Metacinema (The Form and Content of Filmic Reference and Reflexivity) - David LaRocca)

 

Metacinema

 

Metacinema The Form and Content of Filmic Reference and Reflexivi Reflexivity  ty  Edited by 

David LaRocca

1

 

3 Oxord University University Press is a department depart ment o the University o Oxord. It urthers the University’s objective o excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxord is a registered trade t rade mark o Oxord University  Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States o America by Oxord University University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States o America. © Oxord University Press 2021 All rights reserved. reser ved. No part o this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, sy stem, or transmitted, in any orm or by any means, without the prior permission in writing o Oxord University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope o the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxord University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate circul ate this work in any other orm and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. acquirer. Library o Congress Control Number: 2021935072 ISBN 978–0– 978–0–19– 19–009535– 009535–22 (pbk.) ISBN 978–0– 978–0–19– 19–009534– 009534–55 (hbk.) DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.001.0001 9780190095345.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States o America

 

Contents  

Foreword: Forewor d: The Cinematic Question—“What Question—“What Do You Want from Me?”

vii

R󰁯󰁢󰁥󰁲󰁴 B. P󰁩󰁰󰁰󰁩󰁮

Contributors

xi

Introduction: An Invitation to the Varieties and  Virtues of “Meta“Meta-ness” ness” in the Art and Culture of Film

1

D󰁡󰁶󰁩󰁤 L󰁡R󰁯󰁣󰁣󰁡

I C O N C E P T UA UA L A N D T H E O R E T I C A L REORIENTATION TO METACINEMA

1 Cinematic SelfSelf-Consciousness Consciousness in Hitchcock Hitchcock’s ’s Rear Window  

31

R󰁯󰁢󰁥󰁲󰁴 B. P󰁩󰁰󰁰󰁩󰁮

2 Adaptations, Adaptations, Refra Refractions, ctions, and Obstructions: The Prophecies of André Bazin

53

T󰁩󰁭󰁯󰁴󰁨󰁹 C󰁯󰁲󰁲󰁩󰁧󰁡󰁮

3

A Metacinematic Spectrum: Techniqu echniquee through Text to Context

63

G󰁡󰁲󰁲󰁥󰁴󰁴 S󰁴󰁥󰁷󰁡󰁲󰁴

4 Recursive Reflections: Types, Modes, and Forms of Cinematic Reflexivity

85

D󰁡󰁮󰁩󰁥󰁬 Y󰁡󰁣󰁡󰁶󰁯󰁮󰁥

5 Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese: Authorship, Historiogr Historiography aphy,, and Videographic Styles

115

E󰁬󰁥󰁮󰁩 P󰁡󰁬󰁩󰁳

I I I L L U M I N A T I O N F R O M T HE D U P L I C A T I O N S A N D REPETITIONS OF REFLEXIVE CINEMA

6 8½: Self-Reflexive Self-Reflexive Fiction and Mental Training

139

J󰁯󰁳󰁨󰁵󰁡 L󰁡󰁮󰁤󰁹

7 Clouds of Sils Maria: True Characters and Fictional Selves in the Construction of Filmic Identities L󰁡󰁵󰁲󰁡 T. D󰁩 S󰁵󰁭󰁭󰁡

155

 

vi  Contents  

8 Holy Motors: Metameditation on Digital Cinema’s Present and Future

173

O󰁨󰁡󰁤 L󰁡󰁮󰁤󰁥󰁳󰁭󰁡󰁮

III AFFECTIVITY AND EMBODIMENT IN METANARRATIVES

9 Fight Club: Enlivenment, Love, and the Aesthetics of Violence in the Age of Trump

191

J. M. B󰁥󰁲󰁮󰁳󰁴󰁥󰁩󰁮

10 Funny Games: Film, Imagination, and Moral Complicity

219

P󰁡󰁵󰁬 P󰁡 󰁵󰁬 S󰁣󰁨󰁯󰁦󰁩󰁥󰁬󰁤 S 󰁣󰁨󰁯󰁦󰁩󰁥󰁬󰁤

11 Shoah: Art as Visualizing What Cannot Be Grasped

233

S󰁨󰁯󰁳󰁨󰁡󰁮󰁡 F󰁥󰁬󰁭󰁡󰁮

I V M E T A D O C U M E N T A R Y, Y, E X P E R I M E N T A L F I L M , A N D A N I M AT AT I O N

12 The Act of Killing: Empathy, Morality, and Re-Enactment Re-Enactment

255

T󰁨󰁯󰁭󰁡󰁳 T󰁨󰁯󰁭󰁡 󰁳 E. W󰁡󰁲󰁴󰁥󰁮󰁢󰁥󰁲󰁧

13 Waltz with Bashir ’s ’s 󰁁nimated Traces: Traces: Troubled Indexicality Indexical ity in Contemporary Documentary Rhetorics

271

 Y󰁯󰁴󰁡󰁭  Y󰁯󰁴 󰁡󰁭 S󰁨󰁩󰁢󰁯󰁬󰁥󰁴 S󰁨󰁩󰁢󰁯󰁬󰁥󰁴

14  Alone., Again: On Martin Arnold’s Metaformal Invention by Intervention

291

D󰁡󰁶󰁩󰁤 L󰁡R󰁯󰁣󰁣󰁡

 Acknowledgments Index

319 323

 

Foreword The Cinematic Question—“What Question—“What Do You Want rom Me?”

Anything filmed—fictional filmed—fictional narratives, documentaries, experimental films, animated films—and films—and offered or viewing is inherently reflexive. Tat is, it embodies a concept o itsel and assumes there the re is some point in displaying the film to viewers, some end to be achieved. One dimension o that reflexivity is an identification with genre categorization; first o all, with one o these broad types and then within each, with an established genre like romantic comedy, melodrama, western, political critique, anime. Ofen this is straightorward. Te film can be said to “take itsel to be” an action-adventure action-adventure film, a musical, a slapstick comedy, and its point in being displayed is to amuse, please, ple ase, entertain, and thereby to be consumed or a price. And there t here can certainly certain ly be more ambitious agendas. Tese typological and genre identities (which, as Stanley Cavell pointed out, exist mostly to be redefined each time, or the boundaries to be reset) also signal an audience, suggest assumptions that ought to direct attentiveness; that is, suggest a modality o attentiveness or the reflective selunderstanding inherent in herent in a kind o viewing. “Embodied” and “inherent” and the like suggest difficult philosophical questions about just how a reflective orm can be at work in such an aesthetic aestheti c object even eve n i not prominent and not attended att ended to in the experience exp erience as such. But one way it can be at work is or the issue itsel to be attended to within the o the work, sometimes the world depicted the work, eitherworld as a general issue,and or, in the mostincomplex cases, in anininternal interrogation o its own particular cinematic orm. Te film itsel can be said to be metacinematic and attention can be directed to elements o cinematic orm or to the pragmatic dimensions o display and presentation, whether as a so-called so-called art film or a commercial vehicle. Te most amiliar examples are films about filmmaking, either explicitly, like François ruffaut’s Day  or Night  Night  (1973)   (1973) or Federico Fellini’s 8½ 8½ (1963),  (1963), or more indirectly and in a way as much about Hollywood as about film, as in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), Place  (1950), Vincente Minnelli’s Te Bad and the Beautiul  (1952),   (1952), Robert Altman’s Te Player  (1992),  (19 92), or David Davi d Lynch’ Lynch’s Mulh  Mulholland olland Drive (2001). Drive (2001). Both Michael Powell’s Peeping om (1962) om (1962) and Alred Hitchcock’s Psycho Psycho (1960)  (1960) thematize the psychological meaning and attraction attraction o observing while being

 

viii  Foreword

unobserved (a key element in all film: the film world is present to us; we are never present to or in the film fi lm world). My candidate or the most complicated and thoughtul reflection on cinematic orm in general and its own psychological stake st ake in cinema is Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Window (1954), which culminat c ulminates es in a character, Torwald (Raymond Burr) exiting the representation o the “watched world” (the window-ramed window-ramed scenes as watched rom the opposite apartment building), enteringasthe and himsel asking Jeff (James Stewart), “the viewer, ” plaintively, an viewer’s avatar oworld, Hitchcock himsel: : “What do you want rom me?” Te same sort o double viewing is possible in documentaries. I mean attending to the object o the documentary, while also noting that the documentary menta ry is questioning either the documenta documentary ry orm itsel (e.g., its possibility, possibility, the possibility o nonfiction) or the point o its own recording and display. Perhaps the finest and most subtle example is Joshua Oppenheimer’s Te Act o Killing  (2012,  (2012, the subject o an essay in the ollowing), where the murderous death squad members’ own sel-display sel-display in the film is olded into an interrogation o the ethical tone o the documentary itsel, its display and relation to the beholder. beh older. Godrey Reggio’ Re ggio’s Koyaanisqatsi Koyaanisqatsi (1982)  (1982) embodies this double  viewing in a differen differentt way way, given that our atten attention tion is consta constantly ntly drawn to the aesthetic orm o the documentary itsel, as well as the question o whether it is a documentary. docu mentary. Errol Morris’ Morris’ss films are also als o so made as to raise r aise the question, que stion, ofen lef unresolved, about the point p oint o the documentary documentar y and “what we want” want” by watching it. Since Ari A ri Folman’ Folman’s Waltz with Bashir  (2008,  (2008, also the subject o an essay in this book) combines both the documentar do cumentaryy orm o autobiography autobiography with animation, that orm itsel, animation, is immediately thematized as an issue, its appropriateness and point. Experimental Exper imental films, like the works o Louis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Kenneth Anger, Conner, or Martin Arnold, are unavoidably Te veryBruce concept o experimental, which signals an attempt metacinematic. to make something that will not fit standard typological or genre classifications, or any classifications, signals a metacinematic interest by requiring the viewer, in eect, to find the object’s distinctive, even unique, cinematic orm and wonder about the point o the object being made and displayed. A general question is raised by all such metacinematic attempts. What is distinctive, especially distinctively valuable, about such cinematic sel-explorations, selexplorations, as opposed most obviously to a standard, discursive philosophic-aesthetic philosophicaesthetic inquiry into the same issues? Answering that question would require we first identiy the nature o the aesthetic orm o cinematic sel-consciousness, selconsciousness, in itsel quite a complicated issue, but whatever answer we suggest, we will have to preserve that element o interpretive ree-play, ree- play,

 

Foreword ix

breadth o possible meaning, and affective involvement opened up in an aesthetic experience. exp erience. Its own thematization o o itsel, as itsel aesthetic, aesthet ic, could thus be ironic, deliberately misleading, could capture the point o view o a character or an ideology. Tat is, we need to respect the act that such a orm is not just a shorthand expression o propositional claims. At the minimum, whatever cinematic attention is directed at the object’s own orm, it remains cinematic notitan invitation or spur to o independent reflection, attention, and as such requires the same sort polysemousphilosophical interpretive work and affective involvement as any aesthetic orm, as is all so ably demonstrated in this collection. Robert B. Pippin

 

Contributors J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Proessor o Philosophy at the New School

or Social Research. His writings include Te Fate o Art: Aesthetic Alienation rom Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992); Adorno (1992); Recovering Ethical Lie: Jürgen Habermas and the Future o Critical Teory   (1995);  Adorno: Disenchan Disenchantment tment and Ethics Ethics   (2002); and  Agai  Against nst Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning o Painting  (2006).  (2006). His most recent book is orture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury  (2015).  (2015). He is working on a manuscript with the tentativ tentativee title O Ecocide, Sustainability, and Human Rights: Ethical Lie in the Anthropocene. Anthropocene. imothy Corrigan is Proessor Emeritus o Cinema and Media Studies and English at

the University o Pennsylvania. Books include New German Film: Te Displaced Image; Image; Te Films o Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History ; Writing about Film; Film; A Cinema without Walls alls;; Film and Literatur Literaturee; Te Film Experience (coauthored Experience (coauthored with Patricia White); Critical Visions: Readings in Classic and Contemporary Film Teory   (coauthored with Patricia White and Meta Mazaj); America Mazaj); Americann Cinema o o the 2000s; 2000s; Essays on the Essay Film  Film  (coauthored with Nora Alter); and Te Essay Film: From Montaigne, afer Marker , winner o the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award or the outstanding book in film and media studies. He has published essays in Film Quarterly , Discourse Discourse,, and Cinema Journal , among other collections. In 2014 he was awarded the Society or Cinema and Media Studies Award or Outstanding Pedagogical Pedagogi cal Achievement Achievem ent and the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award Award or Distinguished eaching at the University o Pennsylvania. Laura . Di Summa is Assistant Proessor o Philosophy at William Paterson University.

