The Unexpected Static of Feelings
Cinematic Modernism and the Aesthetics of Frustration as a Critical
Irritant in L’Eclisse and Carnival of Souls
Luukas Veivo – 12301043 Supervisor: Dr. A.M. Geil Second Reader: Prof. Dr. M. Kavka MA in Media Studies (Research) Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam 23 June 2020
Abstract
The disciplinary self-articulation of Film Studies has long revolved around an implicit
agreement that holds the cinema up as an art form and technology uniquely suited to articulate the ‘feel’ of modernity, mediating or even shaping the structure of lived experience in the twentieth century. Attempts to successfully theorise cinema’s modernism have however splintered critical discourse on the subject into three competing paradigms that frequently contradict each other’s understanding of the relationship between film, historical modernity and the aesthetic idea of the modern, frustrating the very meaning of the phenomenon that they seek to affirm. This thesis interrogates the theoretical friction that surrounds cinematic modernism in film theory and aesthetics, and proposes that its frustrating slipperiness performs a key function in our reading of the concept in terms of a metacritical form as well as a cinematic expression of modern experience. Bringing to attention dialectic contradictions that have informed its imagining, it is argued that the capacity of the idea of a modern cinema to serve as a critical irritant, both inviting and frustrating meaning, enables the articulation of multiple aesthetic modernisms and historical modernities under the aegis of cinematic
modernism. In reading for this aesthetics of modern(ist) frustration in L’eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) and Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), it is shown that by embracing the inconsistencies of cinema’s modernism, we can recover it as a theoretically productive notion for an analysis of the complex and ambivalent relationship between film and modern experience.
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 1
1 CINEMATIC MODERNISM: A (META)CRITICAL HISTORY ... 10
1.1 Stylistic Modernism: Cinema as Aesthetic Experience ... 14
1.2 Political Modernism: Cinema as Ideological Construct ... 20
1.3 Vernacular Modernism: Cinema as Historical Sensation ... 23
1.4 Cinematic Modernism as a Critical Irritant ... 27
2 READING FOR THE ABSENT: L’ECLISSE AND THE FRUSTRATED TEMPORALITY OF MODERN(IST) FILM STYLE ... 29
2.1 Look Back in Boredom: Aesthetic Tedium and Critical Distance ... 33
2.2 Affirming Absence: Cinematic Frustration and Post-Industrial Modernity ... 41
2.3 The Limits of Style ... 45
3 AFTERIMAGES: CARNIVAL OF SOULS, CINEMA AND THE PARADOX OF MODERN SENSATION ... 47
3.1 Crashing: Cinema’s Ghostly Movements ... 49
3.2 A Novel Present? Cinematic Time and Historical Modernity ... 54
3.3 A Vanishing Feel: Cinematic Modernism as Material Sensation ... 60
Conclusion ... 64
1
Introduction
The Cinema has a grammar uniquely its own. Unattended, without words, an air of conviction alights from the screen on eighteen hundred pairs of eyes. Words slither like wet cakes of soap around what we try to say… On the line of communication we are interrupted by an unexpected static of feelings. Everything remains to be said and we give up, exhausted. Then the screen lights up its silent loudspeaker sky.1
Jean Epstein (1926) Sketching out his thoughts on the relationship between the cinema and writing in a short essay published in his 1926 book Le Cinématography vu de l’Etna, Jean Epstein was one of the first scholars of film to clearly express an idea that would come to be stand as both a key
contention and conundrum in the field of Film Studies. A pioneer of early film theory, Epstein was a thinker deeply convinced that the cinema possessed a radically new aesthetic sensibility that made it uniquely suited to articulate the experience of modernity in the first decades of the twentieth century, as waves of deep-reaching industrial and technological change were transforming the conditions in which art was produced and consumed. He was, however, remarkably less sanguine about the prospects of accurately translating this sentiment – the qualities that made film feel so inexpressibly in tune with the rhythm of modern life – into a written form without something getting inevitably lost on the way. To speak of cinema in a precise manner, he lamented, was to watch feeling escape from the confines of words and slide around clusters of meaning like bars of soap; an expression that could easily pass for a poetic synopsis of the convoluted intellectual history of cinematic modernism.
Born initially in the 1920s out of a desire by Epstein and others to substantiate the critical and artistic significance of the new medium, the idea of cinematic modernism – of film as an aesthetics uniquely suited to articulate the ‘feel’ of the modern, mirroring or even determining the structure of lived experience – has gone through several comprehensive reformulations over the years, only to eventually meet new conceptual limits and trip into a seemingly inevitable tangle of internal contradictions and theoretical frustration. This has left the concept in a curious critical limbo, suspended between the banality of a commonplace assertion (‘Cinema is innately modern’) and more specific, yet often mutually contradicting
1 Jean Epstein, ‘ The Photogenic Element,’ trans. Tom Milne in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 301.
2
theoretical frameworks that each attempt to explain the character of this modernism in more detail. Ask your average film historian or theorist, and chances are they will tell you that to speak of the cinema is to speak, to a greater or lesser degree (but a degree nonetheless), of modernity and the modern itself. Ask them what they mean to say by that, however, and chances are that discrepancies will arise: one scholar may tell you that cinematic modernism refers to a set of cultural practices that mediated new sensory experiences brought about by industrial modernisation2, while another argues that it constitutes instead a formal poetics organised around a particular set of stylistic elements specific to the film medium 3– to mention only the two most prominent schools of thought. Faced with a series of theoretical inconsistencies and conceptual irreconciliabilities, Epstein’s words seem to ring true for the critic that strives for a cohesive and seamless image of cinematic modernism. Reading a film text for signs of the modern, one is consistently interrupted by an ‘unexpected static of feelings’ – frustration, confusion and exasperation – and the nagging impression that, no matter how compelling an argument may be made for any particular interpretation of the shape it assumes, some aspect of the relationship between cinema and modernity nevertheless escapes us and in the end we must admit defeat. What this thesis argues, however, is that we can recover the concept cinematic modernism, and by extension that of a ‘modernist’ cinema, as the tools for productive critical analysis precisely because of their ability to engender this critical frustration.
