credit terms and began a level of engagement that by 1936 would see the Ministry involved in more than 70% of German feature films. He also instigated measures which restricted the right to work in the film industry to “true Germans,” and reorganized the professional bodies that represented the industry. In June 1933, after a blaze of activity, the seal was on the efforts of Goebbels to assume authority at every level for the RMVP. At the same time Hitler delivered a speech in which he said that the RMVP is to be responsible for

 

all tasks related to the spiritual guidance of the nation, to the promotion of the state, culture and the economy, to the promulgation of information to domestic and foreign sources about the nation as well as the administration of all the agencies responsible for these endeavours.

 

It was a realization of the totalitarian imagination for Goebbels, who had argued that the need for reform in the film industry was a spiritual one and must counteract the decadence of the Weimar years. With this foundation some of the most memorable, audacious, and controversial films ever made were produced in Germany over the next dozen years, films that were quite often regarded as such for the same reasons and at the same time. Rentschler notes that much of the supposed omnipotence of the RMVP has been exaggerated, and the situation may have been more confused and less simplistic than was once imagined; the RMVP was not as totalitarian nor as omnipresent as the myths which have grown around it. However, the legacy of the films’ artistic and creative innovations is still as apparent and as current as the analysis of the potential of cinema made by Goebbels.

 

Rentschler acknowledges that the traditional image of the films of the Third Reich has been framed in the light of the political regime of the Nazis, and it was once almost taboo, or at least a guilty pleasure, to admire the aesthetic qualities in isolation from their context. Much of this can be attributed to the influence of landmark critics from the Frankfurt School such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, who problematized the whole notion of a pure aesthetic. While Susan Sontag confessed, somewhat riskily, to finding Fascism fascinating, it may have been in the spirit, not so much of admiration, but, more likely, of admitting to the awful fascination of seeing what unchecked certainty and uncritical dreaming could achieve. The debt that the Hollywood spectacle has to the masterly control of image-making in Nazi cinema has either been rehabilitated or ignored. Yet, this lineage of imagery continues: as recently as this year, the opening shots from the airplane in Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-winning film, The English Patient, echo the shadow that Leni Riefenstahl showed flying across the landscape of Nuremburg in The Triumph of the Will.

 

Rentschler, however, feels that to concentrate exclusively on themes, trends, and manifest content is to miss the significance of the films’ semiotic complexity. He suggests, not entirely fairly, that little has been previously said about the aesthetics of the Nazi films, those features that he feels make them so resonant and well regarded. He sees, and here his point should receive emphasis, a reciprocal link, at least aesthetically, between Hollywood and Berlin, and realizes that not every film produced in this era was crude propaganda.

 

Rentschler lays out his thesis based on five premises (16-24). He suggests that

 

• “the cinema of the Third Reich is to be seen in the context of the totalitarian state’s concerted attempt to create a culture industry in the service of mass deception.”
• “entertainment played a crucial role in Nazi culture. The era’s many genre films maintained the appearance of escapist vehicles and innocent recreations while functioning within a larger programme.”
• “Nazi film culture–and Nazi propaganda in general–must be understood in terms of what Goebbels called an ‘orchestra principle’” where not everyone was expected to play the same instrument.
• “it is by now a truism that we cannot speak of National Socialism without speaking about aesthetics.” Rentschler adds that we must also speak about mass culture.
• “when critics decry Nazi cinema as an abomination, they protest too much…. It is common to reduce all Nazi films to hate pamphlets, party hagiography, or mindless escapism, films with too much substance or none at all, either execrable or frivolous.”

 

He argues these points with reference to a number of emblematic, significant, or representative films. He includes Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light) (Dir. Riefenstahl 1932), a mountaineering film which came from the tradition of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, which is technically pre-Nazi but gets into the frame not least because of its aesthetic, its themes, and Riefenstahl’s direction. He then considers the much more grandiose Münchausen (Dir. Von Blaky 1943) and others, wishing to show each chosen film as an exemplar in its own way. He also includes two of the most famous Nazi films, and two most often cited for their propaganda content, Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) (1933) and the quite notorious Jud Süss (Jew Süss) (Dir. Harlan 1940). Indeed, had he ignored the most well-known examples altogether he might well have been considered perverse.

 

He defends his various theses with mixed success and sometimes it seems that his analysis is inconsistent and his method becomes a little fuzzy. While the contextual analysis of Nazi cinema is undoubtedly critical, he is still faced with the problem of the strident rhetoric of the RMVP and how the conditions of real life moderated action. He notes that many of the official statements emanating from the RMVP would appear to support his premise, yet, at the same time, he is also aware of degrees of subversion within the Ministry and the film industry itself which somehow conspire against any utopianism. Perhaps what we have come to learn of the chaos that lurks just below the surface of disintegrating totalitarian regimes in our own age can make us regard any protestations of unity and perfected order with a degree of skepticism. It seems to suggest that what can fall apart, will fall apart, and we should be regarding the hubris of those who think otherwise as simple folly. He warns against those who are dangerously sure of themselves.

 

As other authors (Hull, Taylor, Friedlander, Schulte-Sasse) have argued, there was often a divergence of opinion about the nature and function of film between Goebbels and Hitler. Of the two, Goebbels seemed to have the more sophisticated appreciation of the ideological content of all art forms, and realized that the public’s appetite for or capacity to absorb blatant and less than subtle presentations may be limited. So Goebbels wanted to establish the film culture in the very fabric of the nation’s mind-set. He wanted a Hollywood star system; he recognized, as many in Hollywood and the world of advertising do today, that often the most powerful messages are the ones you don’t even realize are there.

 

Apart from films, Goebbels saw the value of pageants and fetes, flags and uniforms. These all fostered a sense of identity; they signified what could be called “us,” and what was “them.” He was quick to spot any opportunity to emphasize the point, but whenever possible it was to be couched in terms of enjoyment and recreation. It is as though he believed that a content mind is an uncritical mind.

 

The aesthetics of Fascism are said by Susan Sontag to glorify and glamorize death and the body, often together and often in a disconnected way. Rentschler takes some critics to task for adopting an attitude towards the popular culture of the Third Reich that is dismissive, almost patronizing. He wants to emphasize that popular culture was exactly that, popular. It was there in songs of the period, as Goebbels’ favorite band, Charlie and His Orchestra, sang amusing light ditties about bombing London. It was there in the ordinary household items in the shops; the pictures that appeared on tea-towels and trays were choices made within this entire context. Nevertheless, in part because of the indelible images of the great spectacles and Riefenstahl’s work in particular, the idea of Fascist art, when it is skillful, remains troublesome to the Western liberal conscience. Had he wished to, it is possible that Rentschler would have found direct descendants in the MTV videos of Michael Jackson and his uniformed chorus, or the disturbing depersonalized idealization of some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. This is a topic that Rentschler does well to draw to our attention, and it is still full of unexplored possibilities.

 

His final premise is that the critics are, in general, as totalizing in their condemnation as they think Nazi art is in its monologism. In what may be an uncomfortable equation for many, Rentschler argues that most Nazi films are as understandable in their conventions and readings as any familiar, traditional Hollywood film. The essentials of narrative and characterization are much the same and vary just as much in terms of skillful presentation or complexity.

 

Rentschler makes an argument for a much more nuanced reading of the relationship between politics and entertainment in Nazi Germany. He is admirably careful about condemning too hastily or praising too easily. However, he does recognize that he is, as he puts it, entering a minefield of explosive issues. He notes the revisionism that has emerged since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 and the unification of Germany and, quite correctly, does not see himself as an apologist or driven revisionist. He admits that he is “mindful of the problematic postmodern relationship to the images and imaginary products of the Third Reich” (23). Nevertheless, he has made a major contribution to the literature. He has assembled a formidable collection of notes and appendices which run to over 200 pages, as much as the text itself. In a fascinating addition he includes a comparative historical listing of dates, films, biographies, and other important events and moments of the Nazi regime; one can almost feel the momentum of history, almost hear the clock ticking. Occasional errors notwithstanding, such as his quotation from the closing scenes of Fritz Lang’s M (1930) (although that could be taken from an unfamiliar source), his scholarship and the depth and breadth of his resources make the book fascinating and accessible to the interested beginner as well as the established scholar. It also makes an interesting conjunction with other well-publicized but less-than-orthodox histories of the Third Reich such as Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners or Linda Schulte-Sasse’s Entertaining the Third Reich, with which it shares many concerns.

 

It seems he is justified in calling his final chapter, with a sense of irony and realism, “The Testament of Dr. Goebbels.” He starts out in the book by suggesting that “as time passes, the legacy of the Third Reich looms ever larger” (23). He ends, appropriately, by saying that “more than fifty years since the demise of National Socialism, the testament of Dr. Goebbels continues to haunt us” (223). This book enhances our ability to deal with that legacy.

Works Cited

 

• Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf & Company, 1996.
• Hull, David S. Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933-1945. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
• Schulte-Sasse, Linda. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illustrations of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.
• Taylor, Richard. Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. London: Croom Helm, 1979.

 

Anthony Enns

Department of English
University of Iowa
anthony-enns@uiowa.edu

 

Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway.Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.

 

It is significant that the subtitle of Alan Woods’ new book, Being Naked Playing Dead, is not “The Films of…” or “The Cinema of…” but rather “The Art of Peter Greenaway.” “Artist” is certainly a more accurate description of Greenaway’s occupation than “filmmaker”; while he is widely known as one of today’s most brilliant and unique filmmakers, he has also worked in the mediums of painting, installations, experimental television, and opera. Woods’ subtitle not only indicates this fact, but also makes clear that Greenaway’s films must be considered in light of his wider body of work, and, more importantly, that his work must be considered within the context of contemporary art rather than contemporary cinema. As Woods points out: “Greenaway’s cinema requires a critical analysis which is not restricted to cinema, but draws its terms and concepts and examples both from the history of Western painting since the Renaissance… and from a base within the very different world of contemporary art practice” (87). Through his in-depth understanding of salient issues in contemporary art and his ability to decipher the wealth of influences and references at play within the works themselves, Woods distills the complexities of Greenaway’s art into a cohesive aesthetic theory, an outline for a “new cinematic language.” He constructs a fascinating portrait of Greenaway’s working method as well as illustrates a potentially new method of film criticism.

 

Part of what makes Greenaway’s films unique is the way they address the medium of film itself. Greenaway is obsessed with the difficulties of representing reality on film, and this problem becomes focused on representations of the body. As Greenaway explains: “[there are] two phenomena I have never been able to suspend disbelief about in the cinema–copulation and death” (52). Copulation and death are the two subjects addressed by Woods’ title, and they are particularly significant to Greenaway because they mark the limit of representation, the limit of film’s ability to represent the physical world. According to Woods, naked bodies, which are ubiquitous in Greenaway’s films, are linked to mortality: “Our interest in the nude, he suggests, is more than sexual: it is also to do with our knowledge of our own mortality. Many of the bodies he shows us are dead, or at least… acting dead” (162). It is paradoxical that Greenaway’s method of addressing the artifice of film is actually a project of connecting viewers to something more genuine: the experience of their own bodies, their mortality, the human condition. Greenaway recognizes the inability of “dominant” cinema to convey this experience because of its strict adherence to narrative; narrative is unable to remind people that they are mortal, and this is why Greenaway advocates a new cinema, a “cinema of ideas, not plots.”

 

Jorge Luis Borges once said that the short story did not necessarily require a plot, but rather a “situation,” and it is this word that appears in Woods’ text in place of plot: “the situation, however artificial, becomes difficult to bear because it must be thought about rather than consumed/resolved through narrative” (201). Narratives fail because they resolve tension, whereas Greenaway uses tension to evoke thought. Narrative relies on character identification, on the viewer’s empathy with the plight of the protagonist, but Greenaway rejects such a notion: “Empathy… prevents us from dealing with, facing up to, what is really real” (176). This repositioning of the viewer in relation to the work of art is almost Brechtian, except that Greenaway’s project does not encourage political awareness so much as an awareness of the operations of nature; according to Woods, Greenaway disrupts narrative from a “Darwinian standpoint.” However, it would be wrong to interpret Greenaway’s emphasis on nature as an attempt to evoke a spiritual or a transcendent experience. Woods describes Greenaway’s use of cinematic artifice as an attempt to combine Brechtian as well as Baroque theatricality (the Baroque aesthetic combines soul and body, the spiritual and the material): “It is not spirituality which is co-existent, doubled, with corporeality in Greenaway, but the presence of mind to imagine, to represent, as well as live out, physical existence” (200). This statement best explains the difference between Greenaway and Brecht: Greenaway demands that the viewer engage his films both intellectually and physically.

 

Throughout his work, Greenaway connects the material to the intellectual, objects to ideas, as Woods points out: “[Objects] are at once matter and spectacle, idea and thing” (17). The distinction between symbols, words and things gradually becomes blurred. His use of naked bodies, therefore, is not simply the reduction of characters to objects, but rather the creation, through their objectification, of meanings: “What… gives his work its particular charge, individuality and excess is that… he invests all objects, all bodies, with intricate, inexhaustible meaning” (49). Greenaway also solves the problem of narrative through a similar objectification. He prefers to think of narrative not as a story but as a “sequence”: “Sequence is inevitable in cinema, but narrative might not be” (227). In other words, he is able to accomplish this combination of Brechtian and Baroque theatricality by reducing narrative elements themselves to objects, to physicality, and it is through their physical presence, in succession, that meaning is generated.

 

This objectification of narrative elements can also be understood as the transformation of spatial meaning into temporal meaning. Greenaway not only invents a new cinematic language, he also teaches his viewers how to read it. He introduces a model of viewership based on the medium of painting rather than cinema: “When you go to the National Gallery… you don’t stand in front of the painting and emote. You don’t cry, you don’t shout, you don’t scream. Why should we demand those sorts of relationships in the cinema?” (81-2). Paintings, according to Woods, convey spatial meaning; they exist outside of time in a “continuous present.” Cinema conveys temporal meaning; meaning is created through the movement of objects in space over time, through narrative. Woods believes that “[Greenaway] retains as much simultaneous, spatial meaning as possible, and reinvents it for a temporal meaning” (123). Woods connects Greenaway’s rejection of the temporal limitations of cinema, a rejection of narrative and ephemerality, to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin was critical of film because it denies the viewer the ability to contemplate the image: the moving picture constantly distracts the viewer and controls both the direction and the duration of the viewer’s perception. Woods posits Greenaway as a potential solution to Benjamin’s dilemma: Greenaway’s films do not attempt to control the viewer’s perception, but rather, through the rejection of narrative and an emphasis on repetition and physicality, Greenaway demands that his images be contemplated: “The distancing effect involved in the picture’s treatment of the material–and, for us, in our own distance from the period in which it was painted–demands that it be considered, rather than consumed” (81).

 

Benjamin also believed that contemplation was the experience of the object’s authenticity, its “aura”: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (221). The “aura” of the work is its physicality, its presence in time and space, which the film image obliterates. Greenaway often says he enjoys the making of films, but he is always disappointed in the result–he refers to the finished film as a “dissatisfying by-product” of the process of its creation–and what is disappointing to Greenaway about film is that it has no substance: “it is a frustration that cinema has no substance… it can have no intimacy with history” (93). Much of Greenaway’s artistic work outside of filmmaking involves exhibitions and books which chronicle the making of his films; they are an attempt, in other words, to give physicality to film: “What is unique… is his increasing interest in finding ways of reconstructing for his audience the physical realities of the set, the props, the bodies which, in film, are… insubstantial traces, reduced to light” (87). And his interest in exhibitions, in the physicality of film, also reflects Benjamin’s notion of cinema as distraction, as detrimental to contemplation:

 

We cannot inch a little to the left, to see the dining-table from the south side... this is a deeply impoverished situation, when we know that tables can be viewed from north, west and east as well... We could use a contemplation of the phenomenon of the exhibition to improve the status of the cinema. (140)

 

The physical presence of the film allows viewers to control their own perception of the work of art not only temporally, but also spatially. The film, embodied in the exhibition, is then able to have an intimacy with history as well as the viewers, and at the same time the viewers are allowed a greater intimacy with the experience of their own bodies.

 

After disrupting narrative and emphasizing physicality and corporeality, Greenaway discovers the possibility of creating meaning through the repetition and referencing of objects and ideas. This can be clearly seen in an exhibition entitled 100 Objects To Represent the World, in which Greenaway attempted to list 100 objects which could represent every aspect of human culture. Greenaway’s description of this process explains how meaning is generated through objects:

 

Since every natural and cultural object is such a complex thing, and all are so endlessly interconnected, this ambition should not be so difficult to accomplish as you might imagine. For example... the fountain-pen inside my pocket is a machine that can represent all machinery; it is made of metal and plastic which could be said to represent the whole metallurgy industry from drawing-pins to battleships, and the whole plastics industry from the intra-uterine device to inflatables. It has a clip for attaching it to my inside jacket pocket and thus acknowledges the clothing industry. It is designed to write, thus representing all literature, belles lettres, and journalism. It has the name Parker inscribed on its lid, revealing the presence of words, designer-significance, advertising, identity. (20-21)

 

Greenaway’s films ask the viewer to search for clues, to seek out references to other works of art, and to establish links from one film to the next. These games of referencing become the meaning of the films, their physicality, their embodied narrative. These endless references are reflected in the organization of Woods’ book, which does not trace Greenaway’s career in chronological order but rather constructs a web of associations, beginning with simple topics such as “water” or “curtains,” which lead him from one work to the other and from one association to the next in an apparently inexhaustible cycle. What is truly wonderful about Woods’ book is the way it reflects Greenaway’s own aesthetic: meaning is not generated through the construction of a narrative, but rather through the associations and links between objects and ideas.

 

What possibly makes Greenaway unique among contemporary filmmakers, and what may be the foundation of his “new cinematic language,” a language of bodies and objects rather than characters and stories, is that he rejects the emphasis on interpretation and content which pervades film criticism, as Susan Sontag pointed out in her essay “Against Interpretation.” Sontag believes the notion of content in a work of art is obsolete: “the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism” (5). She argues for a criticism of appearances, of surfaces; for example, her description of Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film Last Year at Marienbad, a film that Greenaway greatly admires: “the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images” (9). Greenaway’s films also offer a wealth of sensuous imagery that does not ask to be interpreted, but rather to be witnessed, to be experienced, to be contemplated. Woods believes that the language of contemporary film criticism is inadequate to discuss Greenaway’s work: “there seems to be no equivalent set of continuing dialogues between Greenaway and contemporary film directors” (13). Woods also points out that Greenaway does not see himself as following cinematic tradition: “I can think of no other director so apparently uninterested in, impervious to, almost the whole range and history of Hollywood product” (15). Woods seems to be calling for a new type of criticism to discuss Greenaway, a criticism informed by the history of Western painting and contemporary art practice, a criticism, as Sontag suggests, of surfaces rather than content. In this way, Woods’ book not only makes a compelling argument for the significance of one of today’s most challenging filmmakers, but also for a new method of applying the tools of art history to works of cinema, of valuing ideas over plot, figure over character, spatial meaning over temporal.

 

The book concludes with two interviews with Greenaway, the latter of which was conducted during the editing of his most recent film, The Pillow Book (1996). Throughout both interviews, Greenaway struggles to articulate his concept of cinematic language, of the vocabulary intrinsic to the medium of film. He states repeatedly that film should be more than simply the illustration of text, more than simply stories told visually, and The Pillow Book stands out as a perfect example of this concept. By using multiple screens, text overlays, and changing aspect ratios, The Pillow Book is a uniquely cinematic object, and the relationship between text and image is central to both the narrative and the structure of the film. The film tells the story of a calligrapher’s daughter who is obsessed with having her body written upon. She later becomes a writer herself and uses other people’s bodies as paper. According to an article by Greenaway in Sight and Sound, the Japanese hieroglyph is the central metaphor of the film: “the text is read through the image, and the image is seen in the text–very possibly an ideal model for cinema” (15). Words are more than the things they signify; they are also images themselves. Thus the hieroglyph written upon the body illustrates the blurring of the distinctions between images, texts, and bodies, or between symbols, words and things. The Japanese hieroglyph could also stand as the central metaphor of Greenaway’s cinematic language: cinema is more than simply the illustration of text, but also text as illustration, symbol as object, image as a body itself, carved out of light. Greenaway arranges elements on celluloid as a painter would on canvas, using graphic tools to draw attention to the surface of the screen image, to the artifice of film. Like Marienbad, the images of The Pillow Book have a pure, untranslatable and sensuous immediacy, but they also clearly advertise the artifice behind them, and the importance of artifice, for Greenaway, is ultimately connected to bodily experience. Artifice pulls viewers out of the waking dream of traditional cinematic narrative; it asks them not to consume the film, but to consider it, to contemplate the screen as they might contemplate a canvas, and to recognize, through their experience, the reality of their own nakedness.

Works Cited

 

• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
• Greenaway, Peter. “Peter Greenaway on The Pillow Book.” Sight and Sound 6.11 (1996): 15-17.
• Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
• Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.

 

 

Kim Fedderson and J.M. Richardson

Department of English
Lakehead University
Kim.Fedderson@Lakeheadu.ca
Mike.Richardson@Lakeheadu.ca

 

Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino. Twentieth Century Fox, 1997.

 

Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard opens with the words “King Richard” appearing first on the screen with the other syllables necessary for completing the title being added gradually. This device not only highlights the name “Richard III,” the protagonist of the Shakespearean source for Pacino’s film, it also enlists and then encourages us to search for Richard within the film. And when we go looking for Richard, we can, if we look hard, find him, but not where we had expected and, more tellingly, not where we seem to be directed to look. While it gives us innumerable glimpses of Richard–the documentary frame of the film allows us to see Richard in America, in the Cloisters, in England, at the Globe, in theatrical rehearsal and performance, in cinematic rehearsal and performance–Pacino’s film, like Shakespeare’s humpbacked dissembler, harbors a “secret, close intent,” making Richard far more difficult to locate than his conspicuousness in the film would suggest. And once he is glimpsed, we should begin to question the film’s motives. While Pacino claims that his goal is to make Shakespeare more accessible to his public, what he, in fact, does under this typically American anti-elitist and democratic ruse is to appropriate the cultural commodity that Shakespeare has become and then use it to establish American dominance within the global market in which this commodity is distributed. Pacino does this by first undermining the hold that England has had on Shakespeare’s work, in effect repossessing the work, and then reforming it to his taste so that it may be marketed at home and ultimately abroad. In this cautionary tale about coming to America, Pacino not only hijacks the bard, but then he also audaciously offers him for sale back to his original owners. Indeed, it is only within the film’s conflict with itself, in the division between what it actually does and what it appears to do, that the character of Shakespeare’s smiling villain comes clearly into our view.

 

One of the things this film purports to do and in fact does is to provide us with an iteration of Shakespeare’s Richard III. That Richard III offers a narrative comprised of four phases: 1) an initial state of sovereignty, presented as “true and just” and represented by King Edward IV, comes to an end as Edward sickens and dies; 2) this is followed by an act of legitimate succession as sovereignty passes into the hands of the legitimate heir, who because of his youth, is assigned a protector; 3) this in turn is disrupted by an act of illegitimate succession as the protector turns usurper, “subtle, false and treacherous,” has the rightful heir murdered, and assumes sovereignty himself; 4) finally, the usurper is displaced and dispatched and a new legitimate sovereignty is restored. Pacino’s Looking for Richard presents only a selection of scenes from the Shakespearean original, yet these scenes are carefully chosen so as to represent these major narrative phases: hence, the sickness and death of Edward IV (Harris Yulin) is enacted; the young prince inherits his sovereignty but is forced to relinquish it to the Protector (Pacino), who has his charge murdered and so succeeds illegitimately; and finally, the usurper is replaced by the new legitimate monarch, Henry Richmond (Aidan Quinn).

 

While the major phases of the narrative of Shakespeare’s Richard III are represented in Pacino’s selection of incidents to dramatize in his Looking for Richard, the film itself, as a totality, is as conflicted as “divided York and Lancaster.” The principal source of this conflict is the film’s form. Pacino, as director of the film Looking for Richard, wraps his episodic and fragmentary performances of Shakespeare’s play in a documentary frame, in which Pacino, in the role of dramatized director of the film, explores how Richard III, which the film contends has become lost and mired in tradition, might be made “accessible to the people out there, the people on the street.” This documentary frame contains two distinct narratives, both of which replicate much of Shakespeare’s story about Richard III, but which suppress its tragic implication. The two narratives of Pacino’s frame, when taken together, create an unsettling dissonance within Looking for Richard, one which should cause us to question the film’s happy democratic sense of itself as a film that merely attempts to make Shakespeare’s play more accessible to the American public. Like Shakespeare’s character, the film may ask us to regard it as a “marv’lous proper man” (I.ii.254), but there is no mistaking that it cannot so regard itself.

 

The first of these narratives, and strongly foregrounded at that (both in the film and in its publicity, the press kit, and interviews with Pacino, so that it has become quite clear that this is what we are expected to go looking for), is a quest romance called “Looking for Richard” in which the “authentic spirit” of the play (and of Shakespeare himself), the holy grail as it were, has been lost but is found and renewed, recovered in effect, by the modern hero, Al Pacino. The keeper of the text of the play is analogous to King Edward IV and is as responsible for maintaining the currency and vitality of Shakespeare’s text as the king is for maintaining peace and prosperity in the realm. Like King Edward, the traditions of performance have become moribund. The evidence for the death of the king/death of the text is presented via interviews with “the man on the street,” demonstrating that the American public has, by and large, no liking for, patience with, or understanding of Shakespeare. Historically, of course, the keepers of this text have been British actors and scholars–many of whom are represented in the film. The argument, then, of the manifest narrative in the film is that, in essence, these British traditions of performance and scholarship have, like Edward IV, sickened and died, lost their power to maintain Shakespeare’s vitality, leaving the artistic equivalent of a power vacuum. Pacino, the dramatized director-as-character within the film’s fictional space, offers himself as the new keeper of the text, the man who can make Shakespeare accessible once again to Everyman. This aspirant, from the young nation of America, is analogous to the Princes in the Tower, the future hope for the realm. And as the young princes have backers such as Hastings (Kevin Conway), the dramatized director also has his in the form of Derek Jacobi and, especially, Sir John Gielgud. The latter is with him throughout and, most importantly, at the end of the film is presented as Pacino’s protector and approving witness to his claim. (We know this convention from Star Wars: Obi Wan and Luke Skywalker–an aged Brit who is clearly a part of the tradition sanctions the passing on of the force to an American.) This story mobilizes many of the narrative elements and characters of Richard III, but emplots them comedically, creating a version of Richard III in which no usurper threatens the rightful claims of the new generation.

 

Unlike this manifest narrative (the film as it wishes to be seen; the film fashioned as Richard fashions himself for Anne, to “woo” us) the second, repressed narrative is the product of a Ricardian “dissembling nature” and, like Richard himself, harbors “a secret, close intent.” This buried narrative operates with no delusions about its motives. A couple of lines from the film serve as a nice gloss on its modus operandi: “The text is just a means for expressing what’s behind the text” and “Irony is really only hypocrisy with style.” Like the first narrative, the second one represents the British traditions of performance and scholarship as moribund; the legitimate inheritors, represented by Sir John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Peter Brooks, Emrys Jones, are ineffectual. Indeed Kenneth Branagh, a powerful young Prince, exiting the film like Lear’s fool, is quickly shunted offstage and Sir Ian McKellen, whose own Richard III makes him a formidable rival, is simply not mentioned at all. Pacino as dramatized director, in essence, removes or co-opts the opposition to his claims to sovereignty just as Shakespeare’s Richard does, metaphorically killing off Branagh, McKellen, Trevor Nunn, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, etc. He impudently installs himself within the vacancy he himself has created, offering himself as the protector/successor, the one who should command from the throne of the Globe Theatre. Like Richard, Pacino as dramatized director is an unlikely prospect for the elevation he seeks: Richard’s physical and moral deformities become Pacino’s less than polished accent and speech, the baseball cap worn reversed, and the generally unkempt appearance.

 

As an apparently improbable claimant to the throne, Pacino, in this narrative, must address two problems not inherent in the manifest narrative discussed above, but that are to be found in the Shakespearean original: 1) the quasi-legalistic problem of establishing the legitimacy of his claim on the Shakespearean text: By what right does the future of the Shakespearean play fall to this American actor? Where does he stand in the “proper” (i.e., obvious, expected) line of succession? and 2) the essentially political problem of winning over the public to his side, of having them shout, “The king is dead! Long live the king!”