She earned earne d a PhD in philos philosophy ophy rom CUNY, CUNY, Te Graduate Center, under the supervision supervi sion o Noël Carroll. Her book publicatio publications ns include Te Palgrave Handbook or the Philosophy o Film and Motion Pictures (Palgrave Pictures (Palgrave Macmillan), coedited with Noël Carroll and Shawn Loht, and she is currently c urrently working on a volume entitled A entitled A Philosophy Philosophy o Fashion Fashion through through Film: On the Body, B ody, Style, and Identity  (Bloomsbury).  (Bloomsbury). Shoshana Felman is Robert Woodruff Distinguished Proessor o Comparative Literature

and French at Emory University, Tomas E. Donnelley Proessor Emerita o French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, and a member o the American Academy o Arts and Sciences. Among her works: Te Claims o Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader  (2007);   (2007); Te Juridical Unconscious: rials and raumas in the wentieth Century   (2002); Te Scandal o the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in wo Languages   (2003); Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/ Languages Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis   (2003); estimony: Crises Cris es o Witnessi Witnessing ng in Literature Psychoanalysis and History  (1992,  (1992, coauthored with Dori Laub, MD);  Jacq  Jacques ues Lacan and the Adven Adventure ture o Ins Insight: ight: Psycho Psychoanal analysis ysis in Contemporary Culture (1987); Culture (1987); Literature and Psychoanalysis: Te Question o Reading— Otherwise (1982, Otherwise  (1982, editor); La “Folie” dans l’oeuvre oeuvre romanesque de d e Stendhal  (1971);  (1971); Barbara

 

xii  Contributors

 Johnson: A Lie  Johnson: Lie with Mary Shelley  (2014);  (2014); La Folie et la chose litt éraire raire (1978;  (1978; to be reissued, in 2021, with two new ne w preaces, by the College International de Philosophie, Paris, France). Ohad Landesman  is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Steve isch School o Film and

elevi elevision sion at el el Aviv University. University. He holds a PhD rom the Departm D epartment ent o Cinema Studies Studi es at New York University, where his dissertation ocused on aesthetic implications o digital developmentss in contem development contemporary porary documentary cinema. His recent publications appeared in several anthologies on documentary culture, and in peerpe er-reviewed reviewed journals such as Visual  Anthropology  Anthro pology Review Review,, Studies in Documentary Film, Film, Projections: Te Journal or Movies and Mind , and Ani and Animatio mation: n: An In Interdisci terdisciplina plinary ry Journal  Journal . He is currently working on a monograph about travelogues in Israel, and is coediting the antholo anthology gy ruth or Dare: Selected Essays on Documentary Cinema, Cinema, orthcoming rom Am-Oved Am-Oved Publishing House. Joshua Landy  is  is Andrew B. Hammond Proessor o French and Proessor o Comparative

Literature at Stanord University, where he co-directs co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and cohosts the NPR show Philosophy alk. alk. His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Sel, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust  (Oxord,  (Oxord, 2004), How to Do Tings with Fictions (Oxord, Fictions  (Oxord, 2012), and (as coeditor) Te Re-Enchantment Re-Enchantment o the World: World: Secular Sec ular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanord, Age (Stanord, 2009). David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor o a dozen books. He edited Te Tought

o Stanley Cavell and Cinema; Cinema ;  Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind ; Te Philosophy o Documentary Film; Film; Te Philosophy o War Films; Films; and Te Philosophy o Charlie Kauman. Kauman. He has contributed book chapters and articles on the films o Werner Herzog, errence Malick, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Casey Affleck, Kelly Reichardt, Errol Morris, Rithy Panh, Martin Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Lars von rier, Olivier Assayas, Douglas Sirk, Spike Lee, Joel and Ethan Coen, David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, im Burton, and Charlie Kauman. His articles have appeared in Aferima in  Aferimage, ge, Conversations,, Epoché , Estetica, Liminalities, Conversations Liminalities, Post Script , ransactions ransactions,, Film and Philosophy , Te Senses and Society ,  Midwe  Midwest st Quarterly , Cinema: Te Journal o Philosophy and the  Movingg Image  Movin Image,, Journ  Journalism, alism, Media and Cultu Cultural ral Studies Studies,, Journ  Journal al o o Aesthet Aesthetic ic Educatio Educationn, and  Journal  Jou rnal o Aest Aesthetics hetics and Art Criticis Criticism m. As a documentary filmmaker, he produced and edited six eatures in the Intellectual Portrait Series, directed Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy o Clothes, Clothes, and co-directed co-directed New York Photographer: Jill Freedman in the City . He studied in the Department o Rhetoric at Berkeley, was Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy raveling Fellow in the United Kingdom and participated in a National Endowment or the Humanities Institute, a workshop with Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, and the School o Criticism and Teory at Cornell. He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, the School o Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt. Eleni Palis  is Assistant Proessor o English and Cinema Studies at the University o

ennessee. Her work ocuses on the intersections between classical and post-classical post- classical American cinema as well as race and gender in contem contemporary porary American cinema, adaptation, genre, and videographic criticism. Her work has appeared in Screen Screen,, Te Journal o Cinema and Media Studies ( Studies (Cinema Cinema Journal ), ), [in]r [in]ransition: ansition: Journal o Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, Studies, and Oxord Bibliographies Online. Online.

 

Contributors xiii Robert B. Pippin  is Evelyn Steansson Ne Distinguished Service Proessor at the

University o Chicago. He is the author o several books on modern German philosophy; University a book on philosophy and literature, literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Lie; Lie; a book on modernist art, Afer art, Afer the Beautiul  Beautiul ; and five books on film and philosophy. He is a past winner o the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fellowshi p, is a ellow o the American Academy o Arts and Sciences S ciences and o the American Philosophical Society, and is a member o the German National Academy o Sciences, Leopoldina. Hisolatest books are Filmed Tought: as Reflective Form, published Form, by the University Chicago Press, and Douglas Sirk:Cinema Filmmaker and Philosopher  , published by Bloomsbury Bloomsbur y. Paul Schofield is Assistant Proessor o Philosophy at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

He earned his PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, specializing in ethics, political philosophy, and action theory. Since then, he has developed a proessional interest in film. He has published on Powell and Pressburger’s Te Red Shoes in Shoes in the journal FilmPhilosophy , on Elaine May’s A May’s  A New Lea   in in Movies  Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind , and he regularly teaches a course called Film as Philosophy. Philosophy. He has also written extensively about what a person owes to themselves; his book Duty to Sel: Moral, Political, and Legal SelRelation is Relation  is published with Oxord University Press. Yotam Shibolet Shi bolet  is a doctoral candidate and teacher in the Department o Media at Utrecht

University. He is a cum laude graduate laude graduate o Utrecht University’s University’s Media, Media, Art Ar t and Perormance Research program and o the Marc Rich Honors program in the Humanities and Arts at el-A elAviv University. His interdisciplinary interdisciplin ary research rese arch on “embodi “embodied ed narrativity” narrativ ity” spans media phenomenology, the 4E approach to cognition, narrative theory, and the study o interactive new media and somatic practices. He aims to analyze how the perception o movement and embodied interaction give rise to the experience and interpretation o stories. Shibolet has a background b ackground in filmmaking and remains ascinated with the ways by which the experience o cinematic imagery constitutes an active process o making meaning. Garrett Stewart is James O. Freedman Proessor o Letters at the University o Iowa, and

member o the American Academy o Arts and Sciences since 2010. He has published our cinema books with the University o Chicago Press. Press. Between Film and Screen: Sc reen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (1999) Synthesis (1999) was ollowed by Framed ime: oward oward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007) Cinema (2007) and Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance  Surveillance   (2015). He has rounded out this analytic trajectory rom the celluloid era through digital recording to CCV and CGI thematics with the appearance in 2020 o Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method , whose final paired chapters on visual special effects (VFX) are extended here with more recent Hollywood evidence in reviewing the long tradition o metacinematic reflexivity on the narrative screen. Tomas E. Wartenberg is Proessor o Philosophy Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College.

His main areas o ocus are aesthetics, the philosophy o film, and philosophy or children. Among his publications are Tinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy ; Big Ideas or Little Kids: eaching Philosophy through Children’s Literature; A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Philos ophical Discoveries: Discov eries: Finding Wisdom in Children C hildren’’s Literature; Literature; Existentia Existentialism: lism: A Beginner’s Guide; Guide; and Mel and  Mel Bochner: Illustr Illustratin atingg Philoso Philosophy  phy . He has published numerous

 

xiv  Contributors

papers on the philosophy o film, including “Dramatizing Philosophy” and “ ‘Not ime’s Fool’: Marriage as an Ethical Ethic al Relationship Relationsh ip in Michael Haneke’s Haneke’s Amou  Amour  r .” His philosophy or children website, teachingchildrenphilosophy.org, was awarded the 2011 APA/PDC APA/PDC Prize or Excellence and Innovations in Philosophy Programs. He received the 2013 Merritt Prize or his contributions to the philosophy o education. He served as President o Philosophy Learning and eaching Organization (PLAO) rom 2016 to 2018 and is Film Editor or Philosophy Now. Now. He recently created a website or teaching philosophy through works o art: Philosophy @ Te Virtual Art Museum. Museum. Daniel Yacavone is Senior S enior Lecturer (Associate Proessor) at the University University o Edinburgh, where he has been the Director o the Film Studies Program within the School o Literatures, Languages and Cultures. Currently a Fellow-inFellow-in-Residence Residence at the Netherlands Institute or Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), in Autumn 2021, he will be Senior Research Fellow at the Cinepoetics Center or Advanced Film Studies at the Free University Berlin. He is the author o Film Worlds: A Philosophical  Aesthetics  Aest hetics o Cinema (Columbia Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2015) and is currently writing a book on the cognitive, affective, and inter- and transmedial dimensions o reflexive cinema or Oxord University Press.

 

Introduction An Invitation to the Varieties and Virtues o “Meta“Meta-ness” ness” in the Art and Culture o Film David LaRocca

The highest minds o the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more maniold meaning, o every sensuous act: . . . the masters o sculpture, picture, and poetry. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unamiliar. —Bertolt Brecht

A prefix inherited inher ited rom Greek antiquity, meta meta,, has in the last couple o generations gained traction as an independent word, one that denotes—in denotes—in popular and discourses— discourses—those instances whenboth a work o ch arthave makes internalcritical reerence or invokesthose an external reerent, o which whi the an power to highlight the work’s status as art.1 Te oddness o agency here—that here—that art somehow can “make “make”” or “invoke “ invoke”— ”—provides provides a first clue to the special sense o this unprepossessing preposition. A modest prefix, then, has come not only substantively but also inventively to augment the creation o art and our critical conversation about it. Given the expansive scope o the term’s use, our gathered labors in what ollows in this book are aimed at clariying clariy ing and developing the radiating significance o meta or the study o motion pictures and their sonic s onic correlates— correlates—how how images and sounds relate to the orm and content o film itsel. Despite the widespread wides pread invocation o meta as a concept—or concept—or perhaps because o it, and especially with respect to cinema— cinema—it it remains relatively undertheorized; and as sometimes happens, excellent existing theorizing David LaRocca, Introduction  In:  In: Metacinema . Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0001 9780190095345.003.0001

 

󰀲  Introduction

remains presumed, hidden, neglected, or unknown. Compensations and recalibrations are in order. And since there is such s uch an abundance o meta material to address beyond scholarship, and because the name has become a goto cultural shorthand, a double invitation abides: to take stock o the diversity o content and to take care with the multiplicity o senses at work in varied contexts. Indeed, while meta has gone mega, metacinema has or the most part incorporated (ully digested even) to such an extent its deploymentbeen appears uncontroversial and its meaning assumed to bethat apparent. Not so ast. In our efforts here, we aim to make compensations and contributions that provide a oundation or the everyday and proessional use o meta in the context o cinema studies and film philosophy and more generally in our engagement with a range o media across the arts. From the celluloid origins o motion pictures to the latest developments in digital representation, we wish to articulate how these independent phenomena—meta phenomena—meta and  and cinema cinema— —have distinct as well as overlapping and mutually reinorcing identities. Te contemporary recovery recover y o “meta” “meta” (as a prefix), and subsequent subs equent use as an adjective, adverb, and noun (and in these modes achieving status as a standalone term o art), can be traced to several sources, sources , but perhaps most conspicuously or film scholars to landmark writing by Gérard Genette and Christian Christi an Metz, critics who employed e mployed “meta” “meta” terminology terminolog y ofen borrowed rom linguistics and literary theory, and repurposed it or discussing and understanding cinema.2 o be sure, William H. Gass—who Gass—who coined the term “metafiction”— is an essential part o what Werner Wol retrospectively deemed a broadbased “metareerential turn” in the creation o art and media—rom media—rom fiction to literary criticism to cinema and more.3 Mikhail Bakhtin Bak htin remains remains a ecund reerence or our enduring interrogation o heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotype—in chronotype— in short, how text relates to context, how storyworlds connect to 4

reality, and soyeton.  Erich Auerbach’s legendary conceptualization mimesis is pertinent, even more than its amiliar sense o imitatio i mitation, n, theoparticular charge o the meta is interactivity: what has traveled under the name selreflexivity (one type) and intertextuality (another type).5 Writers o and on the theater, perhaps most essentially Bertolt B ertolt Brecht, also bear cardinal importance, since his reflections highlight the theatrical nature o perormance— namely, its artifice; accordingly, making or breaking the spell o fiction becomes an intriguing potential o acting, including includi ng when acting winds up on celluloid or is digitally captured. By now, the memefication o meta has allowed it to go rogue, so one can eel confident about using the word correctly even as one may be hardpressed to define its meaning in specifics. 6  Tus, in keeping with William Safire’s observation about the “separatist rebellion o the prefixes,” we find

 

Introduction 3

“meta-” transitioned into wide circulation as an independent adjective “meta-” (“Te play is so meta”), adverb (“Contemporary audiences have been trained to think meta”), or noun (“Te stratified narrative proved to be a lively example o meta”), and especially in relation to our interpretation o cultural objects, such as films.7  Once the prefix is pointed out, though, a dozen or more examples o its varied application can be identified—and identified— and across time, disparate disciplines, and categories o inquirymetamusic, (metascience, metahistory, metaphilosophy, metacognition, metatheater, metajournalism, metamaterial, metatext, metalepsis, and perhaps most commonly, metaphor, and even, as eels inevitable, metametaphorism).8  Metalepsis is “maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy o a metonymy,” as Harold Bloom glossed it in a amous metaormulation.9 As with metaphor (which encodes a sense o transit, transer, tr anser, or “carr “carrying ying across”), when whe n “meta” “meta” is prefixed to a word, it regularly denotes a change o position or condition (metamorphosis, metabolism, metagenesis); metagenesi s); an orientation afer, afer, behind, or beyond (metaphase, metacarpus, metadata); or an indication o something conceptual, o a higher or second-order secondorder nature (metalanguage,10 metafictio metafiction, n, metamodernism metamodernism,,11 metapsychology, metagnosis,12  métamatics/metamachines/ métamatics/metamachines/metamechanics, metamechanics, 13  metaethics, metamathematics, meta-analysis, meta-analysis, metatheory, and the website Metacritic, Metacri tic, which unctions as an aggregat aggregator or o criticism/assessment criticism/assessment achieved by a data metasearch, that is, a metacrawl).14 When we turn to instances o creative production, such as the art o movies, “meta” typically denotes work that either reers to genre conventions or to itsel—though itsel— though sometimes, in act many times, to both. In these ways, the meta trades on the potencies o citation and allusion (a gesture that looks outward rom the text at hand to some other source or rame o reerence), or olds back upon itsel (making its very existence an issue). Tere is telescoping in both cases: toImitation, distant reerence points, in the first scenario; to internal ones in the second. impersonation, parody, satire, etc., ofen lead to doubling, repetition, or sequential replication; to transgeneric and transmedial crossings, while the structure o mise en abîme, abîme, or instance, encourages modes variously var iously o recursion recurs ion and regression regressi on “placed in abyss.” Consequently Conse quently,, cinema that is meta appears especially effective at parodying or satirizing at the level o both orm and content—imitating content—imitating styles, styles , iterating traits that bring attention at once to the means o abulation as well as to storytelling trends (aspects already well known and widely used in metafiction). As a broad methodology, or even within a single work o art, the meta provides a compacted, layered space or semiological investigations—indeed, investigations—indeed, ofen distractingly so, since we can be deluged with eatures (such as film stock, lighting, shooting style, graphics, the presence o stars, the cadence o dialogue, ambient sound,