If cinema has long been imagined as the aesthetic horizon of modern experience, the history of this imagining has been one riven with routine disagreements, constant vexations and an endemic tension that appears to derive from the slippery and remarkably ambivalent character of the very phenomenon it has sought to frame. To put it more plainly, if there is no clear consensus on what the exact character of cinema’s modernism is, it is because the very notion of the cinema as an expression of the modern seems to possess an impressive ability to strain against the bounds of theory, refusing to fit comfortably within the neat confines of
2 For two pioneering articles that outline this conceptualisation of the cinema as a sensory vernacular for the historical experience of industrial modernity, see Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cinema, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,’ Wide Angle 8, no 3. (1986): 63-70; Miriam Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,’ Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 59-77. 3 For the work seminal in establishing the notion of cinematic modernism as a matter of film style, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode
3
critical discourse. While a view of the cinematograph as a technology and art that fused new categories of experiences into a novel aesthetic sensibility towards the world – much as it was also a product of that sensibility itself – has long formed an integral part of the conceptual bedrock of Film Studies, hovering as an implicit background presence over many of its intellectual turns, this should not be mistaken as the sign of a critical consensus surrounding uses of the term. Even during the slow coalescence of the field into a proper academic discipline, when a narrative that imagined the histories of film and the twentieth century as closely intertwined did much to establish cinema as a legitimate object of study, critics and theorists of the burgeoning medium rarely agreed on the exact manner in which this symbiotic relationship was supposed to have manifested itself.4 Such theoretical altercations are
however by no means unique to the history of cinematic modernism. As Susan Stanford Friedman notes, the broader field of modernist studies frequently resembles a ‘terminological quagmire’ feeding off a host of unresolved contradictions left within the concept of the modern itself and frequently suppressed in the quest for theoretical clarity – only to resurface later in a violent manner.5 As I will illustrate over the course of my argument, the web of
arguments and counter-arguments that has tangled itself around cinematic modernism has dealt with the volatility of its subject matter by splintering into a set of paradigms and
counter-paradigms designed to contain different critical frustrations. Consequently, to lean on the argument that cinema allows us some unique insight into modernity or the modern
normally means having to choose your ‘side’, as it were, between two or three theoretical frameworks that are satisfactory on their own terms, but acknowledge the others only as intellectual curiosities useful insofar as they evince interests of a historical importance to the evolution of Film Studies. This state of events presents the contemporary critic with a deceptively simple question: has cinematic modernism exhausted itself as a critical form? Is
4 It speaks of enduring lustre of this double narrative – which customarily frames the first commercial screening of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1895 as the dawn of the modern age – that although it has been mostly discredited by historical studies which show that a significant share of contemporary audiences perceived the first films as a natural continuation of earlier scientific and commercial practices, an idea of the cinema’s birth as a transformative moment in aesthetics and history arguably remains fairly central to the identity and self-image of Film Studies as an academic field. For a more comprehensive study of early cinema’s conflicted status as both commercial entertainment and an epistemological tool, see for example Marta Braun, Picturing Time:
The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).
5 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,’ Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (September 2001): 499.
4
there a way for us to rethink the concept in metacritical manner that accommodates the dichotomies, gaps and oppositions that define its use in the current scholarship, or should we instead lay it to a deserved rest and come up with more apt names for describing the various discourses that congregate and feud under its banner? The answer I propose here is that, with a diametrical shift in perspective, we may turn these myriad theoretical frustrations into the tools for a more productive reading of cinematic modernism, both as a critical form and a cinematic expression of modern experience.
Like with a catalyst or a chemical reagent, the principal utility of thinking cinema’s modernism as an articulation of the lived experience of the modern lies in its capacity to serve as a critical irritant – generating a constant tension between categories of meaning that
sustains the need to reconsider how film ties into the wider fabric of twentieth century
modernity –, rather than in its capacity to provide us with any definitive answers. However, in order to better illustrate what I mean to infer by this assertion, it is necessary to clarify at this junction my use of the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’, a triad that I have already employed in a fairly loose and doubtlessly provocative manner. As Peter Osborne argues, the aesthetic idea of the modern constitutes at its most rudimentary level a temporal logic of negation, transitoriness and impermanence; it is a ‘means of sustaining loss’, that is to say a negative ontology for art that defines and re-defines itself against that which it is not (the old, the not-new, the moribund).6 Consequently, the modern involves a sense of the present as radically novel, which makes it to a degree always removed from history; as we shall see, the ‘feel’ of the modern rarely lasts for very long, even if we can say that as a temporal form it has certain inherently aesthetic aspects. Modernity, on the other hand, possesses a different, epochal significance: it marks a distinct historical period, commonly understood to run roughly from the end of the eighteenth-century to the late 1960s, that saw the sense of a decisive break with the temporality of the past and tradition progressively intensify. As Stephen Kern has shown in his seminal book on the cultural history of modernity, this process of acceleration reached its highest pitch around the turn of the twentieth century, when technological inventions such as the railway, the telephone and the cinematograph combined with the emergence of industrial capitalism to produce a series of deep-reaching socio-cultural transformations in Western societies, bringing about entirely
5
new modes of thinking and feeling ‘modern’.7 It is thus perhaps unsurprising that critics from
Epstein onwards have seized so eagerly on the cinema as a medium that framed the feel of the modern as a distinct category of experience, both in a historically determined and more abstract sense. How does modernism, then, fit into this picture? Osborne suggest that it is quite simply the ‘collective affirmation of the modern, as such [emphasis in original],’ or the expression of a specific relation to modernity instantiated into a particular aesthetic form.8 One of the issues that has contributed to the progressive fragmentation of the critical view on how film may articulate such a relation, however, is the relative ease with which one can confuse the conceptual dynamics that inform this terminological triad.
Much of the friction that we can diagnose in the discourse(s) on cinematic modernism is in itself the function of an undertheorised slippage between the modern and historical modernity. As Michael Wood bemoans in a recent essay, an unexamined intellectual nostalgia for cinema’s modernism has flourished with such fervour over the years that it has provoked an instinctual tendency among many film scholars to treat the words ‘modern’ and ‘cinematic’ as close to interchangeable if not entirely synonymous, with the effect of confounding their meaning and reducing film from the expression of a real shift in historical and aesthetic experience to a remarkably vague shorthand for an ‘accelerated image of modernity.’9
However, while it can indeed be argued that the cinema was modernist from the beginning, in the sense that it articulated a sea-change in aesthetic sensibility brought about by the material conditions of industrial modernity, to claim that it was also always modern represents
something of misapprehension. The emergence of cinematic modernism as an aesthetics devoted to affirming a sensation of the novel in a modernist cinema was rather, as we shall
7 Although Kern’s book The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) remains the defining work on the cultural history of modern experience as a whole, his arguments have been developed extensively by a later generation of modernist scholars concerned with the intersection of art and aesthetics with the temporality of everyday life. See for example Bryony Randall’s discussion of the experience of ‘dailiness’ in relation to aesthetic modernism in Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a recent work that develops many of the same ideas in a more distinctly abstract and theoretical direction, although curiously without making a direct mention of Kern, see also John Jervis, Modernity Theory: Modern Experience, Modernist Consciousness, Reflexive Thinking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
8 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 73.