 

On the matter of legitimacy, Pacino’s solution is not unlike Richard’s: Richard has Buckingham imply the bastardy of the Princes in the Tower; Pacino undermines the imputed British claim to exclusive dominion over Shakespeare by a variety of tactics. First, he argues that those with the most obvious claims are the very ones that have allowed the plays to falter. The film implies that the British tradition–both its actors and its scholars–has turned the body of the bard’s play into an inaccessible, irrelevant, antiquated corpse. If Shakespeare’s fortunes flag it is because of the elitist pedantry of British scholars, and the technically precise, but inauthentic and insincere, classical dramatic training of British actors. Pacino further delegitimizes the British claimants by dissociating the play from the specificity of its language. For it is in the British sway over the language of the plays, a language that is obsessively referred to within the film as an obstacle for American actors and audiences alike, that the British contenders find their strongest argument. Masterfully co-opting his opposition, Pacino gets one of the British scholarly authorities in the film to argue that “the text is just a means for expressing what’s behind the text,” thus legitimizing the claim that Shakespeare’s essence exists separately from Shakespeare’s language. Once Shakespeare can be shown to exist outside of the Englishness of his language, the corollary can then be advanced that the essence of Shakespeare may not be English at all, but could indeed be American. A homeless man, one of the many mechanicals Pacino peoples his new world with, extols the bard’s virtues and his relevance to contemporary problems. Pacino himself argues that Richard is just like the American-style gangsters with whom he made his reputation. Once we get past the irksome “prithees” and “post-hastes,” it turns out that Shakespeare has, in fact, been hiding out in Poughkeepsie looking for Pacino.

 

On the matter of public approbation: as Richard and Buckingham manipulate the commoners to make them cry for Richard as king, so Pacino interviews his fellow New Yorkers and foregrounds those who clearly need someone to reclaim Shakespeare for them, and then, like Richard, offers himself as the necessary successor. In this version, there is no Richmond to challenge Richard because the usurper gets away with it. He successfully eliminates his rivals by displacing Branagh, effacing McKellen, and assuming a familial coziness with Gielgud, and, finally, ascends the throne. If the play is to be reanimated, the “Barons” of Branagh and Gielgud will have to, and indeed do, pay allegiance to Pacino (while “pretenders” like McKellen apparently “flee the scene”), thus authenticating Pacino’s assertion of legitimate succession. This ironic narrative offers no fifth act because the audience fails to recognize that its smiling, redeeming hero can also be regarded as its usurping villain.

 

And to do this, Pacino must pull off the improbable feat of seducing all and not be seen seducing any. The analogue for this achievement is Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne (Winona Ryder): just as she is seduced into transferring her affections from her dead father and husband to Richard, their murderer, so Pacino, an unlikely Shakespearean whose American “deformities” would seem to preclude his being the last best hope of the text, asks us to accept him as the one who can save the bard for us, now that the British tradition has died off. Having pried Shakespeare loose from the British tradition of performance (a tradition which has always made Americans feel themselves culturally inferior to their former colonial masters), it can now be remade to American tastes, or more precisely, to the usurping Pacino’s tastes, since the version that prevails must be his own.

 

Pacino’s satisfaction at having taken Shakespeare to the people is compromised by the liberties these very same people will take with the bard’s texts. Interpretations proliferate: one commoner talks about talmudic Shakespeare, another talks about a rock n’ roll Lady Macbeth, and a Hamlet who’s like every kid. Pacino, dismayed by the license the commoners allow themselves, complains, “You must get me out of this. It’s gone too far. I want to be king.” Here we see that Pacino’s goal is not to bring just any Shakespeare to the people. The bard that is enthroned in majesty must be his. The scene which follows this is entitled, significantly, “Now to take the crown.” And it is charged with a double resonance: it refers to Pacino as Richard taking the crown within the performance of the play, and to Pacino as dramatized director within the frame assuming sovereignty over the text. Having displaced the opposition and staked his claim to Shakespeare, Pacino is then able to repatriate the Bard. The implicit claim goes something like this: Shakespeare, having been freed from what the film claims are the ossifying traditions of British performance, is restored to his pristine essence in America, and now, in addition to being a marketable commodity able to meet foreign competition–Branagh, Luhrmann, McKellen et al.–within the domestic economy, can also be exported and marketed abroad. Thus, in the film’s most deliciously vertiginous moment, Pacino installs himself center stage at Sam Wannamaker’s restored Globe theatre–the new American-sponsored Euro-Shakespeare theme park–and intones the opening soliloquy of the play.

 

The frame’s two narratives (the happy manifest narrative of legitimate succession and the ironic and repressed narrative of successful usurpation) taken together create a dissonance within Looking for Richard. It is within this dissonance that Pacino the undramatized narrator looks for Shakespeare’s Richard: the frame’s doubled narrative enacts the duplicitous split between seeming and being that constitutes Richard’s character; he is both the saint of the delusionary manifest narrative and the devil of its repressed other. Richard, then, is not Pacino playing the crookbacked monarch imposter in the staged scenes, but the smiling villain, the beguiling dramatized director making the film Looking for Richard. The dramatized scenes in the film look for and find Shakespeare’s play; the film itself, however, looks for and finds its titular character, and makes him a victorious usurper.

 

The implicit premise of the film–that Shakespeare’s work is in need of resuscitation–is, of course, completely wrong: never before have Shakespeare’s works been made so accessible to the American public–largely due to Branagh and Nunn, the imaginatively modernized productions of McKellen and Baz Luhrmann, and the experimental work of Greenaway and Jarman. The tradition is anything but ossified, and foreign Shakespeares now compete at the box office with major Hollywood productions; in short, the endeavour to persuade the American audience that the bard of tradition is dead is necessary in order to protect the domestic market from foreign competition. The key question is not whose Shakespeare, or which style of Shakespearean production, but rather who gets to keep the financial and cultural profits. If the analogy between Lady Anne and the American audience holds, Pacino/Richard’s line, echoed chorically throughout the seduction scene–“I’ll win her, but I’ll not keep her long”–speaks volumes concerning their intentions; namely, both will move on to more profitable affairs when they have had their way with the current ones. Having legitimized himself and having seduced America with his Shakespeare, he can now return to his old standbys. Thus, he appears next in Donnie Brasco and currently in The Devil’s Advocate, a film in which he finally gets to play the ultimate seducer.

 

Although on the whole the frame transforms Richard into a successful usurper and hence does not recapitulate Act V of the play in any detailed way, there is one aspect of Act V that does make an appearance and might suggest that Pacino’s victory is not total. Just as in the final act of Shakespeare’s play, Richard is haunted by the ghosts of all those he has slain in his rise to the throne, so the British traditions that the frame declares to be dead continually haunt Pacino’s performance of the selected scenes from the play. They are, for the most part, faithful and largely derivative iterations of the text in a realistic mode à la Branagh’s Henry V; in dramatized performance, the baseball cap gives way to period costumes; Pacino’s New York accent modulates to the mid-Atlantic; there is considerable concern that the sets be realistically correct; and Pacino’s one major effort actually to rewrite the text with a view to simplifying and hence “clarifying” Shakespeare as well as asserting his own control over the script is abandoned in performance. In making Shakespeare new and accessible, Pacino gives him a very familiar and traditional face. The innovative frame notwithstanding, the film gives us none of the creative translation of the text that Luhrmann attempts in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, nor the anachronistic restaging of the story in McKellen’s Richard III. As if haunted by the British “right” to Shakespeare, the colonial “pretender” Pacino must not only take him back to Britain, to the rebuilt Globe, but also must seek the approbation of the allegedly displaced rivals, and he does this by handing back to them an imitation of the implicitly denigrated “conventional” product. And, re-enacting the cultural inferiority complex that originated the entire project, Pacino wants his performance to be recognized and valued by the British and on British soil. The British “right” over the tradition haunts the colonial Pacino and he still seeks their approval. Gielgud, recalling his role of the butler in Arthur, nods approvingly at the end of the film. Despite talk of “method,” of a romantic communing with the essence of the text, of sidestepping the American obsession with the language of the text which acts as barrier for American players and audiences alike, Pacino keeps “turning British” as he performs. “New,” potentially censorious and hence threatening, Shakespeareans, like McKellen, are to be kept offstage. Pacino in true Ricardian fashion is less concerned with making Shakespeare accessible, or with renewing the bard for contemporary audiences, than he is with establishing his own right of succession within the tradition, with all the perquisites that that entails. But the very timidity of mounting such a conventional (though perfectly good) performance whilst surrounded in the field by many more adventuresome Shakespeareans argues for the presence of a deep-seated anxiety; perchance Pacino senses a Richmond in the wings after all.

 

Edward Brunner

Department of English
Southern Illinois University
ebrunner@siu.edu

 

Prelinger, Rick. Ephemeral Films 1931-1960: To New Horizons and You Can’t Get there from Here. CD-ROM. New York: Voyager, 1994.

 

Prelinger, Rick. Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Dark Side of the American Dream: Volume 1: The Rainbow is Yours with Volume 2: Capitalist Realism; Volume 3: The Behavior Offensive with Volume 4: Menace and Jeopardy; and Volume 5: Teenage Transgression with Volume 6: The Uncharted Landscape. CD-ROM. New York: Voyager, 1996.

 

When W. H. Auden supplied the foreword to John Ashbery’s first book of poetry in 1956–Some Trees, which Auden had chosen for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series that year–one of the few poems he singled out for attention was “The Instruction Manual.” Ashbery’s speaker was so bored with his task of writing a technical manual that he instead daydreamed of a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. Auden praised the poem for its contrast between the speaker’s “historically real but profane situation, doing hackwork for a living” and “his sacred memories of a Mexican town,” and quoted from these lines near the poem’s close:

 

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our
     experience of Guadalajara!
We have seen young love, married love, and the love 
     of an aged mother for her son.
We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and 
     looked at colored houses.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that 
     we cannot do.
And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered 
     old tower, I turn my gaze
Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream 
     of Guadalajara.

 

“Reading this,” Auden remarked, “I who have never been to Mexico nor wish to go there translate this into images of the happy life drawn from quite different cities.” Yet it seems all too obvious that Ashbery, exactly like Auden, had also never been to Mexico nor had he any wish to go there. This “tour” has all the earmarks of a cheap travelogue, the kind of thing one might have dozed through as part of a double bill in movie theaters in the 1940s. As a conveniently-located band plays excerpts from Scheherazade, Ashbery sweeps us from one side of the public square to the next. If, at first, the sights seem suitable enough, though a bit mundane–“Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers, / Each attractive in her rose-and-blue stripe dress (Oh! Such shades of rose and blue), / And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit”–by the time we enter a “typical” household to be introduced to family members (“Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the wide streets” where an “old woman in gray sits… fanning herself with a palm leaf fan”) we realize we have by now been trapped wholly in the realm of the cliché, the unreal, the “picturesque.” The colors that play throughout each description–as pushy as any technicolor print–give an impression of “detail” and individuation even as they relentlessly neutralize any information, reducing each scene to a play of picturesque tints, as is evident when we look out from the church tower: “There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces. / There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.” (These particular colors are precisely weighted, but it takes a moment’s pause to recognize Caucasian skin coloring and the hue of despair associated with poverty.) Ashbery understands the daydream perfectly, of course; it is precisely an exercise in looking without seeing. So we never have left home–we never have even escaped the simple rigidity of the instruction manual. As “the last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower,” we should realize how often we have been at this same juncture in the closing images of a slipshod documentary. This old tower has been in need of a freshening breeze for a long time indeed.

 

Auden had a particular talent for misunderstanding Ashbery that has not gone unnoticed. “Remarkably disaffected” is how Richard Howard summarized Auden’s foreword. In fact, Auden had decided that no manuscript submitted to the Yale series in 1955 merited publication, and only the intercession of his companion Chester Kallman prodded Auden into reconsidering two manuscripts from writers in the New York gay subculture. (Ashbery won over Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency.) Still, the question arises: how could Auden have so completely mistaken Ashbery’s send-up for a solemn work of poetic art? One answer might be that Auden came from a generation with a heavy investment in the authority of the documentary. Arguably, documentary was the form that originated with and was nurtured by the generation of the 1930s. Auden himself worked in 1935 with the Film Unit of the General Post Office as assistant director, writing texts for half a dozen documentary films, including the much-heralded “Night Mail” (music by Benjamin Britten). To Auden, it must have seemed natural for the speaker in Ashbery’s poem to jog memory by drawing upon images that might have been at home in a documentary. To Ashbery, however (about to embark on a career as an art critic for the International Herald Tribune), some documentary embodiments of “reality” could be so maladroitly organized that they were not just profoundly suspect but even objects of lampoon.

 

I.

 

While postmodernist Ashbery was able–even ready–to regard the form of the documentary with distrust, as though the stage-management of the “realistic” visual image in film was already complicit with a form of commercialization, a modernist poet such as Auden, who came of age with the documentary, must have found it difficult to conceive of the extent to which others might violently abuse it. Yet almost from its inception, the film documentary perfected in the 1930s was understood by business, professional and government interests as a particularly enticing form that lent itself to manipulation in ways from which they could profit both directly and indirectly. Any doubts about this are thoroughly dispelled by Rick Prelinger’s invaluable assemblage of industrial, promotional and educational films that are available on a one-disc CD-ROM, Ephemeral Films, 1931-1960, and on a series of two-disc sets that will eventually be six in number appearing under the overall title Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Darker Side of the American Dream.¹ These are films that we are sure to believe we have seen at one time or another, though we cannot precisely remember their details. Rather than remembering the films, we are likely to remember the circumstances under which we first saw them, for these films have been designed essentially to lack presence, to blend into the circumstances that surround them as if they were incontestably representations of the ordinarily “real.” What places, then, do these films return us to? Watching “Safety Belt for Susie” (1957), which uses first a doll, then human-scale crash dummies, to demonstrate the value of safety belts, will evoke driver education classrooms in second- or third-rate public high school in the 1950s or the 1960s. “A Date with Your Family” (1947), which suggests that happiness in families is a learned behavior, and family-members who begin to play the role of the happy child or happy parent may eventually find it easier and easier to fall into that self-assigned part, will recall the brightly-painted basements and metal fold-out chairs of well-meaning suburban churches where such films might be shown as part of a catechism class. The Union Pacific Railroad’s use of three unhappy examples of injudicious behavior to dramatize how feckless judgment could have lasting repercussions, in “The Days of Our Years” (1954), will remind employees of large corporations of “Safety Week” or some other program with a promotional slogan and extended lunch-hours with time set aside time for worker incentives. A half-hour production such as “Freedom Highway” (1957), sponsored by Greyhound, which extols the patriotic lessons to be gleaned by traveling from the West Coast to Washington by bus–as well as the pleasures of such a luxurious mode of travel–will recall the tarnished elegance of long vanished theaters of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s with their double bills and the “short subject” interspersed between the coming attractions and the cartoon. And “Design for Dreaming” (1957), which ends with an array of the General Motors automobiles of the future, vehicles built in prototype but never actually put into production, like the turbine-powered Pontiac Firebird II, may remind some of us of an early autumn ritual for families in the 1950s, the annual visit to the showroom of the local automobile dealer for the unveiling of the “latest models.” (Bouquets of flowers, a variety of hors d’oeuvres, and a professional pianist softly playing “standards” in the background were all elements that my father, who owned a Packard franchise in New England in the 1950s, deemed essential when he plotted the stagecraft for the new arrivals, including his own custom-stylized one-of-a-kind variant on a 1954 Packard, the “Monte Carlo.”)

 

It is easiest, perhaps, to think of these films as Americana, as fragments of settings and circumstances and rituals that have long been materially erased. But they are a good deal more than that, as Prelinger’s illuminating introductions always succeed in demonstrating. The rich vein of primary materials that Prelinger has reconstituted recommend themselves at once as potential texts for scholars in a number of disciplines–cinema, history, literature, popular studies, cultural studies, sociology or anthropology. Like a collector who realized that the coming of the LP threatened the preservation of the music on fragile 78s, he began in the 1980s to rescue from obscurity, and from outright destruction in some cases, those reels of film by small commercial filmmakers that no one could imagine a use for. (In a 1995 interview, he estimated he had around 90,000 cans of such film stored around the country and in his own Manhattan archives–a small portion of the 600,000 marginal films that he estimates were produced between 1920 and 1960.)² He has culled the most suggestively complex of all the films in his collection, and he has deployed the resources of the video disc as ingeniously as anyone could wish. Not only has he grouped the films in categories and in sequences that present something of the range that exists in sub-genres that may seem to be inordinately constricted, but he has also bundled alongside many of the films a slew of additional documentation, including excerpts from other films, contemporary interviews, segments from popular books, articles from trade journals, related advertisements, and (for one film) the front-page illustration from service station road maps of the 1950s (it is in itself a valuable brief anthology). Each CD contains approximately 100 minutes of viewing. But the time to be spent among these archives is extended immeasurably by the remarkable amount of extra data that Prelinger makes available.

 

The films Prelinger places before us are peculiar artifacts, half-familiar, half-alien. The experience of seeing them might recall another experience, that of discovering the pleasures in hearing musical recordings from decades past that we are better poised to appreciate than the audiences for whom that music was performed. Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band must have seemed, to a street corner audience in Memphis in the 1930s, just one more hodge-podge band of blacks working with outrageous instruments (jugs, washboards, kazoos along with guitars and banjos) to play their “hokum” music that most audience members would associate with traveling medicine shows. To an audience listening sixty years later, however, Shade and his band represent an astonishingly complex moment in the evolution of American jazz as a vernacular African-American art form. To us, their recordings occupy a point midway between a just-about-outmoded rural blues tradition with its solo guitar and an about-to-be-invented urban jazz with its leanings toward group improvisation and orchestrated sequences. And to us, their instruments, while unbelievably crude, demonstrate the interplay possible between music built upon the regularities of the western diatonic scale and music driven by an attentiveness to sheer sound, in which timbre and tone are no less important than pitch. Their songs are clearly not yet jazz, but they are far more intricate than the Delta Blues, even as they borrow freely from the commercial music of their own time, even venturing unhesitantly into novelty effects. They were considered popular musicians in their own time, and they were relatively successful as entertainers. Only later is it possible to appreciate the complicated strands that they were mediating to perform their music and to understand the degree of inventiveness in their decision-making.

 

Prelinger’s films can be regarded with a similar zest. There is both pleasure and scandal in viewing these films. The pleasure lies, in large part, in being placed as late-coming viewers who are in the powerful and superior position of looking over, around, through, and beyond these films. The only subject position never inhabited by the present-day viewer is that of the gullible audience-member who would take them at face value. These films carry within them, almost as a defining element, the husks of the audiences for whom they had been previously intended. And an added pleasure is the level of sharp and critical engagement that is always elicited by the category of the “bad.” At some level, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Last Year at Marienbad are similar in that both works encourage us to see there is more than one version of a story, more than one way to narrate events, for no scene can appear in Plan 9 without us seeing at once how it might have been presented in another way. The pleasure of bad art is that it so invites the play of our ingenuity (a pleasure that, it is true, can exhaust itself with dangerous speed). At the same time, these films are never merely laughable. They are scandalous examples of how thoroughly the media environment has been penetrated by schemes for social engineering.

 

Prelinger has a devastating eye for a telling detail. Our Secret Century dazzles most when he arranges his material to disclose the cultural and historical framework within which the films sought to nestle. Consider one example: what may be one of the most straightforward of the discs, Volume 2: Capitalist Realism, which places on display the corporate mentality of a time (the late 1930s) and a business (General Motors) as represented by a single firm, the Jam Handy studios of Detroit, the largest and by all accounts most lucrative of the commercial filmmakers. By turning to “the Archives” section of the disc, we can read six accounts of Handy’s developing career, all plucked from a slew of hard-to-uncover trade publications, beginning with “Motion Pictures–Not for Theaters” from the February 1940 Educational Screen to “Jamison Handy: Master of Show ‘Em” from the March 15, 1963 issue of Sales Management. Handy even talks for us in excerpts from a 1961 TV interview (in which he explains that the first moviemaker was Christ because he used images to illustrate his parables). Handy began as an editor of newspaper comic strips (he discovered Popeye’s creator, E. C. Segar) but found himself drawn into the volatile marketing strategies of the early 1920s that centered around various alternate designs for projecting slides and short moving pictures. Handy understood that salesmen had to be equipped with inexpensive movie projectors if films were to become successful merchandising devices, and he bankrolled the development of cost-effective models. Handy’s shrewdest move, though, was to center his operations in Detroit and take advantage of a friendship with Richard H. Grant, a General Motors executive who carried Handy with him as his own star rose (he eventually became President of the Chevrolet Division). Linked strongly with GM–he wisely rented space in the new General Motors building downtown and used the opportunity to proselytize–his fortunes grew rapidly. By 1936 he was employing 400 people, including eight directors and twenty-eight writers.

 

Capitalist Realism features two examples of Handy’s work from the 1930s, “Master Hands” (1936) and “From Dawn to Sunset” (1937). Both reveal how elaborate the sponsored film could be. Both are extended operations, thirty minutes in length, with striking visual presentations. At the same time, the limits of these films are also evident. Both represent a corporate position toward labor that is subtly demeaning. These two films also indicate how deftly Prelinger has chosen his examples, for the first was filmed just before and the second was filmed just after the 1936-1937 sit-down strikes by assembly-line workers that forced major concessions from GM. Two rather different attitudes toward workers, then, can be read back into each film. Indeed, the first often views the workers in settings that heroize them–enmeshed within the intricacies of the modern factory, manipulating formidable and mysterious slabs of machinery. The image of the worker borrows heavily from socialist realism films. In the second film, however, the worker is represented as first and foremost a consumer. As Prelinger notes, the film dwells on the worker receiving a paycheck, often through images of disembodied hands reaching out. With references to plants in far-flung areas (Buffalo, St. Louis) instead of celebrating a single plant in Flint, the film reminds workers that overall prosperity depends upon nation-wide cooperation.³

 

These two Jam Handy films are offset in Capitalist Realism by a third, but this is a project that might better please Auden. Willard Van Dyke’s “Valley Town” (1940) offered a view of the devastation wrought by unemployment in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Subtitled “A Study of Machines and Men,” the film was intended as part of a series to be produced by the New York University Film Institute that would publicize the effects of automation on American life.⁴. (The series was, in fact, bankrolled by a foundation spearheaded by Alfred P. Sloan, then chairman of GM, who withdrew his funding of the project shortly after viewing “Valley Town”). Although it ultimately delivers a compact little message–the solution to automation is educational programs that will teach displaced workers new skills–it does so after a series of powerfully disturbing scenes. The shots of workers in “Valley Town” contrast pointedly with those in “Master Hands.” Van Dyke’s workers speak back and forth to one another as they toil. Their conversational exchanges imply that work is an extension of social life. Yet the drudgery and routine of laboring in a steel mill is not downplayed. Shots of disembodied feet move back and forth in a dance-like shuffle. Still, while such repetitive motions indicate the mechanical pressures of assembly-line operations, they also convey how a worker can embody a particular rhythm that can be imposed over and against the demands of the job. These images, however, of active, satisfying labor belong to New Castle’s past. (The footage was actually assembled from a visit by the crew to prosperous Lancaster, Pennsylvania.) When the mills in New Castle began to reopen–European rearmament was just under way–they reopened as state-of-the-art operations whose automation cost hundreds of jobs. Current shots in the modern New Castle mills show glowing slabs of steel floating mysteriously over mechanized rollers, and in the rare moment when a worker appears, he is only a disembodied face.

 

Van Dyke’s documentary is sharply distinguished from Handy’s pseudo-documentaries through its use of numerous narrators and multiple points of view. Handy sets out to construct a single voice, a corporate voice, that speaks for all workers. Van Dyke lets a range of voices speak for the worker and indeed, his project sets such voices free, for it concludes with scenes in which a group of workers are openly discussing their predicament, without any final position dominating. Before that conclusion, moreover, Van Dyke has used voice in unusually compelling ways. At the opening of the film, a single voice narrates, that of the mayor who functions as an objective chronicler. But at its midpoint, when the film shifts to investigate the unemployment caused by automated mills, the job of narrator transfers to a young husband reluctantly returning home after unsuccessfully searching for a job. At home, the governing narration passes to the voice of his young wife who, in a strikingly effective shift, not only speaks but sings–and sings in words and music composed by Marc Blitzstein.⁵ Everything, in short, demands that we attend with care to a range of different voices, each representing a view by a worker in this film, beginning with the thoughtful public official, moving on to the unemployed husband, then to the young housewife (who also is configured as a worker in that she must provide a meal without adequate financial resources), to flourish with the musings of the unemployed at the end. Because of the importance accorded to voice, one of the most powerful passages in the film turns out to be a long scene at the kitchen table where the unemployed husband, the wife, and their small child eat their meager fare–in silence. Poverty has robbed this family of speech, that communal interchange that is the basis of so much that the film reveals as positive.

 

Capitalist Realism as a volume is somewhat atypical insofar as its supplementary source material is exceptionally rich. Other items that Prelinger posts for our usage include a statistical map that dramatically indicates where supplies of tear gas had been shipped from 1933 to 1936 (most went to the industrial belt as manufacturers prepared for labor unrest); a 1940 article from Harper’s, “War and the Steel Ghost Towns,” and a 1936 article from Barron’s Weekly, “Detroit: the Commercial Hollywood.” What is typical, though, is the care with which this volume establishes a framework and helps provide a groundwork for later films. These 1930s films, the earliest from Prelinger’s archive, foreground issues that will return, notably inflected, in later films, including: an aesthetic based on appearing as up-to-date as possible, as if the need to take continual surveillance of one’s position should be a source of continual anxiety; the prestige-value of the documentary approach and its co-option by corporate enterprise; the appeal of “education” as a concept that invites endless redefining; the search for a strategy that will define the identity of the worker to the worker; the difference between the worker figured as an element in a working class community and the worker figured as a consumer moving upward into a middle class; the predominance of a male point-of-view; and the utterly complete erasure of even a hint of the existence of the African American or, for that matter, any substantial minority presence. The WPA guidebook to Michigan, in Prelinger’s excerpt, mentions that “Negroes form the largest racial group” in Flint, the setting of “Master Hands.” Not one is in sight in the film.

 

II.

 

Capitalist Realism is also atypical in that the comparisons it offers between its films (between Jam Handy and Willard Van Dyke) are quite pointed. In part this is an offshoot of a subtext in this volume, profiling the early days of the Jam Handy Studios. But Jam Handy is a sort of mini-mogul of commercial films; his jobs turn up on almost every disc. His relentlessly bland commercialism becomes a standard against which other commercial filmmakers come to be defined. Indeed, if there is a hero who emerges from the first six volumes of Our Secret Century–a foil to Jam Handy–it would have to be Sid Davis, whose productions dominate Volume 5: Teenage Transgressions. Davis specialized in films about youth in trouble. Working closely with actual figures from the judicial establishment who appear with all their disapproving gruffness intact, Davis captured an ominous and menacing Southern California environment in which youngsters were the victims of drug-dealing sharpies and sexual predators or of broken families or of neighborhood gangs. The script he commissioned for “Gang Boy” (1957) even went so far as to acknowledge ethnic differences between Chicanos and Anglos at the base of L.A. gang violence, though the shooting script altered the original script so that “Emilio” became “Martin,” “Luis” became “Larry,” “Gabriel” “George,” and “José” “Joe.” If the films sometimes seem immersed in a cop’s eye-view of the world, the mask-like and toughened faces that regularly appear among the main figures (the credits for “Gang Boy” offer thanks to members of “the following clubs:… Red Hearts, Red Dragons, Sharkies, Vikings, Lancers”) testify to a pervasive brutality that is more than simply a mark of the street-wise. 1950s popular culture was notorious for being unable to decide whether the Juvenile Delinquent was a psychopath or a Byronic hero and thus opted for a combination of both, in the character fleshed out by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones or in the adulatory sketch of Dean Moriarty in On the Road.⁶ Davis’s gritty films expose the unlikelihood of such elegant archetypes. Relentlessly recording an irredeemably harsh environment–not only in the visages of participants but in the backlot locales, in the littered streets and noisy rail yards, in rooming-house interiors, and last but not least (especially in “The Dropout,” 1962) in the frenetic fourth-rate jazz that careens irritatingly through the background–these films offer persuasive testimony that no one person can survive as larger-than-life in this environment. Everyone gets beat. Merely to survive in such hard and cruel circumstances requires stamina, good luck, and most important of all but hardest to convey to teen-agers–a willingness to cooperate with others.

 

The pivotal figure in Davis’s films is the dedicated professional–the case worker or district court judge who understands that a troubled youth may be, in fact, a sensitive youth. But that professional, perhaps not surprisingly, is apt to be a bit crusty. No one could mistake the air of chilly disapproval that clings to the chambers of Judge William B. McKesson of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, as he soberly recalls, in “Name Unknown” (1951) and “The Terrible Truth” (1951), the errors of judgment by innocent teens that led to drug addiction, rape, and murder. Indeed, the most terrifying faces in these films are not worn by the miscreants–they often seem remarkably vulnerable, their faces open and wide–but by the adults in the police department into whose hands these kids eventually fall.