 

󰀴  Introduction

musical motis, etc.) that send our minds in many directions, seemingly at once. Te technological and artistic attributes o film (as a medium) and film (as an art) are wonderully, i aggressively aggressi vely,, suited to such dimensionalities. dimensionaliti es. o wit, our ocus in the ten entirely new chapters collected here (all invited and written expressly or this occasion), joined by a crucial set o our nowessentiall touchstones, is works o art that may be grouped under the category— essentia and notion— notion—o “metacinema” as be a category and a notion, how itoismetacinema. used, where itWhat is invoked, and whymeans it might advantageous to careully theorize the concept or cinema, media studies, and related meta studies, constitutes our primary primar y task. Given the prevalence and prominence o meta, our efforts should be a worthy, engaging, and (as befits the structure o the meta) an inexhaustible inexhaust ible errand. As we have benefited rom our ongoing examination o the influence o other culturally resonant prefixes—autoprefixes—auto-,, extra-, extra-, inter-,, multi-, intermulti-, retro-, retro-, sel-, sel-, trans-, trans-, and the like (whether longlong-ago ago “pre-fixed,” “pre-fixed,” still attached, or, as with meta, newly liberated to independent existence), similar illuminations should attend our explorations here o the “meta- ness” that pervades the objects and methodologies—namely methodologies—namely,, films and audiovisual audiovi sual modes—that modes— that draw and hold our attention. Consulting the Oxord English Dictionary , we learn that in ancient Greece, meta   (μετα meta μετα)) meant “afer” as in a temporal or conceptual order: “Aristotle wrote the Physics Physics,, and then later, the  Met  Metaph aphysics ysics..”15  Metaphysics, in this case, is “afer” physics sequentially but perhaps not conceptually. Verily, despite its position “afer physics,” Aristotle deemed metaphysics “first philosophy.” Te OED OED includes  includes an illuminating gloss on what has happened since that distant usage, namely, that metaphysics has been “misapprehended as meaning the science o that which transcends the physical.” No such connotation wasonly meant to bemomentum sug gested byinthe suggested prefix “meta.” “meta. ” Still, than e misapprehension has gained modernity, since suchthe allusion “has been ollowed in the practice o pre-fixing pre-fixing ‘meta’ to the name o a science to a designation o a higher science (actual or hypothetical) o the same nature but dealing with ulterior and more undamental problems.” For instance, in his English raits, raits, Ralph Waldo Waldo Emerson Emers on wrote: “It “It seems an affair aff air o the race rac e or meta-chemistry”— meta-chemistry”—namely, namely, as the OED OED phrases  phrases it, “the chemistry o the supersensible.” 16 Tus, the meaning o “meta” as “afer” has shifed over time to mean “higher.” Looking to the most widespread use o the prefix in contemporary parlance, that is in postmodernity, we see how it has also also come  come to mean sel-aware sel-aware or sel-reeren sel-reerential, tial, since both o these descriptions require require a mental move understood as a view rom a separate, perhaps elevated, position. Baruch Spinoza’s perception o things sub species aeternitatis may aeternitatis may be a

 

Introduction 5

first glimpse o the dawning o our present-day present-day notion o meta, or when we look at phenomena “rom the standpoint o eternity,” we are, no doubt, on higher ground g round— —or perhaps none at all. Describing something as “meta” has become a deault, highly economical and thus convenient linguistic shorthand or locating the characteristics o a work o art, and in turn, assessing its value and virtues; indeed, as a meme it has become a conspicuous tick periodicals o interpretation, both casual casua l and proessional. proessional. Since authors in mainstream continually invoke meta as an accepted stand-alone stand-alone concept, they must assume it is intelligible intellig ible to their readership. Yet how did this reliable usage and prevailing assumption develop, take hold, and to what end? Richard Dyer psychologizes astutely: “Intellectuals tend to be drawn to the meta-discursive meta- discursive in art; since what they do is a metaactivity, they take special comort rom other things that are meta, like selreflexive refle xive art. ar t.”17 Te book in hand may be one more submission o evidence or Dyer’ss cogent observation about intellectual obsessions. Dyer’ obsess ions. Yet are we not also also hearing  hearing the ascription “meta” more and more because art has, in act, become become more  more meta? What are people talking about in the first place? And why do more and more circumstances seem to offer, or demand, an appeal to the meta? Tis quality o “meta-ness,” “meta-ness,” as critics at the New York imes put imes  put it, addresses the eeling that many cultural and art objects—and objects—and perhaps especially  films—can  films—can be understood and enjoyed in part, or in whole, by their connection to other things, say other films, or, indeed with a special reerence to themselves.18 Te work o art we experience, on this account o the meta, either depends upon some previous work o art—and art— and thereby implicitly or explicitly ex plicitly stands st ands in a citational cit ational relationship to that t hat earlier work—or underminess some o the cardinal traits that undermine t hat make art absorbing (and or many people, entertaining). On the latter point, the (potentially) entrancing qualities o a work o art are with replaced with alienating effects, thus exchanging the pleasures o immersion an awareness o artifice (perhaps, as we will see, offering a different sort o pleasure). In short, when something is meta, when it is imbued with “meta-ness” “meta-ness” or has “gone meta,” we are no longer (solely) engaged with the work o art that stands beore us—including us—including its characters, its storyworlds, and so on—as on—as something to “enter,” “get carried away by,” and remain within, but instead are called upon to think about and remember the various reerences the work makes to realms beyond it, or to its very status as a work o art (e.g., its stars, its participation in a genre, etc.). Instead o encountering a stand-alone stand-alone work o art, meta-art meta-art opens up a museum; rather than reading a novel, metafiction insists on a library; quite apart rom watching a single film, an audience or metacinema is directed to consider the ull expanse o cinematic history. Tus, and all at once, the meta work o

 

󰀶  Introduction

art cleaves: it abides as an object to be studied and also introduces also introduces us to new, maniold points o reerence—within reerence—within the work, yes, and ofen well beyond it. Te metawork endures on at least a double register regis ter,, and ofen insists on many more levels. Once readers engage the terms o art and salient film examples in play in this collection, collec tion, it will wil l be readily apparent just how widespread meta-ness— ness—and and metacinema, in particular—has particular— has become. cultural speeds up—with up— with stand-alone standalone eature films givingIndeed, away toasabundant ab undantproduction series, serials, seri als, episodic works, and ranchises—metatraits ranchises—metatraits prolierate. And once one is tipped off what to look or when studying “movies about movies,” 19 or “films within films,”20 a consumer o art may soon be inundated and eel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity o metatexts and metareerences.21 W  Wee are ofen asked to address a ddress our attention attention to more than one thing th ing at once—as once—as i to simultaneously ocus on what is screened in the t he present and  on  on what that content calls to mind rom  rom the past; thus, somehow to achieve ull presence with a single work (be attentive attentive to it), while also allowing or one one’’s absence rom it by way o distraction by many other works (private reflection on that contingent collection that lives precariously in one’s personal, pers onal, mental experience). Te pleasures o remembering and making connections rom retrieved memories, linking present to past, tying the here to the elsewhere, however, is periodically offset by rustrating rust rating lacunae and misrememberings revealing themselves along the way. o aid some recovery rom such a vertiginous predicament, this book has been created by metacinematicians laboring to offer terminological clarity and close readings o representative works o meta-art. meta-art. In its capacity as a guide or the interested (and perhaps also justifiably perplexed), the collection o dispatches may also unction as something o an announcement or “call “call to theorize” among among those who care to think about such things. In this way, way, the volume participates in an emergent subfield— subfield—and and perhaps more than one: metastudies, generally, metacinema, specifically. (Once such endeavors find a grounding, a urtherand s eseries o related domains present themselves or our consideration: metatheater, metatheater, meta-perormance metaperormance art, metatelevision,22  meta- video game games, s, metameta-social social media, and so on through the ranks o cultural and technological production.) As part o the present terminological terminological and disciplinary investiga investigation, tion, then, let us ask ourselves how we have come to use the word “meta” and its filmic compound “metacinema.” Does it denote a technique o filmmaking or a genre—or genre— or something o both? Te question ques tion reminds us that we are, undoubtedly, seeking criteria or discussing metacinema. As we cast about, looking intently at discrete moments o the meta in a film, or assessing entire films or collections o films, we may borrow rom Stanley Cavell’s sentiment that there is “nothing one is tempted to call the the eatures  eatures o a genre which all its

 

Introduction 7

members have in i n common. c ommon.”23 Since there is no de acto  acto definition on hand, or as suggested earlier, perhaps many competing and overlapping ones persist, we seem in need nee d o a clinic on usage and its variants: “Nothing would count as a eature until an act o criticism criticis m defines it as such. such.””24 I metacinema is a case o knowing it when one sees see s it, what, in act are some some o  o the qualities or cases that call or its conceptual invocation? Such a question points up the way that the present is reflecting   on the  on topic o metacinema while also,re-building tantly,, trying tantly trvolume ying to invent a critical conversation conversation about  about it. Akin to the re-concomibuilding o the ship o Teseus, this project can quite fittingly be thought o as a meta enterprise: an expression o metatheory and metaphilosophy—how metaphilosophy—how we go about doing theory and (film) philosophy while aboard—since aboard—since it is an inquiry into existing methods and terms that nevertheless are deployed to define a still evolving evolv ing and or that reason inchoate field o inquiry. inquiry.25 Tat said, the principal hermeneutic o this series ser ies o meta studies invo involves lves close attention to a more generally available approach to cinema, what Cavell called “reading”26 films—  films—aa trope admitting yet another another terminological terminolog ical import rom longstanding habits o relating to the literary liter ary arts. arts . Moreover, Moreover, that reading is undertaken with another Cavellian claim and moti in mind—namely, mind—namely, that “film exists in a state o philosophy: it is inherentl i nherentlyy sel-reflexive.” sel-reflexive.”27 Te implication o inherency is startling, in part, because it would ollow that all cinema is metacinema; such a global statement may be a compelling curiosity o the medium, but it also risks being an unhelpul bit o hyperbole (especially or skeptics and novitiates). Moreover, Moreover, the claim doesn’ d oesn’tt necessarily necess arily aid an urgent urge nt interest inter est in the mode in which (specifically) metacinematic traits are emphasized and made prominent (above and beyond the standing condition o medium-specific mediumspecific sel-reflexiveness). sel-reflexiveness). We critics must contend, thereore, with alternations between thoughts on the o filmoascourse, such (the medium in which and persist, ontology now expanded, to acknowledge digital)movies and thearrive encounters we have with specific films (including what Cavell named the “inflectionality” o the camera—“what camera—“what it is responding responding to inside or outside outside o itsel”). itsel ”).28 Dana Polan has shrewdly ramed a similar double inventory that guides our work here: “On the one hand, . . . cinema exists to transcend itsel in the articulation o theoretical questions,” and on the other hand, there remains an interest in “individual films in all their aesthetic specificity.”29 Cavell, as i in reply to these two aspects, aspects , said that his “guiding “guiding assumption is that everything ever ything we know o [mise [mise en abîme, abîme, in this case] must be derived rom its unction in particul par ticular ar films.” films.”30 Tis tandem methodology, as applied in our collection, makes both aspects better: theory is clarified and amplified by attention to concrete examples, while particularly vexing filmic instances stand in need

 

󰀸  Introduction

o theory. Film theory, then, is rightly beholden to filmic expressions. o that end, while each chapter calls the method and meaning o theory into question, as befits a metaphilosophical enterprise, the authors do so in the company o particular particul ar,, discrete works o film art. Consequently, C onsequently, as a way way o finding her bearings with respect to a range o metaphilosophical metaphilosophical expressions (in art and in the criticism o art), a reader o this volume will find regular recourse to the “reading” films, or with as necessary, filmoverlapping genres (understood as groups or cycles o o specific individual films shared and “static and dynamic”31 characteristics). From Arnheim, Bazin, Cavell, Corrigan, Deleuze, and Elsaesser to Felman and onward to Landy, Metz, Mulhall, Mulvey, Peretz, Pippin, Rothman, Silverman, Sinnerbrink, Stewart, and Wartenberg, among many others, we have been told that film is an inherently philosophical medium. In point o act, film’s very ontology suggests that “film was as i made or philosophy” (and, admitting the achronology, vice versa).32 Y  Yet et i we are by now convinced that film is a philosophical medium medium,, perhaps—given perhaps—given the great breadth o its expressive exemplifications—we exemplifications—we remain in need o a term that will help us unu nderstand when film is used philosophically or announces its philosophicality, that is, when we seem to have an encounter with what may be called the philosophical mode or register o films and filmmaking. It is to these latter terms, their definitions, explications, and illustrations that we are reliably devoted in this book. Put tersely, while film can be said to “do” philosophy and encode, embody, embody, depict, or otherwise express various philosophical themes and problems, we are embarked on a project aimed at articulating the th e special specia l category o metacinema: that is, as the book’s subtitle announces, when film orm film orm   or film content  calls  calls itsel into question—a question—a philosophical move i ever there was one. A governing interest in what ollows, indeed, an implied investigative is to become awarei.e., o the way we or speak o a kind art that goal, makesthen, awareness (either awareness  (eithermore internally, reflexively; externally, i.e.,oreerentially) a hallmark o its attributes. It is precisely in the uncanny parallel with our own (human) selconsciousness that t hat we find a pecu peculiar liar correlate in the movies. Te resemblance would seem to suggest, in short, that th at films think, or better that they entreat us to think about them or with them—instead them—instead o, as fiction is ofen wont to do, get lost in them (hoping or distraction, submitting to immersion). imothy Corrigan has described the phenomenon “when films interrogate films” as “reractive cinema. cinema.””33 Implied in Corrigan’s ormulation is an overture to the  viewer to join the interro interrogation gation (otherwise thought thought o as the work o the film film’’s cast and crew). It is thus a measure o the metacinematic when one notices that one is thinking  about  about what one is watching instead i nstead o, say s ay,, being caught c aught up