9 Michael Wood, ‘Modernism and Film,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 268.
6
see, a later and more specific historical development that has in some ways been retroactively mapped onto early cinema, particularly by scholars associated with the so-called ‘historical turn’ such as Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning and Vanessa R. Schwartz.10 This terminological fuzziness and indeterminacy has led to the not entirely unsubstantiated claim by Wood that we have reached a point where it is feasible to claim almost any film as modernist in one way or another, and the argument has indeed been made that cinematic modernism is either too narrow in its focus, singling out what is merely one moment in a more complex
cinematographic and aesthetic experience11, or that the more self-consciously discrepant forms of post-modern theory offer an overall better frame for making sense of the medium’s disparate qualities.12 However, Wood too falls inadvertently prey to the mistake of confusing cinematic modernism with the modern itself, forgetting that only the former is bound to the static shape of historical experience. The conceptual logic of the latter in fact revolves around the generation of a multiplicity of modernisms required to sustain its newness, even if this has the distinct habit of making it frustratingly difficult contain in a lasting form – the feel of the modern slipping from our grasp amidst a sea of aesthetic modernisms. However, instead of swimming against the current in a futile attempt to overcome its fragmented condition, the only way to recover cinematic modernism as an overarching critical form is to dive head-first
10 For Schwartz’s take on this ‘vernacular’ paradigm of cinematic modernism introduced in footnote 2, which she argues ‘mastered’ novelty and rapid change by means of creating a new visual culture, see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (London: University of California Press, 1998), 177-199.
11 For an essay that puts this argument forward eloquently, suggesting that the mistake of modernism is to isolate the modern (as the new) from a wider aesthetic regime within which images become interpretable, see Bram Ieven, ‘Memories of Modernism,’ in Rancière and Film, ed. Paul Bowman (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2013), 83-98. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of cinema as a ‘thwarted fable’, Ieven notably does not assert that this makes cinema’s modernism an altogether vapid notion, for the aesthetic tensions engendered by its single-minded logic provide us with a means of interrogating film’s function as a means of ‘organising and reorganising reality’ and historical meaning. However, despite correctly identifying an irritating friction at its heart, he seems to conceive of the cinematic modernism only as the narrow aesthetic programme affiliated with a self-conscious and explicitly ‘Modernist’ cinema – which arguably replicates many of the issues that he criticises the modernist scholarship for, and does not go very far towards explaining the function of the idea as a critical form.
12 For characteristic example of a post-modernist approach to film theory that seeks to appreciate all that is ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed’, see for instance the collection of essays addressing Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of ‘acinema’ in Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward, eds.,
7
into the soapy waters. It is, I argue, through the friction that reading for the modern engenders that we can appreciate its enduring ability to both sustain and defy critical interpretation, as well as rethink the relation of cinema to the lived experience of modernity.
What are the uses of engaging critically with something that not only resists stable interpretation, but actively frustrates the interpreter by consistently breaking out of the bounds of theory? To return to the metaphor of a critical irritant, it is because reading for traces of the modern in a film so frequently rewards us with a static of unexpected frustrations that we are driven to develop a more nuanced understanding of cinematic modernism. As Nick Salvato has suggested, clinging to the obstructive qualities of a concept, notion or text can be an effective means of reorganising nigh insurmountable dichotomies into a sleek set of dialectic frictions, for it precisely for the developing of a ‘more granularly textured feeling of, up, and against the wall [of an idea] that the clinging enables’.13 To wit, it is my contention that it is more helpful to think of the relationship between cinema and modernity not as a question of being but rather as one of becoming and a concomitant unbecoming. If the principal aim of this thesis is to interrogate why the notion of cinematic modernism has enjoyed such extensive currency while defying unequivocal definition, the answer that I advance lies in understanding the concept as a configuration of separate but interrelated modernisms that converge across certain flashpoints of critical friction.14 For reasons that will be further corroborated in my discussion of its critical history, I argue more precisely that cinematic modernism represents a means of engaging with the idea of cinema as an expression of
modern experience in itself, a conceptual constellation encompassing both individual aesthetic modernisms as well as a wider metacritical form organised around the act of reading for the modern.15 Key to this argument is a category of feeling I have already alluded to on several
13 Nick Salvato, Obstruction (London: Duke University Press, 2016), 4.
14 This is not to say that I mean to suggest that attempts to understand cinematic modernism in more circumscribed terms are in themselves foolhardy or short-sighted. To the contrary, the plurality of cinematic modernisms has contributed greatly to widening our understanding of the complex weave of aesthetic qualities and categories of meaning and experience that constitute or have at a certain time constituted the modern. However, what interests me more is the ability of the notion to simultaneously encourage and frustrate new readings, which I argue we can see articulated in the motif of critical friction that structures academic writing on modernist film aesthetics.
15 As noted above, the threat of theoretical confusion is ever present in any discussion of cinematic modernism, yet its utility also depends on the ability to frustrate the clarity of critical discourse. I have therefore attempted to make it as clear as possible in each instance whether I refer to a cinematic modernism writ large, as outlined
8
occasions, and that has structured nearly all significant attempts to speak of cinema and modernism in the same sentence: frustration, of a historical and aesthetic as well as an interpretive kind. In particular, I want to suggest that to read for cinematic modernism means to engage with the cinema as an aesthetics of frustration, organised around the production of a series of critical frictions that allow us reconsider the ability of film to articulate modern experience in all its shades and hues.
It seems self-evident to say that frustration is defined extensively by our subjective experience of a thing as frustrating, as resistant to whatever use or meaning we wish to make of it. However, in thinking of the feeling only as a result of the subject’s failure to engage with the object of frustration, we fail to appreciate the feeling as meaningful in itself. In recent years, as the so-called ‘affective turn’ of film theory has begun to give signs of losing steam, a small but growing contingent of affect theorists has sought to reinvigorate the study of
cinematic feeling by rethinking affect as matter of form and texture, embedded into film aesthetics as a structural principle around which a work is organised. This appears to me a particularly productive theoretical discourse to bring into a dialogue with cinematic modernism for several of reasons. The literature on modernist film aesthetics – however defined – has put an overwhelming emphasis on the formal organisation of the text as the key means through which the medium’s modernism is articulated, and this presents us with an intriguing means of reading for the frustration of modernism in the affective and aesthetic structure of a film. That is to say, I propose that we may think of an aesthetic ‘frustratingness’ as a formal property of cinematic modernism that activates frustration as a critical affect when it is actively read for. Drawing on the work of revisionist scholars of cinematic feeling such as Sianne Ngai, Eugenie Brinkema and Pansy Duncan, I will therefore not only perform a close reading of two film texts as expressions of a frustrated modernism, but also consider
frustration as a feeling that informs cinematic modernism as a metacritical form as well.16 The purpose of this reading conducted across two levels will be to trace the function of frustration both an aesthetic-affective structure that enables the articulation of multiple modernisms, as
here, or to one of the historically specific discourses known under the name and which are addressed
individually in Chapter 1. If some instants of critical disorder must inevitably remain, it is my hope that they will bear out in earnest the capacity of frustration to incite the faculties of criticism into action.