 

It is almost a signature of a Sid Davis Production that the forces of authority will be associated with brutality, especially in “Gang Boy” and “Age 13,” both written and directed by Arthur Swerdloff. Andrew, in “Age 13,” has been unable to mourn the loss of his mother. In his case, his mother has died abruptly of unknown causes, though even this small detail is a mark of the sensitivity evident in these films: it is most important that the central character should suddenly experience an absent parent and a broken home, and it is not necessary to supply a scandalous version of that loss. Andrew’s behavior is ultimately explained as stemming from his difficulty in working through anger and mourning, but before the film reaches this conclusion it has presented so many examples of truly dark and quirky behavior that the explanation seems all too simple, even optimistic. Andrew seals up his father’s favorite cat, who had been competing with Andrew for his father’s affection, in the boxcar of an outgoing train and watches stonily as it departs–a scene that is not simply illustrative of Andrew’s anger but, as filmed, stands as a deviant mock burial that replays the voyage into the unknown of his lost mother. Andrew’s efforts to comprehend her loss lead him to the master bedroom where he sniffs perfume from her cosmetics and examines the room with her hand mirror, which shatters when he drops it (startled by his father’s cat). His father’s dismissive comment on the accident–“More bad luck!”–only dramatizes to Andrew his father’s ignorance of his mother’s sacred status. Scenes so disturbing lodge firmly in the viewer’s mind, as do similar kinds of images in “Gang Boy” which traces the social networks that a Chicano male learns to rely upon even as a youngster, all of them tests of endurance and courage that confer “manhood”: standing by the edge of the railroad tracks without flinching as a train bears down, high-diving into the depths of a treacherous quarry. The sheer amount of violence that the central characters experience on an everyday basis undermines even the modest message of hope that the film wants to deliver at its end.

 

Fifties-culture fantasizing about the Teen Rebel may suggest that the films in Teenage Transgression that cite the dangers of adolescence are exclusively the product of areas of social anomie like southern California. (Various Sid Davis films credit the police departments of Santa Monica, Inglewood, Pomona, and Los Angeles for aid with the production.) But the notion of the postwar teenager as a troubled figure turns out to be a durable concept that translates into a wide variety of situations. All the films in Volume 3: The Behavior Offensive, present teens whose situations and whose problems are light-years distant from “Gang Boy” and “Age 13.” In these films, there are no gangs, unless we count the girls who invite Barbara over after school (in “Habit Patterns,” 1954) for such conversation as

 

First Girl: I didn't even want to go to my first concert because I thought it would be too long-haired. Oh, but the music is wonderful! Now I want to go to the whole series!

Second Girl: My mother had to drag me to the museum. They have a wonderful costume exhibit there. I got an idea for a new dress!

 

And moms don’t vanish from these households–they stay in them all day, bedecked in tasteful jewelry, outfitted in heels ‘n’ hose, planning and cooking the six-course meal that father, sister and brother will gather over at nightfall, to make amicable small talk. These, in short, are fantastic films, positing ideals of social harmony that would be barely attainable except under the most affluent situations. The unreality of this set of films is itself a striking testimony to the ambitions of a postwar America that, in fact, fell far short of realization. Most of the films were made between 1946 and 1955, and they assume that within a short generation the upward mobility fostered by advances in technology, wide access to education, and the elimination of cultural problems thanks to the advice of sophisticated social scientists will result in a country that is astoundingly prosperous, wonderfully stable.

 

Were these films trying to keep the lid on social change by rigidly proscribing the rules for middle-class behavior or were they promoting successful upward mobility by openly instructing a new audience in social protocols that might otherwise remain mysterious? One might ask the same question of Evelyn M. Duvall’s Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers (1950), segments from which Prelinger places alongside two films, the somewhat menacingly-titled “Are You Popular?” (1947) and “Shy Guy” (1950). Duvall addresses awkward topics–under what circumstances might a girl telephone a boy, the occasion on which a “first kiss” is appropriate, the distinction between fondling and “petting.” Her comments do indeed establish definite boundaries that curtail the range of the discussion (no category exists beyond “petting”) but her frankness also serves to demystify taboo topics.⁷ The films divide along similar lines. They always set out to address a specific problem. (For a sample, just consider films by Coronet alone that Prelinger cites in his selected readings under “W” : “Ways to Good Habits” (1949), “Ways to Settle Disputes” (1949), “What Makes a Good Party?” (1950) [I think the question mark in this title is absolutely essential], “What To Do on a Date” (1950) and “Why We Respect the Law” (1950). By always setting out to address a specific problem, the films give an illusively narrow range to social contact; they reduce behavior to a matter of strategy and awareness. Social problems can be solved through better guidance. The idea that there might be significantly larger problems in need of attention is never considered. Instead, the films instruct individuals in how to adjust their attitudes. What is being cured, then, is the impression that a problem exists. That a problem may have root sources seems to be unthinkable.

 

The assumption that social problems can be cured by a strategic shift in public attitude rather than through large-scale alterations of the political, social, or economic system is probably the one theme constant to all these films, but it surfaces most consistently in the films in Volume 4: Menace and Jeopardy. As Prelinger notes, “We Drivers” (1936), produced for General Motors in 1936, with updated versions released in 1947, 1955 and 1962, places the burden for road safety directly on the shoulders of the drivers. With no consideration given to lobbying county engineers to redesign dangerous curves, we are that much further removed from thinking automobile manufacturers might shift their resources away from styling innovations to safety improvements. And the corporate underwriting of these films almost guarantees a variety of subtexts will co-exist. Prelinger suggests that one of the agendas at work in “Last Clear Chance” (1959), produced for the Union Pacific R. R. and displaying the vivid cinematography of Bert Spielvogel, is to shift the responsibility for safety at unprotected highway grade crossings from the railroad to the motorist. “Why are so many grade crossings unprotected?” Prelinger asks. “Obviously gates and signals cost a lot of money.” But a more substantial subtext in “Last Clear Chance” is even more obvious: the extraordinary hazards of travel by highway. The film is narrated by a Highway Patrolman who is recounting the terrible accidents he has witnessed, and they occur even under the most up-to-date of roadway conditions. The 4-lane open highway lends itself to “inattention,” and “another hazard of our superhighways” is the tendency of lax motorists to drift from one lane to the next. Indeed, improvements in roadway engineering turn out to have increased the dangers of driving: “Those narrow two-lane country roads that used to be so peaceful are now several lanes of high-speed traffic.” To be sure, the overt message works to shift responsibility to the operators of vehicles (“everything in the world of transportation has improved,” the patrolman growls, “–everything except the drivers”), but surely the covert message–rendered about as penetratingly as a text can be and still remain subliminal–is that if one must travel the best way to do it is by train. After all, one reason why grade crossings pose hazards is they are traversed by high-speed trains delivering people rapidly (and without danger) from one spot to another. Spielvogel’s eye for a sharp design cannot entirely account for why most of the trains shown are passenger-and-mail combinations in the distinctive yellow colors of the Union Pacific.

 

Subliminal messages can easily nestle in these films about safety because the films themselves are so distracting. Unlike other sponsored films, these always have a series of climactic moments in which danger strikes and violence explodes across the scene. Prelinger is typically insightful when he points out that our anticipation of these dramatic pay-offs inevitably shift attention from the safety habits we are supposed to be internalizing. What we may internalize instead is that the world is a place of endless dangers–the very point Thomas Hine developed in his New York Times book review of Our Secret Century, entitled “Disaster Is Imminent, So Plan Ahead.”⁸ The conservative mind-set that dominated the early and mid-1950s was deeply indebted to a similar conviction, but these “menace and jeopardy” films also work against their own agenda of caution by cultivating an appetite for explosive moments. One of the films that seems to be especially allied with the devil’s party is the deliciously bizarre, almost voluptuous “Time Out for Trouble” (1961), produced through the ingenuity of the University of Oklahoma General Services Extension Division. The film purports to deliver an important 3-step message that will help us avoid accidents, viz.: “Face Your Feelings,” “Beware of Boredom” and “Watch for Danger.” But these rubrics are so hopelessly bland that their vast parameters free the filmmakers to concoct any number of peculiar episodes to illustrate them. In addition, it is never clear just what the specific danger is that is under scrutiny. One episode involves the courting and marriage of Jeff and Martha, which begins with the camera lasciviously eyeing from the waist down the provocative strut of a tight-skirted female, a shot that melts into a close-up of the upper half of a female torso swiveling to display breasts enclosed in a form-fitting sweater–scenes that will be used to explain why Jeff sits alone in a tavern, drinking one of many whiskies. Jeff is by himself, we are told, because his relationship with Martha was based only on physical attraction. (And we can easily see how this might have happened.) After the two of them were married, a female narrator purrs in a disarmingly throaty voice, “only then Jeff found out there was just one thing wrong with Martha: she didn’t have anything in that pretty head of hers but buckwheat batter.” So Jeff, apparently bored by mere erotics, compensated by having more than one too many at his local, until that fatal night when, as the filmmakers show, he staggered outside to walk in front of an oncoming car. He will live, though crippled, and ironically even more dependent on Martha’s buckwheat batter personality. The question that remains, though, is what danger exactly is this episode a warning against? Excessive drinking, one might think, or possibly even jaywalking. But so many dangers surround this brief episode that the mind boggles. What about the danger of drunken driving (would Jeff have survived once he started driving under the influence)? And of course there is the danger of the femme fatale: isn’t Martha indirectly culpable, by being only an attractive woman? Or is that our schools have failed by letting some students fall into the role of bimbo? Once we begin to look for dangers, the horizon recedes. The film itself, however, is prepared to state directly why Jeff was maimed: it was due to his boredom, to extensive boredom (the second, we now recall, in that list of alliterated warnings: beware of boredom). Perhaps the hidden agenda in “Time Out for Trouble” is that films themselves should strive to be entertaining or at least startling enough to ward off boredom. This gives new life to the title, which no longer functions as a shorthand piece of advice but denominates a site in which the filmmakers themselves take time out in order to play around with trouble. This wildly unfocused film (it is also narrated at times by a talking clock with vicious designs on humans), with organ music improvised by one Baird Jones in a vernacular manner reminiscent of a score for a Fellini movie, remains for me a high point in sheer loopiness and a superb example of how a text that sets out to be restrictive can unwittingly sanction permissive (and even subversive) behavior.

 

III.

 

The University of Oklahoma film is about as far from a Jam Handy Production as one can get, even as it moves in a direction very different from that of Willard Van Dyke or even Sid Davis. Yet it is Jam Handy whose influence seems most pervasive in the other two volumes. This should not be surprising, given the commercial nature of this enterprise. Handy always followed the money, producing everything from one-minute infomercials in the 1930s for Singer Sewing Machines (in the 1938 “Three Smart Daughters” [in Ephemeral Films], the social life of three beauteous teens is saved when they are directed to a Singer Sewing Center where they can hand-craft elegant dresses for an upcoming party) to thirty-minute epics that sought in the 1950s to associate the future of America with the fortunes of Chevrolet. Of course the Jam Handy film was by definition bound to be elaborate. Typically, it always wore a double disguise: it was crafted to imitate the look of the moment, to appear as if it was a production undertaken simply to entertain its audience, precisely to mask the fact that it was film with a sponsor. The extent to which “American Harvest” (1951)–one of the Jam Handy films in Volume 6: The Uncharted Landscape–is an advertisement for General Motors is by no means evident. It appears to set out to celebrate the abundance of American life at mid-century. Only about halfway through its thirty minute run does it settle on the concept that the nation is bound together by “air-lanes” and steel rails and highways, all of which are also the avenues through which corporations guarantee the distribution of abundance. By film’s end, all that “America” represents to the film’s audience is conflated with the automobile, represented here by the Chevrolet. Indeed, in a concluding movement, it seems that, in some peculiar way, America is actually brought to us by Chevrolet. As the melody of “See the USA in a Chevrolet” plays softly, the camera tracks across a variety of landscapes–a cliff-side view of the ocean, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, masses of people walking quietly toward a looming factory–and a voice-over (the astonishingly oily voice of John Forsythe) declares:

 

And so it is that all of us in interdependence live independently on wheels. And all this far-reaching interdependence is the great secret of why it is possible to put America's automobiles within the reach of so many people. And all America, all its rockbound beauty, all its pleasant vistas, all its historic shrines, and all its ways of living, all its sports and recreations, all its scenic grandeur, along all its far-flung highways, within the reach of all.

 

The referent of “its” begins to get a bit fuzzy as this unending no-verb sentence rolls onward. “It” is America, but it also lends itself to the automobile (“its far-flung highways”) and the automobile is always Chevrolet–as the very air of the landscape itself testifies, with its strings that sigh out the Chevrolet theme song.

 

As the films in The Uncharted Landscape indicate, big business found it easy to regard the whole of the country as a blank slate upon which corporations could inscribe their own standards. Few of the productions are as lavishly narrativized as Greyhound’s Freedom Highway (1957), in which a transcontinental bus becomes a stage for a drama that links patriotism and marriage in parallel plots. Riders who happen to be sharing a coast-to- coast journey, the Attractive Babe and the Old Curmudgeon, will find their lives changed. The Attractive Babe (a young Angie Dickinson) will find true love: traveling back to her New York fiancé, she will coincidentally meet on the bus a Handsome Football Player who is just plain more virile than her fiancé (we are sure of this because her fiancé’s name is Waldo). And the Old Curmudgeon will find his faith in his country restored: traveling to Washington with bitterness in his heart, to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded posthumously to his son, he will meet on the bus a Mysterious Stranger who will open his eyes to the need to sacrifice the lives of young men for the country to continue. These two narratives intertwine. At issue is no less than the continuation of the human race in America. For the contest over the body of the Attractive Babe is (as Jam Handy’s scriptwriters might say) “in interdependence” with a contest for the body of America. Virility triumphs in both instances, restoring a balance that had been perceived to be threatened: as the Attractive Babe enters the protecting orbit of the Football Player (and rescued from the effeminate Waldo), so America is saved by its military conquests (and protected from the encroachments of alien enemies). As the bus travels across country and the Football Player makes his pitch for the Attractive Babe, so the history of America is recapitulated, thanks to an Inquisitive Young Boy, whose questions always provoke a response from various passengers, remarkably knowledgeable about American history from a military perspective. (“Have you ever heard of the Alamo, boy?” inquires the latest passenger, Country-and-Western Star Tex Ritter as he reaches for his guitar.) But then American history in this film is always already military history–the Alamo, the Battle of New Orleans, the Battle of Gettysburg. These battles, in fact, stand for the history of America, or more accurately, they signify its scarred yet beloved body. The story of liberty is a story of armed aggression. The Mysterious Stranger who directs the Old Curmudgeon to Gettysburg (and who allows the filmmakers to recall the spirit of sacrifice that Lincoln consolidated in the Gettysburg Address) and thus transforms the Old Curmudgeon into the Solid Patriot–that Stranger turns out to be a ghost: the ghost of the Unknown Soldier, no less (Tex Ritter says to him as they disembark at one bus stop: “Now I know where I’ve seen you! Weren’t you in my old outfit, the Second Division?”). This ghost is presumably driven to walk the land (or nowadays, ride the bus) when unpatriotic sentiments begin to flow. “America” exists as a great battlefield, over which we can now travel in comfort and safety, thanks to sacrifices like that of the Old Curmudgeon’s son. Their deaths allow America to continue, always ready to fight the next necessary battle (in which some day no doubt the Inquisitive Young Boy may have a chance to become a player).

 

It would be difficult to determine at what point to be most offended by “Freedom Highway,” though the profound anti-intellectualism that underwrites every moment in the film would be a fine place to start. (When Waldo meets his fiancée at the New York bus terminal, he greets her with words whose bookish vocabulary paint him as a man who reads: “Welcome, thrice welcome! I trust you feel completely rejuvenated!”–though Angie is most offended, it turns out, when he plants a very wet smooch on her kisser: or is she just flabbergasted at the blatant pretense of a man so effeminate?) Prelinger has arranged a particularly eloquent counter-response to these corporate expropriations of the territory of America by concluding The Uncharted Landscape with an unusual example of “home movies”–brief clips of life on Main Street in Britten, South Dakota, as filmed in 1937 and 1938 by the owner of the town’s movie house, Ivan Besse, who then screened them as a kind of local newsreel. Besse’s films portray Main Street as a space where ideology is in recess, the very opposite of the interlocking and coercive narratives produced for Greyhound and Chevrolet. Santa’s arrival in a pickup truck becomes an occasion for the whole town to turn out, even though closeups of “Santa” reveal just how casually he had been dressed for the part. One might surmise that simple poverty, or worse yet, lack of basic imagination, could explain the rather flimsy attempt at disguise. But a better explanation suggests the disguising was deliberately sketchy. Surely everyone in Britton over age twelve knew who would be playing “Santa” that year–it would have been a topic of discussion throughout the town. Besse’s film immediately instructs us in the intricacy of an everyday life in which rituals have been localized, in which a community delights in the inflections its members bring to their various roles. By contrast, the rigidly “interdependent” narratives that regulate every technicolor moment in “Freedom Highway” reveal a desire for control and order that verges on the terrifying.

 

Exactly as this sixth volume of films demonstrate that the American landscape, or the concept of “America,” was palpably reconfigured by corporate interests seeking to impose their designs upon it, so the films in Volume 1: The Rainbow Is Yours reveal the female body to be under a similar siege. Of course no filmmaker ever went broke (to paraphrase P. T. Barnum) by playing fast-and-loose with the female body. These films offer no exception to that dictum. Indeed, The Rainbow Is Yours is a veritable anthology of instances in which the female body is strategically repositioned to glamorize and eroticize objects to which it is supposed to be adjacent, beginning with the opening film, an excerpt from Jam Handy’s “Looking Ahead Through Röhm & Haas Plexiglass” (1947). Prelinger has chosen to reproduce just the technicolor portion of a longer film, but the panes of brightly colored plexiglass that no doubt guided the transition from black-and-white also invite us to peer voyeuristically through colored transparencies that effect ingress to a young lady’s boudoir. Even more dramatically, the young lady herself is in that boudoir–and deeply within it, lounging on a bed (reading a book, lonely thing), for we must peer past a plexiglass door to behold her. In one sense, she is dressed modestly, in a floor-length robe that is worn, open and belted, over a floor-length peignoir. In another sense, however, her dress spectacularly triggers voyeurism: the peignoir is orange-red, the robe is the color of tanned flesh, and the robe is belted open to present a frontal zone of vivid color that defines the body space from below the neck to the feet. The young lady detaches herself from her bed ‘n’ book, and as a voice-over declaims the virtues of plexiglass, wanders intriguingly from one area in her boudoir to the next, from her shower stall to her dressing table, all the while fondling plexiglass doors, shelves and drawers. She is willing, it seems, to reveal her inmost cosmetic secrets (or perhaps it is the transparency of plexiglass, so effortlessly framing these metonyms for her body, that put her in the mood for exposure). Seated at her dressing table, she opens drawer after drawer as the narrator murmurs approvingly: “on one side the pedestal swings open to reveal plexiglass trays for cosmetics, hose and lingerie.” Plexiglass not just refines intimate space but frames it so it becomes an arena for evocative display. Who would object to such gentle penetrations? This selective accessibility to private areas suggests an elaborate manipulation of sexual desire–a point of interest not only to the audience of tradesmen and contractors but, arguably, to the postwar woman as well.

 

Not all the films are willing to go quite this far in eroticizing a product (though the others lack the advantage of a product depending directly upon sight), but this group of films–most are from the mid- or late 1950s–is heavily committed to glamorization, and their sense of glamour takes its cues from a smarmy eroticization of the female body. In Jam Handy’s “American Look” (1957), something of a sequel to “American Harvest” in The Uncharted Landscape, the insuperably vacuous Jam Handy rhetoric begins its clog-and-choke procedure once again (“By the way things look as well as the way they perform, our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accommodations, expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice”) but before the numerous anvils it sets out to juggle while saluting the flag and simultaneously whistling “The Stars and Stripes Forever” cause it to collapse under its own weight, it gestures fleetingly toward linking the streamlined quality of well-designed products with adjectives associated with the performance of the female body: “In form, proportion, rhythm and variety, the stylists leave their own unmistakeable marks on everyday conveniences, in flowing lines and graceful shapes which we as Americans may enjoy”; “[modern packaging] brings festivity to the marketplace–tempting, hinting, and revealing.”⁹ When MPO Productions, working for General Motors, staged a lavish musical to introduce the 1957 automobile models in “Design for Dreaming,” it arranged a young lady to appear alongside each new car as it appeared, allowing the announcer to introduce not only “the Eldorado Town and Country Cadillac” but also to add “ensemble by Christian Dior–of Paris.” In one sense, of course, GM was merely underscoring the resemblance between its line of products and haute couture fashion; in another sense, GM was suggesting everything from the fantasy that each new car somehow included its own lithe paramour to the notion that if a man couldn’t easily trade in his old wife… (The wife, to be sure, could fantasize quite differently, as in all these films, associating with a product whose glamour would never threaten but only enhance her own attraction.)

 

Prelinger demonstrates how prevalent such concepts were when he juxtaposes an elegantly licentious four-minute dance routine excerpted from “Frigidaire Finale” (1957) with ads from 1957 and 1958 promoting something called “The Sheer Look.” “Frigidaire Finale” is at once the most erotic and the wittiest of these glamor pix, choreographed with a boy-seduces-girl/girl-seduces-boy narrative that integrates presentations of stoves, washer-and-dryers, and refrigerators. At first, boy and girl simply dance about appliances, opening oven doors, picking up sample pots, and generally framing the appliances with their own graceful movements. That their role could be something more is brought into the foreground in a sequence that centers on a single dark-hued refrigerator. (All the rest of the appliances had been white.) This curious dark interloper seems to signal or permit transgression, for the girl, instead of taking her usual place on the opposite side of the appliance, now jumps to its top and perches there, stumping her companion who cannot comprehend where she has gone. As he opens the refrigerator’s upper door and then its lower door, looking in as if to expect her to be inside, this redirection of his gaze from her to the appliance comes to seem a hint or clue he is offering to the audience as he models an act of transference. After all, she is not invisible to us but perched fetchingly (yet outrageously, transgressively) on top of the refrigerator, barely able to contain her vivacious glee, leaning her front over its front, eagerly dangling her legs along its side, swirling her body provocatively–all the time in a kind of oneness with the appliance. (The appliance may even be seen as eliciting her sexual glamour; at the very least, it is that which she transforms into an occasion for flirtatious play.) The more deeply he looks into the refrigerator cabinet, the more visible a presence she becomes to us. When he finally spots her, the reunion is joyous: a flirtation is definitely underway.

 

That this new flirtation is inseparable from the refrigerator is underscored in a follow-up scene in which she opens the door of the first in a series of refrigerators, then rushes behind it to the next, leaving her male companion to search for her by closing the door, at which point she has already stationed herself by the second refrigerator, whose door she now opens and so forth. This hot pursuit ends with her bestowing a peck-like kiss on his lips. This then escalates into even more direct foreplay that boldly centers on further exposure and display of the refrigerator. Now the girl pauses to run her hand down the length of a refrigerator door in a sweeping gesture that seems to enflame the lad who cannot help but rush toward her, arms wide open. She rebuffs him pertly, by detaching a tray from a compartment in the door and handing it to him and dancing off. Left holding that tray, his shoulders sink as if under a burden and he flips over the contents–spilling about four dozen eggs. But as the eggs fall, he looks briefly into the camera, with the flash of a satisfied smile.¹⁰. A conquest has been made. The facade has been deeply penetrated an exchange has occurred, and he has spilled (on?) the eggs. In final frames, the dancers join together, her legs happily twirling in a vivid display of new-found energy.

 

Only in a Jam Handy production, I suppose, would we get a money shot that is configured through the contents of a refrigerator. But the idea of equating the female body with a refrigerator cabinet is paralleled in Frigidaire’s own “Sheer Look” campaign of 1957, whose visual signature of a woman holding her arms (both encased in elegant shoulder-length evening gloves) up at a 90-degree angle was rendered so that the white space below her, where her body actually was, could be equated with the white space of the refrigerator. The glamour that Frigidaire associated with the refrigerator, by placing a model in evening dress in each of its ads, depended on transferring the appreciative gaze ordinarily directed toward the impeccably-dressed woman to the refrigerator cabinet. To open a refrigerator door, then, becomes as charged a moment as an act of undressing. But everything about “The Sheer Look” crackles with sexual innuendo. Why is the woman looking at us? Why is her face not visible? Her frank stare encourages us to come back with a gaze that is equally frank. Her face need not be visible because (a) we can fantasize about its particulars and (b) a face that is absent displaces attention to hair, eyes, and glove-encased arms-and-hands: all visual centers that signal the erotic.

 

For me, it is was with “Frigidaire Finale” that one of Prelinger’s ephemeral films attained a point of genuine sublimity. Here is a text that appears now to be both elaborately orchestrated and ridiculously crude, elegantly sophisticated and hopelessly vulgar, intricately convoluted and transparently clear. Who would have imagined that there could be so inspired a blend of commodity and sexual fetish? Prelinger has provided us with documents that offer epiphanic glimpses into the heart, soul, and pocketbook of America in the middle third of the twentieth century.

 

Notes

 

1. Only the first three of the 2-disc sets of Our Secret Century were available when research for this review began. Two more 2-disc sets have since been issued: Volume 7: Gender Role Call (films that instruct in gender distinctions) with Volume 8: Tireless Marketers (the evolution of the brief commercial from movie theater bills to TV); Volume 9: Busy Bodies (educational films about sex) with Volume 10: Make Mine Freedom (patriotic films). The final two collections, Volume 11: Nuts and Bolts (films about high-tech machinery) and Volume 12: Free to Obey, (extreme versions of social control) have been announced.

 

2. See Richard Gehr, “Rick Prelinger’s Ephemeral Films” at http://www.levity.com/rubric/prelinger.htm.

 

3. Here as elsewhere Prelinger’s supporting data is exemplary. As added material, he offers not just an account of the 1936-1937 sit-down strikes from the 1941 WPA history of Michigan but an excerpt from Mary Heaton Vorses’s Labor’s New Millions, a 1938 report from a left-wing perspective. He also includes an excerpt from a worker testifying before the 1937 Senate commission led by Robert LaFollette, whose charge was to investigate corporate violations of free speech and the rights of labor. That in turn contrasts with the prize-winning essay in a 1948 General Motors competition, “Why I Like My Job,” an explanation by 67-year-old Calvin H. Dunlap of the virtues of being loyal to the corporation.

 

4. Van Dyke went on to have a distinguished career as a conscientious producer of documentary and informational films that were supported by commercial sponsors, according to a 1960 article by Ralph Caplan in Industrial Design that Prelinger bundles with the first volume. According to Caplan, Van Dyke preferred to work as independently from his sponsors as possible, aiming to retain some of the integry of the explanatory documentary. In one example, a film devised in collaboration with poet Norman Rosten–a writer with strong left-wing connections to the 1930s whose The Big Road (1946) was an epic poem documenting the importance of the roadway in western European history from its inception to the apogee of the recently-completed Alcan (Alaska-Canada) Highway of 1942–for an unnamed manufacturer of communications was eventually modified to its detriment by the sponsor who added a three-minute prologue. In a second more triumphant example, Van Dyke produced “Skyscraper” under the sponsorship of Reynolds Aluminum, Bethlehem Steel, Westinghouse Elevators and York Air Conditioning; the film, which depicted the construction of a New York skyscraper, went on to win two first prizes at the Venice Film Festival, an award of merit from the Edinburgh Film Festival, and first prize for short subjects at the San Francisco Film Festival. Van Dyke’s independent operation, on a scale far smaller than Jam Handy’s 500-plus (in 1960) employees, became a successful alternate to large-scale producers who (in the case of Handy) were essentially the extensions of their influential corporate sponsors.

 

5. Obtaining Blitzstein’s services for Valley Town was an impressive coup: he was fresh from the Broadway triumph of The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and hard at work on No For an Answer (1941 ). It was a project, of course, for which he was eminently suited. The left-wing opera Cradle was set in “Steeltown, U.S.A.” And the musical form he was developing for the center of No For an Answer was the recitative. The song that the young housewife recites and sings in Valley Town, then, is something like a heretofore missing link between the operatic mixes in Cradle and the more vernacular-oriented recitatives in Answer. In an interview with James Blue in 1973 (that Prelinger has included in his disk), Van Dyke recalled the recitative as the high point of the film, the portion that he always listened to with the greatest emotion. (Still, Van Dyke may misremember how his alliance with Blitzstein occurred. He recalls that it was his admiration of Blitzstein’s work on No For an Answer that compelled Van Dyke to ask Blitzstein to contribute to Valley Town. But Valley Town, which premiered in May 1940, was completed before No For an Answer, which premiered in January 1941.) A condensed discussion of Blitzstein’s music in the 1930s is in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso) 285-295.