 

Introduction 9

in it, carried along by it. o be stopped, thrown back upon the work o art, to realize that t hat it is, indubitably i ndubitably,, a work o art that one aces (and not, say, a world to enter and remain remain in) is to experience exper ience an encounter with the metacinematic. Joshua Landy, like Corrigan, also a contributing voice in this conversation, describes the phenomenon as “mental calisthenics.” Whether this effect is received as a welcome labor or a tiresome chore will sif audiences; the metacinematician, o course, already or the conceptual intrigue o such consequences. Yet, themaniests invitationa claim to (improved?) cognitive— and metacognitive—acuity metacognitive—acuity presents something o a conceptual, and in time, hermeneuticc surplus to the act hermeneuti ac t o mere absorption. Working Working out the meanings o metafilms can be a rewarding workout. When watching any film, but especially movies that make an effort to announce their createdness, we may be positioned, as Cavell commended in Te World Viewed , to “discov[er] how to acknowledge a undamental act o film’s photographic basis: that objects participate in the photographic presence o themselves; they participate in the rere-creation creation o themselves on film; they are essential in the making o their appeara appearances. nces. Objects projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, reflexive, they occur as sel-reerential, sel-reerential, reflecting upon their physical origins. Teir presence reers to their absence, their location in another place.”34 First, note Cavell’s serial adducement and clustering o core terms: sel-reerential/ sel-reerential/reflexive/ reflexive/reflecting. reflecting. Moreover, i the mental lie o humans is also also “inherently  “inherently reflexive” reflex ive” (or in the more colloquia colloquiall expression or thought, “reflective”), then cinema—and cinema—and especially metacinema—makes metacinema—makes a match. It turns turns out that films “think” in ways that resemble human cognition. cogniti on. Just as a mind can become aware o its thoughts, so a film can express awareness o its sounds and images. Metacognition and metacinema are kindred phenomena. Such a resemblance is not pointstoworthy o worry. being (too) selsel-conscious conscious may be anwithout impairment better living, livi ng, we Just mayas wonder i the metacinematic mode leads le ads to better—or better—or worse!—movies worse!—movies (and or that matter better or worse film criticism). As the child plays immersively, absorbed in durational expanses o time (in Henri Bergson’s sense o durée durée), ), the creative artist finds an “optimal experience” through what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow, “flow,” or the gifed gife d musician or athlete enters and remains “in the zone,” so the “naive” filmgoer (simply) enjoys the dreamlike, even womblike, qualities o the movie theater—as theater—as a sound chamber in surrounding darkness, offering a rame  rame o light, bracketing the offscreen world, ocusing on an object beyond or outside one’s own mind, and so on. Here cinema, in its everydayness, ever ydayness, presents an opportunity or an an escape rom narcissism, a certain momentary lostness rom the lie one lef at the theater

 

󰀱󰀰  Introduction

door. But what o a cinema that pushes its audience to keep close track o the screen and  the  the lie beyond the th e screen, the “inside “insi de”” o film and one’ one’s own inner lie—the lie—the lived reality o ethical significance and conflict, o epistemic crisis, o ontological seriousness? Tis is movie watching with the lights on. Such doubleness (or layeredness, what Christian Metz styles “imbrication, braiding, or entanglement entanglement”) ”)35 lies at the core o metacinema: to experience the workand o thus art and howoit art pushes indeed, upon the dience, to asee world and back lived upon realityitsel, beyond the theater theater, , at authe  very surace o the screen— screen—where where worlds make contact. Cavell wrote compellingly that “we come to think o our viewing vi ewing as gazing inward. A good film or text will try to make us sel-conscious, sel- conscious, or to re-create re-create sel-consciousness.” sel-consciousness.”36  And assuredly, assuredly, as Stephen Mulhall has noted, Cavell’s own writing provides a model or “pr “prose ose that is continuo continuously usly responsive” to “multiple, complex, and idiosyncratic conditions,” conditions,” o which an engagement with film—along film—along with the task o using language to account or film—must film— must be counted.37 In addition to agitating sel-consciousness, sel-consciousness, metacinematic works also also invite  invite us to gaze outward: to see the work o art as art, perhaps to recover some o the playulness and invention i nvention suggested in Fluxus artist artis t Robert Filliou’ Fi lliou’s circular and thus reflexive remark that “art “art is what makes lie more interesting than art.” art.” (Te traditions o Dada, surrealism, and other modernist moder nist conceptions o the work o art intimately neighbor many incarnations o the meta, including metamodernism.) In Te reacher reacheryy o Images (1929), Images (1929), in his painting o a pipe, René Magritte would seem to have given us a bona fide emblem o meta-art meta- art in modernity by declaring on the surace o the very ver y same work: Cec Cecii n’ n’est est pas p as une pipe. pipe. Metacinema presents an alternate reality in order to give us back b ack to our own reality anew, differently; it serves as a perpetual reminder that we must process bealls us, transorm it— it—think think then rethink it—and it—and thentrouble return againwhat to extra-filmic extrafilmic experience with itsand conditions remade. Having writing a story? How about a story o a writer trying to write? Struggling to make a film? Consider making a film about the struggle to make a film. (Film (Fi lm directing, acting, and screenwriting are vocations prominently eatured in metacinematic metacinema tic films.) And whatever else unsettles us— us—love, love, work, rie riendship, ndship, children, health, and so on—can on—can be olded into the meditation and mediation as well. So it can also also be  be the case that Cavell’s “unembarrassed propensity or continuous sel-reerence” sel-reerence” in his own writing exemplifies these trying, try ing, ofen troubling conditions: namely, that we as viewers are called to respond to metacinema in ways that would seem to require a persistent metacritical dimensionality or our thinking—that thinking—that consciousness too remains aware o its 38 createdness.

 

Introduction 11

Quite consequentially, metacinematic works challenge us to consider the merit o sel-consciou sel-consciousness sness as such— such—both both as an attribute o human cognition and with respect to its purpose purpos e in, or as, a work o art. Afer hundreds, even thousands, o years, some may eel (depending on the tradition and rames o reerence) that the discourse about “the sel” has become antiquated, moribund, counterproductive, and wrongheaded. As a species, we may be finally moving rom the metaphysical question is aMetacinema, sel?” to the aferthe-act theact away anthropological inquiry: “When was “What the sel?” however, seems to be one spot in which we are orced to remain in contention with our sense o the positive, productive productive significance o the viewing, hearing, and experiencing subject—or subject—or example, having a point o view (even as a camera is camera  is said to have one), being attuned to what is presented/represented/ re-presented, presented, cultivating an aware o our awareness, and so on. At the same time, the act that the conversation about the meaning o meta preserves and deploys “sel”-centric “sel”centric phrases when adducing qualities in a work o art (instead o a person)—e.g., person)— e.g., sel-consciousness, sel-consciousness, sel-awareness, sel-awareness, sel-reflexiveness, sel-reflexiveness, etc.— intimates potentially problematic (and archaic) anthropomorphisms; with a touch o irony firmly in place, should this attribution—or attribution—or potentially un verified translation— translation—be be something we become (more) aware o, and beyond that, seek to resist or change?—For change?—For a start, “sel-reflexive” “sel-reflexive” may be redundant, since “reflexive” encodes a circular logic o relation. Many audiences intuitively account or this eature, since metacinematic films, perhaps more than films aiming to seduce us into immersive storyworlds (realms admittedly in which one may want  to  to lose or orget one’s sel, or diminish one’s chattering inner narration), create a continual risson between the viewer and viewed, hearer and heard, thought and thought about thought. In these ractious moments, the relationship between medium, representation, and audience will suggest that ininwa the rd, company certain films, as “we our  viewing as gazing inward, ” we areoalso looking outward, outwa rd, come that is,tointo inthink to theo“selconsciousness” o the film. No wonder time spent with metacinematic works so ofen eels like being bei ng in the company o o another mind. As ound in the chapters collected here, the metacinematic mode is one that involves a certain set o thematics (e.g., doubleness and multiplication— “the quadruple, or the centuple”; centuple”;39 repetition and recursion; nesting, levels, layers; the constructedness o art; genre conventions; a contest between alienation and immersion) in conjunction with technical/technological technical/technological parameters and potentialities (e.g., medium type, combinations and interactivity o media, aspects o display). o o sort out and sort through th rough these categories and conditions, among other actors, we have the ortune o making mak ing

 

󰀱󰀲  Introduction

ourselves amiliar with the capable and compelling labors o our gathered critics. As noted, ten essays appear in print here or the first time; to these thes e are added selections select ions and updated versions o earlier, now indispensable work by Robert B. Pippin, imothy Corrigan, Joshua Landy, and Shoshana Felman. Bringing these ourteen contributions together, together, a new chorus on metacinema coalesces. Part I aimsnotto just provide conceptual reorientation metacinema— metacinema—not bringing us up to and speedtheoretical on how cinema as such to is metacinematic, but also, more especially how the sometimes inconspicuous or subsumed traits o sel-conscious sel-conscious cinema can be amplified by the manipulation o reerence and reflexivity. o consider an inimitable instance o such aggressive experimentation, we begin with Robert B. Pippin’s recent, i already, canonical chapter rom Filmed Tought: Cinema as Reflective Form, Form, “Cinematic Sel-Consciousness Sel-Consciousness in Hitchcock’s Rear Window.” Window.” Te interaction between the reerential and the reflexive in Rear Window (1954) Window (1954) is not only satisying as entertainment, but also as an education in cinema itsel, and Pippin duly appoints (and anoints) it one o our touchstones or thinking about reflectiveness-asreflectiveness-as-thought thought and filmic reflexiveness. Pippin’s observations on the observational unsettle our relationship to undisputed masterworks o the medium: why doesn’t Jeff use film to take photographs photo graphs o the alarming things he sees, or thinks he sees, s ees, through his telephoto lens?—that lens?—that is, apart rom a flowerbed! Pippin reminds us o prototypes such as Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Jr. (1924), with its understated allusions to the era o silent film as well as to the finer points o theatrical dramaturgy and production design, thereby sending us on our way to the urther consideration o Hitchcock’s oeuvre, including Vertigo Vertigo (1958)  (1958) and North by Northwest  (1959).   (1959). Pippin’s close reading o Rear Window as Window as an exemplary icon o mid-twentieth mid-twentieth century metacinematic sets up the cascade o pieces to ollow. For instance, imothy moviemaking, Corrigan reclaims insights rom André Bazin about how the “reractive environment” we have inherited includes both cinema and literature—and literature—and in increasingly interdependent and generative ways. Here metacinema and metafiction collide. Tus we find Corrigan Corri gan placing Bazin at the center o a (prophetic) discussion o Charlie Kauman’s Ad Kauman’s Adapt aptat ation. ion. (2002,  (2002, dir. Spike Jonze) and Lars von rier’ rier’ss Te Five Obstructions (2003). Obstructions (2003). itular notions such as adaptation and obstruction become bec ome master terms or our contemporary contemporary understanding o metacinema, including its evolving definitions definiti ons and uses. Like Pippin, Garrett Stewart turns, or returns, our attention to an indelible, iconic film text—Citizen text—Citizen Kane (1941, Kane (1941, dir. Orson Welles)—to Welles)—to both illuminate the film’s potent metacinematic traits and to enrich our capacity to understand them. Beginning with an onslaught o pseudo-newsreels pseudo-newsreels in the service

 

Introduction 13

o backstory on Charles Foster Kane, Welles is a filmmaker ampliying film’s expositional power in the service o a soaring portrait and searing critique critique o the melodrama o American capitalism. As he does a generation later in F or Fake (1973 Fake  (1973), ), Welles’ Welles’ss hall o mirrors beckons be ckons our assessment asses sment o actor, star, star, and character; and o diegesis and extradiegesis. Consider C onsider how Citizen Kane’ Kane’s film fi lm within a film innovates with a veritable film beore beore a  a film, a prologue repeated many since ampliy by means o so-called so-home called movies documentary ootage the realitytimes credenti credentials als to o all that ollows it (ersatz are a go-to goto norm). As with later experiments, such as Adam as Adam’’s Rib (1949, Rib (1949, dir. George Cukor), in which a home movie intervenes early on to allow us and the characters a moment o sel-critique sel-critique and group analysis, so too in Citizen Kane, Kane, as Stewart notes, we find “the rame o reflex reerence through which we see not just the eponymous American tycoon but, at our own spectatorial off-angle, off- angle, the exposed celebrity etish o a mass attention that the imaged fictional Kane shares, or instance, with movie stars (like Welles) in their larger-thanlarger- than-lie lie aura, optic duplication, and limitless visual distribution.”40 Welles, in short, provides a lesson on how “medial technique technique directs  directs each episode o narrative narrative text  toward  toward its reflex context .” Hence film style offers a first encounter enc ounter,, while whi le its achieved reerent pushes outward to actor, audience, history, and the amous film known as Citizen Kane. Kane. Te categories and concepts conce pts at work in the opening op ening trinity tri nity o chapters—by Pippin, Corrigan, and Stewart—are Stewart—are given taxonomical order and elegant exegetical definition in i n Daniel Dani el Yacavone Yacavone’’s handy, highly nuanced contribution to the subfield o metastudies. At a pivotal moment in the volume, in his careul organization and assessment o theoretical approaches to the varied terms ter ms and rarefied distinctions scholars have employed when discussing meta works, Yacavone acavone’’s abcdiary abcdi ary not only refines how we can speak s peak o reflexive works but, as expected, also transorm transorms may experience part o should a largerbeproject to come, Yacavones how herewe generously shares athem. first As look at a rereshed typology or understanding works o art that make reerence to themselves and the world beyond themselves. Eleni Palis closes out this opening salvo o conceptual and theoretical reorientations to metacinema by steps—first steps—first by taking up Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) Hugo  (2011) as that film draws us back to cine- origins and the t he preternaturally inventive George Méliès. Uncustomary in the context o Scorsese’s usual are o (and flair or) criminal lie, but completely in keeping with his archivism and cinephilia, Hugo Hugo is  is a movie about moviemaking that, like Holy Motors  Motors  (addressed in chapter 8), aims to think through the contemporary lie o films in company with both the first stirrings o the medium and the latest cutting-edge cuttingedge technologies: here computer-generated computer-generated imagery is put into