16 For the key works that have inspired this approach, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (London: Harvard University Press, 2009); Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (London: Duke University Press, 2014); Pansy Duncan, The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other (London: Routledge, 2016).
9
well as a scholarly affect that fuels the critical desire to tame the unruly character of the modern. For, as Brinkema reminds us, ‘it is only because one must read for it that affect has
any force at all [emphasis in original]’, and it is through its capacity for both inviting and
frustrating meaning that cinematic modernism achieves a theoretical force.17
Chapter 1 of this thesis charts the critical history of cinematic modernism through three paradigmatic schools of thought. By focusing on the contradictions and historical tensions that have prompted three successive attempts to theorise cinema’s relationship with the modern in novel terms, it will be shown that a sense of critical frustration lies at the heart of film theory’s imagining of the cinema as modern, and that by embracing these
inconsistencies we may develop a theoretical outlook better suited to understanding the dialectic tensions that have made and unmade the critical fortunes of cinematic modernism. The following chapters will consist of a close reading of two films from 1962, L’eclisse (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) and Carnival of Souls (dir. Herk Harvey). In concentrating on texts from the so-called ‘late’ end of modernity – the first famous and widely recognised as
archetypally ‘modernist’, the second relatively unknown and ostensibly far removed from paradigmatic ideas of cinematic modernism – I aim to illustrate in practical terms how reading for the modern across two remarkably different aesthetics complicates our understanding of the relationship between cinema and the modern, and enables the articulation of multiple categories of modern experience under the aegis of cinematic modernism. Chapter 2, which focuses on L’eclisse, reads the aesthetic modernism of the film as the expression of both a historical film style and the temporal logic of the modern in order to show that cinematic modernism cannot be reduced a historically determined poetics, for the structure of modern experience frustrates our attempts to contain it within the moving image. Chapter 3 calls into question the ontology of cinematic time and sensation, arguing that the aesthetic and affective frictions that mark Carnival of Souls reveal the vernacular of sensations around which the text is organised as the afterimage of a historical modernity, complicating our understanding of the relationship between the film and material conditions that allow for the present to be
experienced as new.
10
CHAPTER 1
CINEMATIC MODERNISM: A (META)CRITICAL HISTORY
Epstein was not alone in claiming a uniquely modern aesthetic sensibility for the cinema, and the notion of cinematic modernism has proven over the years the object of persistent
fascination, if not a wholehearted critical fetish, for significant contingent of film theorists, historians and critics. While this has had the effect of embedding an image of cinema and the modern as two sides of the same coin deep into the intellectual matrix of the scholarship on film aesthetics, as suggested in the introduction this has frequently been at a certain cost to conceptual clarity. If it has become an arguably fairly challenging task to look back at the parallel histories of cinema and the twentieth century without a touch of symbolism surreptitiously creeping into the picture – whether in the form of the Lumières’ first, thoroughly mythologised screening at the Parisian Grand Café in 1895, the 1940s ‘Golden Age’ of classical Hollywood, or the much-vaunted ‘death’ of cinema at the dawn of the present millennium –, from a closer distance it becomes quickly evident that such wistfulness, while central to the disciplinary self-articulation of Film Studies, hides a number of
significant disagreements and theoretical frustrations. As this chapter will illustrate, the critical shape of cinematic modernism is a difficult one to define entirely in terms of properties formal, historical or otherwise, and attempts to reformulate the concept have routinely progressed through a shift in emphasis towards a new side of the
‘modern-modernism-modernity’ triad. The most influential of these, and hence the most salient for our purposes, can be divided into roughly three generally antagonistic, yet also mutually buoying paradigms after the level at which they identify the main point of intersection between film aesthetics and the modern: form, ideology and the material conditions of historical
experience.18 Proceeding through an account of these schools of thought through the example of key scholars, I show that although each paradigm provides us with a definition of cinematic modernism that is both cogent and largely self-sufficient on its own terms, there is
nonetheless a particular critical frustration that is suppressed in all three theoretical
18 This programmatic division is, of course, drawn by necessity with a degree of arbitrariness and there are many minute differences that escape its boundaries. Nonetheless, the most influential conceptualisations of what it means to speak of cinema as an expression of modern experience all fall clearly within one of the three
paradigmatic discourses traced below, which allows them to capture the arguments most relevant for the purpose of drawing out the historical role of frustration in the construction of cinema’s modernism.
11
frameworks and which can be brought to the surface by means of a dialogue. This
consideration, I argue, bears out my assertion that the question of cinematic modernisms can be thought in terms of a productive frustration of critical forms . However, in order to more thoroughly appreciate this metacritical function of cinematic modernism, it is helpful to first briefly consider the role of irritation in the wider sphere of modernist aesthetics.
A certain air of critical frustration with modernism is hardly unique to the history of Film Studies, and doubtlessly a general dampening of enthusiasm for liberal use of the
concept (such as that demonstrated by Wood) has fed off the quick rise of post-modern theory from the 1980s onwards. Coinciding with the emergence of a powerful narrative that
announced a transition from the modern to a post-modern idiom, championed by philosophers and cultural theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard, the last decade of the previous century saw much of the scholarship on film aesthetics consumed with
proclamations of the imminent doom of aesthetic modernism and even the entirety of cinema itself – an assumed correlation that in itself speaks of the degree to which cinema has been identified with the modern.19 Recent events have however demonstrated that the question of
modernism is far from played out. As many of the post-modernists have had to recognise (often to their professed distaste), the various facets of the broader modernist paradigm have resurfaced with a vengeance in a series of theoretical and aesthetic ‘regressions’ – to use Jameson’s word –, while post-modernism itself seems to be currently experiencing if not a gradual waning at least a significant downturn in its critical fortunes.20 Championed across the breadth of the humanities by monographs, articles and anthologies with titles such as The
Contemporaneity of Modernism21 or Planetary Modernisms22, this ‘new’ or ‘neo-‘ modernist
19 For key texts in the critical articulation of post-modernism as a new cultural logic and set of aesthetic mediations, see Fredric Jameson, Post-Modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1980).
20 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Version, 2002), 1-13. 21 Echoing Peter Osborne, this collection of essays argues for the possibility of a ‘contemporary modernism’ as the means to restore a meaningful, heterogeneous relationship with the present to a criticism that post-modern theory has largely reduced to a linear zero-sum game between a historical (modernist) and post-historical (post-modernist) temporality, where one must inevitably be subsumed into the other. Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges, eds., The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (Abingdon: Routledge 2016). 22 Moving away from reading the modern within a primarily temporal frame, Susan Stanford Friedman asks for a fundamental rethinking of modernism on a ‘planetary scale’ as an aesthetics that affirms instead a polycentric
12
scholarship drives across with remarkable force the fact that the modern continues to exert a powerful magnetism over scholars in search of both questions and answers in regards to the relationship between aesthetic experience and the historical and material conditions of lived reality.