 

6. “It was remarkable,” Kerouac writes in On the Road (1957), “how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul–which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road–calmly and sanely, as though nothing had happened” (qtd. in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters [New York: Viking, 1992] 18).

 

7. A more accurate title for Duvall’s book might have been Facts of Life and Love for Teenage Girls. In addressing the problem of how to sustain a boy-girl conversation on a date, Duvall’s solution is for one of the member s to play the role of an interlocutor:

 

He: It's a great night, isn't it?
She: Wonderful. Did you ever see such a moon?
He: Isn't that what they call a Harvest Moon, or is it the Hunters' Moon?
She: Hunters' Moon? That sounds interesting. Do you hunt?

 

Though both boy and girl interrogate, Duvall’s comment suggests she conceives the audience for her advice to be primarily female: “There you are from the weather to his pet hobby in four little steps, simply by adding a question to every answer.” A “conversation” on a date, Duvall seems to be suggesting, is not intended to be a “dialogue.”

 

8. See www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0915book-century.htm for the September 15, 1996, review.

 

9. An anecdote that Handy recalls in his 1961 TV interview suggests that distracting clothing was perhaps improper, at least between men, though close friends were just barely able to touch upon the subject. He recalls one of the incidents which taught him to dress with an appropriate modesty when speaking with upper-level executives: “‘Jam’–I was on a first-name acquaintance with him (well, I think I may say it was none other than Tom Watson, Jr., of IBM)–he said: ‘Jam, would you mind starting all over again? I have been so interested in that beautiful tie that you’re wearing that I haven’t heard a word you said.’” It is not exactly clear whether the full import of this anecdote can be quickly exhausted; at its basis it is attesting that image distracts from meaning, that the “beautiful tie” overwhelms actual discourse.

 

10. Or at least I think he appears to wear a satisfied smile. The quality of reproduction is such that one cannot be sure. And here is perhaps the place to mention that some viewers of films on CD-ROM are dismayed by the look of films operating under the QuickTime program. Hine for one complained of the indistinct images and said he’d “much rather be watching these on a videocassette recorder, with the comments and supporting documents in a book.” I can’t agree. The disadvantage of the QuickTime program is that images do seem to be jerky, their tonal values broken into Seurat-like pointillistic ensembles. But the advantage is the arrangement of the screen allows one to freeze a film in mid-frame, back up or move ahead a set of frames at a time, and easily replay narrative; by dragging a bar, it is possible to fast forward or fast backward. These positives outweigh the negatives, for me. Prelinger distinguishes between the movie on CD-ROM and the movie in a theater this way: “It’s not an immersive experience like going to a theater and being wowed by a powerful movie. But these are not immersive movies. You know, immersive means evasive, and QuickTime allows you as an individual, maybe with one other person, to look not at a movie, but at a picture or rendering of a movie. It’s much easier to look at a movie critically on your computer, to see it as a document with a context” (qtd. in Richard Gehr, “Rick Prelinger’s Ephemeral Films,” an interview dated April 24, 1995).

 

Peter Donaldson

Department of Literature
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
psdlit@mit.edu

Introduction

 

In these pages I trace how Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books reads The Tempest anachronistically, as a play about the end of books and the advent of electronic forms. Greenaway finds The Tempest relevant to this shift because, as he puts it, we are living in the early years of “the second Gutenberg Revolution,”¹ in which the ambitions of the Renaissance magus with his magic books are being realized, in part, through digital technologies.

 

Prospero’s Books is an anticipatory or proleptic allegory of the digital future, figuring destruction of libraries and their rebirth as “magically” enhanced electronic books. It is set in the past, and extrapolates from the several passages in the play in which Prospero’s books are mentioned the story of twenty four wonderworking books through which Prospero achieves his magic; yet, by calling attention to the digital special effects by which these books have been created on screen–digital painting and photoprocessing applications, computer animation, multiple screen overlays–Greenaway suggests that the magically enhanced codex volume is as much a part of our future as our past.

 

And perhaps that is so: the “expanded book” CD-ROM is one form that moves in this direction (though it is not a book), experiments with ink that reconfigures itself in response to computer instruction, and with “hot” links embedded in ink on paper may move us futher in the direction of such a future, retaining something like the form of the book but amplifying its powers.

 

Like Prospero’s Books, this essay itself exists in a transitional form (networked hypertext with linked images and brief video citations), and like Prospero’s Books it imagines future forms and depends on them. It is relatively linear in its form and bounded in its contours, presenting a small number of textual and visual citations. Yet it asks its readers to imagine that they are exploring a path, one particular path, through an immense networked digital archive.

 

Such an archive would include the complete film Prospero’s Books–as well as all other Shakespearean film adaptations, linked to relevant lines of text; which would include all extant copies and page fragments of the Folio text of The Tempest, and an extensive library of commentary; which would be linked as well to extensive collections of anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance forward, and to texts and images that illustrate the motif of the “end of the book” in the late twentieth century.

 

With such an archive in place,² the role of the critic or interpreter would be at least a double one. One task would be to create a bounded exploratory hypertext, a “collection within a collection,” by specifying a number of linked resources relevant to the subject. The other task would be the marking of a path through that mini-archive, by choosing and commenting upon examples, as I do here. In such an environment, one could follow my path or break off to explore one of the text and image collections of which it is contructed. To borrow, at third hand, a phrase of Wittgenstein’s, interpetive hypertext would allow for “travel over a wide field of thought, criss-cross in every direction.”³

 

An essay within a digital archive–such a form might expand the resources that can serve as context for an interpretation, extend them to include several media, and create marked and unmarked paths to traverse. Such a form might also foster a documentary tendency, a style of interpretation in which the critic’s work always includes comprehensive access to the work discussed, to its sources, and to digital records–text, film, image–of the historical and material evidence relevant to the work under discussion. These digital documents might illustrate the rich and complex traditions from which an artist like Peter Greenaway (whose films are themselves encyclopedic and archival) draws his material. But their function would not be limited to illustration. The hypertextual and documentary aspects of such an essay would, perhaps, converge insofar as documents–virtual or material–always tell their own stories, or incite us to tell stories about them; encourage us, that is, to follow paths other than those plotted by artist or critic. Documents also ask us to ponder, if never fully to answer, the impossible yet sometimes urgent question of the relation between our stories and what is real.

 

· · · Begin End of Books · · ·

 

Section Notes

 

1. Peter Greenaway, Prospero’s Books (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991) 28.

 

2. Such an archive now exists in part, in the Chadwyck-Healey Full Text Database, in the Arden Texts and Sources CDROM, in the University of Pennsylvania’s posting of Folio and Quarto facsimiles on the Web, in Michael Best’s plans for Internet editions, in the work of the Shakespeare Database group in Munster, and in the work of my group on the MIT/Folger Shakespeare Electronic Archive.

 

3. Gunnar Liestøl, “Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader’s Narrative in Hypertext” p. 87 in Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. George Landow (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994) 87-120, citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Blackwell, 1953) vii.

 

Adrian Miles

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
amiles@rmit.edu.au

 

This work presents a hypertextual reading of a key sequence, the song-and-dance number “You Were Meant for Me,” from Kelly and Donen’s 1956 musical Singin’ in the Rain. The sequence is read as characteristic of the film’s general semiotic principles, which combine several levels of seduction to establish an aesthetic claim for a properly musical cinema.This reading represents an experiment or heuristic exercise meant to discover possibilities for interpretation (not just of film but of any complex text) in multi-linear, hypermedia presentation. Forced into an artificially singular sequence, the components of this reading might seem elliptical and repetitive; they are designed to be explored from various perspectives and in differing combinations. Though it has an argument and an interpretive agenda, this is not so much an essay as a text in the deepest sense: a fabric of ideas deeply and multiply connected.There is of course always more than one way to read a hypertext. All the components of this text are listed in the table at right. You could begin with the numbered pages at the top of this list, begin instead with the collected presentation of the sequence, or choose some other point of entry. (You may want to bookmark this index page for later reference.) On the component pages you will find a large number of textual links representing various lines of connection and development.   This hypertext incorporates film extracts in the form of QuickTime movies. To view these extracts you must have QuickTime installed on your computer, and the QuickTime plug-in installed in your Web browser. If you do not have the plug-in installed, the movie extracts will have to be downloaded to your machine and played using a helper application.   If you have both the plug-in and the QuickTime system resources in place, the clips will play within the browser window. The clips are designed to need an 8Kb stream (easily supported by most modems). This will provide 1 frame per second and sound.   Extract pages also include a download link to a more economical version of the same material, sampled at 5 frames per second for faster transfer. These files require an appropriate helper application for QuickTime and will play in a separate window.   Many pages are illustrated with images from the film. Each in-line illustration is linked to a larger version of the same image.   It is recommended that you use Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x or later. QuickTime is available for Macintosh and Windows from the Apple QuickTime Web site.		Component Files 1: The Opening 2: Inside 3: Prelude 4: The Song 5: The Song(2) 6: The Dance Alchemy Analysis Sequence “Beautiful Girls“ Works Cited Chambers Characterology Charisse Cinema and Hypertext Close Reading Cosmo Cosmo and Clown Don and Kathy Elocution Lessons Framing Terms Greimas Hypertextual Readings Kathy Liminal Structure Lina Lyrics Materiality Metaphor Musical Cinema Open and Close Praxis R.F. Seduction Sequence Sequence Reversal Sequence Structure Stardust The Premieres

 

William D. Routt

La Trobe University
w.routt@latrobe.edu.au

 

Abstract: This article attempts a preliminary understanding of the experience–or sensation–of place evoked in the cinema, based on some of the earliest films and their spectators. It exposits certain ideas contained in Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture and finds a delirious resemblance between these ideas and some in Gilles Deleuze’s two Cinema books. Perhaps the piece suggests that madness is a property of the sensation of place in the cinema. Animated GIF files, maddening their sources, offer a crude supplementary patchwork commentary.–wdr

 

• Section 1: The Event of the Cinema
• Section 2: The Mad Poet Dwells in Images and The Plagiarism
• Section 3: Thinking Images
• References

 

Proceed to Hypertext…  

 

Jorge Otero-Pailos

School of Architecture
Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico
jotero@mit.mit.edu

 

…the concept of reality is always the first victim of war.

 

–Paul Virilio, paraphrasing Kipling (War and Cinema 33)

 

Vacillating Realities

 

At the corner of the bar a man in a white suit, probably an American business traveler, asks for more coffee and looks intently at a young professional woman who, seated across the room, is slowly sipping a Martini. The bartender notices his stare and quietly smiles while drying off the sparkling glassware. The room is dimly light by wall sconces that cast a pale glow over posters of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. “As Time Goes By” is playing almost imperceptibly in the PA system. Five clocks on the wall mark the time in L.A., New York, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo. He could be anywhere in the world. The napkin under his drink has a familiar logo that reads “Rick’s Café,” and through the front door he can see the Hotel receptionist. The man finishes his coffee, walks slowly to the front door of the Hotel, and exits. He pauses for a moment to light a cigarette and to look around. An immense boulevard lies before the building dividing a row of modern structures from an old masonry city wall. “Is this really Casablanca? It looks nothing like the movie,” he murmurs. It is a typical scene inside Casablanca’s Hyatt Hotel.

 

Figure 1: Rick’s Café (postcard).

Figure 2: Hyatt in Casablanca (photo by author).

 

Hyatt’s version of Rick’s Cafe is the only place in Casablanca where one can find a designed and direct reference in the real to the imaginary scenes of the Film. And yet the city owes much of its international fame to the Hollywood movie. Most people can picture Casablanca, although they might have never been there, as a city of tight sinuous streets, claustrophobic markets, parrot vendors, hookah pipes, picturesque locals, and filmic foreigners. What is shocking when we set foot on the real streets of Casablanca is that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the movie: they are ample boulevards lined with modern low rise structures and harboring a bustling metropolitan life. Inside the old Casbah walls there are no wooden trellises overhead, signs like those outside of the “Blue Parrot Club” have been replaced by advertisements for Levis, and the French administrative buildings–which are crucial in the spatialization of the old city in the film into the Café-Police Headquarters-Airport triangle–are nowhere in sight–they are, as it turns out, outside the Casbah in the “modern” city.

 

Arriving in Casablanca as a Western traveler/movie fan, one feels strangely betrayed by the city’s reality. The movie had placed an emphasis on its own adherence to reality with the authority, and transparent objectivity, implied by the war documentary style of its introductory scenes, where the very real struggle of European refugees in World War II is superimposed on a map of Northern Africa and views of the city.

 

Figure 3: Still from Casablanca.

 

To buttress this blurring effect, the film was released in New York on Thanksgiving Day 1942, just eighteen days after the Allies landed in Casablanca, in an obvious attempt to benefit from the international attention the city was receiving. The army’s use of “Rick’s Place” as a pseudonym for Casablanca throughout the war just goes to prove the film’s effectiveness at conflating the imaginary and the real. In fact, ever since the premiere of the motion picture, the virtual and the real cities of Casablanca have coupled in the collective imaginary of the West. It is therefore understandable that, when confronted with a city that looks and feels nothing like what we might have been led to expect by the movie, we experience in Casablanca a strange perversion of the horror vacui which, according to Umberto Eco, emerges when “the ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake,’” and “absolute unreality is offered as real presence” (7). A similar feeling would pervade us if, arriving in Paris, we all of a sudden realized the Tour Eiffeldid not exist, outside of post cards and films, and that in its place was just a wonderful six-lane highway.

 

One could speculate about the reasons why Director Michael Curtiz might have chosen to construct the city out of revamped props of Warner Brothers’ 1942 version of The Desert Song, and shoot in the company’s Burbank Studios rather than on location. First there was the economic factor. Moving the crew to Casablanca was certainly more expensive than working in California. Second, the world was at war, and after Pearl Harbor it was clear that US interests were not safe abroad. Traveling to Morocco could mean endangering the crew. Can the significant gap between the filmic and real cities be the result of these unfortunate logistic imperatives? But what about all the other “flaws” of the film; can they be attributed to the same cause? Certainly not. Logistics had nothing to do in the wrongful depiction of uniformed Germans in Casablanca. Studio writers knew that the German Army did not set foot in Casablanca during World War II, just as they knew that such things as Letters of Transit signed by Général Charles de Gaulle did not exist, and that neither American nor French troops entered Berlin in 1918 (Robertson 79). Another exterior pressure was driving writers and producers to exaggerate and distort the real, one that demanded political effectiveness over historical accuracy: the war. And, in the name of this effort, reality would have to be betrayed by virtuality, and turned into ideology.

 

It is widely known that Casablanca was a war film aimed at sedating the general American opposition to US involvement in World War II. If a number of historical flaws are consciously present, it is because they were deemed necessary in order to

 

Figure 4: The fighting French march
outside of New York’s Hollywood
theater, 1942 (from Miller, Casablanca:
As Time Goes By–50th Aniversary
Commemorative.

 

accomplish this objective. By depicting fictitious Germans, Americans, Frenchmen, and Resistance leaders in simple exchanges, and encouraging the spectator to synecdochally associate each character and his/her actions with his/her nation and its international policies, the film effectively transfigured a complex international political situation into an easily understandable set of social relationships. The successful resolution of the movie’s crisis thanks to an American expatriate’s involvement in the affairs of a number of Europeans, and his ability to retain his autonomy and freedom in the end, were narrative mechanisms geared to convince American audiences that it was possible for them to fight in the war and maintain the unencumbered relation to Europe that had stood as the basis of their identity and freedom. In re-presenting Casablanca, the film industry rendered the all too gray world of international politics in vivid chiaroscuro, dividing, beyond reasonable doubt, the light from the dark, the good from the bad, radically affecting the audience’s perception of the real, and consciously attempting to sway public opinion towards a homogeneous support of the war. It is difficult to assess the exact extent to which Casablancaalone influenced the American body politic in deciding to engage in the war. We do know, however, that it was the most widely acclaimed of the enormous volume of war films produced by the major Hollywood studios during the 1940s, and that its premiere caused a number of pro-war demonstrations, including the 1942 parade of the Fighting French outside of New York’s Hollywood Theater.

 

A little known fact is that just as war and its contingencies were at the root of the film’s production, so too was armed struggle the basis for the modern city’s construction by the French, next to the old Medina. Indeed, the principal importance of both objects resided in their ability to serve as political technologies which helped mobilize the population as a single unit towards war. In the late 19th century, German and French imperialistic interests clashed in Morocco, turning control of the West-African country into a veritable arm-wrestle where military force, and the ability to rapidly mobilize troops and armament, were measured up before an imminent conflict. The monumental effort to erect the “modern city” and to overhaul the old Casbah was carried out, not out of a magnanimous will to “share” modernity with Morocco, but out of a necessity to demonstrate France’s military response time, strength, and administrative expediency. But this “show” was not staged just for foreign powers, it was (as was the movie in America) devised to quell national anxiety and low self image before the increased strength of the German Empire. The new city’s main objective would not be to adhere to the forms and spatial configurations of Moroccan architecture and urbanism with archaeological precision, but to construct and project an alternate reality where the French might find a compelling, almost mythical, image of their own mettlesome nature, their industrious spirit, their benevolence towards the colonized, and their republican stability. This effort would entail a necessary manipulation of the city’s reality (which prefigures Hollywood’s later distortions).

 

Political Technologies of Control: The Idea of War

 

Although the film and the city bear no visual resemblance, this is not to say that they have nothing in common. As we shall see, they share a number of particulars which, understood historically, cast new light onto the performative potential of architecture and film as social practices in contemporary society. To begin let us return to the most obvious commonality: the blatant interpretative liberties (not to say disregard) that both objects exhibit towards their pre-existing context. French designers, far from employing or referencing local typologies in their plans, imposed a Beaux Arts spatiality to their new cities, which they then adorned, if ever so slightly, with simulated Moroccan motifs (Koranic script is conveniently erased in the French versions).

 

Figure 5: Casablanca’s Palais de Justice (Joseph Marrast, 1925), in Casablanca’s Grand Place, now Place Mohammed V (photo by author).

 

In turn, Hollywood’s productions designers chose to present a wholly fictitious city, where not a single building of the French or Moroccan town is present.

 

Figure 6: Scene from Casablanca; the film’s version of Casablanca’s Palais de Justice can be seen in the background.

 

It would be impossible to attribute this attitude towards design to a designer’s whim, to time constraints, or to mere logistics. Both architecture and film are intensely decision-based artistic practices, and solutions are contingent on approval by the designer or director, the client or producer, the financing institutions, the prospective user’s or audience’s preferences, etc., so that such basic considerations are not likely to be the result of mere oversight or typical contingencies. In fact, we know that French administrators amassed large reference libraries of photographs and drawings documenting existing Moroccan buildings and cities,¹ and that Hollywood production designers used photographs of French Casablanca as a reference in their work.² We might contend that if the motivations for the construction of these objects were political, decisions concerning their final appearance were also political, and we should therefore turn, not to architecture or film, but to the art of politics, to ask why disavowing the real in representation might be an effective and desirable practice. Now, if only for a moment, we make a backward leap to the fourth century B.C. to ask this very question.

 

In his construction of the Ideal Republic, Plato describes rhetoric as a fundamental technology of politics. It was the art used by the orator in convincing an assembly that a particular course of action was good and virtuous. Of course for Plato, this orator, a man capable of persuasion, should also be a man capable of discerning right from wrong and of determining what goals and public policies might ensure or enable the individual happiness of all citizens–i.e., a philosopher. Rhetoric’s political value lay in its ability to make the members of the assembly (a group of individuals including those daltonic non-philosophers unable to perceive the subtle shades of truth) see actions and situations in a particular light, to sharpen their awareness of what was virtuous as the camera focuses our attention with its depth of field, to penetrate reality and represent its essence. Already in the Republic it is clear that the notion of representation is a prerequisite for the very existence of politics.

 

Unfortunately, Plato–who was as we know a fine orator–had more than a few difficulties carrying on his self-appointed mission as politician in the public sphere. His mentor Socrates, another able speaker, had already met an untimely death for not holding his tongue before the state. War, in this case the Peloponnesian War, combined with the instability of the 403 B.C. counterrevolution, had radically transformed the operations of the Athenian State from a forum for debate to a mechanism for homogenizing thinking and legislating ideology. The visions of death and destruction that plagued the minds of Athens’ democratic rulers turned all considerations of good and evil on a single axis: winning the war. The Idea of War was a specter so powerful it could fracture and dismantle any rhetorical presentation constructed by philosophers. This for Plato was the root of all the social evil of his time. Thinking men, concerned with the able exegesis of the real, had been cast off from politics by men of action in the name of the war. A new technology of politics, the spectacle of war had befallen every transaction of state affairs, threatening to subvert any attempt to understand the real by simply establishing a new reality (by decree).

 

If the goal of politics is to conduct the public affairs of a body of people, it is also necessarily to exercise control over the agency of individuals in the name of efficiency. State affairs are deemed too complex to explain to everyone, yet they must somehow meet with the support of all affected by them if the government is to function effectively. Therefore, policies and directives, once resolved at the legislative level, must be presented as the best and most desirable solutions, and communicated to the socius in simple but persuasive terms. This aspect of politics–the interface between government and individual–is all about representation, about wheedling, about influencing the public’s understanding of reality. In this sense, war is a perfect political technology: It exercises its political strength by placing an emphasis on difference, and rallying a particular and otherwise heterogenic socius into a cohesive unit–within which difference is not tolerated. It is a condensation of complex diplomatic relations into a simple and understandable right and wrong: either you are in or out; it is a matter of life or death. Plato himself, however against men of action, recognized political virtue in war, and sought the unification of dissenting Greek states by projecting the Idea of War against the Persians onto the minds of his interlocutors. But he knew full well that in order for these thoughts to develop into sinister specters they needed to excite a dreadful imagery of death and destruction, and so Plato advocated the practice of sending children and women as spectators into the field of battle so that “in that way they will get a good view of their future business” (170). In this way, when the children-turned-adults would hear of a possible battle, they would be so stricken by fear that they would rally together to protect themselves against the oncoming perils.

 

The Idea of War, as prospect or memory of bloodshed, can be stimulated in the socius as pure representation, functioning as a political technology more efficiently, permanently, and economically than war itself–armed conflict as a political practice is, as

 

Figure 7: The “body of the town,” anthropomorphic city with fortress (Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Architettura, ingegneria e arte militare. Late fifteenth century. Turin, Codex Saluzzianus 148, fol. 3).

 

we know, not infinitely sustainable. Historically, during times of peace, the tools employed in war (walls, fortresses, shields, armors, weapons, and banners) served as its mnemonic symbols in public spectacles (i.e., in parades, architectural ornaments, sculptures, paintings, etc.), keeping the threat of bloodshed alive in the minds of spectators to buttress various forms of government. For instance, the political power of wall circuits, constructed around cities up until the 19th century, went well beyond their physical resistance to projectiles. These military structures established, in a simple spatial language, those that stood outside or inside the body politic, and served as permanent reminders to both inhabitants and visitors of the threat of aggression. When describing these walls in 1452, Alberti would point out that they were founded with “the greatest religion” to protect a city which was “continually exposed to Dangers and Accidents; just as a ship which is tossed on the sea” (133). The idea of the encircling wall generated theoretical discourses and images of anthropomorphic cities that buttressed the notion of a collective body struggling for survival, and emphasized the concept of allegiance between citizens. Not surprisingly in these representations the noblest part of the city was the military fortress. City walls are thresholds to the polis, moments which, for phenomenologists such as Christian Norberg-Shultz, represent “the ‘rift’ between ‘otherness’ and manifest meaning, it embodies suffering and is ‘turned to stone’” (133). Indeed these objects exercise their communicative capacity by manipulating the material reality of the world, but there is more. A military wall will, at one level, be understood as separationprimarily because it divides us from each other, but, at another level, the wall will always be exercising a deictic reference to war, for it is only because of armed conflict that its existence is justifiable.

 

Efforts such as the French and American versions of Casablanca were conceptually similar to the fortress wall insofar as they were, first and foremost, visualization technologies aimed at propagating a homogeneous, orderly, politicized world view. The Idea of War was mobilized in both as a means of internal control, as a kind of endogenous war where victory was determined not by fire power but by persuasive ability, since they aimed not at killing but at rallying supporters for a particular political platform by affecting their perceptual fields. To answer our original question, the extent to which the film and the modern city manipulated perceived notions of reality was directly proportional to these political aims. As political technologies, both objects could only be effective if they paid careful attention to establishing a play on the real that remained within the parameters of the dominant perceptual modes of the times, that is, within the general field of what reality was understood to be. We have intentionally begun by discussing a simple vertical plane (a city wall) which performed simultaneously as a tool to apportion space, as a military defense, and as a vehicle of propaganda, to stress the convergence of architecture, war, and politics around a notion of reality that was centered on territory, space, and time. Architecture is, ontologically, a field of endeavor concerned with the manipulation of space in time. Understandably, so long as the realm of the real has been circumscribed by these two concepts, architecture has stood as the prime tool to manipulate it. What concerns us in this essay is to expose how, as industrial and technological developments of the first half of the 20th century shifted the (conscious or subconscious) dominant perception of reality away from time and space, architecture became increasingly obsolete as an effective political technology, and was displaced by tools, like film, whose nature coincided with new notions about the makeup of man’s perceptual environment.

 

The Urgency of Order

 

There are striking similarities between the social conditions that prompted politicized institutions to use Casablanca city and Casablanca film as propaganda vehicles for the Idea of War. The years preceding both works are times when internal crisis, social strife, and discord menaced the prevailing order of things. Consider the following descriptions of conditions in France in the 1890s and the United States in the 1930s:

 

Aesthetic disarray and moral decay shared the same root, in that both seemed to reveal fundamental weaknesses, most notably a pervasive apathy, in French society itself. From University lecterns, church pulpits, and town council halls came repeated calls for "rejuvenation," "moral education." New voluntary organizations vowed to break the debilitating lethargy afflicting both the state and the older, established social groups. (Wright 16)

 

Among intellectuals and in centers of political power, the importance of cultural myths to social stability was a seriously debated topic.... The widespread doubt about traditional American Myths threatened to become a dangerous political weakness. In politics, industry and the media there were men and women... who saw the necessity, almost as a patriotic duty, to revitalize and refashion a cultural mythology. (Sklar 195-9)

 

In either scenario the prevailing sentiment was one of generalized disillusionment with the present. The cacophony of divergent opinions resulted in the perception that traditional values were being lost, and that a once-united socius had fallen into disorder and degeneracy. A central, recurring theme in both countries was an understanding that people’s lack of direction, and lax value systems were conditions that could spur uncontrollable, debilitating mass spasms. The crowd’s fragmentation was conceived as a dangerous symptom of political feebleness before other world powers. To avoid this, recreating the illusion of a single body politic became a national priority. The imperative for both nations was the same: to steer the masses, as a cohesive unit, back to the values that had traditionally stood as symbols of national identity and pride. Just as before World War I, France’s urbanists labored earnestly to provide new mechanisms of establishing social order, so too did Hollywood’s film industry carry out its self-appointed mission in the 40s to congeal the American socius into a single block. Needless to say, this was a conservative effort, a folding back onto safe ground, a regrouping of the troops to gather new strength.

 

France’s low self esteem was exacerbated when its efforts to gain control over Morocco were stemmed by German initiatives. Hostilities were ushered in when, in an overt attempt to undermine France’s prospective territorial score, German Emperor William II exacted his theatrical proclamation of Moroccan independence and integrity from his yacht on March 3rd 1905 while visiting Tangier. Two marked international crises ensued, one in 1905-06 and one in 1911, which almost resulted in an early start to World War I. In 1907, as a result of the first face-off, Colonel Hubert Lyautey was instructed to take an army unit from Western Algeria into Morocco and establish a “definitive French presence” in Morocco.