 

󰀱󰀴  Introduction

service or exhibiting the marvels o the photochemical experiments o the French fin de siècle cinematic innovator. In the company o film critic-cumcritic- cumdirector Alexandre Astruc, Palis incites our thinking about the caméracaméra-stylo stylo,, and thus about authorship (especially o films) and thereore about the director as auteur, as “signatory” “signatory” o/ o/on on the work o art. With Hugo Hugo— —a mash-up mash-up o Méliès and Scorsese—we Scorsese—we are positioned to think anew about inscription inscripti on in its variable senses sens es (a theme that will recur in chapter 14 on the films o Martin Arnold). Unmistakably, the very notion that metacinematic works compel us to reflect on their creatio creation— n—their their authorship—is authorship—is central to their vitality, a vexing aliveness. Where we had been happily ensconced, distracted, and immersed in a work o art, we are suddenly jolted to think about who made the film, how it was made, who the actors are, and how the finished film relates to the culture that created it and the history that contains it. Hugo Hugo,, as one instance o this phenomenon, is a multiauthor film that achieves this consciousness in us by presenting a “videographic” style—one style—one that is defined by reerence to and thus reliance reli ance upon prior pr ior works o film. Tis inormative category— c ategory—the  videographic—will  videographic— will radiate radi ate throughout the remainder o the volume as it is re vealed in serial instances o implem implementatio entation n and and reconcep reconceptualiza tualization. tion. Similar to the making o metacinematic works and the subsequent study o them, there is much that remains in flux, part o an ongoing project o hermeneutic discovery and theoretical invention. Part II ollows the analytic approach modeled in Part I, namely, o sustained, perspicacious analysis o specific films (and their distinctive qualities and characteristics) in the service o identiying perhaps more general traits as well as strategies or theorizing kindred works o metacinematic art. Joshua Landy begins the new series, whose portions together create a scene o continental Landy Italy studying Federico Fellini’s 8½  (1963), (1963) , Laura . exploration: . Di Summawith hiking within Olivier Assayas beneath bene ath the Clouds8½ o  Sils Maria (2014), Maria (2014), and Ohad Landesma L andesman n tracking Leo Carax— C arax—or or more conspicuously, Denis Lavant (in a perormance o ervent energies and ractal results)—through results)— through the streets, cemeteries, and sewers o Paris in Holy Motors  Motors  (2012). Tis sequence o selected films and these astute readings prove re vealing insoar insoar as we we are made to cont contend end with the nature nature o actor actor,, character character,, star; director, auteur, membership in a creative guild; figure/figuration, figure/figuration, perormer/perormance; ormer/ perormance; and related attributes o the humans who represent reality and fiction on screen. In 8½ 8½,, Marcello Mastroianni plays a film director, Guido Anselmi, who not only spends his diegetic time negotiating his relationship to being a film director, but—under but—under Fellini’s Fellini’s direction—  direction—these these doubled presences press the

 

Introduction 15

 viewer into a multivale multivalent nt considera consideration tion o memories, dreams (daydr (daydreams? eams? nightmares?), and one’s own sense o being, acting, playing, and even establishing the texture o inner/outer inner/outer reality itsel. Landy takes up the mise en abîme as abîme as an occasion o ccasion to consider the service such art provides or what he calls “mental calisthenics,” drawing in part rom empirical psychology. Film, in short, gets us thinking, but metacinematic film—and film—and the metafictions that animateconsciousness” it—keeps us agitated it—keeps ask urther reminding us o the “double that istorequired o usquestions, in such encounters, such thinking; awareness is partnered with a perception o awareness. Moreover, in assessing types and kinds o reflexivity, we are positioned to consider the differences between “challenging and acile” exemplifications. Some works o metacinema prompt reflection more than others, and thereby reward our enduring, endlessly renewed contemplation. For Landy, 8½ 8½   is one o the metaworks that is worth our time. Te raught fiction/nonfiction fiction/nonfiction divide that stirs much metacinema is in bold evidence as Laura . Di Summa considers how another reractive en vironmentt propel  vironmen propelss our group investiga investigation. tion. In Clouds o Sils Maria, Maria, an iconic French actress, Maria Enders (played by iconic French actress, Juliet Binoche) is served by Valentine (ormer American ingénue, Kristen Stewart), and studied by Jo-Ann Jo-Ann Ellis (yet another ormer American ingénue, Chloë Grace Moretz). In this arrangement, the amiliar doubleness and reractiveness o character/ character/star star is collapsed by meta motis in the story and by means o meta casting; two identities—one identities—one diegetic, one nondiegetic—overlap nondiegetic—overlap and intermix. In these pairings and parallels, repetitions and reconceptions, not only are we summoned to remember La Binoche as ingénue (amed early on, rom Jean-Luc Jean-Luc Godard’s Je Godard’s Je vou salue, salue, Marie [ Marie [Hail Hail Mary , 1985] and Krzyszto Kieślowski’s rois couleurs: Bleu  Bleu  [Tree Colors: Blue, Blue, 1993]), but also the serial archetypes the theatrical backstagehas or played offstage,out oron example, this actress/ingénue, actress/ ingénue,ocharacter/star character/ star dynamic screen—when screen—rom rom All  All  About  Ab out Eve (1950, Eve (1950, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) to All to  All About About My Mother  Mother  (2000,   (2000, dir. Pedro Almodóvar) and the obsessive repetition o A o  A Star Is Born Born (1937,  (1937, 1954, 1975, and 2018) and beore all o them, What Price Hollywood?  (1932,  (1932, dir. George Cukor). Assayas’s Assayas’s own earlier earli er work, Irma Vep ep (1996),  (1996), pro provides vides yet another set o conspicuously relevant reractive reerences that inorm Clouds o Sils Maria— Maria—commentary on the history o French cinema (rom silent film to ruffaut’s Day or Night ); ); closely-held closely-held convictions—or convictions—or good and or ill— about Hollywood movies; the unity u nity and doubleness o the actor/ ac tor/celebrity celebrity;; the nature o making a remake, an adaptation, ad aptation, or an iteration—and iteration—and perhaps most pointedly, becomes a resource or tracking Assayas’s long-standing long-standing ascination with w ith “cinema about abou t your navel. navel .”

 

󰀱󰀶  Introduction

I Landy has made a case or the continuity o metafiction metaficti on and metacinema and Di Summa has us renew our appreciation or the influence o film (and theatre) history on the creation o new works o film art, Ohad Landesman’s study pushes us to dwell on film’s medium specificity—especially specificity—especially as we continue to negotiate the transition to digital capture, distribution, and projection. As Amy Villarejo has said, “Cinema is about everything and always 41

about it sel. itsel .”  Landy  Landy, Dionce Summa, andor Landesman have given ussolicitation reas on to see reason why this condition is, at a cause renzy and a standing to explore cinema’s capacity or conceptual and artistic generativity. o exempliy the matter, in Holy Motors, Motors, and within a ew minutes o each other, we encounter “short “short excerpts excer pts rom Étienne-Jules Étienne-Jules Marey’s Marey’s late nineteenthni neteenth-century century chrono-photographic chronophotographic experiments” and then another human figure who, in the present age, “shows how postproduction capacities o digital manipulation can nonetheless retain photographic indexicality indexica lity and remain entirely entirely dependent on old-ashioned old-ashioned physical perormance.” Tough we may eel very ar rom the origins o cinema, Landesman’s metameditation highlights the unities and affiliations that shrink the temporal and conceptual distance. Film is film whenever film is. Part III finds a trinity o metacinematic works that aver representations o human bodies in some orm o pain, turmoil, contestation, or trial. I film’s character as a (mere?) projection o light makes it seem insubstantial, ephemeral, truly a product o the “dream actory” it is said to emerge rom, what do we make o substantive encounters with sel-inflicted sel-inflicted harm, sadistic s adistic torture, torture, or industrial-scale industrial-scale mass genocide? Moral, political, and personal aspects o metacinema are thereore duly pronounced in J. M. Bernstein’s rump-era rump-era rereading o David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), Club (1999), the scene o which becomes laden with the potentialities inherent to art’s creation and meaning (as well as to the annihilation portentous threat o moral deterioration, destruction, and physical that attends such creation). Inpolitical short, with first initials reversed, Donald rump is our yler Durden; to unpack and explain this canny i troubling equivalency, Bernstein draws pointedly rom Plato, Freud, Adorno, and the critical literature on the film (including its indebtedness to the eponymous Chuck Palahniuk novel). Since the chapter was composed beore rump rump’’s deeat, Bernstein Be rnstein added adde d a coda in the wake wa ke o the first successul succes sul breaching o the U.S. Capitol in the nation’s history, on January 6, 2021, in which a new ne w “alt“alt-right right fight club” club” ulfilled ulfill ed the “pattern o charismatic bonding becoming political ascism becoming political violence.” Tough the rump presidency may be over, over, the rump era—or era—or some variant o it—may it—may not. In his daring return to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 Games (1997 and 2007), Paul Schofield productively applies and develops the moral philosophy o

 

Introduction 17

Richard Moran. Te ethical strain o Schofield’s research intersects with the study o rhetorical affect ound in Christopher Carter’s “reflexive materialism,” or instance, the way films can ormally build in critique—or critique—or beckon consciousness—o consciousness— o their morally weighty weig hty content.42 A master o meta, meta , Haneke adds yet another twist: the remake. Tus, beore we even get to explore “multiple Brechtian moments” in Funny Games, Games, we are struck by the duplication and repliAnd replication cationbyothe Haneke’ Haneke’s work—thatStructurally, work—that the film is notthese one but made, then remade. samesfilmmaker. twotwo; works stand in communication with one another, but, o course, thematically, the diegesis reveals a deep interest in what lies at the limit o the screen: the audience, the  viewer “sae “sae”” in her seat. Te film is alive alive to our our presence. presence. Tus, to to (material) (material) duplication is added (thematic) duplicity, where the perpetrators’ efforts to hurt the characters “in “ in”” the film are coupled with the attempt to make viewers contend with their status outside the rame—innocent rame—innocent and yet somehow also implicated. For his part, Schofield aims to extend Moran’s argument or the role o imagination in our encounters with art, concluding that Funny Games  Games  “isn’t simply an exercise in moralistic finger-wagging, finger-wagging, but an invitation to reflect on the way narrative films prompt us to ‘try on’ points o view, and on how we in the audience become,” in turn, “morally complicit.” Indeed, we  viewers are told by by the characters characters that they are doing doing what what they are doing doing or  or us— us —or our entertainment. Perhaps they also do it or our edification? Tus, pain is inflicted—and inflicted—and protracted—in protracted—in the film by exploiting and exploding genre conventions and by teasing audience taste by testing testi ng it. Concluding Part III with a lietime’ lie time’s worth o reflection reflec tion on human suffering and trauma, Shoshana Felman’s essential remarks on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) Shoah  (1985) eel as pertinent as ever, especially as we continue to struggle to make sense se nse o the nature o “the event,” witnessing, witness ing, accounting or trauma, documenting loss, and undertaking related measures o compensation or the gravest aspects o history: human allibility, ailures o empathy, and the burden o mourning. With Shoah Shoah in  in mind, Felman draws the act o film spectatorship into communion with very notion o witnessing history (e.g., watching the firsthand, “eyewitness” testimonies o Holocaust survivors; listening to a multiplicity o languages that must be translated—and translated—and yet acknowledging whose languages, or experiences, may or must remain “untranslatable”). Felman asks: “What does it mean to be a witness to the process o the film?” Te survivors sur vivors are witnesses, witnesses, but so also seem the filmmaker and and the audience. Like Li ke so much metacinema, Lanzmann L anzmann’’s landmark film achieves achieve s a “double task”—o task”—o breaking silences and also o complicating the audible discourses discours es around them. As Lanzmann says, he doesn do esn’t’t regard Shoah Shoah as  as a “historical film fil m” so much as an “incarnation “i ncarnation”” or “resurrection. “resurrect ion.” Hence, “Te “ Te whole

 