If the modernist impulses of the humanities have clearly yet to exhaust themselves, to the irritation of certain cultural theorists, does this mean that they themselves operate
according to a logic of critical friction? To quote Marshall Berman, the distinct virtue of the modern is that, slippery and hard to pin down, it ‘leaves questions echoing in the air long after the questioners themselves, and their answers, have left the scene’ and if modernism today seems to be everywhere one looks, it may be inferred that this is due to its ability to compel and frustrate critics across disciplinary lines.23 Though it may therefore be more accurate to speak of a perpetually expanding and contracting range of modernisms, cinematic and otherwise, rather than of a single conceptual entity, it is beyond the remit of this thesis to develop a full argument to this end. In fact, is important to note here that although the status of modernist aesthetics within the broader sphere of the humanities may give us some surface insights into what makes cinematic modernism such a compelling notion – and why it is timely to revisit the concept –, the cinema stands out among art forms due to the particular circumstances of its birth. In addition to an aesthetic medium, it is also technology and platform for mass culture that was born out of the specific historical conditions of modernity, and consequently cannot be folded easily into the articulation of other artistic modernisms such as literature. It is therefore helpful to rememberthat, even if the recent avalanche of modernist literature has provoked Jameson to assert that the contradictions that cluster around the modern are ‘as unavoidable as they are unacceptable’, we need not take such an hostile view of the critical inconsistencies and structural imperfections that are particular to cinematic modernism.24 Indeed, an emerging branch of modernist theory has lately sought to outline an inherent volatility as one of the key performative functions of aesthetic modernism in general.
The notion that aesthetic modernism is an unstable, innately restive thing has found its way into the new modernist paradigm only recently, and in what is a relatively loose form
geohistorical condition obtaining to broader set of experiences than we can discern by addressing only the usual, Western instances of modernity. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity
Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
23 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into the Air (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 21. 24 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 13.
13
(which is perhaps fitting). Yet, even if we cannot go so far as to speak of a coherent
theoretical project devoted to establishing friction as the operational logic of modernism – a ‘frustrated turn’, if you will –, scholars such as Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower have nonetheless made great strides towards showing that one can find all across the artistic and intellectual landscape of the fin-de-siècle a profound fascination with what they have elected to call ‘vibratory phenomena’.25 As they argue, a mania with the moving, the restless and the
unsteady manifested itself strongly not only in scientific thought concerning matter and energy (such as wave motion theory and the concept of the ether), but also in the arts and across avant-garde movements fascinated with speed, change and dynamism (Futurism and Surrealism) and even in the realm of the spiritual (occultism, theosophy and the search for ectoplasm), marking a definitive move in the organisation of empirical, aesthetic and metaphysical thought towards the forms of the unstable and fraught.26 Similar observations
have been made by Robert Brain, whose work traces a web of tethers between the emergence of the protoplasmic theory in the biological sciences and new aesthetic doctrines based on notions of automatism and synaesthesia, both of which he argues sought to articulate an idea of modernity experienced in the sensation of a restless ‘pulse’ or change in ‘vibratory
rhythms’.27 Although neither of these scholarly projects bears directly on cinema (even if
tangential mentions abound), both point to an intriguing new vista from which to reconsider cinema’s modernism, posing as they do the implicit question of whether we can find a similar volatility simmering on the silver screen. However, although this thesis will move onto a close reading of specific film texts in Chapters 2 and 3, I want to suggest beforehand that the idea also presents us with a useful metaphor for uncovering the performative function of
25 Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, ‘Introduction’ in Vibratory Modernism, ed. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 20.
26 The link between aesthetic modernism and interest in a variety of supernatural phenomena has attracted a particularly significant amount of academic interest in recent years, some scholars even suggesting that it had a visible influence on the evolution of film as an art form. For an in-depth discussion of the intersections between cinema and the idea of an occult, paranormal world, see Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with
Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinbugh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 103-116. Benedikt
Hjartarson, ‘Ghosts Before Breakfast: The Appetite for the Beyond in Early Avant-Garde Film’ in Tessel M. Bauduin and Henrik Johnsson, ed., The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillam, 2018) 137-62, also presents an interesting case study of 1920s avant-garde cinema as an
epistemology of modern esotericism.
27 See Robert Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015).
14
cinematic modernism in a critical sense. By engaging in a sort of indirect reading for the friction that shapes cinematic expressions of modern experience, apprehended from a distance through the irritations that inform writing on celluloid modernism, we can draw out the function of frustration first as a metacritical form that mediates our engagement with the multiple modernisms of cinema. It is by playing out the theoretical inconsistencies and irreconciliabilites of each paradigmatic imagining of a modernist cinema that we can begin to rethink cinematic modernism on a broader scale, as well as develop a capacity for reading for frustration as a textual form.
1.1 Stylistic Modernism: Cinema as Aesthetic Experience
The first and oldest conceptualisation of cinematic modernism, which we may call the stylistic or formalist paradigm, has focused chiefly on determining whether cinema constituted a radically new form of art, distinct from older mediums due to a unique set of formal and technological attributes that allowed it to reach for an aesthetic sensibility more true to the character of life in the twentieth century. This was a discourse that first emerged from the idiosyncratic writings of the early film theorists, who were fascinated with the mechanical gaze of the cinematograph and the possibilities they saw in it for depicting the fabric and feel of everyday experience with a level of nuance unavailable to more venerable plastic arts such as painting or sculpture. For thinkers such as Jean Esptein and Hugo
Münsterberg, although they rarely referred to themselves or their object of study as explicitly modernist, cinema was first and foremost a modern art. That is to say, an art that captured the feel of the present as new, with its pulse intact. Due to its ability to render reality not only in photographic detail but more importantly with its natural, moving state preserved, the cinematograph appeared to each man as uniquely suited to articulate the increasing temporal pace of modern experience, and both argued that the mechanical indifference with which the film camera met its subjects raised it above the flaws and quirks of individual perception. Interestingly, however, they drew remarkably different conclusions from this technological automatism, which for them defined the cinematic apparatus. As Epstein saw it, the cinematic gaze allowed its emphasis to fall on various mundane facets of reality that we rarely perceive consciously – such as a hazy cloud of cigarette smoke or slowly moving doorlatch, to give two of his favourite examples –, suspending what he saw as the stultifying contrivances of narrative, language and meaning, and in so doing rendered in aesthetic form a world in which many established categories of significance were rapidly unravelling amidst new technologies
15
that transfigured the experience of time and space.28 The aim of this process he identified in articulating the quality of photogénie. A property particular to film, and which Epstein
considered particularly difficult to convey in writing, this was a sense of wonderment realised when the medium most fully embodied cinema’s promise to transform the relationship
between man and the material reality of life, revealing something of the world to us as only the cinema could.29 Münsterberg, on the contrary, believed that cinema could sharpen our sense of the historical present precisely by giving the Kantian notion of a detached and disaffected aesthetic experience a new lease on life. As Münsterberg muses on cinema’s ability to cultivate an aesthetic attitude proper to modern life in comparison to theatre:
But we know from the theater that movement is not the only condition which makes us focus our interest on a particular element of the play. An unusual face, a queer dress, a gorgeous costume or a surprising lack of costume, a quaint piece of decoration, may attract our mind and even hold it spellbound for a while. Such means can not only be used but can be carried to a much stronger climax of efficiency by the unlimited means of the moving pictures. This is still more true of the power of setting or background. The painted landscape of the stage can hardly compete with the wonders of nature and culture when the scene of the photoplay is laid in the supreme landscapes of the world. Wide vistas are opened, the woods and the streams, the mountain valleys and the ocean, are before us with the
28 Jean Epstein, ‘Visual Fabric,’ trans. Franck Le Gac, in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, eds. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 355.