 

Figure 8: Général Lyautey and Général D’Amade inspect the “Général Drude” command post in Casablanca, 1908 (from Marcelin Flandrin, Casablanca Rétro)

 

To carry out his orders, the French official would need a vehicle not only capable of carrying the message, but in itself the verifiable proof of the message. Concerned with making visible the new territoriality, he fashioned the request for presence on a millenary tradition of staking out the ground: architecture. He resolved to erect French buildings on Moroccan soil and to make Casablanca his first test case. With Casablanca, the French responded to Germany’s aggression by superseding it theatrically and thus dwarfing Emperor William II’s gesture. From the outset, the city was understood as a weapon deployed in the theater of inter-national and intra-national warfare. It was a counterattack to Germany that simultaneously marshaled the Idea of War before the French socius, binding it together in the common cause of national defense. Lyautey understood that exercising political and military power was not “a matter of destroying [people], but transforming them” (qtd. in Wright 16). Lyautey’s self-declared infatuation with urbanity was rooted in a conviction that cities, in their ability to partition the space of social exchanges, constituted a “pacifist arsenal” capable of segregating, harmonizing, and reconstructing social structures and ways of life. The Colonel was not alone in his thinking. In fact, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the work of French scholars, like the vastly influential 1894 book by Jean Izoulet, La cité moderne et la métaphisique de la sociologie, had focused on achieving social order through careful urban design and strict social policies. “Issues as varied as the low national birthrate, poor industrial productivity, class antagonisms, inadequate housing stock, and a perceived decline in national prestige since the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war, all these had urbanistic implications” (Wright 17). Whereas the tenuous political strength of regional administrators in France prevented these theories from being implemented on French soil, the pressing need to control Morocco made the Western Mahgreb a fertile culture for experimentation. Constantly referring to his initiatives as progressive and contrasting them with the intransigence and torpidity of legislature in the métropole, Lyautey sought to demonstrate how French inventiveness and power, if nourished by a strong political system, could continue to stand at the forefront of the world. The French needed only to secure their traditional values through new, clearly planned cities, a spirited and forceful government (like his own), and a consolidated socius, in order to become, once more, a great nation and empire.

 

The colonization of Morocco, decided in the privacy of a government office, could only perform as an image of French strength and stability if it was cast in the realm of the visible and offered up for the world’s consumption. Lyautey knew his primary task was to produce evidence of his administration’s ability to maintain a “definitive presence” in Morocco–in other words, of his capacity to control space in time. Many options were initially shuffled, from tourism to magazines, but none could be mobilized without having an object to “show.” At a fundamental and symbolic level, even before considerations of urbanity as a tool to mold social patterns, architecture was a perfect vehicle to carry out Lyautey’s orders, insofar as its relationship to the ground responded to the 19th century’s technology of war–one that emphasized victory as the permanent acquisition of territorial gains. Architecture offered Lyautey a means to guarantee the extended temporal presence of France in North Western Africa.³

 

By grounding French structures in Casablanca, Lyautey was very consciously making visible the new status of the Moroccan geography. The first military barracks, erected around the old medina, were quickly followed by a full blown national Architecture and Urbanism program that legislated the growth and aesthetic character of all major Moroccan towns. French architects like Henry Prost, Joseph Marrast, Adrien Laforgue, and Albert Laprade were handpicked, summoned to serve as functionaries of the state, and charged with all the public commissions. In their hands lay the responsibility of transforming the physical milieu to convey the new political order. The approach seemed to yield positive results. On November 4, 1911, after much haggling with Germany and Spain, France was “given” rights to a protectorship over Morocoo in exchange for ceding parts of French Congo to Germany and revising Franco-Spanish borders in the Mahgreb. Nonetheless, international tensions continued, and, in 1912, Poincaré had promoted Lyautey to Résident-Général of Morocco and head of the Army, so long as he could channel and mold social and economic desires and consolidate the success of the French occupation.

 

To control architectural production, Lyautey immediately set up two government offices that would wield uncontested command over Moroccan cities’ patterns of growth, infrastructure, and aesthetic character. In 1912 he founded the Bureau of Fine Arts, appointed Tranchant de Lunel as director, and “granted him unprecedented powers, greater than anywhere else in the French-speaking world, to regulate new construction and restore existing buildings in the Moroccan medinas and mellas (Wright 130). In addition, in 1913, Lyautey established the Architecture and Urbanism Department under the direction of Henry Prost, to devise master plans for the new towns, draft zoning ordinances, and design all public structures, and canonize styles. The effect was the production of perfectly controlled urban environments. Casablanca sprang up as a veritable phantasmagoria, in perfect communion with the aims of the state.

 

Perception is Reality

 

Prost and Lyautey were convinced that their city would soon become the New York of Africa, through a convenient marriage of architectonic aesthetizations of politics and iron-fisted socio-economic policies. Unfortunately, the main objective of their collaboration–to make an international presentation of the solidity of the French Empire to the world in the face of imminent war–was dramatically behind schedule. By 1917, when Prost’s team finished drafting the master plan for Casablanca’s monumental central square (the Grand Place) World War I was well underway, placing enormous economic burdens on France and its colonies. Architecture, as an effective visualization technology of politics, had been rendered outmoded by the speed of war: There were simply no funds to build Casablanca. However, instead of postponing construction until the finances were made available, colonial administrators opted for increasing the speed of construction at all costs. Lyautey, under the battle cry “every quarry spares me a battalion” (Marrast 54), ordered the acceleration of building projects on course, and the immediate initiation of new works. The result was Prost’s “architecture en surface” where only the facades of buildings were constructed to create the “appearance” of a coherent city. The rest would be “filled in” when funds were made available. The intention was clear, and it was quite obviously Haussmanian: the surface of architecture would be spread over the city like a varnish to cover its discontinuities. A surface rendition of unity, a new reality, spreading over the dismembering city. The foremost task of architects was shifting from their traditional role as organizers and distributers of programmatic activities in space, to a new and awkward responsibility to produce the stage sets of a photographically ordered, almost two-dimensional, city.

 

Such was the rush to get from design to finished city, that in documents such as Prost’s Grand Place plan, certain key structures, like the edifice facing the Hotel de Ville, were simply blocked out, but contained no indication of what program they were to house.

 

Figure 9: Master plan for the Grand Place Casablanca, Henry Prost and Jean Marrast, 1914-1917 (from Wright, The Politics of Design)

 

Designing on the run, architects valued aesthetic clarity over content. What initially seemed a strategic refusal to accept reality was actually a deliberate effort to construct an alternate reality, which was deemed essential for the survival of the empire. Architecture was marshaled to represent France’s ability to endure war with spirited confidence and full command. Lyautey could not turn back. Forced to keep up with the pace of war and to design at an accelerated rate, architects had to draw from conventions and ready-made solutions, to install meaning rather than to excavate it, to produce the real. When Lyautey was called back to France in 1925, he left behind a Casablanca that had nearly tripled its population, and that boasted a new “ville moderne,” and a scenographically remodeled Casbah.

 

Figures 10 and 11: Aerial views of Casablanca taken in 1907 from a reconnaissance balloon by Lieutenant Bienvenue, and in 1928 from an airplane by Marcelin Flandrin (from: Flandrin, Casablanca Rétro).

 

Notwithstanding the strategically choreographic maneuverings carried out in Morocco to demonstrate military superiority without physical confrontation, World War I broke out in 1914. It took the death of millions of men, three years of trench warfare, and the near exhaustion of the industrial production machine (the Allied effort almost came to a halt a year into the conflict due to scarcity in munitions), to make commanders realize that the technological advances of weaponry had transformed the logics of battle beyond their comprehension. Soldiers who had initially been sent into battle in bright uniforms (offsprings of the 17th and 18th century when smoke in the field made it difficult to discern your friends from your foes), were rapidly clothed in earthly tones to blur their contours against the desolate topography of no-man’s-land. To look beyond to the other trench meant being seen, and whatever was visible was the potential target of artillery and snipers. These limitations on the utility of human vision and hand-to-hand combat prompted the production of technologically mediated images of the battlefield, inducing a transformation of the dominant field of perception and space/time conceptualizations.⁴ The increased replacement of the battlefield’s topography with reproductions, the necessary reliance on imaging devices given the inability to depend on the soldier’s direct vision in conflicts where targets were literally out of sight, had a noted effect crucial to our understanding of Casablanca: The diminished relevance of the territory (of space in time), and the increased importance of speed (which collapses space and time into motion, as does cinema) as a primary register of reality.

 

Already during World War I, photographic technology had proved quite attuned to the new perceptual exigencies of the war machine (there were regular air reconnaissance operations carried out, especially by the US expeditionary corps, to document troop movements). A veritable coupling of the art of war and the art of chronophotography was being achieved that rapidly turned film into a weapon. According to Paul Virilio, the possibility of this amalgam was rooted in the similitude of space-time distortions produced by technological advances in modern war and in cinema:

 

[T]he military voyeur is handicapped by the slowness with which he scans a field of action overstretched by the dynamic revolution of weaponry and mass transport.... For the disappearance of the proximity effect in the prosthesis of accelerated travel made it necessary to create a wholly simulated appearance that would restore three-dimensionality to the message in full.... [T]his miniaturization of chronological meaning was the direct result of a military technology in which events always unfold in theoretical time. As in cinema, what happens is governed not by a single space-time principle but by its relative and contingent distortion, the capacity of repressive response depending upon the power of anticipation. (59-60)

 

As the cataclysmic events of the Great War unfolded, the trust placed on the ability of spatial technologies to control the crowd was put into crisis: The inertia of physical barriers could not match the explosive power of new projectiles. However, French officials insisted on the relevance of urbanity. But, because of the exigencies of the war, they were forced to rely on the image of urbanity over its real presence, to convey the idea

 

Figure 12: Poster for the 1917 exhibit of Morroccan art organized by Lyautey’s administration in Casablanca. The profits went to benefit wartime construction.

 

of France’s long term presence in Morocco. Prompted by the critical importance of convincing the world that French Casablanca was a reality, even if it was not a finished product, the colonial government deployed an aggressive publicity campaign, hiring travel writers, photographers, poster artists, and filmmakers. As early as 1908, journalists, like Reginald Rankin of the London Times, were regularly sent to the city to report on current events. The Franco-Moroccan Exposition (1915) held in Casablanca with the intention to “demonstrate France’s determination to maintain the white city” (Cohen and Eleb 19) triggered the first comprehensive photographic documentation of Moroccan buildings and cities–other similar exhibits would follow regularly. Official journals like La Renaissance du Marocwere founded with the objective of disseminating the image of French Morocco, and of lauding the work of French professionals (architects were deliberately compared to renaissance masters, salvaging and re-interpreting the Islamic past). In this and other similar periodicals, French-built cities were continuously described as generating the kind of civic morality needed in France at the time.

 

Just as the city wall had at once been a physical instrument of military deterrence that literally contained the socius, Casablanca had been constructed as a spectacular deterrence mechanism that would unite France under a single effort. But it was becoming increasingly evident that the political task of the city was being carried out in other fields of endeavor. The gap in temporality between the political commission and the architectural delivery was being filled in, almost imperceptibly, by photographs and written accounts that were twice-removed from the real. But in these photographs, the memory of the Idea of War was alive, much more alive than in the actual cities. In fact, photography could already be classified as a military weapon. Photography, as a medium, was not only the primary source of military surveillance, but also the new synthetic battlefield. Children would no longer have to be sent to view the spectacle of war. It could be delivered to them with the same intensity as it was experienced by military commanders behind the lines: in pictures (and, not much later, in moving pictures). Under the camera’s eye, architecture fused into the new simulated territories, no longer as a material substance, but as an ethereal phenomenon symbolically designating ownership, and certifying the verity of the new representations. Conspicuously, writers such as Pierre Mac Orlan would describe Casablanca not as a physical presence, but as an essence, a symbol of French prowess: “Endowed with all that modern industry can provide, this spontaneous phenomenon of French energy [is Casablanca]” (qtd. in Cohen and Eleb 19). But the spectacular construction was not as spontaneous as the French writer would have liked: its production required such a slow gestation that the city’s “presencing” in the real would only come after the Great War it was meant to deter, as a kind of flashback of it. Mac Orlan’s prose, published in 1934, veiled the fact that the city’s construction had been 27 years in the making, and that many official buildings were still unfinished.

 

Figures 13 and 14: View of the corner of Bouskoura and Galiéi Streets towards the Grand Place in 1926 and 1928 respectively. The Hotel des Postes can be seen terminating the axis, but most structures remain unfinished (from: Flandrin, Casablanca Rétro).

 

Lyautey had originally thought of the flourishing tourist industry as a means to exhibit his urbanistic prowess and to boost the economy. His contention was that “since the recent, intense development of large-scale tourism, the presentation of a country’s beauty has taken on an economic importance of the first order. To attract a large tourist population is to gain everything for both the public and the private budgets” (qtd. in Wright 134). Tourism had the added advantage that it effectively held the tourist’s sight captive, from official monument, to canonized local quarters, to scenographic French boulevards and plazas. To create a desire for the French public to visit Morocco, Lyautey sent his architects to Paris to reconstruct fragments of the Empire. In 1925, Tranchant de Lunel would design the Moroccan section of the North African Pavilion for the Arts Déco exhibition, and in 1931 a large architectural display was erected at the 1931 Colonial Exhibit. But tourism was still too selective and expensive, entailing long trips from Marseilles to Oran and then to Casablanca. However, the touristic gaze could be molded, controlled, and allowed to perceive the colonies, without actual travel, through representation. The added advantage was that the surface rendition of unity ushered in by Prost’s architecture en surface could be made to appear whole and complete. With the disappearance of the “proximity effect,” there was a window of opportunity to move from the prolonged constructive temporality of Architecture, to wholly simulated, instant environments that could fill in the discontinuities of the real city. It was becoming increasingly evident that architecture could no longer serve either as a primary means of military deterrence nor as a sufficiently expedient political technology. As “Countries, including Britain, would down their traditional means of defense and concentrated on research into perception” (Virilio 50), Lyautey would invest in alternative means to propagate the idea of order embodied in his Casablanca. He invited Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, acclaimed travel writers of the 20s and 30s, to Morocco, so that they might, through their work, foment the touristic visions of Morocco. The Tharauds willingly came under the mandates of the colonial administration–probably thinking they were helping bring morale back to the disconcerted French socius–and produced a wealth of popular accounts on Moroccan cities. The two brothers traveled much of the Mahgreb (and the globe for that matter) in military planes, peering down at the work of the empire from the sky, as their compatriot fighter pilots had targeted objectives with their guns and cameras during World War I. What is interesting in the work of the Tharauds is that, as Emily Apter has pointed out, they repeatedly described their aeronautic eye as a cinematograph panning across the landscape, evidencing the fact that filmic vision had already become the predominant perceptual mode of their era.

 

In 1930 Josef Von Sternberg released his film Morocco, and in his footsteps, a multitude of filmmakers were enticed to use Lyautey’s theatrical cities as backdrops to their scenes. During the 30s, “the film crew had become such a commonplace appearance in the Moroccan landscape that Wyndham Lewis dedicated an entire section of his jaundiced Moroccan Travelogue Journey into Barbery to a pastiche of what he called ‘film-filibusters,’ industry magnates who ‘send their troupes (not troops) merely to afford their sham-sheiks a Hispano-Mauresque photographic setting’” (Apter 22). The residual components of an unfinished Casablanca were being reconstituted according to a new cinematic logic which defied single space-time relationships, and which was increasingly independent of the ground, of space, and of architecture. In his 1921 essay entitled “Grossissement,” Jean Epstein theorized this displacement from space to cinema as rooted in the cinematograph’s ability to subject time to technical manipulation–a quality paralleled by spatial technologies. Giovanni Pastrone, the Italian Futurist filmmaker, contemporary of Epstein, saw the camera not as an instrument to produce realistic portraits but as an instrument to falsify dimensions. With film cameras the spectator’s viewpoint could be mobile, in communion with the speed of moving objects. Epstein dreamt of being inside his characters, of moving with them and seeing what they saw. For Virilio, what Epstein and Pastrone saw as manipulation was in effect the production of a new kind of understanding of reality, one that would no longer be based on space/time conceptualizations, but on speed:

 

[W]hat was "false" in cinema was no longer the effect of accelerated perspective but the very depth itself, the temporal distance of the projected space. Many years later, the electronic light of laser holography and integrated-circuit computer graphics would confirm this relativity in which speed appears as the primal magnitude of the image and thus as the source of its depth. (Virilio 16)

 

With World War II this new conception of reality became predominant, as the globe’s geography became increasingly commensurate with cinematic samplings, and millions of attentive viewers lived the terror of battlefields, once scattered across the globe, now perceived simultaneously, collapsed onto the silver screen via news reels and war propaganda. By the time the next world war was brooding, it was clear that speed of communication (the kind of speed that Architecture could not deliver) was a determinant factor in victory. In speed lay the new possibility of military superiority. Up until the nineteenth century, permanent military fortifications had produced the effect of surprise with the help of booby traps, ditches, and moving gates or walls. Where the enemy was once startled by spectacular architectures, now he would be paralyzed by the sudden appearance of images and signs on monitor screens that simulated the field of battle. As the world’s reality was supplanted by surrogate military technologies, cinema came under the category of weapons, not because of its ability to depict battles, but because of its capacity to create surprise.⁵ In Lyautey’s mobilization of Casablanca as a vehicle of the Idea of War, where architecture was inevitably superseded by cinema, we find a rare film-city, a strange hybrid prefiguring the transformation in political technologies from architecture to film, from physical space to filmic time/space simultaneity, and finally to speed. Here we find evidence of how architecture, serving outdated political technologies of territorial conquest, proved inefficient and was supplanted by more effective mechanisms of propaganda: war films.

 

Ordering the New Reality

 

In the late 1930s and early 40s, when the US felt the danger of war approaching, and fears of unpredictable mass actions causing social breakdown began to resurface, spatial technologies could no longer be considered as viable solutions to curb internal political weaknesses. With the pressing need to wake its population to the new reality of industrialized production and destruction, the political machine turned not to architects but to movie producers. Whereas French architects and urbanists had sought to present a new world order to their compatriots by attempting to actually change the world, the American moviemakers focused on altering people’s perception of reality in order to achieve similar goals. The Hollywood studios, understanding that their own distribution networks and economic survival were at stake, answered the call to arms with a rich assortment of war movies that focused on bringing the aspirations and desires of the population closer to the political goals of the state. The particular attraction of film was that it comfortably slid under the skin (or should we say pupils) of a socius increasingly accustomed to equating reality with their cinematic perceptions of the world. Film, as a technology of politics, was unburdened by the immobility and territorial constraints of architecture. It was almost instantaneous, affecting the entire population simultaneously, and offering as commodities pure emotions and ideas.

 

With lines as unburdened by sophistication as Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet)’s “My dear Rick, when will you realize that in this world, today, isolationism is no longer a practical policy,” Casablanca informed American audiences about the new contingencies of international affairs. The message reached the entire population almost instantly. Between 1930 and 1945 Hollywood’s film industry dominated the American socius’ field of perception with its visual entertainment products. Eighty million citizens, more than half of the US population at the time, crowded movie houses every week, drawing 83 percent of the total spent on recreation by Americans. Television, still in its infancy, remained a luxury for the majority–only 8,000 US homes had TV sets in 1946 (Ray 25-26, 132). Hollywood held distribution networks that spanned the world, making the profits reaped internationally by Casablanca upon release roughly equal US takings–the production, which had cost little over a million dollars, made almost six million dollars at the box office.

 

Casablanca‘s emphasis was, again, not on depicting the spaces of the original (the French city), but on creating a new city that could generate simple emotions in the spectator thanks to elementary scale contrasts (small, tortuous city streets to

 

Figure 15: Warner Bros. 1942 poster

 

express confinement, against a vast airport, which, occupying a space comparable to the entire city, stood as the allegory of freedom). The world was at war, and Casablancawas fired at the population to reinforce the idea of a collective project, and of particular values and codes that stood in contrast to those of other nations. The film was aimed at uniting the nation, rallying it against the forces that endangered traditional societal bonds. It was clear to producers that the film’s potential strength would not come from its photo-realistic depictions of the city, but from its ability to surprise the general public. When, on November 8, 1942, the allies landed in Casablanca, final touches on the film were dropped to speed up release and divert the public’s attention away from the real events and into the movie houses. Eighteen days after the incident, American movie houses were playing the film, and newspapers were filled with advertisements reading “Warner’s Split-Second Timing! ‘Casablanca’: The Army’s got Casablanca–and so have Warner Bros!” Inside the dark theaters, the camera’s lens became America’s prosthetic eye, and where there once was an incomprehensible and chaotic world, now a clear image of right and wrong came sharply into focus.

 

The stamina exemplified in the building of Lyautey’s city and Curtiz’s film drew its lifeblood from an understanding that war “consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the ‘immateriality’ of perceptual fields” (Virilio 7). This is an archetypal military concept, yet, in Casablanca, its logic appears to us in relation to the delirium of industrialized production, and acquires new meaning and relevance. What is fascinating, and at the same time terrifying, about the American and French mobilizations of Casablanca is that they used aesthetics that were fundamentally militaristic as a means to solve socio-political problems. Both summoned the Idea of War as a reductivist filter of state affairs, where clear distinctions between what is correct and good, and what is deviant and bad were established and propagated, by responding to political demands with the theatrics of warfare. The surprise that befell on French colonial administrators when they realized their city was not ready in time to prevent war, was matched by the impotence and frustration of French generals, when, unable to break the enemy’s trench lines, they failed to understand that the strategies of 19th century offensives had become obsolete with the advent of long-range automatic weapons. Industrial production had delaminated the human senses, and projected them beyond time and space, subverting the old ways of experiencing the world. If reality is perception, the impulses sent by the new photographic eyes of the armies to the minds of their fellow men were visions of a whole new universe. Architecture, as a structure that, in a strange double motion, casts the condition of the ground in the visible by standing over it and veiling it, could not stand on top of this new, infinitely expanding dominion. Cinema, however, by technologically collapsing time/space relationships in terms of speed, was capable of delimiting and describing this new topography, and rendering it in the visible. As in architecture, the ability of cinema to perform its exegesis of the new ground could only be carried out by covering it, by concealing the original. Theoreticians like Virilio have read this phenomenon as causing the “disappearance” or the “disintegration” of “things and places,” but we must differ. Just as the ground remains under buildings allowing them to stand, territories and space remain under the surface of film as its supporting scaffolding. In Casablanca one can perceive the sequence unfolding, from ground to architecture to film, as a function of war. Each vehicle of representation, forged in accordance to the conditions of reality, was superseded when the general perception of that reality changed. The thread that guides us through this protean sequence is politics, for the changing perceptions of reality ushered in with each evolution of communication technologies threatened chaos and instigated the need to establish order. The political deployment of the Idea of War in architectural or filmic vehicles, as a means to structure disorder, marks the extension of perceptual realities that characterize our contemporary condition. Casablanca, as rendered in stone or film, does not exemplify the ending and the beginning of mutually exclusive realities, but the buttressing simultaneity of perceptions that constitute our understanding of the world today, from the immediacy of the spaces we live in, to the poliverses of overlapping global territories we inhabit.

 

Notes

 

1. The Rabat headquarters of the Bureau of Fine Arts, for example, boasted a collection of 25,000 photographs of various Moroccan buildings. See: Gwendolyn Wright., The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991) 133.

 

2. Some of the original photographic and textual references, provided by the Warner Bros. Research Department, and used as background for the film’s writers, designers, and director, are presented in Frank Miller, Casablanca: As Time Goes By–50th Anniversary Commemorative (Atlanta: Turner Publishing; [Kansas City, Mo.: Distributed by Andrews and McMeel], 1992) 45.

 

3. The dependency of a building to its site is perhaps better understood in philosophical terms. Philosophy is the construction of propositions characterized by their ability to stand up. However, the exercise of that capacity is dependent on the ground’s condition, on the structure’s supporting presence. In any case, “standing up through construction makes visible the condition of the ground” (Wigley 8). In The Architecture of Deconstruction, Mark Wigley references Heidegger’s propensity to address philosophy as a kind of architecture, and metaphysics as an “edifice” with firm “foundations,” laid on stable “ground” that must first be prepared to receive the structure. “Heidegger argues that philosophy’s original but increasingly forgotten object, ‘being’ [Sein], is also a kind of construction, a ‘presencing’ [Answesenheit] through ‘standing.’ Each of philosophy’s successive terms for ‘ground’ [Grund] designates ‘Being,’ understood as ‘presence.’ Metaphysics is the identification of the ground as ‘supporting presence’ for whatever stands like an edifice” (Wigley 8). Wigley’s analysis draws our attention to relationship between architecture and its ground in an oblique fashion: by demonstrating how philosophy, in order to perceive itself as a construction concerned with the exegesis of the structure of Being, must first perceive itself metaphorically as an architecture that renders the status of its ground perceivable, we come to understand that architecture is, in part, a technology to visualize the state of the ground.

 

4. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London and New York: Verso, 1989). Also see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983).

 

5. See Virilio 7-9, 72.

Works Cited

 

• Alberti, Leon Battista. The Ten Books of Architecture. Trans. Giacomo Leoni. London: Edward Owen, 1755; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1986.
• Apter, Emily. “The Landscape of Photogeny: Morocco in Black and White.” Architecture New York 16 (November 1996).
• Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Perf. Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and Claude Rains. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., 1942.
• Cohen, Jean-Louis, and Monique Eleb. “The Whiteness of the Surf: Casablanca.” Architecture New York 16 (November 1996).
• Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986.
• Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
• Marrast, Jean. “Maroc.” L’oeuvre de Henri Prost: Architecture et Urbanisme. Ed. Académie d’Architecture. Paris: Imprimerie du Compagnonnage, 1960.
• Miller, Frank. Casablanca: As Time Goes By–50th Anniversary Commemorative. Atlanta: Turner Publishing (Kansas City, Mo.: Distributed by Andrews and McMeel), 1992.
• Norberg-Shultz, Christian. Genius loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Place. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1986.
• Plato. Republic. Trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1967.
• Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985.
• Robertson, James C. The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Sklar, Robert. Movie Made America: A Social history of American Movies. New York: Random House, 1975.
• Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1993.
• Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London and New York: Verso, 1989.
• Gwendolyn Wright. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1991.

 

Joseph Christopher Schaub

Department of Comparative Literature
University of Maryland
Joseph_C_SCHAUB@umail.umd.edu

Introduction

 

Contemporary discussions about gender in cyberspace often rely on assumptions about the immanently liberatory potential of technology.

 

Animated image constructed by
author using Man With a
Movie Camera production stills.

 

Undoubtedly much of this enthusiasm for technology has been generated by Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” the foundational essay on cyborg subjectivity. Haraway embraces technology’s disruption of such previously stable borders as that between the organism and the machine. She is making “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries… an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the tradition of imagining a world without gender” (Haraway 150). But amid all the enthusiasm for a postgender cyberspace, it is important to remember that Haraway is not the first to imagine a world without gender in the coupling of humans and machines. The writers of the Futurist movement of the early twentieth century precede her vision, but to achieve it they called for the elimination of the feminine.

 

In an essay entitled “War, Sole Hygiene of the World,” the premiere theorist of the Italian Futurist movement, F. T. Marinetti, “specifies that the ideal universe remains devoid of women, consisting only of men and machines” (Orban 56). The passage creates a troubling obstacle for theories of the cyborg which attempt to establish a connection between the disappearance of the techno/organic boundary and the disappearance of gender. Perhaps for that reason, the Futurist roots of the cyborg have been largely ignored in the hope that the technological advances which have made the cyborg “our ontology” (Haraway 150) have eliminated Marinetti’s misogyny.

 

Instead of ignoring the Futurist roots of the cyborg, I have chosen to explore alternatives to the misogyny inherent in Marinetti’s writings on Futurism. The Russian Futurists, for example, though their platform was very similar to the Italians’ in their hatred of bourgeois conventions, differed remarkably in two areas which the Italians saw as fundamental for escaping those conventions: the glorification of war and the demonization of women. Particularly in the work of Dziga Vertov, filmmaker and theorist of the early Soviet era, the anti-feminist stance of the Italian Futurists is rejected in favor of a representational strategy that privileges women as filmic subjects without reinforcing patterns of visual pleasure that support bourgeois patriarchal ideology. In what follows I will examine the traces of Futurism that inform Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and discuss the way that Vertov’s cyborg construction, the Kino Eye, destabilizes the gender hierarchy that underlies bourgeois capitalism without eliminating women from the world of the text. By foregrounding its own process of production, and displaying both men and women involved in creating the film, Man With a Movie Camera radically departs from the bourgeois conventions which all Futurists despised; but it does so without scapegoating women.

 

Man With a Movie Camera is the result of Vertov’s ten-year effort to work out a theory of technologically-assisted vision. “Kino-Eye” is the name he gave to his the ory, and it involves not only a disappearance of the border between the camera and the eye but a dissolution in the stages separating the process of film production as well. Vertov’s cameraman and brother, Mikhail Kaufman, appears in the film as often as Vertov’s editor and wife, Elizaveta Svilova. As a historical representation of the cyborg that promotes strategies for minimizing the hierarchical stratification of gender, the film serves as a model for contemporary discussions of postgender cyberspace . Rather than eliminating one or both genders in a human/machine merger, Vertov balances the masculine and feminine contributions to the production of meaning in what may be the first revolutionary cybertext, Man With a Movie Camera, with th e first revolutionary cyborg, the Kino-Eye.

 

The Futurist Roots of the Cyborg

 

After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.