󰀱󰀸  Introduction

process o the film is a philosophical one.” Such a filmmaker, it is clear, like others attuned to the riches and resources o film, is aware o the medium—its medium— its complicity and complications—even complications—even as it is used us ed to make art and testimony. testimony. In all three cases—Fight cases—Fight Club, Club, Funny Games, Games, and Shoah Shoah— —the very nature o filming and watching is under critical consideration: What does it mean to be an audience? How does viewing involve complicity? Can one testiy to what one has seen (e.g., as casually a vital historical rommatinee)? the profilmic “time o the replies event” or merely when catchingproxy a Sunday As we cultivate to these questions, we may appreciate how Felman’s work provides a hinge between Bernstein’s and Schofield’s chapters and those three to come in Part IV, that is, where perormance (“acting”), re-enactment, re-enactment, “playing onesel,” direct witnessing, testimony, and more are brought into conversation with animation, the manipulation o ound ootage, the intimacy o fiction and nonfiction, and the troubled status o the documentary index. For instance, thinking o genocide, what would constitute proo o it—encountering it—encountering visible evidence, sharing witness accounts, ac counts, having perpetrators perp etrators dramatically re-enact their deeds de eds (trading memories o real horrors or a playul retelling)? retelling)? Such questions, which were enriched by the investigations o Part III, propel us orceully into the metacinematic creations under analysis in the final segment seg ment o the volume. volume. Part IV continues and concludes our multivalent investigation by pushing beyond the iconic, canonical, mainstream films o Part I; the celebrated “oreign films” and “indie darlings” o Part II; and the audience-oriented audience- oriented provocations o Part III, to urther modes and genres, namely, documentary, animation, experimental, and avant-garde avant-garde cinemas. Tomas E. Wartenberg, who has become an instructive interpreter o Joshua Oppenheimer’s Te  Act o Killing  Killing  (2012)   (2012)43—a film that was executive-produced executive-produced by both Werner Herzog and Errol Morris—returns Morris—returns here to refine the metacinematic attributes and o this disquieting Striking thetools topics and achievements techniques addressed is the waymasterwork. Oppenheimer hands among over the o expression to the subjects subje cts o his film, namely, inviting the perpetrators perpe trators o genocide to “act out” out” their relationship relationsh ip to the real-world, real- world, violent events they were complicit in. Instead o the documentary “study”—whether “study”—whether as interview, as ethnographic ethnograp hic report, as cinema- vérité, as observational, observational, as “direct”— “direct”—here here we have an experimental method : documentary as the site o antasy and true conession, o propaganda and its reckoning. Likewise, Yotam Shibolet takes us to the location o another atrocity—the atrocity—the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, 1982. Yet when addressing this historical moment, the director o Waltz with Bashir  (2008),  (2008) , Ari Folman, doesn do esn’t’t hand over the camera so much as displace it altogether: we are in the realm o animation. Fantasies and conessions, nightmares and hallucinations,

 

Introduction 19

memories and traumas, are rehearsed here as well, but to different effect— especially at the end o Waltz with Bashir , when the viewer experiences what might be deemed “the return o the index.” Animation gives way to video ootage and where we had spent eighty-odd eighty-odd minutes accustomed to the dance o colorul, mostly two-dimension two-dimensional al shapes, the screams find their bodies and the blood is suddenly ar rom cartoonish. An animated take on the documentary becomes a documentary animation’s representation. powers and its (apparent) competition/complementarity competition/ complementarity withophotographic Finally, in the concluding chapter o the book, I add one more category or the reader’ reader’ss consideration, consi deration, namely, avant-garde avant-garde filmmaking in the instance o Martin Arnold’ Arnold’ss Alone. Li Liee Wastes Wastes Andy Andy Hardy  Hardy  (1998)  (1998) and its parent project, Te Cineseizure. Cineseizure. I Oppenheimer has us u s considering the th e nature o agency, agency, narration, and genre, and Folman conjures a new mode or “documentary” filmfilm making about history, Arnold orces a deep dive into the varied significations o manipulated audiovisual media. In his accomplished, hip-hop hip-hop remixes o ound ootage rom Hollywood’s golden age, we appear to be given new, unintended meanings. meani ngs. But are these t hese latent or imposed? imposed ? X-rays o the psychoanalytic content o until now hidden desires, or epiphenoma o metaormal experimentation? Te stakes o such metacinematic questions are urgent in their own right: what inheres and what is added? Intention and reception become uncannily intermingled, perhaps to the point o an indistinguishable union. And i the implica implications tions o such an inquiry have been duly raught since Arnold’s Cineseizure Cineseizure,, the pronounced arrival o CGI, AR/MR/ AR/MR/VR, VR, NFs, deepakes, and GANs promises to send metacinematic panic into an entirely novel stratosphere.44 o our great ortune, the discerning, generous critics gathered on this occasion provide a remarkable set o indispensable interventions into the landscape o metacinema, rom theWelles early innovations George Méliès standard-bearers standardbearers by Orson and Alred oHitchcock to thethrough latest maniestations in this illustrious sequence. Moreover, these labors not only illuminate the orms and unctions o specific spe cific films, but also yield language we can use to speak sp eak o other existing works o metacinema—and metacinema—and those to come. We are given the terms and conditions to negotiate individual and collective encounters with the reflexive and reerential art o film, and in effect, invited to roam beyond cinema—to cinema—to meta media and modes that can be drawn into this conversation or benefit rom its findings. While the use o meta as a stand-alone stand-alone word is a airly recent development— invoking at once a contemporary eeling o postmodern sel-awareness, sel- awareness, acts o capacious textual reerencing, and atemporal hyper-connection— hyper-connection—the the

 

󰀲󰀰  Introduction

origins o the meta impulse are ancient, antediluvian; they have been, thereore, only magnified, enriched, and made more culturally apparent by the modern technology technolo gy o cinema and its media me dia heirs. Tat is to say s ay,, humans have been seeing their reflections in the surace o water and struck—troubled— struck—troubled—by by the existential implications ever since becoming human (and likely well beore). I there is trouble, however, there is also comort: we should be sensible to nostalgia as guiding and orcethe in reassurance the motivation createtogether—as and consume art. Admittedly, thea disquiet maytotravel together— as when a remake, prequel, adaptation, spinoff, sequel, series, or even a brie instance o media sampling at once ractures our sense o relation to the film and also  also  rewards us or loyalty to the history o intellectual property proper ty and the industrial products that package it. Film has, rom the start, provided humans with the impression o traveling temporally and spatially; o encountering revenants, proxies, and dopplegängers; o indulging in the pleasures and terrors o vicarious experience; and o exercising empathy, or ailing to. Te varied and inventive deployment o cinema or these several purposes—as purposes—as it were in response to primordial psychological needs and desires—has desires—has made the interace between audience and sonic spectacle the signature o the medium. Not surprisingly, then, there is seemingly a brand o metacinema or everyone— high, low, kitsch, camp, avant-garde, avant-garde, well-trodden, well-trodden, globally distributed, or privately presented. In all cases, something in the work makes us eel a certain way and, in turn, invites us to think about our reaction. In these ways, “reflection “reflecti on”” has always been a punning punn ing problem or homo sapiens, an admission o how consciousness (or sel-consciousness) sel- consciousness) introduces us to ourselves as beings and  as  as the type o being bei ng who has an awareness o that being. Fathoming how sel-awareness sel-awareness is the kind o “thing” it is is precisely what we have come to call “thought” (or a “sel” having a thought). We see a reflection reflection and  and then we reflect. we  reflect. We ace— ace—and and are aced with—Cinema—as with—an an indication o our existence, and so thinking itsel finds a new dimension. Cinema— as the art o reflection and, indeed, the reflexive—created reflexive—created a material basis or the th e ongoing artistic and philosophical exploration o these indelible acts. I the instinct that renders sel-awareness sel- awareness and sel-reerence sel-reerence is primeval, cinema remains a novel art—one art—one that is transormed continually by evolving technologies and the uses we put them to. “Seeing ourselves”—giving ourselves”—giving rise to narcissistic and nostalgic tendencies—remains tendencies—remains persistent, pervasive, and thus undeniably vital. Yet could it be that afer more than a century o hyperobsessive exploration o cinematic possibilities o or or the meta, there is a sense that our ascination with the mise en abîme has abîme has been exhausted? Has this sel-eating sel-eating become sel-deeating? sel-deeating? Are we lef with what Werner Herzog calls “inadequate imagery”?45 More than celebrating the double, the proxy,

 

Introduction 21

the nested, hasn’t the art itsel  become   become repetitive—drawing repetitive—drawing us ull circle to the origins o cinema in magic and thus gimmick? Our initial and considered replies to such questions may lead us to the observation that the meta has become, at last, banal, moribund, decadent, culminating in a culture o hand-mehandme-downs, downs, recycled properties, and ceaseless surrogates, substitutions, and synecdoches—a synecdoches—a perhaps fitting outcome o postmodernism and its apparent to pulverize and ormulations remainscapacity only impotent debrisoundations, (and a lot oorms, conceptual conu sion to until conusion boot).there Seeking a counter-response counter-response to the chagrin that might be elt under these conditions, however, we can point out that repetition, recycling, and recirculation are crucial elements o the art at hand and only activate urther the cognitive and emotional potency o the meta move; that is, while meta-ness meta- ness may at times present itsel like li ke an outmoded parlor trick (and thus seem easily dismissible), it is in act an ontological attribute o cinema as such (thereore undeniable and interminable) and an essential aspect o what would give credence to its artistic achievement. For these reasons, the meta is necessarily, that is, structurally, a sel-eeding sel-eeding mechanism, and it is also a means o production. Such unctioning can take the shape o the auto-cannibalizing auto-cannibalizing ouroboros, or it can maniest as a perpetual perp etual motion machine, endlessly regenerating. o be sure, these allegories—like allegories—like the metacinematic works that bear them out—may out—may not always always sustain our ascination, as cination, or earn our praise, though they are situated to sustain themselves. themse lves. Te capaciousness o the meta can be intimidating: once one catches sight o the provocations it affords, it demands, one can eel overwhelmed. But then the comprehensiveness—as comprehensiveness—as pictured and parodied, or example, in Synecdoche, New York (2008, York (2008, dir. Charlie Kauman)—is Kauman)—is a reminder to us that anything  can  can become a subject or our considered interest. Some understand reflexivity in art, in philosophy, as an urge, or perhaps better aorwillingness, to “study theordifferences,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein counseled, to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary, as Henry David Toreau prescribed. As part o this Socratic tradition, Cavell proposed “[that] philosophy is at all times answerable to itsel, that i there is any place at which the human spirit allows itsel itsel  to be under its own question, it is in philosophy phil osophy,,” and—imperative and—imperative or our thinking about cinema, this sentence s entence and its sentiment end this way— “that anything, indeed, that allows that question to happen is is philosophy.”  philosophy.”46  Consequently, we cannot help but recognize the pronounced  philo  philosophic sophical  al   credentials o metacinematic works: i cinema is an art that is naturally, as we have said ontologically, reflexive and reerential, then metacinema adds a new degree o intensity to the cinematic status quo. Hence the generativity, hence the atigue. Since metacinema is cinema that exists perpetually “under

 

󰀲󰀲  Introduction

its own question”—insistently question”—insistently oregrounding its status as as art  art and as art that contains or reers to to art—  art—we we are continually invited to consider its reflexiveness as we reflect reflec t on it and on ourselves. In a word, metacinema exemplifies a tendency o art, or art, to take itsel seriously seri ously and by extension to remind us o the seriousness—the seriousness—the consequentiality—o consequentiality—o our own lives. (Not to be missed, o course, is the attendant risk o sels el-importance, and its common associass ociations with narcissism, suite undue selregard,can andbepretentiousness. Yet even that seemingly seeming ly unavorable o sel-regard, afflictions profitably reflecte reflected d upon.) I the expanding abundance o the meta in our lives is proving exhausting, it may also be an indication o it exhaustiveness. Compiling some o the conspicuous qualities o the meta, we quickly recognize the spirit o its expansion: namely, how it is acquisitive, consuming, drawing all and everything into its vortices. ext, history, myth, memory: anything and all can be aggregated and integrated. [The movie] studio lot was one in the orm o a dream dump. A Sargasso o the imagination! And the dump grew continually, or there wasn’t a dream aloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having irst been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint. Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever e ver entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduc reproduced ed on the lot. 47

Drawn rom a moment o Nathanael West’ West’s brazen, ofen caustic Hollywood novel, Te Day o the Locust , we are reminded that no matter how much we are “troubled,” anything photographed, filmed, perormed, or engendered by digital means may become a uture subject or our obsessions—cinematic, obsessions—cinematic, cultural, psychological, ever navigating negotiating the sea and seaweedphilosophical. (sargassum)) oWe (sargassum the are situation. West’ss bookand West’ courts our deliberation on this long-lasting long-lasting act about fiction and, o course, about the movies; cinema is always alive to our remembering, recovering, and repurposing. Robert Stam’s image o the “Hollywood combinatoire combinatoire”” comes boldly to mind.48 Metacinema—  Metacinema—whether whether rom  rom a mainstream mainstream studio, an independent collective, or homespun rom iPhones—is iPhones—is a undamentally reproductive mode o art: seemingly all o its offerings are quotations and in turn sub ject to urther quota quotation. tion. Derivation and appro appropriation priation are are now established, respected methodologies or transfiguring or otherwise repurposing prior works into new works. In contest with aspirations to originality, citationality has become the predominant posture with respect to existing material culture. Cinema has not escaped this ate; instead its practitioners—mobilizing practitioners— mobilizing

 

Introduction 23

latent attributes o the medium—have medium—have made such an acquisitive and derivative orientation a primary eature o its aesthetic, thereby aiming to perpetually intensiy the allure (and necessary membership) o each subsequent film, series, or episode. Since metacinema seems to be everywhere—rom everywhere—rom the movie house to home theater, rom blockbuster eature to social media clip, rom experimental short to documentary film, rom commercial advertisement to mixed reality—it reality— it is our question to ask and answer how metacinema matters to us in our time and the time to come (or instance, how will post- or permapandemic art interact with pre-pandemic pre-pandemic meta practices? Will new work be regressive in the wake o trauma or innovative in the space o shattered norms?). Admittedly, the volume presumes an audience—readers audience—readers (and cineastes) already savvy enough to notice why metacinema is a worthy topic. Yet even with an arsenal arse nal o experiences exper iences to draw rom, it may be difficult difficu lt to find one’s orientation to such bounty. How, or example, is addressing the ourth wall different rom “breaking” it? Are “movies about movies” 49 always (and necessarily) metacinematic, or can they take moviemaking as a topic without admitting much, i any, reflexiveness? Can a film that eels very ar rom the studio soundstage or backlot nevertheless be dynamically sel-reerential? sel-reerential? Tese types o questions—and questions—and dozens more permutations thereo—are thereo—are given careul vetting in the chapters that ollow, with each contributor isolating an aspect o metacinematic art and then doing the hard work o offering a series o potent, tractable replies. Nathanael West’ West’ss sense s ense o the human— human—artistic— artistic—impulse impulse to collect dreams, to be “troubled” by images, to “reproduce” “reproduce” as a response to both the hoarding ho arding and the anxiety—is anxiety—is part o a long tradition o meta-expression meta- expression in literature, reaching back to Apuleius’s  Met  Metamorphose amorphosess  and Lucian’s Philosophies or Sale Sale and  and Melville, onward toand Miguel Cervantes,with Lawrence Sterne, Tomas Carlyle, Herman Luigide Pirandello, numerous innovations in contemporary metafiction and autofiction (among them, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Fire, Saul Bellow’ B ellow’ss Herzog , Philip Roth Roth’’s “Philip Roth Roth”” novels, and itemized dispatches rom Karl Ove Knausgaard50); percolating up in philosophy rom Plato to Friedrich Nietzsche and in the exhilarating use o pseudonymous authorship by Søren Kierkegaard; and in contemporary screenwriting, unctioning perhaps perh aps most notably in the work o Charlie Kauman (master o mise en abîme) abîme) and Quentin arantino (maven o metareerence). 51 Directors— rom George Méliès to Werner Herzog—continuously Herzog—continuously test what Cavell (in response to Erwin Panovsky) called the “aesthetic possibilities o the medium.”52 With Méliès we are reminded o cinema’s origins in proximity to magic—that magic— that it remains remains magic  magic or us is likely not news. With Herzog (and his