29 It is important to note here that Epstein was by no means the only one of cinema’s early theorists to use the notion of photogénie to refer to his ideal vision of cinema. Extremely popular with French critics of the 1920s, the term was initially coined by Louis Delluc in a seminal essay in reference to the ‘fever, the sagacity, the rhythm of cinema,’ that is to say its ability to transcend the static visual forms of photography. This text, from Delluc’s 1920 book Photogénie (Paris: Editions Brunoff), has not been translated into English, and the quote employed here comes from Laurent Guido, ‘Introduction: The Paradoxical Fits and Starts of the New ‘’Optical Unconscious’’ in Between Still and Moving Images, eds. Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 11. If the concept of photogénie is nowadays often associated particularly strongly with Epstein, it is largely because he stuck to its use even as the advent of sound cinema destabilised many of the aesthetic notions associated with the term, developing it further into the direction of his own vision for a film aesthetics that would allow the spectator to apprehend the world in a ‘lyrosophical mode’, enabling the speed of thought to catch up with the intensified sense of modern life. For more on Epstein’s articulation of the idea, see Katie Kirtland, ‘The Cinema of Kaleidoscope,’ in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 93-114; Christophe Wall-Romana, ‘From Lyrosophy to Antiphilosophy: The Thought of Cinema in Jean Epstein’ in Film as Philosophy, ed. Bernd Herzongerath (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 90-110.
16
whole strength of reality; and yet in rapid change which does not allow the attention to become fatigued.30
For both men, then, the moving image marked the vanishing point of a thoroughly new aesthetic horizon, true and complementary to the radical manner in which technologies such as the telephone, the radio, and the railway had upended long-held conceptions of movement and distance.31 Like its compatriots, cinema had come from the land of the modern to sweep
away the tired conventions of yore and to replace old, sedentary modes of perception with ones ideally suited to the constant, almost unbearable newness of an existence where anything and everything might take on a sudden significance. Similar sentiments were echoed by other influential voices in early film theory such as Béla Balàsz, who praised cinema for its ability to bring to surface the irreducibly dynamic cast that twentieth century life had taken, and particularly for its drive to strip out the exigencies of literary storytelling in favour of an aesthetics proper only to the cinema; in a film, nothing was concealed within the ‘hidden depth’ of abstraction, but instead seen and imbibed directly from its a material atmosphere.32
Simply put, cinema seemed to cleave more than any other medium to the dictum, made famous by Gertrude Stein, to ‘make it new’, giving everything it touched an air of the novel and the exhilarating, confirming the medium’s position at the centre of the greater maelstrom of ‘moving modernisms’ that so obsessed the early twentieth century.33 Although this tide of
30 Hugo Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg on Film: ‘The Photoplay’: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (London: Routledge, 2002), 84.
31 It is interesting to note briefly here on Münsterberg’s frequent use of the word ‘photoplay’, reminiscent of the theatre, in reference to film, which conveys rather firmly that unlike Epstein, his conception of the cinema was closely welded to classical aesthetic theories. Consequently, while Münsterberg understood the cinematic experience as having certain truly novel psychological effects on the spectator, he believed these to expand on the aesthetic experience enabled by older arts such as the theatre rather than to entirely overturn it.
32 Quoted in Adrian Martin, ‘Different, even Wholly Irrational Arguments: The Film Philosophy of Bela Balàsz,’ in Film as Philosophy, ed. Bernd Herzongerath (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 53.
33 Although Stein herself did not engage in filmmaking, and most of the theorists mentioned so far were, in spite of a marked fondness for comparing cinema to poetry, equally indifferent towards the modernist movement in literature (except perhaps Balàsz), both literary modernists and cinema’s advocates nonetheless professed a strong common faith in the need for a radically new type of art fit to the measure of new historical conditions. For more on modernism as a ‘space that is filled with [a] moving’ of the new between art forms, avant-gardes, and technologies, see David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach, ed., Moving Modernisms: Motion,
Technology, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). David Trotter has also stressed a need for
17
theoretical panegyrics already hid certain tensions that would fester in later film theory, and invited its share of criticism from highbrow dismissals of cinema’s popular credentials to condemnations of its mechanical reconstruction of movement as nothing but a chimera, it gave birth to a remarkably attractive discourse that grounded cinematic modernism in a radical newness carried by the stylistic and mechanical properties of the moving image.34 Soon, its idiosyncrasies would fuse into a more systematic paradigm.
In the years after the Second World War, the blend of aesthetic formalism and technological enthusiasm espoused by the early film theorists found its greatest champion in André Bazin, whose itinerant film criticism articulated a coherent ontology of the moving image, built on the principles of cinematic automatism and the photogenic abilities it endowed the cinema with. For Bazin, what was singular about film was its ability to ‘embalm’ time with unsurpassed mechanical detail, allowing the spectator’s gaze to wander freely across the surface of modern life stripped from the ‘spiritual dust and grime’ with which our senses habitually cover it.35 This ‘ontological realism’, which he identified strongly with a particular
grammar made up of stylistic elements such as deep focus and a discreet use of montage, provided film scholars of the following decades with an authoritative framework through which to filter their own insights, and Bazin’s thought has consequently proven highly influential to later attempts to define the basis of cinema’s claim to a unique aesthetic sensibility. Even if his insistence on certain notions – such as the role of an ever-increasing mimetic realism as the principal ‘guiding myth’ of cinema36 – has been largely discarded by
many newer approaches to film, which tend to favour less directly representational ideas of
suggesting for example that the fascination with automatism that informed in literary forms such as the stream-of-consciousness novel can be interpreted as an attempt to distil the uniquely modern logic by which the cinematic apparatus operated into older mediums. See David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
34 A particularly common criticism of early cinema was that it merely substituted show for substance, presenting the spectator with illusory snapshots from a Platonic ‘kingdom of shadows’, as the Russian author Maksim Gorki famously dismissed one of the first Lumière screenings in 1896. See Maria Tortajada, ‘The Cinematography Versus Photography, or Cyclists and Time in the Works of Alfred Jarry,’ in Cinema Beyond Film: Media
Epistemology in the Modern Era, ed., François Albera and Maria Tortajada (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2010), 101.