 

–Luigi Russolo

 

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” outlines a number of boundaries that have been broken by the late twentieth century in the United States. For discussions of the cyborg, the most important of these is the distinction between organism and machine which she says is now “thoroughly ambiguous” (152). As Haraway notes, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves, frighteningly inert” (152). In creating a postmodern cyborg subjectivity, Haraway acknowledges changes in our conception of the various binary structures which modernist notions of subjectivity were founded upon. High modernist works such as The Scream illustrate the split in the subject, a division between the subject’s inside and outside, which the modernists define as alienation. This division and its implications “are no longer appropriate to the world of the postmodern,” as Fredric Jameson notes (14). Strict distinctions between signifier and signified, subject and object, reality and representation have collapsed in the wake of the late twentieth century’s poststructuralist critique. Haraway’s extension of this critique into the line dividing organic and inorganic matter is as much a product of postmodern/poststructuralist thinking as a contribution to it. Likewise, when Haraway states that “the cyborg is a creature in a postgender world” (150), she acknowledges the fragmentation of gender as a binary structure, as well.

 

The early Futurists would have found it difficult to engage in this particular border dispute. As modernists they were thoroughly entrenched in the kind of binary thinking that separated organic from inorganic and masculinity from femininity. As a result their conception of the cyborg is only apparent through their pairings of men and machines in their art. In “The Founding Manifesto of Futurism,” Marinetti makes clear that man with machine is the subject of the future. “We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth” (21), Marinetti writes in point number 5. This follows the oft-quoted statement in point number 4 which affirms that a roaring motorcar is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. For Marinetti the future was guaranteed to “Man” by his insoluble bond to machines. Woman and femininity belonged to the past, to the 19th century. The connection with women and institutions of the past is made obvious in point number 10, which reads, “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice” (22). The future belonged to men.

 

The Russian Futurists were different, though, like the Italians, they disdained the past and the various institutions which preserved it. Their founding manifesto reads, “The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity” (B urliuk et al 51). But Russian Futurism and Italian Futurism were never as closely aligned as their common name would suggest. In his 1927 article, “We Are the Futurists,” Osip Brik acerbically states, “Russian Futurists arose long before Marinetti becam e well known in Russia. And when Marinetti came to Russia in January 1914, the Russian Futurists met him with complete animosity (252-252). Still, Brik concedes that the Russian Futurists “have made use of certain of the Italian Futurist’s slogans…”(Burliuk 252). He goes on to list the points which the Russians had adopted from Marinetti’s founding manifesto. The list contains points 1 through 4. It skips points 5 and 6, then includes points 7 and 8, but leaves out 9, 10 and 11 (Burliuk 252).

 

The points Brik repudiates in this crucial essay reveal the stark differences between Russian and Italian Futurism. Point number 5, which hymns the “man at the wheel,” has already been discussed, as has point 10, which vows to destroy feminism, as well as museums, libraries, and academies. Perhaps the most objectionable notions, though, are contained in point 9. It reads: “We will g lorify war–the world’s only hygiene–militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman” (Marinetti 22). The Russian Futurists never relied on the glorification of war or misogyny to advance their platform celebrating humanity’s union with technology. The intention behind Russian Futurist art was “not the hymning of technology, but its control in the name of the interests of humanity” (Mayakofsky 35).

 

In the work of Dziga Vertov, we can see how the Russian Futurists recuperated the essentially cyborg notion of combining technology and humanity from the misogynist trap into which the Italians fell. Vertov’s cyborg construction was originally conceived as a device for enhancing human optics, as this 1923 statement sug gests: “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it” (17). But Kino-Eye’s first person address already suggests a merger between human and machine, something that would be further explored and complicated i n Vertov’s later writings.

 

By the time Man With a Movie Camera was made, Vertov’s conception of the Kino-Eye was divided into the three stages of the production process that he and his collaborators used to create their films. In 1929, Vertov wrote: “Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film wit h the camera) + kino-organization (I edit)” (87). These three stages correspond perfectly to the three positions occupied by Elizaveta Svilova, Dziga Vertov, and Mikhail Kaufman, collectively known as “The Council of Three” (12).

 

After Vertov, Kino-Eye.

 

As the camera-man, and Vertov’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman fulfilled the kino-seeing function, Vertov himself, as director, was responsible for what was shot, the kino-writing, and Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s wife, edited their pieces.

 

The Kino-Eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning. Those positions were obviously chosen so that equitable contrib utions could be made from representatives of each gender. (The apparently uneven number of males and females in the Council of Three will be explained later, in light of the importance of editing in Soviet filmmaking, relative to the other stages of pro duction.) It is the first example of a theory of the cyborg that does not rely on a misogynistic eradication of the feminine in order to unite man and machine. In order to see how the Kino-Eye works in a film text we must now examine Man With a Mo vie Camera.

 

Man With a Movie Camera

 

After Vertov, Kino-Eye.

 

As the last of Vertov’s silent films, Man With a Movie Camera stands at the peak of the Soviet avant garde film movement of the twenties, and extends the most thorough vision of Vertov’s understanding of the combination of the human and the machine implicit in the term Kino-Eye. The subject of Man With a Movie Camera is the cyborg; it is not “man.” Vertov ass ociated man as subject with the bourgeois filmmaking he hoped to supplant with Kino-Eye filmmaking. In a polemical treatise reminiscient of the early Futurist writings, Vertov attacks the mainstream tradition of the narrative “film-drama” which draws upo n previous bourgeois conventions, such as the romance and psychological novel. Vertov writes, “the ‘psychological’ prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine.” In banishing the conventio ns of bourgeois cinema, Vertov also eliminates the human character, as he acknowledges in this statement: “For his inability to control his movements. We temporarily exclude man as a subject for film” (7).

 

Vertov’s exclusion of “man” as a subject for film has a double meaning. Not only does it allude to the need for a filmic subject able to transcend the imprecision of the traditi onal psychologically motivated narrative, but this same subject must not be gendered in a way which implicates the viewer in the logic of the look so essential to maintaining power relationships in patriarchal culture. It is the look, or “gaze,” and its obvious association with scopophilic pleasure, which Laura Mulvey has discussed as essential to maintaining patriarchal power relationships. Mulvey writes:

 

Woman... stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. (15)

 

This is where Man With a Movie Camerapresents the greatest challenge to mainstream filmmaking. While excluding man as subject of the film, Vertov also includes woman as maker of meaning.

 

Man With a Movie Camera begins with a shot of a movie camera, facing the viewer, and from out of the top of the camera a miniature Mikhail Kaufman climbs with his camera and tripod, aims it at the offscreen space to the right, and begins to crank. A cut reveals the top of a building, which, according to the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema, where the spectator identifies with the look of a character, is presumably the object the came raman is filming. But already this simple association begins to subvert those conventions it appears to follow, as Judith Mayne points out in her analysis of this segment:

 

Production stills, Man With a Movie Camera.

 

The “how” precedes the “what”; the image is designated as a product of the cinematic process, and not as a reflection of a world outside that of the film. The following two shots repeat a similar pattern with slight differences. In shot three, the cameraman is seen at an increased distance; and the angle of shot four, a la mppost, is slightly different from the angle of shot two. A puzzling reversal occurs as well: the off-center but nonetheless continuous match between shots one and two is impossible between shots three and four, since in shot three the cameraman picks u p his equipment and moves off-screen. Thus a sense of continuity is established and violated at the same time (Mayne 159).

 

Following these four brief shots, we see the cameraman, now in scale with his surroundings, entering the movie theater through the curtains and heading to the projection booth. He then threads the projector with what the logic of continuity driven cinema would have us believe is the film he has just exposed. This completely elides the processes in between shooting and screening a film.

 

Here the particulars of the filmmaking process are not hidden to disguise aspects of the film’s production as in mainstream narrative cinema, which does not wish to jeopardize th e viewer’s pleasure, but rather to avoid the possibility of showing that process so completely that a narrative centered on filmic production might arise from the very attempt to subvert traditional narrative. Again, a sense of continuity is established and violated. This pattern of foregrounding the process of production appears again and again throughout the film, because “the film aims to take the spectator from a position of unreflective consumption of cinema to one of actively producing the film’s meaning” (Crofts and Rose 15). This is a crucial point, and will be returned to shortly, but I will first address a problem regarding the opening sequence.

 

Reading the opening sequence as a narrative preliminary to the rest of the film sets up the cameraman as the central character which would then appear to violate Vertov’s exclusion of “man” as a subject of film, and reinstitute the gendered hierarchy which Mulvey critiques. However, it soon becomes apparent through scenes such as the one in which a young woman’s eyes blinking are intercut with venetian blinds opening and closing that there is no central characte r to this film. In fact it is possible to determine this even before the venetian blind scene as Mayne displays in stating:

 

From the very beginning... the centrality of the cameraman's vision is put into question, since he moves out of frame in the third shot of the film. In other words, the cameraman cannot be equated with a central character, or even the central narrating i ntelligence of a narrative film, since visual perspective is not localized in a single figure, but dispersed through multiple perspectives. (162)

 

This notion of the visual subject dispersed through multiple perspectives is as fundamental to an understanding of the Kino-Eye as an essentially cyborg construction as the combining of human and machine, which is also seen throughout the film.

 

The Kino-Eye, then, can be understood as an ideological weapon, a cyborg combination of human and movie camera, which both creates and depends upon multiple perspectives for its interpretation and communication. In taking the spectator from the position of passive consumer to active producer of cinematic meaning, the K ino-Eye functions as a contagious “virus,” contained in the film text. Once infected by it the viewer becomes Kino-Eye, “challenging the human eye’s visual representation of the world and offering its own ‘I see’” (Mayne 21). Through a new form of visua lization it begins to destabilize the various hierarchies which patriarchal capitalism depends upon for maintaining hegemonic dominance.

 

Animated image constructed by
author using Man With a
Movie Camera production stills.

 

The most prevalent hierarchy destabilized is gender. Several writers have commented on the complex way that gender is questioned in Man With a Movie Camerasince most of the subjects of the camera are women. Kaufman is the human figure who appears most frequently in the film, but he never appears in close-up, thereby making character identification quite difficult, and he never appears without his camera, which suggests that he is not gendered male, but cyborg. In other words he is not man as bearer of the look, but man, bearer of the camera. Even more important, though, is the presence of Vertov’s wife and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, at the editing table creating cinematic meaning from ribbons of celluloid.

 

Svilova appears about 21 minutes, or one-third of the way into this 66-minute film, seated at her editing table, with scissors in hand, cutting the film and cement-splicing it into new patterns. About one minute before she appears a series of freeze-frame stills, beginning with a horse pulling a carriage and ending with close-up faces of people, appears for the first time in the film. S ince Man With a Movie Camera uses all manner of camera and editing techniques, the use of freeze-frames isn’t unusual. But in this instance the stills prepare us for a pseudo-identification with Svilova’s “gaze,” since she sees the film firs t as an extensive strip of separate images. In some of the images we even see the perforated sprocket holes at the edge of the frame, completely demystifying the illusion of cinematic continuity as well as mimesis.

 

Svilova’s appearance as the editor in this film is somewhat more complex than Kaufman’s appearance as cameraman because of the place that editing had in the hierarchy of Soviet s ilent film theory. In numerous articles advanced by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, and Vertov, editing, or “montage,” was given prominence as the most important aspect of filmmaking. Pudovkin’s famous quote that, “the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material” (Leyda 211), serves as a not-so-subtle reminder of the place of editing, and of cinematography in the filmmaking process of the early Soviets. However, it may be pointed out that the fi lm is entitled Man With a Movie Camera, not “Woman With a Pair of Scissors.” The important thing here is not so much whether the cameraman or the editor serves as the privileged locus of signifying practice, rather it is the way in which the gender hierarchy is destabilized by the Kino-Eye, which must now include the eyes of the editor as part of its totality.

 

Further examples of the way that gender is destabilized by the Kino-Eye include the ambiguous nature of the eye itself when reflected in the lens of the camera. Lynne Kirby, in “From Marinetti to Vertov: Woman on the Track of Avant-Garde Representation,” argues that the eye we see superimposed over the camera lens is not Kaufman’s, but rather the eye of a woman who is awakened by a train passing over the cameraman who lies on the tracks. According to Kirby, “The association of the camera lens and shutter with the woman’s eye is the most frequently cited example of the self-reflexive operations of Vertov’s film. That this is first a woman’s eye, however is often overlooked” (313). For Kirby, the Kino-Eye is a feminine machine set in motion, or awakened by the passing of a train over the body of the cameraman. But I see a more gender-neutral identity for the Kino-Eye. In the sequence of shots Kirby cites (approximately eight and a half minutes into the film), the cameraman does appear to be run over by the train at the very point when a woman wakes and begins to look around. But immediately following the shots comprising his being run over, which include close-ups of his feet and head on the tracks, quickly spliced between shots of the train rushing by, the cameraman gets up unscathed and walks back to a car waiting to drive him away. The fact that the cameraman is completely unharmed by his encounter with the train rules out any possibility of perceiving this sequence as strictly violent. Kirby, however, argues that the train, the woman awakening, and more specifically the shots of her dressing which follow constitute “the setting in motion of a sexual imaginary…” (313). Indeed there are erotic undercurrents pervading this film, which doesn’t hesitate to display in fragmented form semiclad bathers at the beach, the slow motion bodies of both male and female athletes performing various feats, even a woman giving birth. But the eroticism is always mitigated by the gender-neutrality of the Kino-Eye, which does not indulge in the kind of scopophilic fantasy narrative so common in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

 

The erotic undercurrents in Man With a Movie Camera are impossible to explain using theories in which desire is either masculine or feminine, but theories of the cyborg explain the eroticism in this film quite adequately. William R. Macauley and Angel J. Gordo-Lopez, in their article “From Cognitive Psychologies to Mythologies,” discuss seduction and technological abandonment of the body through the performance artist, Stelarc: “He claims that mutilation of the body is an obligatory passage point for our communion with technological webs” (435). In light of this quote, the initial train scene, in which Kaufman appears to be run over, can be viewed as the obligatory passage point for the cameraman’s transformation into the Kino-Eye, awakened by the “mutilation” of Kaufman’s body. But in Man With a Movie Camera, the merger that occurs is as much with the awakened woman as it is with technology.

 

This is the real source of the erotic undercurrent in Man With a Movie Camera. The Kino-Eye is neither masculine nor feminine. Vertov emphasizes its hybrid nature both as a techno/organic and as a postgender creation. In her analysis of the film Kirby even suggests this by attempting to locate a “di–v ision… between a feminine and masculine voyeurism” (309). By hyphenating the word, “di–vision,” Kirby appears to be searching, not so much for two separate types of voyeurism, which the word “division” would imply, as two related types–a double visio n. Understanding the Kino-Eye as a gender-neutral, or more appropriately, androgynous human-machine construction, makes this di–vision, a scopophilic desire to understand other cyborgs, or as Vertov would put it, “the sensory exploration of the world th rough film” (14).

 

Conclusion

 

While Man With a Movie Camera has been closely examined as a Marxist and constructivist text (most notably in Stephen Croft’s and Olvia Rose’s “An Essay Towards Man With a Movie Camera”), the film’s value as a cybertext has gone largely untapped. This comes as a bit of a surprise since Dziga Vertov’s depiction of the Kino-Eye in Man With a Movie Camera has much in common with the postmodern cyborg that Donna Haraway has theorized in the “Cyborg Manifesto.” Like Haraway’s cyborg, the Kino-Eye is not dependent upon an organic ontology, an d its multiple perspectives closely resemble the heterogenous points of entry which characterize Haraway’s conception of cyborg subjectivity.

 

Italian Futurism glorified the union of man and machine, but Vertov’s Kino-Eye escaped this binary perception of gender which lead Marinetti to efface the feminine. The Kino-Eye embraces the feminine perspective and represents woman as maker of meaning in Man With a Movie Camera. Vertov’s decision to completely foreground the production process was a bold move even for an avant-garde filmmaker, since many of his contemporaries were still working largely within the narrative tradition. No less bold was his decision to emphasize the contribution of women. Man With a Movie Camera presents these two separate agendas seamlessly in a direct reversal of the Classical Hollywood style which hides the process of production. Classical Hollywood Cinema also presents woman as spectacle for masculine pleasure. The pleasure in Man With a Movie Camera begins with liberation from gender hierarchy.

 

Production still, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

 

In contemporary discussions of gender in cyberspace the equitable representation of women is not a foregone conclusion. The cyborg has done as much to reify existing stereotypes about gender as it has to eradicate them. Hyper-masculine cyborg creations potrayed by Arnold Schwarzenneger in the Terminatormovies suggest that the dream of the Italian Futurists, a world devoid of women, leaving only men and machines, rules Hollywood today. For this reason it is even more important to seek out historical representations of the cyborg that promote strategies for minimizing the hierarchical stratification of gender. In this paper I have tried to suggest that there is a wealth of relevant theory in the revolutionary work of the Russian Futurists. Vertov’s Kino-Eye is one applicable example of a responsible paradigm for managing the merger of technology and humanity.

 

Works Cited

 

• Burliuk, D., Alexander Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov. “Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” Russian Futurism Through its Manifestos, 1912-1928. Ed. Anna Lawton. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. 51-53.
• Crofts, Stephen, and Olivia Rose. “An Essay Towards Man With a Movie Camera.” Screen 18 1 (Spring 1977): 9-58.
• Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Kirby, Lynne. “From Marinetti to Vertov: Woman on the Track of Avant-Garde Representation.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 10: 309-323.
• Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Ruskin House, 1960.
• Macauley, William J, and Angel J. Gordo-Lopez. “From Cognitive Psychologies to Mythologies: Advancing Cyborg Textualities for a Narrative of Resistance.” The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1995. 433-444.
• Marinetti, F. T. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909.” Futurist Manifestos. Ed. Umbro Apollo nio. New York: Viking Press, 1970.
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Ed. Patricia Blake. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1960.
• Mayne, Judith, Kino and The Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989.
• Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 1989. 14-26.
• Orban, Clara. “Women, Futurism, and Fascism.” Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture. Ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. 52-75.
• Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises (excerpt). Futurist Manifestos. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Trans. Caroline Tisdall. New York: Viking Press, 1970.
• Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Kevin Obrien. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

 

Stephen Mamber

Department of Film/TV
University of California at Los Angeles
smamber@ucla.edu

 

…the cinematographic image is in the present only in bad films.

 

–Deleuze

 

Stanley Kubrick’s racetrack robbery caper film The Killing (1956) is a conceptual exercise in time travel.[1] Using a narrator reminiscent of Dragnet, or the impersonal narrators of Kubrick’s later films, the film goes forward in time most often in overlap, by first going backward to pick up the thread of another character’s movements earlier than where we are currently placed. There is no progress in the film, because wherever you go returns you to where you’ve already been. Once again, an early Kubrick preoccupation is evident–exactly the same might be said of The Shining or Full Metal Jacket and most of his circularly organized constructions.

 

Rather than stress the intimations of early Kubrick in The Killing, I want to explore what it does rather strikingly on its own terms–to express temporal notions of simultaneity and overlap. The ingenious, complex narrative structure is worth some examination in its own right. The Killing might be called a flashback film with no flashbacks (with one exception, as I shall discuss), an expression of the idea Deleuze has expressed so well in Cinema 2: The Time Image: that awareness of the past doesn’t depend upon flashback constructions. The Killing goes backward from the very beginning, and its end is where we start, so the entire movie is a series of elliptical goings-back.

 

To illustrate this strategy, let us resort to a chart:

 

The chart is of roughly the second half of the film, which all takes place in one day–the day of the robbery and the subsequent capture of Johnny, the leader (or should we say recapture, as a week earlier, at the start of the film, he had just been let out of jail). Each horizontal line of the chart represents the character announced by the narrator, always in terms of where they are at the start of a sequence and importantly, what time of day this action is taking place. If a segment shifts location or time, the narrator generally offers us the particulars, and most sequences end as well with another announcement of time (“Nikki was dead at 4:23”). By following these indicators, we can construct the chart. Each colored rectangle represents a narrative sequence; the gaps indicate temporal breaks. To “read” each line from top to bottom is to go through all of the film on the day of the race. Ordinarily we would have to line up the sequences in time, as shown in this chart. When do we go backwards? By a lot or a little? And more importantly, when do we go back over time we have already seen elsewhere or by some other point of view? To see that on the chart, one must construct vertical time slices after we’ve seen all the pieces. When we do, as we might expect, the overlap and the expressions of simultaneity are considerable.

 

The film has some interesting means to express simultaneity, generally through repetition, which perhaps keeps it from being completely impossible to follow. However, its genius lies in the conceptual nature of this enterprise, the glimpses of a grand design which are far larger than the simple signs that can initiate the investigation.

 

Easy-to-read repetitions obviously include the racetrack announcer, who can tell us that the seventh race is about to begin or a horse is down. Others include repetitions of dialogue, such as Maurice the Wrestler’s staged racial epithet as he begins to cause a scene. When these repetitions occur, we know we are back where we’ve been, free now to see another piece of the puzzle. Some use of this kind of construction is not unique to The Killing. What is unique is the extent to which it becomes the organizing principle of the work. One clear predecessor (as for so many movies) is Citizen Kane, whose flashback structure also has pointed overlaps–Susan’s opera debut being shown twice would be one instance among many. It’s not for nothing that Kane and The Killing both make overt use of the jigsaw puzzle metaphor, as both films also make clear that their pieces aren’t going to fit. Also, what constitutes a “piece” becomes a nice problem, as particularly in The Killing, we often might not be sure where and how the overlaps are coming. There is, in fact, only one true flashback in the film, tossed in like one of those moments in a jazz improvisation where the melody is played straight, to show that the person breaking the rules knows what they are. That one flashback occurs in a scene in which most of the gang are still alive and are back at their rendezvous-apartment. There they recall how the money bag had been thrown out the window to land at the feet of Randi the Cop–an action we had already seen from inside during one of Johnny’s sequences. In The Killing we lurch back and forth in a manner that only comes to make sense retrospectively.

 

Along with the narrator, the failed mastermind Johnny warns us of this difficulty in seeing the big picture. Johnny is that combination of grandiose, power-mad genius and dumb sap so familiar in Kubrick–in no small ways, something like both God and a film director. The linkage between the artist and the gangster is made perhaps too explicit in a near incomprehensible speech by the heavily-accented Maurice,² but importantly, while Johnny has come up with the grand scheme, he doesn’t motivate or control it. Johnny is under the thumb of the narrator as completely as all other characters, and while he gets somewhat more attention (see the chart again), he has no privileged position. The king on the chessboard is still a piece, and still as vulnerable to attack.

 

An important consequence of this temporal strategy is spatial isolation, although we could as well reverse the equation–the sequences of isolation lead to the temporal overlaps (the small diagram below seeks to represent this notion). Members of the gang during the course of the robbery rarely see each other. They can occupy the same space briefly, Johnny going in a door as Maurice is dragged away by a gaggle of security cops, but only as they go in different directions (and/or to their deaths). As such, the little boxes of the chart have a counterpart in the separation of spaces. Even though most of the film takes place at one racetrack, our view of it is greatly fragmented. The task of filling in the spaces, as it were, is just as conceptual as the temporal ordering. In both cases, the filling in is a mental activity on our part of grand designs Kubrick suggests through his ingeniously fragmentary construction. We as much have to figure out a temporal ordering as a spatial arrangement; the two, of course, strongly depend upon each other.

 

In his useful new biography of Kubrick, Vincent LoBrutto reports (very thoroughly, but without all the irony it deserves) that Hollywood was less than pleased with Kubrick’s temporal experiment. Attempts were made, fortunately to no avail, to see if the film could be recut and presented in a more classical manner (LoBrutto 123). That would be rather like Michael Powell trying to do The Red Shoes in black-and-white, taking the film’s reason for being and seeing if it could be eliminated. These last-minute fears about intelligibility have, of course, dogged Kubrick throughout his career.

 

Back at the racetrack, let’s add some spatial considerations to our temporal ones. In a simple reconstructed overview, let’s visualize the space of the film as follows:

 

Even in so simple a view, some things become apparent a bit more easily. For one, the space of the film is extremely limited (maybe not much bigger than the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, say). Even though nobody hardly ever sees anyone else, you’d think they’d have a hard time not doing so. If Nikki’s shot at Red Lightning were to miss, he’d as likely hit Johnny or the easy target of Maurice. In other words, temporal isolation enforces spatial separation. Also, the spaces are used as isolated fragments. Even though no more than a door or a window may separate two spaces, they are as likely to be shown to us in separated temporal segments. Johnny going through a door in one episode won’t come out the other side until much “later” in another sequence. (The same can be said many times, of money bags, girl friends, cops.)

 

Seen as a construction in this manner, The Killing becomes something like what it already is, a grandly conceptual vision that perhaps can be expressed in something like a video game as much as a movie, or as much a chessboard filled with game pieces as a jigsaw puzzle. To that end, I have taken the visual pieces included here and put together a way to explore the film which uses space and time to explore each other. Clicking on the chart above would take you to the appropriate point in the film, together with a model of the space in question and an indication on an overview of where this moment/place belongs. It’s only by visualizing this linkage between isolated spaces and temporal overlaps that one begins to appreciate the conceptual complexity of Kubrick’s film. To that end, a few of the 3-D recreations are included here, and it will be left to the reader to see where they would belong in the earlier time chart, though it’s not feasible to include the corresponding video clips here as well.³

 

Click here to see the 3-D images 

To look at one key moment in a bit more detail, we can examine the all-important shooting of Red Lightning, which signals the delay (Johnny using a wise Kubrick strategy) that allows the money to be in one place long enough for Johnny to steal it. While this is only one instance of temporal overlap, it gives a pretty good idea of how the rest of the film also works (Johnny getting in the door during Maurice’s diversionary fight, finding a way to get the money out of the park, and the gang shootout are a few other examples of the same narrative strategy). We can take a little “time slice” of one hour and see how extensive the overlap becomes–pieces of the same hour are shown during five separate sequences.

 

In virtually every one of the episodes, not everything goes according to plan, but it goes smoothly enough to keep the whole enterprise lurching forward. Nikki shoots the horse as he was hired to do, but is himself killed. Earlier when accepting the assignment, Nikki has theorized what the effects of his act will be, but Johnny characteristically insists upon the importance of his remaining in the dark. Ironically, however, Nikki’s horseshoe-aided demise seems to be the result of his own human deficiencies and not Johnny’s plan. (Like Major Kong in Strangelove, the guy who delivers the goods is the first to go.) We get an inkling of simultaneity when the “horse is down” announcement is heard while Johnny dons his disguise just before bursting into the money-counting room. In another near screw-up, after sending the money through the window, Johnny escapes as planned, but only because the drunken Marv has ignored his instruction to stay away from the track and is there to bump into a returning security guard. Are we seeing unplanned contingencies or major errors? Is there a grand design? The horse-shooting suggests the general orientation–the isolated pieces fit in terms of a strategy, but the foul-ups can never be fully accounted for. Somebody’s always going to fight in the War Room.

 

Click here to Get Quicktime File – 3-D Model of Betting Area 

In John Huston’s great earlier version of the grand caper, The Asphalt Jungle (also starring, of course, the wonderful Sterling Hayden), the plan falls apart because of human weaknesses of the participants involved. The Killing seems to offer a similar conclusion, but it veers into more complex territory. The ability to conceive the exploit, like the bone-becoming-weapon in 2001: A Space Odyssey, carries both the brilliance of the plan and with it the capacity for self-destruction. (The title 2001, by the way, is also a nice temporal indicator.) By the time Johnny’s plan has fallen apart in at least a dozen ways, one almost begins to adopt Johnny’s own bit of philosophy in the film’s last line: “what’s the use?”. The problem lies in the difference between the elegant conceptual construction and the need to use human beings to execute that construction. What makes The Killing particularly brilliant is that its own daring construction exposes that process so extensively.

 

Notes

 

1. This article assumes the reader has already seen the film, so no summary is provided. For one very useful breakdown of the film, see Falsetto 100-123.

 

2. Quoted by Falsetto, 106-107.

 

3.The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of one of his students, Kevin Scharff, to the 3-D model.

 

Works Cited

 

• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• Falsetto, Mario. “Patterns of Filmic Narration in The Killing and Lolita.” Perspectives on Kubrick. NY: G.K. Hall, 1996. 100-123.
• The Killing. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flipper, Coleen Gray, Sterling Hayden, and Marie Windsor. United Artists, 1956.
• LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. NY: Donald I. Fine Books, l997.

 

Gina Marchetti

University of Maryland and
Nanyang Technological University
tgmarchetti@ntu.edu.sg

 

 

Figures 1 and 2: Posters for To Liv(e) and Crossings.