 

󰀲󰀴  Introduction

inheritors, such as Joshua Oppenheimer) we are repeatedly buffeted against the charged border o fiction and nonfiction, orced to contend with where the “real” (and “true”) “true”) and the “abricated” mix, mingle, reverse positions, p ositions, and otherwise upset any settled notion o representation. Te rise o deepakes, issuings rom generative adversarial adversari al networks, and the radical provocations o non-ungible nonungible tokens are present-day present-day harbingers or a media—and media—and meaning— landscape that is obsolete already presenting to inherited, perhaps categories. Iincreasingly metacinemaelaborate has been challenges a reliable fixture o image-making image-making since its nineteenth-century nineteenth-century origins, perhaps we can draw rom its tuitions as we ront twenty-first twenty-first century conditions. As we have benefited rom ever-emerging ever-emerging installments devoted to wellworn but not worn-out questions— questions—ound ound in films by Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Abbas Kiarostami, and Hong Sang-soo, Sang-soo, and more recently in  ventures  vent ures such as Olivier Assayas Assayas’’s NonNon-Fiction Fiction   (2018), Quentin arantino’s Once Upon a ime . . . in Hollywood  (2019)   (2019) and its metaliterary companion, a novelization o the same name (2021), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Kore-eda’s Te ruth  ruth  (2020), Werner Herzog’s Family Romance, LLC  (2020),   (2020), and David Fincher’s  Mank  Ma nk (2020)—  (2020)—the the meta abides. Tat said, even a high-profile high-profile film critic such as Manohla Dargis conesses to her readers parenthetically, as i sharing a transgressive bit o commiseration out o earshot: “(Filmmakers love making movies about movies more than many o us like watching them.)” 53 Essayist Phillip Lopate noted, in a similar vein, that “academic film critics . . . overrate cinematic cinema tic selsel-reflexivity.” reflexivity.” 54 How would we know? Perhaps by observing, in the spirit o Sianne Ngai’s inquiries, how metacinema—as metacinema—as a permanent and prominent eature o cinema and among the most definitive aesthetic categories o postmodernity— p ostmodernity—may may present itsel as a gimmick yielding momentary pleasures and insights (“entertainment”), yet also enriching, sustaining 55

ones.  Te intrinsic metameta-ness nessrepeating o cinematic orm united(aswith compulsive interests in re-circulating recirculating and existing content i renewing the lease on Genette, Propp, and odorov’s structuralist approaches to narrative mores and archetypes), would counter most critiques that metacinema must, at last, admit o decay or triviality trivial ity,, or both. Rather than th an a durable, but now deunct ashion, metacinema seems to be a permanent part—and part—and potentiality— o movies, whatever their provenance in time and space. One o the surprises o this collection, we hope, is that reading about these metacinematic works—with works—with their elaborate traits and entrancing techniques— in the company o such versatile, inormed, and nimble critics, readers will eel rewarded or their ascination with the medium and its capacity to take an interest in itsel. No doubt, readers will be newly equipped to ace a present and uture demanding the astute interpretation o such works, known and yet

 

Introduction 25

to be created. Given the longevity o the metacinematic instinct, we can recognize at once the talent needed to create such films about films and also the appetite among audiences to experience and understand them—but them—but have we been provided sufficient and intelligent companionship in sorting and sifing the virtues and varieties o such works and their effects on our lives? Tough theorizing metacinema admits general attributes and telltale characteristics, we likely have to decide, perhaps on a case-bycase- by-case case basis, films o this sensibility are worthy o study, admiration, even love. Onewhich afer another, the contributors here assess the accomplishments and, in turn, recommend the compensations or studying these exemplary instances. I it is true, on occasion, that some metacinematic works are closer to odder or stunt than superlative art, cinephiles should wish to find ways to articulate the differences. And while making such distinctions, as we do in what ollows, we can be grateul or anything—any anything—any work o art, any film, however seemingly acile or slight— that provokes and sustains serious philosophical reflection. Guided and challenged by film’s capacity or reerence and reflexivity, we may come to regard metacinema as a genre, a mode, and an elemental attribute attribute o the medium that prompts prom pts us perpetually per petually to an awareness o what we experience. exper ience. Notes  1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Te Poet, Poet,”” in Te Complete Works o Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson , Concord Edition (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–4), 1903–4), 3:4; Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Teatre: Te Development o an Aesthetic, Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 1957) , 192.  2. See, e.g., Gérard G érard Genette,  Métal  Métalepse: epse: De la figure à la fiction fiction   (Paris: Seuil, 2004) and Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University o Nebraska 1997); Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place o Film, Film, trans. Corma cPress, Cormac Deane (Newand York: York: Columbia University Press, 2 016). 2016).  3. William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures o Lie (New Lie (New York: Alred A. Knop, 1970), 24– 25; Werner Wol, ed., Te Metareerential urn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation (Amsterdam: Explanation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011) and earlier, Meta earlier, Metareer reerence ence across Media: Teory and Case Studies (Amsterdam: Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). See also R. M. Berry, “Metafiction,”” in Te Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, “Metafiction, Literature , ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (New York: Routledge, 2012), ch. 10, 128–40. 128–40.  4. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Te Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University o exas Press, 1983; originally published, 1975).  5. See Erich Auerbach, Mim Auerbach,  Mimesis: esis: Te Represen Representation tation o Reality in Western Literature Literature (1946), trans. Willard R. rask rask (Princeton: (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2003) and also ime, History, and Literature, Literature, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

 

󰀲󰀶  Introduction

  6. See, e.g., the “Meme” entry in Keywords in Remix Studies, Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough (New York: Routledge, 2018), 202–16. 202–16.   7. William Safire, “On Language: What’s What’s the Meta?,” New York imes Magazine, Magazine, December 25, 2005, Sec. 6, 30. See also Noam Cohen, “Meta-Musings,” “Meta-Musings,” New Republic, Republic, September 5, 1988, 17–19. 17–19.   8. Natha Nathaniel niel Hawthorne Hawthorne used the term “metascience “metascience”” in “Te Birth-mark” Birth-mark” (1843). See Hayden White’s Meta White’s  Metahistory  history  (1973).   (1973). Metamusic includes not just highbrow, high-modernist high- modernist work by Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage, but also contemporary instances, such as Father John Misty’s inserted chorus o (mocking) laughter on “Bored in the USA” (2014) and his thirteen-minute thirteenminute meta-reflection meta-reflection “Leaving LA” (2017). For “metametaphorism,” see Ian Bogost, Alien Bogost,  Alien Phenomenology Phenomenology,, or, or, What It’ It’s Like  Like to Be a Ting  (Minneapolis:   (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2012), 80, 82.   9. Haro Harold ld Bloom, Bloom, A  A Map Map o o Misreadi Misreading  ng  (Oxord:  (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1975), 102.  10. 10. See Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Teory o Language, Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University o Wisconsin Press, 1961).  11. 11. See  Meta  Metamodernism: modernism: Hist Historicity oricity,, Affect, and Depth afer Postmod Postmodernism ernism,, ed. Robin  van den Akker Akker,, Alison Gibbons, and imotheus Vermeulen (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).  12. 12. See Danielle Spencer Spencer,,  Meta  Metagnosis: gnosis: Revelato Revelatory ry Narr Narratives atives o Heal Health th and Iden Identity  tity   (New York: York: Oxord University Press, Press , 2020). 2020) .  13. 13. Jean inguely (1935– (1935–91) 91) designed machines that could make art. Tis extension o a Dadaist tradition offered as a satire o automation can be traced to present-day present- day works by the consortium Obvious, which designed a generative adversarial network (GAN) that, in turn, created Edmond de Belamy  (2018,  (2018, 70 cm × 70 cm), a GAN portrait painting painting that sold at Christie’s or $432,500. Here inguely’s métamatics meets acheiropoieta acheiropoieta— —works o art “made without wit hout hands.” hands.”  14. 14. Definitions are drawn rom a series o entries available in the Oxord English Dictionary ,  American Herita Heritage ge College College Dictionary , and the online dictionary aggregator—what aggregator—what we can call a metadictionary—dictionary.com. metadictionary—dictionary.com.  15. Oxord English Dictionary , 1971. Not to be conused with the Pali word mettā mettā (rom  (rom the Sanskrit maitrī ), ), commonly translated t ranslated as lovingl oving-kindness, benevolenc b enevolence, e, amity, or goodwill. See Peter Harvey,  An In Introduction troduction to Buddhism: eachin eachings, gs, Histo History ry and Practices Practices   (Cambridge: Cambridge University University Press, 2012), 278– 278–79. 79.  16. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English raits  raits  (1856), in Complete Works, Works, 5:238. See also my Emerson’s English raits and the Natural History o Metaphor   (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 118; and Emerson, Te Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks o Ralph Waldo Emerson,, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Belknap Press o Harvard Emerson University Univ ersity Press, 1977), vol. 8 (1852– (1852–55), 55), 246.  17. 17. Richard Dyer, Te Culture o Queers (New Queers (New York: York: Routledge, Routle dge, 2002), 2002) , 201.  18. 18. Wesley Morris Morr is and A. O. Scott, S cott, “Te “ Te 10 Best B est Actors o the Year, Year,” New York imes, imes, December 9, 2019.  19. 19. Christopher Ames, Movies Ames,  Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected  (Lexington:   (Lexington: University Press o Kentucky, 1997) 1997)..  20. 20. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, esp. Part II, ch. 8.  21. 21. See PatriciaStanord Pisters,University Te Matrix o Visual withUniverse DeleuzeasinMetacinema,” Film Teory   (Stanord: Press, 2003); Culture: see esp. Working ch. 1, “Te

 

Introduction 27

 22. 22.

 23. 23.  24. 24.  25. 25.  26. 26.  27. 27.  28. 28.  29. 29.  30. 30.  31. 31.  32. 32.

 33. 33.  34. 34.  35. 35.  36. 36.  37. 37.

14–44; see again Wol,  M 14–44;  Met etar are eer eren ence ce acr acros osss Med edia ia   and Te Metareerential urn; urn; Décio orres Cruz, Postmodern Metanarratives: “Blade Runner” and Literature in the Age o Image  Image   (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Eyal Peretz, Te Off-Screen: Off-Screen: An Investigation o the Cinematic Frame  Frame  (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 2017). See also imothy Corrigan, “Adaptations, Reractions, and Obstructions: Te Prophecies o André Bazin,” Falso Movimento  Movimento 1, no. 1 (Fall 2014); and Joshua Landy, Landy, “Mental Calisthenics and Sel-Reflexive Sel-Reflexive Fiction Fiction,,” inTe in Te Oxord Handbook o Cognitive Approaches to Literature, Literature, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxord University Press, 2015), 559–80. 559–80. For Corrigan and Landy L andy,, see in this volume respectively, chapters chapters 2 and 6. Some prominent examples o metatele metatelevision vision include Te Muppet Show, Show, It’s Garry Shandling’ss Show Shandling’ Show,, Curb Your Enthusiasm (see Enthusiasm (see esp., “Seineld,” s7:e10), Te Office, Office, 30 Rock, Rock, Community , BoJack Horseman, Horseman, Fleabag , Russian Doll , and WandaVision WandaVision.. Te meta-ness meta-ness o television is explored in, among other places, Jen Chaney, “When Did V Get So Meta?,” Vulture,, February 10, 2017, and Scott R. Olson, “MetaVulture “Meta-televi television: sion: Popular Postmodernism,” Postmodernism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4, Communication 4, no. 3 (1987): 284–300. 284–300. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits o Happiness: Te Hollywood Comedy o Remarriage (Cambridge, Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 28. Cavell, Pursuits o Happiness, Happiness, 28. Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics o Cinema (New Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 2015 ), xiv. Cavell, Pursuits o Happiness, Happiness, 2, 202–5; 202–5; and Stanley Cavell, Cities o Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register Reg ister o the Moral Lie (Cambridge, Lie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2004) 2004),, 116, 272. Cavell, Pursuits o Happiness, Happiness, 13. See also 14, 14 n. 1. Cavell, Pursuits o Happiness, Happiness, 203. Dana Polan, “Aferw “Aferword, ord,” in Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, 181. Cavell, Pursuits o Happiness, Happiness, 206. Tomas Schatz, Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Culture (New Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1st ed., 691. Stanley Cavell, Contesting ears: Te Hollywood Melodrama o the Unknown Woman  Woman   (Cambridge,, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), epigraph and xii. See also “Reflections (Cambridge on a Lie o Philosophy: Interview with Stanley Cavell,” Harvard Journal o Philosophy   7 (1999): 25. For urther exploration o the notion, see Te Tought o Stanley Cavell and Cinema: urning urning Anew to the Ontology Ontolo gy o Film a Hal-Century Hal-Century afer “Te World Viewed,”  ed.  ed. David LaRocca LaRocc a (New York: York: Bloomsbury Bloomsbur y, 2020). See Se e also Catherine Catheri ne Wheatley, Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Sel-Reliance Sel-Reliance at the Cinema (New Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019) and Robert B. Pippin, Filmed Tought: Cinema as Reflective (Chicago: Reflective (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2019). imothyy Corrigan, Te Essay Film: From Montaigne, afer Marker   (New York: Oxord imoth University Uni versity Press, 2011), 181– 18 1–204. 204. Stanley Cavell, Te World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology o Film, Film , Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), xvi. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, 76. Cavell, Cities o Words ords,, 325. Stephen Mulhall, “Introduction, “Introduction,”” in Te Cavell Reader , ed. Stephen Mulhall (Oxord: Blackwell, 1996), 1.