35 André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (London: University of California Press, 1967), 15.
18
film, one can see his influence in theoretical currents as far removed from Bazin’s ontological model as Deleuze’s metaphysics of cinema. In particular, however, one can sense his spectre hovering close to the neo-formalist discourse that has taken over certain parts of the discipline after proclaiming the (alleged) death of Grand Theory. Somewhat ironically, the principal forerunner in this exercise has arguably been David Bordwell, whose efforts to collate a historical poetics of classical (which is to say Hollywood) cinema have done much to promote attacks on the notion of film as an inherently modern medium.
Bordwell’s understanding of cinema as alike to cognitive language of sorts is quite distinct from and even diametrically opposed to that of Epstein and many other early film theorists (except perhaps Münsterberg), in that he identifies in the majority of ‘mainstream’ cinema a stylistics that mimics the register of an ahistorical, biologically hardwired ‘natural perception.’37 Consequently, he argues that cinematic modernism, that is to say a cinema that affirms the experience of the modern as novel, is found only within the art film and consists of a relatively self-contained poetics based on formal experimentation that bears little connection to the historical experience of modernity. While seemingly confining modernist cinema (that is to say, cinema as an expression of the modern) to the rather narrow historical period that saw the arthouse feature emerge as a distinct genre, this assertion however carries an unsuspecting Bazinian echo. While it is admittedly a stretch to suggest that Bordwell shares the aesthetic credo of the 1920s formalists – for, not really having a concept analogous to photogénie, he would likely criticise a cinema built according to this aesthetic ideal as one that in fact detracts severely from the medium’s ability to represent the lived experience of material reality –, the Bordwellian neo-formalist model can arguably be seen as an unlikely inversion of Bazin’s ontology: it is no longer the cinematic apparatus that shows us something of the material world, but the material world that shows us something of how the cinematic apparatus operates. Moreover, this displacement of the ‘modern’ in formalist discourse from film tout court to the rarefied ranks of the intellectual highbrow feature is particularly
37 Bordwell et al., The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 36-41. A Harvard professor of experimental psychology, Münsterberg can arguably be seen as having in many ways paved the way for this model of film theory, having developed an understanding of the cinematic experience based on perceptual reactions identified as novel precisely because they mimic our natural cognitive processes almost a century before Bordwell or film
philosophers such as Noël Carroll. For more Carroll’s influential conceptualisation of film theory, which shares many of its basic assumptions with Bordwell but rejects the mantle of an explicit neoformalism in favour of drawing inspiration from analytic philosophy, see Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
19
interesting for our purposes as it is telling of the frustrations that inevitably rise from tying modernism to a particular style or set of formal criteria.
As suggested in the introduction, the main problem with the modern as with any rhetoric of newness is that whatever its subject, the phenomenon in question keeps getting increasingly old as time goes by, and stylistic sensibilities are no different. Although the aesthetic codes and conventions that emerged over the first three to four decades of cinema’s youth were once seen as the very core of what made it a distinct and distinctly ‘modern’ form of art, by the 1980s both movies and life outside the theatre had changed to a degree that consigned them instead into the role of symbols for a classical or ‘golden’ era that was, inevitably, past. Even if we may still appreciate old films, and even find many of their underlying principles deeply resonant with our times, we would be hard-pressed to call them modern except in a purely historical sense, and this makes it hard to argue that there is such a thing as a innately ‘modern’ aesthetics (even if there are a myriad ‘modernist’ ones).38
Recently, there has been some attempt to overcome this structural flaw in the stylistic
paradigm by suggesting that we think of the feel of the modern in the aforementioned manner as a labile quality that is contingent to a particular time, always subject to change and often coming in waves of radical formal innovation that again push cinema into the realm of newness, restoring its ability to articulate a shift in lived experience.39 However, even if adopting such a perspective may provide us with ample insight into the genealogy of various genres, styles and aesthetic movements, it does not go very far towards answering what, in the end, makes cinema in itself modern (or an art); rather, it frustrates the question more with each step. What the necessity of qualifying all stylistic definitions of modernism with an expiration date really shows is the fundamentally fraught and illusive character of cinematic modernism, while suggesting an ability on the part of the film text to resist easy, universal definition in a manner that sustains an engagement with the faculties of criticism. It is no
38 It is notably with Bordwell that the popular image of the explicitly ‘Modernist’ film as a 1960s ‘world cinema’ – that is to say non-American – arthouse production first takes flight, although as noted this idea has in fact little to do with the modern as such, and as I will further illustrate in Chapter 2 has by now ironically resulted in a common perception of cinematic modernism as a rather narrow and increasingly critically moribund aesthetic trend.
39 For a recent example of such an exercise, which seeks to pick up from where Bordwell leaves off in an attempt to apply the formalist distinction between classical and modernist cinema to the second, ‘late’ half of twentieth-century modernity, see András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
20
wonder, then, that another paradigm has sought to propose alternative ways of determining the relationship between film and modernity, while nonetheless preserving the premise of cinema’s modernism.
1.2 Political Modernism: Cinema as Ideological Construct
The second main current in modernist Film Studies is known today as political modernism, although the name was only coined at a time when the paradigm was already experiencing something of a crisis.40 At its inception in the 1970s, however, this conceptualisation of cinematic modernism emerged as part of wider attempt to answer to some of the problems that the introduction of structuralist ideas into the discipline was beginning to reveal under the façade of the ontological realism that Bazin had so fervently praised. Influenced by the
principles of Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the birth of the paradigm can be dated fairly accurately to the article ‘Cinéma/idéologie/critique,’ published in the October 1969 issue of the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni.41 Questioning whether the ways in which the cinematic apparatus structures the gaze
offered spectators as bare and trustworthy an image of reality as earlier theorists had for the most part implicitly assumed, Comolli and Narboni made the polemical suggestion that the cinema could in fact be manipulated in order to reinforce oppressive ideological constructs, and that the purpose of the critic was thus to decode the political relations embedded in film form. Key to this new paradigmatic discourse – which soon took on the name of Screen theory after its main platform in the United Kingdom – was the notion that the celebrated visual pleasure of cinema, derived from the promise of a privileged access to reality,
constituted in fact a form of voyeuristic fantasy that encouraged spectators to subtly (or not) identify with subject positions that reinforced their own disempowerment and objectification – an argument made most forcefully by Laura Mulvey in her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, another key text in the rapid shift of film criticism towards a
40 Although most commonly attributed to political modernism’ chief diagnostician David Rodowick, he notes in the preface to his influential book The Crisis of Political Modernism that the name originates in fact in a 1982 article by Sylvia Harvey, published in Screen. See David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism:
Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1.