 

Introduction

 

This article looks at the changing shapes of global Chinese cinema through the works of Hong Kong/New York filmmaker Evans Chan. As Chinese films cross beyond traditional borders, they move in directions and among audiences far removed from the Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asian, and “Chinatown” markets that transnational Chinese cinema addressed from its inception. From the edges of Hong Kong’s traditional markets, there emerges a new kind of film culture, mingling more freely with Taiwan and the PRC, drawing on the overseas Chinese experience, produced by filmmakers who often live outside Asia. This give and take between Hong Kong (or China) and the world necessitates a new way of thinking about film culture that transcends the linguistic and cultural determinism of national cinema as well as the aesthetic strictures of established auteurs, genres, and styles.

 

Thinking Beyond Culture

 

The politics of multiculturalism has recently been hotly debated within American society. However, few efforts have gone beyond the “smorgasbord” approach to culture. A “taste” of African music, a sampling of Latin American literature, an appreciation of a Chinese holiday represent tokenism at its worst or the frustrations of identity politics seeking to convey the essence of a culture to the broader body politic with little more than a tourist’s gaze. Scholarship coming from a variety of disciplines has sought to engage this problem (see Shohat and Stam). How can culture be looked at within the context of a national body politic when that body is divided by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality? Postcolonial theory has contributed the notion of hybridity to these debates, and a call to place all notions of an “essential” identity into question within the multiple identities available within the postmodern metropolis (see Bhabha and Chow). Others call for a “radical” multiculturalism that refuses to conceal the issues of power and struggle behind the “melting pot” veneer of contemporary culture (see West). Within these debates, the centrality of the economy and globalization of the culture industry cannot be neglected. Filmmakers, for example, may live in one country, make all their films in a second country, and find financing in a third, while hoping to address a global, polyglot audience with a localized narrative. Because of the transnational nature of these films, a new, “transcultural” politics of representation needs to be elucidated.¹.

 

The oeuvre of Evans Chan can be taken as a case study of the difficulty and the necessity of developing a transcultural approach within film studies. Chan is a New York-based filmmaker, born in mainland China, bred in Macao, educated in Hong Kong and America, who makes independent narrative films primarily for a Hong Kong, overseas Chinese, “greater China” audience. His films straddle the gulf between the international art film and Hong Kong commercial cinema, and thus have also attracted some international art film viewers.

 

To date, Chan has completed two features, To Liv(e)² (1991) and Crossings³ (1994). Both these films openly address issues that find only a marginal voice in the mainstream cinema of Hong Kong and the United States. With one foot in the United States and the other in Hong Kong, Chan can freely address diverse issues. His films look at Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 and the legacy of June 4th in Tian’anmen Square. Both examine the role of women in the world economy (in the “official” economy and the “informal sector” that can include prostitutes and traffickers in narcotics). Each film looks at the processes of immigration and dispersal involving the Chinese globally. While fears of censorship arising from Hong Kong’s laws and the unofficial censorship of the marketplace in the United States place a boundary around what can be said in the cinema, Chan, with his transnational production team, manages to seriously explore controversial topics. In this way, Chan creates a transnational, transcultural discourse through the medium of the motion picture, pointing to a new type of cultural sphere that must be noted within film studies (see Lu, Franncia, and Fore).

 

Determining Indeterminacy: To Liv(e) and Crossings

 

In The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Fredric Jameson devotes a chapter to Edward Yang’s Terrorizer. Jameson notes that the film is poised between the modern and the postmodern:

 

What we must admire, therefore, is the way in which the filmmaker has arranged for these two powerful interpretative temptations--the modern and the postmodern, subjectivity and textuality--to neutralize each other, to hold each other in one long suspension in such a way that the film can exploit and draw on the benefits of both, without having to commit itself to either as some definitive reading, or as some definitive formal and stylistic category. Besides Edward Yang's evident personal mastery, the possibility of this kind of mutually reinforcing suspension may owe something to the situation of Third-World cinema itself, in traditions in which neither modernist nor postmodern impulses are internally generated, so that both arrive in the field of production with a certain chronological simultaneity in full post-war modernization. (151)

 

To Liv(e) and Crossings can be looked at in a similar way. They can be seen as works suspended between the modern and the postmodern; indeed, their textual strategies rely on this deeply rooted indeterminacy to explore people and issues that are themselves difficult to determine.

 

Like Yang, Chan is profoundly influenced by European cinema. The English title, To Liv(e), for example, conjures up both Godard and Gorin’s Letter to Jane as well as Ingmar Bergman’s many works with Liv Ullmann. Chan characterizes the film as “inevitably a response to both Bergman and Godard” (Chan 6). Chan’s film can be looked at as part of the international New Wave discussed by Robert Kolker in The Altering Eye. In her insightful essay on the film, “The Aesthetics of Protest: Evans Chan’s To Liv(e),” Patricia Brett Erens outlines the various ways in which the film draws on Godard. As Erens observes, To Liv(e) favors an aesthetic sensibility rooted in a Brechtian tradition of dramatic distance and political engagement.

 

Peter Wollen’s approach to Godard’s political films as “counter cinema” can be used here to further elucidate this legacy in both To Liv(e) and Crossings. To Liv(e), for example, is organized around a series of letters addressed to Liv Ullmann. These letters admonish Ullmann for her criticism of Hong Kong’s deportation of Vietnamese “boat people” in December, 1989. Ullmann fails to mention Hong Kong’s own uncertain future when it becomes part of the People’s Republic of China, still bloodied from the events of that June. Rubie (Lindzay Chan) composes these letters, which are sometimes read as voice-overs and sometimes read by the character directly addressing the camera. The letters run parallel to other plot lines involving Rubie’s lover, family, and circle of friends.

 

The impact of Godard is clearly apparent in the scene in which Rubie reads her first letter to Liv. Over a shot of boats used as a transitional device, the tinny, hollow sound of a recording of Cui Jian’s “Nothing To My Name” comes up on the sound track. The camera pans across an audience; Rubie is seated in the auditorium. A dance performance “Exhausted Silkworms” [3 MB Quicktime Clip], inspired by the events of June 4th, takes place on stage. Three male dancers, dressed simply in white shirts and black pants, tear their clothes to form gags and, later, nooses. A red scarf is pulled out of one dancer’s shirt like spurting blood. As “Nothing To My Name” ends, one dancer falls, as if shot. Suspended for a moment with a freeze frame, he finally lands on the ground, as the audience applauds.

 

This performance is layered by the inclusion of Rubie’s first letter as a voice-over. As the dancers perform, Rubie’s address to Liv Ullmann (and, through her, to the world at large) adds another dimension to both Cui Jian’s rock music, which says nothing explicit about “democracy” or politics at all, and to the performers’ reenactment of the Tian’anmen demonstration and its suppression. As the dancers act out this violence, accompanied by Cui Jian’s harsh and direct vocals, Rubie likens Liv Ullmann to a respected, distant portrait that comes to life and slaps her in the face with accusations of cruelty and indifference. Rubie not only complains of Ullmann’s ignorance about the Hong Kong situation that her statement about the Vietnamese displays, but also questions her timing. Speaking just months after Tian’anmen, an event that was taken by many in Hong Kong as a barometer of what to expect after 1997, Rubie reminds Ullmann that the population of Hong Kong may soon find themselves in the same boat, so to speak, as the Vietnamese.

 

In this scene there is a juxtaposition of two visual planes. One features Rubie as the originator of the letter. Close-ups of her face accompany the voice-over presentation of the contents of the letter, grounding the letter in the person of Rubie as a fictional character. The other visual plane, using the same images, features Rubie as a spectator, clearly moved by the dance presentation. There are also two audio planes: Cui Jian’s music and the sounds of the auditorium on one, and Rubie’s voice-over letter to Liv on the other. In this fragmented presentation of narrative information, all the elements of “counter cinema” come into play. Narrative intransitivity comes to the fore in the casual introduction of an evening at the theatre for Rubie’s character; time is thrown out of synch because Rubie writes the letter heard in the voice-over at another time and in another place away from the theatre. There is an estrangement from the character of Rubie as she becomes a mouthpiece for the people of Hong Kong, addressing an actual person about actual events, in addition to being a fictional character involved in other plot developments. Her address is not to other fictional characters, but to Liv, and to the world at large represented by the film audience. Foregrounding occurs as the film spectators are invited to see themselves as witnesses to the dance performance, and, by extension, the events in Tian’anmen, and think of themselves, with Rubie, as something more than spectators. Watching Rubie look at a political work of art foregrounds To Liv(e)‘s own status as a similar work of political commentary. The diegesis splits, featuring a self-contained performance work within the film. Aperture must be noted, since an understanding of the references in the dance depends on a familiarity with the mass media spectacle of June 4th, including photos of the demonstrators standing together in the square, Cui Jian’s presence, etc. The unpleasure of the breaking of classical conventions is self-evident, as is the non-fictional basis of the entire scene as a commentary on actual events; i.e., the expulsion of the Vietnamese, Ullmann’s trip to Hong Kong and public condemnation of Hong Kong’s action, the events of June 4th in Tian’anmen, etc. Fictional and non-fictional realms overlap.

 

However, it would be wrong to conclude that To Liv(e) is simply an imitation of Godard. There is another element to this scene that takes the film in a radically different direction. While Rubie is presented as an agent addressing Ullmann, a spokesperson for Hong Kong, and as a spectator of a dance piece (and, by extension, a political event), Rubie is also depicted as distracted. Near the beginning of the scene, she looks at her watch and looks around the auditorium. Later, the fact that Rubie is waiting for her brother, Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming), is revealed. Rubie’s relationship with her brother, his fiancée, and her family propels the film into another, totally different arena, i.e., the realm of the love story and family melodrama. Rubie may be the voice of Hong Kong, but she also plays the roles of daughter, sister, lover, and friend in other parts of the narrative. Her distraction as a character points to a more general “distraction” found within the narrative itself. To echo Jameson, the “textuality” of counter cinema meets the “subjectivity” of the melodrama, the “woman’s film,” and the love story.

 

	Figure 3: Rubie’s brother Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming) in an intimate pose with his financée, Teresa (Josephine Ku), in To Liv(e) (production still).
	Figure 4: Tony with Teresa (production still).

 

There is a similar sense of distraction in Crossings. While less directly indebted to the European New Wave, Crossings still bears the marks of cinematic modernism. Again, fiction and non-fiction overlap as actual footage of Tian’anmen 1989 is cut into newscasts in which fictional characters appear. Dance presentations divide the diegesis further into self-contained fictional realms. Characters again function as mouthpieces for policies or ideas as well as fictional creations involved in narrative events. Rubie (again played by Lindzay Chan) reappears to serve this function again, appearing on New York television as the public voice of the Chinatown community and, through voice-over excerpts from a diary, as the personal voice of the Hong Kong emigrant. However, while To Liv(e) has more clearly demarcated divisions between the various layers of the discourse, Crossings, closer to Yang’s Terrorizer and other works of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Wave, experiments with time and space to a much larger degree. Distraction, in fact, becomes disorientation, since from scene to scene it is often difficult to figure out whether the location is New York or Hong Kong.

 

In one scene, for example, Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), the film’s female lead, has just finished a meeting with Rubie in Central Park. She walks past a shop window displaying a model airliner. The film cuts to a shot of clouds passing over the moon, followed by a graphic match on a toilet bowl. Mo-Yung is vomiting. Members of her family come back from a shopping trip and notice the smell of the vomit. In this case, the transition from New York City to Hong Kong and earlier story events is quite abrupt. The shot in the bathroom offers no clue to Mo-Yung’s whereabouts. Rather, this disorienting presentation of time and place mirrors the contemporary experience of immigration. Unlike previous generations of explorers, pilgrims, colonialists, pirates, and other travellers, contemporary wanderers travel according to a different set of rules and restrictions. Instantaneous communication via international telephone lines connects the spaces again in a different way. (Later, in the scene mentioned above, Mo-Yung receives a call from her boyfriend Benny [Simon Yam] in New York, again reorganizing the sense of space presented in the film.) Jet travel condenses the time and space between New York and Hong Kong even further. If the spectator is disoriented following the character’s disorientation, then the fictional world simply reflects a postmodern experience of time and space.

 

Here, Jameson’s difficulty with Yang’s Terrorizer as both modern and postmodern begins to make sense for To Liv(e) and Crossings as well. While both have elements of counter cinema and both fit within the generic parameters of Hong Kong commercial film as love stories, crime stories, and melodramas, they seem to be doing something that adds up to more than just the sum of these modernist and commercial parts. They have a “schizophrenic” quality that can be seen in their titles. The English title, To Liv(e), is a deconstructed play on words referring to Liv Ullmann, Letter to Jane, and a heartfelt desire for the people of Hong Kong to somehow endure and “to live.” The title in Chinese, roughly translated as Love Songs From a Floating World, refers to the other face of the film that deals with romantic relationships and a Chinese tradition of misdirected and/or impossible love.

 

Crossings offers a similar case in point. The English title conjures up images of immigration, exile, nomadism, the modern metropolis as a “crossroads,” while the Chinese title, Wrong Love, refers to unhappy affairs of the heart. As the titles imply, these polyglot films offer a multiple address and, potentially, a multiple interpretation, or at least a divided ordering of narrative hierarchies, for the English-speaking, art film audience at festivals and art cinemas globally, for the expanding circle of Asian American film spectators, and for the Chinese-speaking audience looking at the films in relation to the standard Hong Kong commercial product.

 

However, it is wrong to look at the films as split discourses in this way, because another possible address needs to be taken into consideration. Rather than operating as a dialectic between the art film and the commercial love story, between English and Chinese, the films can be taken as palimpsests where the elements overlie one another, obscuring meaning for some, illuminating a different kind of meaning for others. A new meaning is not created through the clash of contradictory discourses, as can be seen in the work of Godard. Rather, layers sit on top of one another, some (almost) postcolonial in English, some diasporic and accented in American English, some (almost) post-socialist in Chinese, some modern and part of the tail end of an international New Wave, others postmodern and part of contemporary global cinema culture.

 

Although To Liv(e) and Crossings are quite different, more than a single director links the works together. Taken as a set, they comment on certain common themes (e.g., Hong Kong 1997, immigration, changing family and social relationships in “Greater China,” etc.) from two different temporal and spatial perspectives. To Liv(e) primarily looks at the edginess of Hong Kong residents who are able to leave, but may or may not leave before July 1997. Crossings looks primarily at newly transplanted Hong Kong émigrés in New York City, i.e., at immigration as a fait accompli rather than as a possibility. Two anchors hold these two films together. One is a contemplation of June 4th in Tian’anmen Square, and the other is Rubie. The first represents a common location away from both Hong Kong and the world beyond the People’s Republic at a specific point in time that galvanized the world’s attention on China. The other represents a certain face and voice that embody the socio-political as well as the personal, psychological issues addressed by both texts. Both Tian’anmen and Rubie are difficult to pin down, and it is the indeterminacy of both that forms the heart of this analysis of these films.

 

From Tian’anmen to Times Square

 

There has been a great deal of recent discussion of location within film and cultural studies circles (see Kaplan). Issues of where a scholar is located geographically, politically, and otherwise come up as concerns for evaluation of research. However, the positioning of any intellectual brings to bear many problems. As Rey Chow points out in her work on Chinese intellectuals, looking for an “authentic” voice or a “native” position presupposes an Orientalist belief in a pure and distinct other and represents a desire on the part of the critic rather than anything or anyone that actually exists (1-26).

 

To Liv(e) and Crossings are both positioned in a similarly mercurial way. While characters move around Hong Kong and New York City and talk about places as diverse as Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, Italy, and South Africa, the films inevitably come back to Beijing, specifically to Tian’anmen, as a starting point. While footage and still photos of the May-June 1989 demonstrations appear, no plot action occurs in Beijing. Indeed, very little is said about the demonstrations at all.⁴ (See Hinton.) Rather, Tian’anmen anchors the slippery identities of the films’ characters as well as the slippery identities those characters represent as citizens of Hong Kong or as immigrants elsewhere.

 

One scene in To Liv(e) brings to the fore this question of identity in relation to Tian’anmen. Rubie and her activist friend Trini have a snack in a Hong Kong noodle house after seeing an anti-nuclear performance. The scene begins as Trini talks about her family, resettled in England, and her white British husband. She is not keen to immigrate to England, however, because of the treatment she received from the British embassy while in Beijing during the demonstrations. She goes on at length about her experiences. At one point, she contacted the embassy to help some Hong Kong students escape arrest as “counter-revolutionaries.” The reply from the embassy was: “This should teach them a lesson. They should have thought twice before interfering with other people’s business.” On another occasion, Trini contacted the embassy for an escort to the airport. Her request was denied by the same staff member because her party was travelling on documents issued by the PRC government, implying that the bearers were considered Chinese citizens. Trini sums up the situation as follows:

 

The first time he denied us help was because we're non-Chinese and he advised us to "think twice before interfering with other people's business." The second time he refused to help was because we are Chinese. We're Chinese subjects travelling with our re-entry permit. Either way we lose! What does he want us to be? My conclusion is we're not British subjects. We're probably British objects--to be freely disposed of. (Wong 35)

 

In To Liv(e), Tian’anmen is filtered through the experiences of a number of characters. All of these experiences of Tian’anmen have one thing in common: the positioning of the characters as spectators. Rubie watches in the audience as dancers perform “Exhausted Silkworms” about the events in Tian’anmen. The newsreel footage of Hong Kong demonstrations in support of the Tian’anmen demonstrators illustrates one of Rubie’s letters. She listens as her friend, Trini, acting as an activist/journalist during the demonstrations, finally concludes that she was an outsider in Tian’anmen, a spectator rather than a participant. Trini notes, “We’re only onlookers. There’s no question about that.” Rubie also listens as Elsie Tu, a white resident of Hong Kong, a former missionary and social activist (playing herself) describes her reaction:

 

The Tian'anmen Massacre has thrown everything into a dilemma for me. On the one hand, I can't be disloyal to China. On the other hand, I can't accept what happened. I wonder, am I going to see the people I've been living with all my life be massacred if they speak up? In any case, I do plan to stay in Hong Kong till the end.... I've devoted all my life trying to make Hong Kong a better place and I, too, would like to know what happens here after 1997. (Wong 49)

 

Rubie, Elsie Tu, and Trini are all caught up in the problem of identity. Neither Chinese nor British, they are activists and onlookers uncertain of what they can or should be doing to help themselves and, by extension, Hong Kong.

 

In Crossings, the use of Tian’anmen as a point from which identity may or may not be determined continues. Here, the shift is from Hong Kong to New York’s Chinatown community. During the credit sequence, Rubie appears on a television news segment discussing apathy in the Chinese community on the anniversary of June 4th. Introduced by an image of the “Goddess of Democracy,” a woman newscaster remarks: “Almost five years after the Tian’anmen Square Massacre, amnesia seems to have set in New York’s Chinatown. Is the United States foreign policy toward China still obsessively based on a tragedy that has no bearing on today’s reality?” Rubie appears as an expert to answer this question. However, her reply is non-responsive: “I feel that China and America are intimately connected.” She continues as an off-screen voice, “Did you know the boots Chinese soldiers wore to put down the demonstrators were made in America and the gloves American medics wear to protect themselves from AIDS are made in China?”

 

Here, America is brought into the equation and implicated in the Tian’anmen events. However, the connection, like the connection of Rubie to the students and other demonstrators with whom she empathizes, remains vague. As Rubie comments on the anniversary of Tian’anmen off-screen, another character, the psychotic American, Joey (Ted Brunetti), laughs hysterically on screen, enjoying a joke with some imaginary cronies. Rubie’s observations on the political dimensions of the global economy are juxtaposed with Joey’s lunatic obsessions with Asia and Asian women.

 

At this point, Tian’anmen comes closer to another square, Times Square, as the center for New York’s sex trade. Times Square takes up as a spatial reference where Tian’anmen leaves off. The painter John (Fung Kin Chung), Rubie’s boyfriend in To Liv(e), laughingly mentions that he can always work as a street artist in Times Square, like his mainland counterparts. Indeed, struggling Chinese painters can be found on the streets of New York, Paris, and other cities, trying to eke out a living painting portraits and caricatures of tourists. John fears, though, that he is not as tough as these other artists. Later, a shot of Times Square appears in Crossings, but no artists are present. In this scene, Rubie compares New York to Chang An (Xi’an) during the Tang Dynasty as a “crossroads” of civilizations. From the Goddess of Democracy to the Statute of Liberty, from Tian’anmen to Times Square, the “crossroads” of China and America, specifically New York, point to an unsettling dislocation.

 

From Organic to Diasporic Intellectual

 

Contrasting the “traditional” with the “organic” intellectual, Antonio Gramsci saw the former as educated to maintain the status quo of the powers ascendant at that time, while the “organic” intellectual rose from the ranks of the subaltern classes in order to act as a mouthpiece for their concerns and empower them with a voice in the larger body politic. The idea of the “organic intellectual” has been influential in the thinking of many theorists since Gramsci. More recently, another view of public intellectuals has become current, i.e., the “diasporic” intellectual. Unlike the organic intellectual who remains rooted in the community from which he/she emerged, the diasporic intellectual moves between nations, cultures, languages, and other “positions.” Indeed, the “position” as well as the “location” of the diasporic intellectual is often difficult to pin down.

 

From the scattering of the Frankfurt School, to the postcoloniality of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha, to the work of Stuart Hall (see Chen) in cultural studies, the diasporic intellectual works from the perspective of exile and/or immigration, from the pain as well as the freedom of displacement.

 

In the character of Rubie, To Liv(e) and Crossings create a fictional representation of the process of transformation of a concerned, educated, “organic” intellectual into a “diasporic” intellectual. Like the activist Elsie Tu, who appears in To Liv(e) as the disillusioned British missionary/housewife turned urban activist, Rubie in Crossings leaves behind her roots in Hong Kong to take up the role of community activist and spokeswoman in New York City.

 

In this way, the character of Rubie (played by Lindzay Chan in both films) acts as the other bridge that links To Liv(e) and Crossings. Although it is never made explicit that a single, unified “Rubie” is exactly the same character in both films, the two Rubies clearly function in the same way in both texts and in most ways can be taken as a single character.

 

However, the possible identity of the two Rubies does not belie the fact that the character is presented as a conflicted, often contradictory presence in the two films. As such, she represents all those conflicts of identity central to the thematic dynamics of both films. On the one hand, her roots are found among the poorer quarters of Hong Kong society. During a scene depicting a rather uncomfortable family gathering, her father digresses on the family history as squatters selling groceries, moving from one temporary housing development to another, threatened by floods and ravaged by fire, as well as by corrupt officials demanding kickbacks for a business license. The family is taken under the wing of Elsie Tu, who uses her influence to set the family up in a legitimate shop.

 

From these lower middle class, small merchant roots, the children emerge as full-fledged members of Hong Kong’s professional/intellectual sector. Rubie is a journalist who becomes a community activist/social worker in New York. Her brother Tony is a highly skilled radiologist, and the eldest brother has successfully established himself in Canada. Unlike their parents, the children have the education and skills to move outside a Chinese environment into a global, English-based, diasporic community of post-colonial professionals and intellectuals plying their trades along the path of the former British empire–from Canada to Australia, the United States, and South Africa. They come from an impoverished China, but they move now in other circles. Ironically, it is the experience of colonialism (here embodied by the personal patronage of former British missionary Elsie Tu) that makes this movement and this upward mobility possible.

 

At one point, Rubie pays a visit to her family home and shop. It is filled with the details of a marginal, small merchant’s existence, including the outdoor tables and shop, the bare floor of the main living room, the worn table used as part of the elevated family shrine, the special, round table top brought in for the family gathering, the padded, old-fashioned vest and trousers worn by her mother. It becomes clear Rubie has not always led a solidly bourgeois existence. It may seem that the casting of the Eurasian actress Lindzay Chan in this role and the inclusion of her reading from the lengthy series of letters to Liv in English contradicts this picture of Rubie’s humble origins. Not only does this contradiction alienate the spectator from the character, but it also serves to highlight the indeterminate identity and position of the people of Hong Kong as Chinese British subjects, as educated and superstitious, as Western and Asian, as poor and struggling and established and well-to-do.

 

Rubie speaks in two voices–in fluent Cantonese and in impeccable British-accented English. Like Hong Kong itself, sometimes she looks Western, British, white and sometimes she looks Chinese and Asian. For example, in To Liv(e), she reads several of her letters directly addressing the camera in medium shots, seated against a British union jack, the American stars and stripes, and the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Interestingly, when she is shot in front of the Chinese flag, the lighting of her hair accentuates its reddish highlights. The light allows her to blend in with the flag at the same time it emphasizes her distinctiveness as a Eurasian performer. Rubie sometimes plays the role of a British subject, the role of an ethnic Chinese, the role of an Asian American immigrant, and, most importantly, the role of a character of an indeterminate identity.

 

In Crossings, Rubie tells another story about her origins. She explains her features as a throwback to the Tang Dynasty when she must have acquired some European ancestor from exchanges on the Silk Route. The fact that Rubie’s ethnic and cultural hybridity needs to be explained at all is itself telling. Addressing the reception of To Liv(e), Evans Chan has commented on critics who demand an “authentic” Hong Kong subject:

 

One controversial issue the film does occasion seems to be the establishment of 'the (post-)colonial subject,' hence the problematic status of the letters which are written in English.... I can understand the film's identity being characterized as schizophrenic, however, the notion that English is alien to the film's yet-to-be-post colonial identity is curious. After all, English is still primarily the official language of Hong Kong, where three major English dailies and two English TV channels permeate the everyday life of the educated class. Legal proceedings are conducted in English and Chinese politicians make speeches in English at the Legislative Council. If an average Hong Kong citizen speaks little English, that proves how linguistic schizophrenia may turn out to be a colonial legacy that will take some time, provided the will, to eradicate. ...That Hong Kong is a linguistically hybridized being is a fact that the film is not obliged to transcend. (5)

 

Rubie functions as the voice of Hong Kong, expressing, through her letters in To Liv(e) and her diary and appearances on the television news as an “expert” insider in Crossings, the hopes and fears of her community. Her identity and the identity of that community may be difficult to pin down as they slip among Britain, America, Hong Kong, and China, between the lower small merchant classes and the upwardly mobile professionals, between a “traditional” older generation and a more urbane younger one. Rubie, however, manages to embody this cacophony of “voices.”

 

Rubie is more than a “mouth,” however; she is also an “ear.” Throughout To Liv(e), the “ear” appears again and again as a motif associated with both Hong Kong as a place and Rubie as a character. Near the end of the film, the painting John has been working on throughout is revealed to be a picture of an ear. To break the tension of her brother’s departure, John orchestrates a Vincent Van Gogh practical joke with a bloody cloth over the side of his face and a fake, severed ear. Still unsteady from having just prevented her brother’s attempted suicide, Rubie faints at the sight of the phony severed ear and falls into a dream in which the ear reappears.

 

	Figure 5: Dream sequence with the severed ear featuring John (Fung Kin Chung) and Rubie (Lindzay Chan) in To Liv(e) (production still).
	Figure 6: Dream sequence featuring Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming) and Teresa (Josephine Ku) as Rubie imagines them as a self-destructive and troubled couple.

 

In her last letter to Liv, Rubie refers to George Bernard Shaw’s trip to Hong Kong in 1933:

 

Hong Kong 1933 didn't seem to exist for Bernard Shaw, except as a bad ear messed up by the British for communication with China. And an imperfect ear we've always been--as a bastardized link between a China weighed down by tradition and the clamorous demands of modernity. (Chan 61)

 

Throughout both films, Rubie is this same kind of “bastardized” ear, understanding English (and, through that, the perspectives of the British, American, and international community represented by Liv Ullmann) and Chinese (through Cantonese, she understands the Hong Kong Chinese and, through Mandarin, she understands the “greater China” community). Her trained, cultivated ear can appreciate experimental satiric theatre as well as Italo Calvino and the films of Ingmar Bergman. Like the organic intellectual, she can “hear” the marginalized and dispossessed as well as the bourgeoisie. Like the diasporic intellectual, she can “hear” the subtleties of the official and unofficial proclamations of various governments and other institutions.

 

Indeed, Rubie moves in a social world that is marked by this cultural and linguistic hybridity. This “floating world” of transnational, petit bourgeois labor includes artists, professionals, activists, journalists, among others, who are young, educated, culturally astute, and mobile. Although business people, artists, theatrical performers, and professionals like lawyers and doctors find their way into commercial popular culture, intellectuals seldom make a serious appearance in the cinema (see Ross). To Liv(e) and Crossings, therefore, are unusual.

 

In both To Liv(e) and Crossings, Rubie’s circle is rich in characters who are involved in a variety of artistic and intellectual endeavors. Again, like Bergman and Godard, Chan favors educated, thoughtful, cultured protagonists. In To Liv(e), Rubie’s boyfriend John busily works on his paintings and reads to Tony from Calvino’s Invisible Cities; Rubie attends experimental dance performances (“Exhausted Silkworms” on Tian’anmen, “Nuclear Goddess” on Daya Bay, China’s first nuclear power plant, constructed in suspiciously close proximity to Hong Kong); Rubie’s brother’s girlfriend, Teresa (Josephine Ku), relaxes as an experimental video piece plays on her television; Rubie quotes George Bernard Shaw and The New York Times in her letters to Liv.