41 Although initially contained within the limited sphere of French film criticism, the article quickly achieved a wider currency in the anglophone world after it was translated to English and published in Screen in 1971. Curiously, this translation credits Jean Narboni by his middle name Paul. See Jean-Louis Comolli and Paul Narboni, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,’ Screen 12, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 27-38
21
hermeneutics of suspicion.42 This growing distrust of the cinema soon prompted attempts to devise in the realm of both theory and practice aesthetic strategies that would turn the signifying practices of classical cinema against themselves – for cinema was still, for most political modernists, structured like a language with its own distinct grammar– and allow for a subversive ‘countercinema’ to emerge: reflexive, materialist and staunchly committed to the practice of deconstruction. Significantly, however, it also led to a somewhat convoluted understanding of the relation between cinema and the modern.
For Mulvey and other Screen theorists such as Peter Wollen, it was in the hoped-for ability of counter-cinema to deconstruct its own claim to verisimilitude, and the tectonic shift in perception this was to bring, that the medium’s claim to the modern was realised, instead of the promise of an indexical relation to material reality. ‘The cinema cannot show the truth [of ideology]’, Wollen summarises the paradigm’s basic maxim, ‘because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed.’43 The modernism of cinema could not
thus be found in the aesthetic revelation of the world through photogénie, but rather in the manner in which it could alter the political alignment of a society by tearing down repressive systems of narrative and visual signification that pretended to such power – hence the name of political (or semiotic) modernism. In a notable mark of continuity with the stylistic paradigm, however, Comolli, Mulvey and their fellow theorists still located the expression of this modernism at the level of style: it was in the mise-en-scène, the cinematography and the ‘look’ of a film that one could find its politics, and to make the spectator in a Brechtian manner aware of how they directed his or her vision and desire towards specific, predefined processes of identification was the modernist filmmaker’s goal. Yet, as we may notice this reduction of meaning to film form alone means that modernity itself is conspicuously absent in the resulting theoretical formulation. Since the political modernists understood ideology to act as a screen between the subject and the world, the historical conditions in which spectators engaged with the film text were largely irrelevant to their understanding of aesthetic
modernism.44 And as anyone familiar with the history of film theory knows, this Manichean vision imposed an unbridgeable gap between an ideological/realist and a modernist/theoretical
42 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18. 43 Peter Wollen, ‘Godard and Countercinema: Vent d’Est,’ Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972): 17.
44 In fact, this ahistorical understanding of the cinematic experience represents a surprising point of contact between the model of spectatorship championed by the political modernists and the distinctly apolitical neoformalism of scholars such as Bordwell, two paradigms otherwise largely theoretically incompatible.
22
cinema which has since presented Screen theory with significant challenges it has struggled to overcome.
One of the principal hindrances to a political understanding of modernism lies in the logic of binary opposition by which it operates. As David Rodowick has observed, treating films as able to unilaterally construct positions of identification as either oppressive or liberating has a detrimental effect on our ability to account for nuances of form or meaning, cultivating a discourse that excludes alternatives that do not fit easily in its dualist model.45 Consequently, political modernism has remained remarkably blind to the complex historical relations that characterise our engagement with the moving image and the possibility of reading a film ‘against the grain’, leaving it prey to the frustrations that inevitably arise from an encounter with more ambivalent texts. It can also be argued that, despite their claims to a materialist practice, the political modernists’ understanding of cinema as a primarily semiotic system of signs that may be deployed to suture the spectator to predetermined ideological positions reproduces many of the assumptions which they sought to discredit – namely, a formalism that invests film with a privileged relationship to the real when these signs are deployed correctly, whether this is understood to reveal a genuine and unvarnished picture of modern life or the very impossibility of such a feat.46 As a result, the paradigm has the habit of reducing the spectator to an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with an ideological or theoretical (read subversive) message depending entirely on whether they happen to be watching a Hollywood film or an experimental arthouse feature, and meets with its own irritations when confronted with more ambiguous readings. It comes as no surprise then that political modernism has suffered the most among the three main conceptualisation of cinematic modernism from the development of audience studies and the progressive orientation of the scholarship towards new, more complex understandings of how cinema acquires meaning inspired by affect theory, philosophy and cognitive science. Ultimately, the modern in political modernism cannot even be properly relegated to that of a particular historical moment or stylistic period, but is perhaps better understood simply as indicative of the friction that is inherent to any reading for cinema’s modernism. Yet this should not be taken to mean that the paradigm or its contributions to our understanding of cinematic
45 Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism.
46 For a remarkably extensive outlining of the system of signification through which Screen theory in particular held film to construct meaning, see Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969).
23
modernism ought to be discarded entirely. To the contrary, as we will see in the next section, the introduction of a historical perspective does not necessarily free us from the frustrations of the modern.
1.3 Vernacular Modernism: Cinema as Historical Sensation
If the problem of cinematic modernism cannot be satisfactorily explained, as we have seen, by any single formal poetics or semiotic system and their attendant promises of laying bare the modern, where should we look for an answer? For the third wing of modernist film theory, the way out lies in thinking of cinema as a historically determined cultural practice that
articulated and reflected the experience of modernity in all its idiosyncrasies through what Miriam Hansen calls the ‘mass production of the senses’.47 In other words, the concern of this
paradigm has been to illustrate the role of the moving image and its sensuous qualities in shaping the vernacular experience of the historical conditions that make up modernity.
Although it may at a glance appear as the youngest of the modernist discourses, emerging in a codified form only after the ‘historical turn’ of the mid-1980s, the majority of vernacular modernism bears an indisputable debt to the work of Walter Benjamin, and in order to appreciate its critical frustrations we must turn first to him. Although a contemporary of theorists such as Epstein and Balász, Benjamin embraced their formalist principles only selectively, famously arguing that cinema’s transformative novelty lay in its technological reproducibility rather than mechanical indifference, and in the conditions it offered for the realisation a truly political mass art in favour of a private aesthetic experience.48 What was of cardinal interest to him was the manner in which he saw the cinematic apparatus as capable of overwhelming the spectator with a powerful sensory (and sensuous) shock. Describing the filmgoer’s experience before the screen in manner echoing yet quite distinct from that of Münsterberg, he writes:
Scarcely has he set eyes on it before it is already different. It cannot be pinned down. Duhamel, who hates film and understands none of its importance, though he does know something about its structure, comments on this state of affairs as follows: “I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving images have ousted my thoughts.” The sequence of association of the person viewing those images is indeed instantly interrupted by their changing. That is what film’s shock effect is based on, which like every shock effect seeks to be absorbed by increased presence of mind. By virtue of its technical
47 Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses’, 60.
48 Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 228-259.