 

	Figure 7: “Nuclear Goddess” performed by Karen Suen and South ASLI dancers (production still).
	Figure 8: Rubie and her artist boyfriend, John in To Liv(e) (production still).

 

This world is not only cultured but cosmopolitan. Rubie’s friends and relatives are part of a global society. In addition to Rubie’s elder brother in Canada and younger brother on his way to Australia, Rubie’s circle includes the interracial couples (Chris and Leanne, Trini and her husband), ex-patriots like Elsie Tu, overseas Chinese like Tony’s old flame Michelle, on a trip back from the United States, and many others.

 

Crossings extends Rubie’s circle even more. Again, Rubie functions as a bridge between various groups. Rubie befriends Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), who is an illegal visitor to New York in search of an errant boyfriend. In this case, Mo-Yung acts as a fulcrum with Rubie on one side of the scale and Mo-Yung’s gangster boyfriend, Benny (Simon Yam), on the other side. Rubie and Benny battle over Mo-Yung. Rubie tries to divorce her from her destructive relationship with Benny, and Benny tries to find Mo-Yung either to use her to get to a cache of drugs or to take possession of her heart.

 

Artists, writers, and filmmakers have a long history of using criminals and gangsters as more than objects for social or psychological studies. Indeed, filmmakers as diverse as Godard, Bresson, Fassbinder, John Woo, and Ho Hsiao-hsien have used petty gangsters as cinematic “alter egos,” articulating more than the concerns of petty hoods. The character of Benny is crafted in this tradition. It is difficult to tell whether Benny is a drug trafficker and pimp masquerading as a fine art photographer or a sensitive artist doing a photo-essay, “Countdown to 1997,” who toys with a gangster identity. The photographs Mo-Yung spreads on her bed are as concrete as the drugs Benny’s other girlfriend Mabel cleans on their dining room table. Both serve as visual manifestations of Benny’s character, although it must be granted that the white powder carries more narrative weight than the photographs.

 

Since the silent era, the gangster has been used in film to concretize and contemplate economic relations. He is an outsider who serves as a mirror for the society he haunts. Like the intellectual, he has been produced by and has arisen out of a certain milieu, but he is deviant, an implicit critic of the society that produced him. At this point in time, the gangster increasingly functions as an emblem of transnational economic relations. In Crossings, the comment is made that Marco Polo brought two elements of Chinese culture to Italy, i.e., pasta and the Mafia. Both food and crime continue to cross borders to exert their influence transnationally. The gangster is a sinister citizen of the world. He has become part of the Diaspora–along with intellectuals, legitimate merchants and business people, students, skilled workers and professionals (particularly in medicine), etc.

 

Benny is a hybrid, a gangster-intellectual. Like Rubie, he has humble roots in Hong Kong’s underclasses; however, he transcended his origins through the drug trade rather than through painting like John, the medical profession like Tony, or journalism/social work like Rubie. He is a fitting object for Mo-Yung’s “wrong love,” since the uncertainty of his relationship to her finally comes out on the side of genuine emotion. After using her to smuggle drugs and denying any feelings for her to Mabel, he gives up his freedom and takes a police bullet in the back when he realizes Mo-Yung is having a miscarriage because of his reckless attempt to escape from the law. More than the tenderness in his relationship with Mo-Yung elevates him within the narrative, however. Crossings portrays Benny as a pensive gangster who can appreciate African traditional art, who has a certain flair for fashion, and who looks at his trade in historical terms as a response to the British push to sell opium in China that occasioned the Opium Wars. Since America supposedly encouraged the trade further through its involvement in the politics of the Golden Triangle, Benny justifies his trade as a political act of resistance–getting back at American imperialists by poisoning the population through the drug trade. When Rubie meets Benny in prison, however, he has again taken on the persona of the hardened criminal, the face he used in his interactions with Mabel. Aside from a few brief moments with Mo-Yung, Benny never manages to voice a substantial social critique.

 

Figure 9: Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen) bundled up against the cold in Crossings (production still).

 

The character of Mo-Yung comes a bit closer. Unlike Benny, Rubie, and her relatives, Mo-Yung was born in Suzhou, in mainland China, into an educated family, descended from unassimilated non-Han invaders centuries ago. Her father, an engineer, was forced to kneel on broken glass during the Cultural Revolution. Taking the family away from the excesses of China’s political campaign, Mo-Yung’s family found itself downwardly mobile in Hong Kong, the father finding work as a carpenter. Mo-Yung’s name marks her as a mainlander, as specifically from Suzhou. When she asked to change it as an adolescent, her father questioned her desire: “Are you so eager to conform? To assimilate?” Thus, even in Hong Kong where she grew up, Mo-Yung is an outsider. The fact that she will leave is taken as a given by most in the film. Her family pushes her to marry a Canadian immigrant to ensure another escape from the People’s Republic after 1997. She has already rejected a plan for her to emigrate as a nurse, since she fears that, as a foreign nurse, she will be required to work exclusively with AIDS patients, under conditions she fears will not preclude her being infected. Finally, following Benny, Mo-Yung becomes an illegal alien in New York, sucked into his world of transnational trafficking in drugs and prostitutes. Mo-Yung is left to drift in New York until she meets her tragic end.

 

As in To Liv(e), the voice in Crossings is given to Rubie. Divorced now (presumably from John) and with a child left in Hong Kong, Rubie has been severed from her roots in Hong Kong’s lower middle classes to find herself administering to a similar community of overseas Chinese in New York. At one extreme, in her work in a community clinic, Rubie sees illegal immigrant women brought in to work in the sex industry in New York, including some who become infected with AIDS. She also becomes involved in the edges of the illegal drug trade through her relationship with Mo-Yung. At the other extreme, Rubie moves in a very different social sphere represented by one of her close male friends, a Mandarin-speaker. This character is gay, with a white boyfriend. He does experimental dance, dressed as a female character from Beijing opera, to a pop music beat, in a disco frequented by Asian transvestites. He speaks in Mandarin, she responds in Cantonese, and both translate for the American boyfriend in English.
These two cultural spheres overlap throughout the film, and come together most dramatically at Mo-Yung’s funeral. In this scene, the dancer performs a piece in which his defiantly thrown back shoulders, high aerial kicks, and simple male attire work in concert with wreaths denouncing violence against Asians from various community groups. Looking at this scene in conjunction with the scene featuring a similar dance performance, “Exhausted Silkworms” in To Liv(e), underscores the two extremes used to position the characters and events in both films. “Exhausted Silkworms” reenacts the violence of Tian’anmen and the funeral performance memorializes Mo-Yung, not as a victim of “wrong love,” but as a victim of random anti-Asian violence in the United States.

 

Here, the position of the global Hong Kong community hits two violent terminal points: one in the political fear prompted by the suppression of the 1989 Tian’anmen demonstrations and the other in the social fear of racial violence in New York City. Caught between these two violent extremes, Rubie tries to sort out her own position and identity. At one point in Crossings, Rubie is on an elevated train platform, putting on lipstick. Taking the position of a stalker, the hand-held camera moves in on Rubie. When she is framed in a close-up, Rubie turns and runs. The camera then turns to reveal Joey (Ted Brunetti), who addresses the camera directly, “Blood must flow. What if I push you on the tracks?” The film cuts away to a street person screaming on the sidewalk as the elevated train screeches in the background. A frightened Rubie is shown escaping on the train; a musical bridge connects this scene with a scene of Rubie writing in her journal in her apartment. She recalls a similar incident that happened the week before. The flashback shows Rubie reading the paper on the elevated platform. In this case, rather than taking the point of view of the stalker, the camera takes Rubie’s perspective as an African American man directly confronts the camera (i.e., Rubie) and lashes out at her, “Man, I hate you Japs….” He rambles on incoherently about a blood reckoning to be paid. Back at her apartment, Rubie continues in her diary: “Would it have helped if I’d told him I’m not Japanese, but a Chinese from the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong? Where would I have felt protected? Britain? China?”

 

While the cosmopolitan world of Hong Kong or New York promises a certain freedom associated with the hybridity of the metropolitan experience, it also represents a world in which identity is cast adrift and there is no safe haven. Joey’s psychosis, which these parallel scenes show is not uncommon, revolves around a mis-recognition of the Asian woman. This mis-recognition operates on several levels. Joey stalks Rubie, but, under the assumption that any Asian woman would satisfy his blood lust, he kills Mo-Yung. Joey is driven into this delirium by an encounter with an Asian transvestite, whom, in M. Butterfly fashion, he mistakes for a woman. Indeed, Joey mistakes all the Asian women he encounters, from his prostitute girlfriend in Thailand to the newly arrived mainland Chinese prostitute he visits in a New York massage parlor, for his “dream girl,” submissive, compliant, subservient, and posing no threat to his own uncertain sexuality. In his delirium, Joey even mistakes Mo-Yung for a dummy, raving happily about passing the “test” to see if he could tell the difference between a real person and a mannequin. His racism levels all identity, turning all Asian women into objects. When Joey’s sister tries to explain her brother’s mental illness to Rubie at Mo-Yung’s funeral, Rubie’s only response is, “It could have been me! Don’t you see, your brother was stalking me. It could have been me.” Between Trini’s analysis of her position as a “British object” in To Liv(e) and Joey’s interchangeability of Asian women as objects in Crossings, the voice of the diasporic intellectual becomes silent. If Rubie’s role as an intellectual is to listen and speak for her constituency, she (and, perhaps, the filmmaker who created her) ends up silent in between two worlds marked by violence.

 

It can also be noted that Joey does not inhabit a world totally dissimilar to Rubie’s. As a public school teacher in New York, he is like Rubie part of a class of educators, social workers, media workers, etc., who can be loosely grouped as intellectuals. He has a secure job; the principal of the school laments the fact she cannot fire him, even though he alternately brutalizes and ignores his students, because he has tenure and is “competent until proven incompetent, sane until proven insane.” He has disposable income to travel to Thailand. Also, like Rubie, he seems to be upwardly mobile, living with a sister whose accent and demeanor point to working class roots. If Benny represents the intellectual as gangster and Joey represents the intellectual as madman, Rubie represents the intellectual as something different; i.e., as a woman within the Diaspora.

 

The Ear Is Attached to a Woman

 

If, as noted above, Rubie functions in both films as a public, intellectual ear that is able to hear and validate the various voices that present themselves, she also serves as a private, personal ear. In her Crossings diary, she speaks to herself as well as to the film’s spectators. In both films, Rubie listens to an array of personal problems voiced by those in her circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. With few exceptions, all the film’s characters talk to Rubie, and Rubie listens. As this narrative ear, Rubie holds the plots of both films together, giving them a structure, logic, and certain order.

 

Many directors are known for establishing ongoing relationships with actresses who represent the filmmakers’ concerns and give entree into other realms involving women, the female psyche, and issues concerning feminine subjectivity. Bergman’s relationship with Liv Ullmann comes immediately to mind. In this case, Chan develops a rapport with Lindzay Chan in these two features that allows him to explore not only issues of cultural hybridity but also issues involving women and their concerns. Moving from the textuality of the political discourses of the films to the subjectivity of the “women’s film,” To Liv(e) and Crossings, in their stylistic and generic hybridity, highlight issues that go beyond newspaper headlines and immigration statistics. Although Chan works with a Brechtian/Godardian alienation from his characters, using them often as types to illustrate particular points, the filmmaker also uses these characters in more conventional ways, underscoring their individuality, allowing them to speak as distinct entities as well as representatives of ideological positions and abstract social categories.

 

To illustrate this point, it might be instructive to look at two parallel scenes, one from To Liv(e) and the other from Crossings. Both scenes involve Rubie having a tête-à-tête with another woman. Each scene points to the intimacy between the women. Each features a discussion of the situation of women drifting between countries, roles, and emotions, adding to narrative information, but also standing alone as discourses separate from the public pronouncements of Rubie’s letters or her appearances on American television.

 

In To Liv(e), Rubie meets with her brother’s fiancée, Teresa (Josephine Ku), at Victoria Peak, overlooking the Hong Kong skyline. The two are seated near a ledge, on opposite sides of the frame, with the cityscape between them. Teresa voices her concerns about going to Australia. She also talks about her divorce and difficulties maintaining a relationship with her son studying in the United Kingdom. On a short visit to Hong Kong, the son went shopping with his father rather than taking time to see his mother, Teresa. Because of her divorce and the death of her mother, Teresa feels cast adrift emotionally. Rubie listens and sympathizes with Teresa. The sounds of the city below can be heard throughout the scene. Rubie moves from her position screen right to sit close to Teresa; the camera slowly moves in to frame them close together on the ledge. When Rubie tries to reassure Teresa that there will be plenty of Hong Kong emigrants to befriend in Australia, Teresa counters that she and Tony want to escape Hong Kong to get away from its people (i.e., those, like Tony and Rubie’s parents who disapprove of a union between a younger man and a divorced, older woman). The camera moves out again, to show Rubie and Teresa in relation to the city, as the two embrace each other at the scene’s conclusion.

 

In Crossings, Rubie meets Mo-Yung in a café near Times Square. The camera is positioned outside as the scene begins, then moves inside to frame Rubie and Mo-Yung silhouetted against the café’s window as the traffic of New York passes by outside. Throughout the scene, the camera moves between the two women, using a vase with dried flowers on the table as a pivotal point.

 

Figure 10: Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen) in Crossings (production still).

 

Mo-Yung talks about coming from Suzhou; Rubie talks about her features and the imagined Silk Route ancestor. Both laugh that they are “two barbarians invading New York.”

 

Figure 11: Mo-Yung in Crossings (production still).

 

The camera cuts away to a shot of Mo-Yung framed through the café window, and the mood changes. They wonder about Mo-Yung’s missing acquaintance, Carmen, who had also been involved with Benny. Rubie fills Mo-Yung in on her own situation, and her desire to get a green card and open America as a possibility for her son. Mo-Yung asks, “What if your son doesn’t like America and blames you?” When Rubie replies that he can always go back, Mo-Yung counters, “Do you think you can recreate the past just like that?” The scene ends on a close shot of Mo-Yung putting out her cigarette in an ashtray near the dried flowers, flanked by the empty coffee cups.

 

These two scenes highlight elements that move the narratives into the realm of the women’s film. In these scenes, the emphasis is on the relationship between women, their solidarity in the face of the trials of immigration as well as in the face of changing sexual mores and family relationships. Here, as friends, mothers, lovers, ex-wives, fiancées, and confidantes, Rubie, Teresa, and Mo-Yung illustrate the personal dimension of the political concerns of 1997. Women experience a different type of “crossing” than men. Traditional roles for women dissolve in the Diaspora. Families become unhinged, scattered; romantic relationships become more fleeting. Cast adrift by a desire to escape from rigid families, ex-husbands, and the feeling of being alienated from the traditional world in which they were born and bred, these women move off to Australia and New York with a different sense of loss, different fears, and for reasons that go far beyond the political dynamics of 1997. Following Rubie as the “ear,” the camera in both scenes invites the spectator to share these intimate moments.

 

These two scenes are not unique in either To Liv(e) or Crossings. Rather, they form part of a pattern of scenes in which women’s issues are voiced and Rubie listens to her girlfriends’ concerns. In To Liv(e), for example, Teresa will only discuss her fears of death and abandonment with Rubie; Tony must eavesdrop outside the bedroom door. In Crossings, female characters as diverse as the unnamed, unseen AIDS-infected prostitute at the clinic, Joey’s sister, and a next-door neighbor seek out Rubie as an ear for their stories. Mo-Yung tells the story of her family to Rubie rather than Benny. These acts of speaking and listening among the female characters propel both films out from the orbits of the political essay or the crime story.

 

Figures 12, 13, and 14: Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen) and Rubie (Lindzay Chan)
in Central Park in Crossings (production stills).

 

Looking at the films from this perspective, as love stories and family melodramas, To Liv(e) and Crossings fit within three related subgenres that have become quite popular in Hong Kong after Thatcher’s visit to Beijing. The trend picked up even more after June 4, 1989. One subgenre features romantic entanglements and family problems that arise in Hong Kong around the issue of emigration; e.g., Shu Kei’s Hu Du Men/Stagedoor (1996). To Liv(e) fits squarely in this subgenre. The second subgenre involves the trials and tribulations faced by new immigrants to America, Canada, Australia; some examples include Stanley Kuan’s Full Moon in New York (1990), Peter Chow’s Pickles Make Me Cry (1987), Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996). Crossings tends more toward this subgenre, although, like Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather (1986), it really blends the two. The third subgenre is hinted at through Mo-Yung’s story; it involves mainland Chinese abroad in Hong Kong. Examples include Mabel Cheung’s Illegal Immigrant (1985) and the recent hit, Peter Chan’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) (see Law Kar.)

 

In these subgenres, the relationship between stories about the overseas Chinese and stories about Chinese or Asian Americans becomes more problematic. Another set of categories begins to dissolve as filmmakers born in Hong Kong, trained in the United States, living sometimes in Hong Kong, sometimes in America, make films about people who are themselves between Hong Kong and America. Indeed, the Hong Kong/American connection, including figures like Bruce Lee as well as filmmakers as diverse as Tsui Hark and Evans Chan, is not unique along the edges of what is usually described as Asian cinema. Ang Lee, Peter Wang, and Edward Yang represent a Taiwan connection, and Chen Kai-ge is the best known of those from the mainland who have settled in the States. Ho Quang Minh connects Vietnam and Switzerland, while Anh Hung Tran with Scent of Green Papaya (1993) has given the world its most critically acclaimed film in Vietnamese about Vietnam, totally set in Vietnam, without leaving France.

 

Like the in-between, transnational, transcultural characters they depict, To Liv(e) and Crossings also defy easy classification. However, while identities may be uncertain and fluctuating, the issues these characters embody remain concrete and disturbingly fixed.

 

Endings

 

To Liv(e) concludes with cautious optimism on two fronts. In her last letter to Liv Ullmann, Rubie ends with the hope that China, Vietnam, and, by extension, Hong Kong will improve their respective situations so that all, including Rubie and Liv, will be able to meet as friends. Rubie concludes the film on a note of good humor. In fact, she signs her letter, “Love, Rubie.” The last image of the film shows Tony and Teresa, saved from near suicide and break-up, alight from their taxi at the airport, baggage in hand, on their way to Australia.

 

Crossings, on the other hand, ends on a pessimistic note. Rubie burns incense in memory of Mo-Yung on the subway platform where she was murdered. The last shot shows a graveyard in Hong Kong. Earlier, Benny and Mo-Yung had had a tryst near that graveyard, and Benny told the story of his mother being buried there after working herself to death to support the family. Rubie has promised to return Mo-Yung’s bones to Hong Kong, presumably to that same cemetery.

 

While To Liv(e) ends with death averted and hope in the future, Crossings concludes with the finality of death and the uncertainty of Rubie’s future. She returns to Hong Kong with Mo-Yung’s bones, but it is not certain whether or not she will return to New York, stay in Hong Kong, or go elsewhere. Since, after death, even bones continue to drift between continents, Rubie’s continued “Crossings” between roles and professions, between nation-states, and between Asia and the West also seem to be one of the few certainties in a very uncertain, fictional world. That global filmmakers themselves will continue to drift and make films about this “floating world” of displacement and hybridity also seems fairly certain. To bring Chan’s pessimism back around to a more hopeful note, we might consider this from Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation:”

 

For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity. (170)

 

Notes

 

1. Recently, the term “transcultural” has begun to replace a number of related terms (e.g., “cross-cultural,” “international,” “multicultural”) in a number of disciplines (particularly medicine, psychology, and education). Film studies has begun to follow suit. While following on the widespread use of the concept of “transnationalism” by political economists and sociologists, the use of “transcultural” by scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies also seems to point to the inadequacy of these other terms in analyzing the increasing globalization of culture.

 

2. Plot synposis of To Live: Rubie (Lindzay Chan) lives in Hong Kong with her artist boyfriend, John (Fung Kin Chung). In December 1989, Rubie becomes angered by a statement made by Liv Ullmann about the inhumane treatment of Vietnamese refugees by the Hong Kong authorities. In the wake of the events in Beijing that June, Rubie questions Ullmann’s timing in a letter she composes and addresses to the Scandinavian actress. Passages from the letter punctuate the rest of the film as Rubie must decide, along with members of her family and circle of Hong Kong artists and intellectuals, whether to stay or leave Hong Kong before July 1, 1997. Throughout the film, Rubie talks to a range of people about their feelings regarding the turnover.

 

Rubie’s brother Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming) prepares to immigrate to Australia with his fiancée, Teresa (Josephine Ku). Teresa, however, has mixed feelings about the departure and about her relationship with Tony. Older, divorced, and estranged from her son, Teresa is prone to morbid thoughts and depression. She is thoroughly disliked by Tony and Rubie’s parents, and she fears loosing the younger Tony to another woman. The stormy relationship comes to a head when Tony threatens suicide after a jealous scene at a party.

 

3. Plot synopsis of Crossings: A red shoe, symbol of romantic happiness and the joys of marriage in traditional Chinese lore, is all that remains of Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), a victim of a stalker’s violence on a New York subway platform. Mo-Yung had come to New York, against her parents’ wishes and illegally, to pursue her boyfriend, Benny (Simon Yam). Mo-Yung thinks Benny is a photographer, but he is actually an international drug smuggler. Pursuing Benny, Mo-Yung rubs against the seamier elements of New York as she unsuspectingly plays cat-and-mouse with a shipment of Benny’s contraband. Rubie (Lindzay Chan) is a social worker in New York, who befriends Mo-Yung. Joey (Ted Brunetti) is a psychotic school teacher, who has a fetish for Asian women. Joey stalks Rubie, whom he has seen as a community spokeswoman on television. Mistaking Mo-Yung for Rubie, he kills Mo-Yung on a subway platform.

 

4. Neither film discussed here makes any pretense at investigating the events in May-June, 1989, in Tian’anmen. For the most insightful treatment to date in any medium, see Carma Hinton’s controversial documentary film and Web site, Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Works Cited

 

• Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
• Chan, Evans. “Forward to To Liv(e).” Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Ed. Tak-wai Wong. Hong Kong: U of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.
• —. Crossings. Perf. Ted Brunetti, Lindzay Chan, Simon Yam, and Anita Yuen. Riverside Productions, 1994.
• —. To Liv(e). Perf. Lindzay Chan, Fung Kin Chung, Josephine Ku, and Wong Yiu-Ming. Riverside Productions, 1991.
• Chen, Kuan-hsing. “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. NY: Routledge, 1996.
• Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
• —. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
• Erens, Patricia Brett. “The Aesthetics of Protest: Evans Chan’s To Liv(e).” Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Ed. Tak-wai Wong. Hong Kong: U of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.
• Francia, Luis. “Asian Cinema and Asian American Cinema: Separated by a Common Language.” Cinemaya 9 (Autumn 1990): 36-39.
• Fore, Steve. “Golden Harvest Films and the Hong Kong Movie Industry in the Realm of Globalization.” The Velvet Light Trap 34 (Fall 1994): 40-58.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. NY: International Publishers Co., 1971.
• Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. NY: Routledge, 1996.
• Hinton, Carma. The Gate of Heavenly Peace. http://www.nmis.org/gate/
• Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
• Kaplan, Caren. “The Politics of Location in Transnational Feminist Practice.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• Kar, Law, ed. Overseas Chinese Figures in Cinema. Hong Kong: The 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1992.
• Kolker, Robert. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. NY: Oxford UP, 1983.
• Lu, Sheldon, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Indentity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1997.
• Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. NY: Routledge, 1989.
• Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Random House, 1994.
• Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, “The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age.” Unthinking Eurocentricism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994.” 338-362
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Horasym. NY: Routledge, 1990.
• West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. NY: Routledge, 1993.
• Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent D’est.” Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies. London: Verso, 1982.
• Wong, Tak-wai, ed. Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Hong Kong: U of Hong Kong, Department of Comparative Literature, 1996.

Related Web Sites

 

• The following is a list of other links on Asian and Asian-American film that may be of interest:
• Feng, Peter. “In Search of Asian American Cinema.” Cineaste 21 (Winter-Spring 1995): 32 ff. Also, on the WWW: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/InSearchofAsian.html
• Kashiwabara, Amy. “Vanishing Son: The Appearance, Disappearance, and Assimilation of the Asian-American Man in American Mainstream Media.” http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Amydoc.html#PhantomofChinatown
• Leong, Toh Hai, Yvonne Ng, and Gerald Pratley. “The Irresistible Rise of Asian Cinema.” Kinema. (Spring 1994). http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/ghy-asia.htm
• The Movies, Race, and Ethnicity: Asians/Asian Americans. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/imagesasians.html

 

Robert Kolker

University of Maryland
rk27@umail.umd.edu

 

This issue of Postmodern Culture grew from a conviction that the critical and scholarly study of film could make more use of computer-based image technologies. In our discipline (as in any other humanities undertaking) quotation and illustration constitute proof and demonstration. In the past, we have been restricted in our ability to quote and illustrate because our source material was limited to (at worst) publicity stills from films and (at best) frame enlargements from the films themselves. In all cases, those illustrations were only stills. We wrote about the moving image and offered only the still image as proof.

 

The ability to digitize still and moving images has broadened the scope of our work and enabled us to enter an intimate relationship with the images that are the source of our study. We can choose the stills we want and need, and, most importantly, we can show the moving images themselves. This, coupled with networked publication and the hypertext capabilities of the Web, makes possible new kinds of thinking about film, new textualities in which the work of the critic and the work of the film assume different kinds of relationships, new flexibilities of thought, expression, and publication.

 

The work that appears in this issue represents an extraordinary range of thought and execution. It not only demonstrates how digital technology can be used to open critical perspectives, but how critical thinking about film is changing, with and without technology. In other words, all of the essays advance our thinking about film and culture, and many exist as unique digital events.

 

Gina Marchetti’s “Transnational Cinema, Hybrid Identities and the Films of Evans Chan” concerns a filmmaker whose work is a meditation on national identity, national boundaries, and their dissolution. Because Chan’s work is rarely seen in commercial venues, the inclusion of stills and moving-image clips not only opens Marchetti’s analysis and anchors it in the work itself, but makes that work visible to the reader perhaps for the first time.

 

In “Simultaneity and Overlap in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing,” Stephen Mamber doesn’t use stills from Kubrick’s early gangster film, but creates schematic diagrams and a 3-D fly-through to visualize its complex chronology. Time and space are merged, and The Killing’s mise-en-scène, once thought of as split between what was seen on the screen and heard in the voice-over narration, are understood and visualized as integral.

 

Dziga Vertov was a revolutionary Russian filmmaker who reflected upon the mechanical nature of his art in his cinema. He adumbrated cyborg theory by understanding that the movie camera was a mechanical, perceptual extension of the political and historical imagination. Joseph Schaub, in his “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye,” traces lines of development between Vertov, the Italian Futurists, and contemporary cyborg theory, and sees them in gendered contexts.

 

Jorge Otero-Pailos, in “Casablanca’s Régime: The Shifting Aesthetics of Political Technologies (1907-1943),” examines the city of Casablanca, and the film that most famously represents it to Western eyes. Otero-Pailos sees the city and its history from a political, post-colonial, and architectural perspective. The essay examines the political architecture of the city; the images that accompany the essay help plot the axes of its analysis.

 

Since the mechanics of perceptual fabrication in early cinema are a central concern of William Routt’s “The Madness of Cinema and of Thinking Images,” it is appropriate in a symbolically symmetrical way that the author employs the mechanics of digital fabrication to visualize his analysis about the image in early cinema. Routt uses digital technology to see the history of the spectacular image from a number of critical perspectives.

 

Adrian Miles turns an exploration of Singin’ in the Rain into a hypertext of interrelated moving-image clips, critical analyses, thematic and structural associations. This piece rethinks the linearity of critical writing on film and creates a work that can only exist in a digital environment.

 

So too does Peter Donaldson’s “Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and the End of Books.” Working from the base offered by Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, Donaldson speculates on the relationship of images and archives, text, countertext, and hypertext.

 

Speculation is very much the key to all the essays in this issue. The writers want to know about the history, textuality, and culture of the films they write about and how the writing and their analyses are changed through technologies that offer new ways of seeing and (in both senses of the word) reading. The technologies aren’t perfect. Pushing moving-image files across the Internet is still an event that requires much patience. If you read this issue through a 28.8 modem connection, it will take a while to get some of the images downloaded. Perhaps this belies the myth of the instantaneous that is so much a part of Internet culture. Things aren’t always immediately available to the eye, which is one of the things the authors are thinking about.

 

Many thanks to Stuart Moulthrop and Anne Sussman for the markup and production editing that made this complex issue of Postmodern Culture possible.