 38. 38. Film For ,more sel-reerence, reerence, see Wheatley, Stanley Cavell and Film, 89–90.on Cavell and cinematic sel89–90.

 

󰀲󰀸  Introduction

 39. 39. Emerson, “Te “ Te Poet,” Poet,” in Complete Works orks,, 3:4.  40. 40. See also my “On the Aesthetics o Amateur Filmmaking in Narrative Narrative Cinema: Negotiating Negotiating Home Movies afer Adam afer Adam’’s Rib Rib,,” in i n Te Tought o Stanley Cavell and Cinema Cine ma,, 245–90. 245–90.  41. 41. Amy Villarej Villarejo, o, Film Studies: Te Basics, Basics, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), 11.  42. 42. See Christopher Carter, Meta Carter, Metafilm: film: Materialist Materialist Rhetoric and Reflexive Cinema (Columbus: Cinema (Columbus: Te Ohio State University University Press, 2018).  43. 43. See, e.g., e .g., Wartenbe Wartenberg’ rg’ss “Providing Evidence or  or a Philosophical Philos ophical Claim: Cl aim: Te Act o Killing   and the Banality o Evil,” NECSUS: European Journal o Media Studies  Studies  (2017) and “Contemporary Philosophical Filmmaking,” in Te Palgrave Handbook o the Philosophy o Film and Motion Pictures, Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll, Laura . Di Summa, and Shawn Loht (New York: York: Palgrave Macmillan, Macmil lan, 2019). 2019 ).  44. 44. CGI (computer-generated (computer-generated imagery), AR/MR/ AR/MR/VR VR (augmented reality/mixed reality/mixed reality/ virtual reality), NFs (non-ungible (non-ungible tokens), and GANs (generative adversarial networks). And with GANs, the age o acheiropoieta acheiropoieta is  is upon us—art us—art “made without hands. hands.””  45. 45. See Werner Herzog: A Guide or the Perplexed; Conversations with Paul Cronin  Cronin   (New York: York: Faber & Faber, 2014), 2014 ), 81–3. 81–3. See also my Emerson Emerson’’s English raits and the Natural History o Metaphor , 209–10. 209–10.  46. 46. Stanley Cavell, C avell, “An “An Interview Intervie w with Stanley St anley Cavell, Cavel l,” by James Conant, Te Senses o Stanley Cavell  (Lewisburg:  (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 59.  47. 47. Nathanael West, West, Te Day o the Locust  (New  (New York: Library o America, 1997), 326.  48. 48. Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Jean- Luc Godard   (New York: York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1 992), 26. 26 .  49. 49. See again Ames, Movies Ames, Movies about the Movies Movies..  50. 50. Se Seee my “Autophi Autophilos losophy, ophy,” in Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Reflections, ed. David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 275–320. 275–320.  51. 51. See, e.g., Te Philosophy o Charlie Kauman, Kauman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: University Press o Kentucky, 2011; updated with a new preace, 2019); Quentin arantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”: A Manipulation o Metacinema, Metacinema, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky (New York: York: Continuum, 2012); 2 012); Quentin arantino arantino’’s “Django “D jango Unchained”: Te Continuation o Metacinema, Metacinema, ed. Oliver C. Speck (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Eyal Peretz, “What Is a Cinema o Jewish Vengeance?,” in Te Off-Screen: Off-Screen: An Investigation o the Cinematic Frame   (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 2017), ch. 4; and David Roche, Quentin Frame

 52. 52.  53. 53.  54. 54.

 55. 55.

arantino: Poetics and Politics o Cinematic Metafiction (Jackson: Metafiction (Jackson: University o Mississippi Press, 2018). Cavell, Te World Viewed , 31. Manohla Dargis, “Being “Be ing Catherine Deneuve, De neuve,”” New York imes, imes, July 2, 2020. Phillip Lopate, “In Search o the Centaur: C entaur: Te Essay-Film,” Essay-Film,” in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown, C: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 260. See Sianne Ngai Ngai,, Teory o the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form  Form  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) and her earlier Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting  Interesting  (Cambridge,  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

 

 

PART I

CONCEPTUAL AND THEO RETI CAL REOR IENTA IENTATION TION TO METACINEMA

 

1 Cinematic Self-Consciousness Self-Consciousness in Hitchcock’ Hitchcock’ss Rear Window  Robert B. Pippin

Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means. —Lisa Freemont, Rear  Window

Spectatorship: Lived and Cinematic Filmed fictional narratives seem to most viewers to create some minimal transparency illusion, the illusion that the viewer is somehow magically present at various events, that she is an unobserved observer obser ver in the scenes. s cenes.1 But o course we also know that this cannot be literally true. We are not in in the  the action, cannot be affected by what happens, cannot intervene. We occupy ar too many points o view, including those o several characters, that no one present could. We are in some sense aware that what we are seeing is being narrated, has been photographed and is being told to us in a visual way, and when thistransported eature is unavoidably as another when wecountry, are whisked in time, or suddenly in obvious, one cut to or areback flying through the air, we easily accept a widespread convention. Tat is, we have learned to ignore or the most part that someone is purposeully showing us what we are seeing, has decided what we will not see, that the events are not simply magically present in ront o us. But some directors do not want us to ignore this eature. Tey are able also to draw our attention to the director’s narrational control, and so to the presence o the camera, not just to what the camera is photographing. When we do notice, the visible narrational element is what gives the film its reflective orm. Such a narrative orm cannot but suggest a purposiveness, its point, p oint, and so maniests that the aesthetic ob ject bears a conception o o itsel, a source o unity and and ultimately ultimately interpretive interpretive meaning. It seems odd to say that filmed fictional narratives are in this sense Robert B. Pippin, Cinematic Self-Consciousness Self-Consciousness in Hitchcock’s Rear Window In: Metacinema . Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0002 9780190095345.003.0002

 

󰀳󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

“sel-conscious,” embody an awareness o themselves, but this is just an ellip“sel-conscious,” tical way o saying that the director is sels el-conscious conscious o the point o the determinate narrative orm.2 Tat point may simply be “to create unny u nny situations” or “to scare the audience in a way they will enjoy,” but it can clearly be more aesthetically ambitious; or example, to help us understand something better. Tis all corresponds to our own implicit awareness in experiencing an aesthetic object that that is what we are doing. “Implicitly aware” also requires a lot o philosophical unpacking, but there is a natural sense o something like such potential attentiveness becoming explicit when we find ourselves asking why we are first shown a character by a camera seeming to swoop in through a window (Psycho (Psycho)) or why there are so many close-ups close-ups o backs and backs o heads in the Dardenne brothers’ films. But such aesthetic attending already embodies a norm. It can be done well, or it can be done lazily, sloppily, indierently, in a biased way, or sel-righteously. sel- righteously. Tat issue will ultimately be the topic o the ollowing. Tere is no clearer example o this set o issues than Alred Hitchcock’s 1954 film, Rear Window, Window, and this has occasioned a good deal o discussion about the purpose o Hitchcock’s triply thematizing all at once (1) the voyeurism in the plot, (2) the striking similarity between the main character’s immobile position watching the “ramed” dramas he sees in the windows o the apartments opposite his and the viewer’s position in cinema, unquestionably the most commented-on commented-on eature o the film,3 and (3) (3 ) Hitchcock’s Hitchcock’s calling cal ling attention to his control o what we see and when and how we see it, his insistent breaks rom what is established as the main point o view established, Jeff’s.4 Further, when, in the last twenty minutes o the film, Jeff, the photographer, begins intervening and “directing” the actions that occur (Jeff, araid a suspected murderer is pulling out, finally sends him a note and then calls him sends his riends on(the a mission), we have aposition final allegorical connection and made, (4) between Jeff’s photographer’s) and Hitchcock’s. (Tis is a photographer photog rapher,, though, who, wh o, looking or evidence evide nce o a murder, murder, takes no pictures; never loads his camera although he is always looking through it. We shall have to return to that.) Tis last allegorical connection also reminds us that it was Jeff’ Jeff ’s vivid narration, with its intensity i ntensity,, passion, and unwavering conviction, con viction, to Stella, his nurse, and Lisa, his h is girlriend, and his riend, the detective om Doyle, that initially brought into being the possibility o murder, creating an event out o o several severa l disconnected disconnecte d nighttime events. He created, out o what he saw, saw, what it meant. Put another way, way, he edited together toge ther the various scenes he saw to make his own imagined film narrative, a murder thriller. He put together, in a kind o coherent sequence, a tense marital situation, angry arguments, long-distance long-distance phone calls, three nighttime trips by the neighbor,

 

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Torwald (Raymond Burr), with his metal sample case, and no sign the next day o the wie. (Tis is all he has at first, but he thinks it enough.) Ten he saw a large box, tied with thick th ick ropes and carted away, away, saw some knives, and a saw a dog digging in the dirt and then being killed, Torwald washing down the walls o his bathroom, and finally his wie’s jewelry jewelr y still at home.5 His deep in vestment in what what he wants to be true is also signaled by the strange act that Jeff is, rom the very earliest stages, absolutely and passionately certain that a murder has been committed and immediately, dogmatically rejects any alternate explanation. When he is inormed that he had been asleep when a crucial event occurred that disconfirms his entire theory—Torwald theory—Torwald had been seen by the superintendent leaving with his wie the next morning 6—he is unazed. Tis persists even afer he hears more disconfirming inormation rom the detective-riend. detective-riend. (Mrs. Torwald was seen being escorted to the train that morning; seen picking up the trunk, which turned out just to contain her clothes. All o this emphasize emphasizes, s, to the point o obsession, Jeff’ Jeff ’s investment in the narrative he has constructed.) When it is explained to him that when one observes people unaware they are being observed, not presenting themselves to others as they want to be seen, one does not at all necessarily see some truth about them—they them—they could be presentin presentingg themselves to themselves in a way that is just as theatrical and a kind o sel-pretense— sel-pretense—he he is indifferent to such cautions as well.7 Tis manner o Jeff’ Jeff ’s constructing the suspicion is obviously also linked to what we do when we try to understand what is happening in a film. We are guided by the director and the editor, but we have to do some work, remembering past scenes, deciding which should be remembered, interpreting interpreting how one past scene might mig ht or might not bear on a recent one, anticipating possibilipossibili ties. Usually this is no problem in commercial films because b ecause we are given very ver y clear visual “advice” about to dowe this. more to the eventual point here, it is also ofen what wehow do when tryEven to understand someone or some event in ordinary lie. I we need to work at the understanding, i something does not make initial initi al sense to us, one o the main ways we go about that work is to create this sort o narrational sense. We try to put what a character said or did into some sort o coherent pattern o remarks or actions in the past, requiring us to decide which might be relevant or not, bring to bear what we have heard other people say about the person, what we know about remarks and deeds we might not have experienced, all in the hope that all o this might reveal what was intended and so what the words or the action meant. Tis is usually much more revealing than isolating the words or deed in that moment and trying to “plumb the depths” by some deeper insight insi ght into their inner lie, as i in search o some isolated is olated truthtruth -maker maker,, the act o the matter. But

 

󰀳󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

there are ways o doing this sort s ort o “editing” “editing” that are better or worse, and even though Jeff turns out to be right rig ht in this case, his h is way o going about this is quite problematic, and that act touches on both ethical and aesthetic issues. Tis is because, inevitably, as noted, we are also ofen invested in some way in the clarification, and that investment can be sel-inter sel-interested, ested, sels el-deceived, deceived, biased, subject to wishul thinking, and so orth. One o the ways this can become impossible or us to avoid acknowledging is when our views vie ws intersect in some way with the lives o others and they respond, intervene in some way to challenge us. And, o course, one o the ways this can be avoided  is  is by preventing such challenges, keeping our distance, staying inside our dollhouses or cages, psychological as well as spatial. Te Hitchcockian cinematic sel-consciousness sel-consciousness that we are interested in happens at the very beginning o the film and is dramatically signaled. Jeff, a photographer immobilized by a broken leg, is asleep (we soon learn) in the early morning heat. He is alone. But the bamboo blinds in his modest apartment rise like theater curtains on the courtyard scene and apartment windows visible rom his “rear window,” as the credits roll. Staged drama, which the curtain and the open windows suggest, effaces even more any indication o a narrator.8 Te ourth wall has simply disappeared and we take ourselves to be simply watching what the characters do and say. 9 Hitchcock seems to be introducing this “theater convention” into a movie in order subtly to contrast this transparency illusion we indulge more easily in theater with the contrasting but ofen unnoticed control o narration by a director.10 (Tere is another indirect allusion to the theatrical experience. In a departure rom Hitchcock’s brilliant use o music in his other films, there is no nondiegetic music in the film.)11  I think Hitchcock is alluding to this difference again when he makes his cameo appearance. He is in the apartment o the composer and appears to beup” repairing or setting his clock. In the theater, author “winds eve rything everyt hing up ” and it plays out without intervention. But athe movie director can control control the pace and timing o everything we see, s ee, intervening requently, has control o “the clock” throughout. As i to emphasize his control even more, he turns directly in our direction, something I believe he does in only one other cameo, in Marn in Marnie ie.. Moreover, Moreover, it is almost as i we are to believe belie ve he is giving instructions to the composer about what is the theme music o the film, the piece he is composing that we hear throughout and that eventually is finished as—what as—what else?—“Lisa.”) else?—“Lisa.”)12 Here, the blinds rising makes no diegetic sense; there is no one who could have raised them (except the director). Ten the camera emphasizes its presence and control even more by taking the viewer on a little tour o the outside scene, all until we finally settle on a perspiring James Stewart, L. B. Jeffries, asleep in his wheelchair. (I we are to

 

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come later to have some doubts about the propriety o Jeff ’s voyeurism, we by and large do not at first notice our own compromised position, that our first look at Jeff is rather invasive, a man in a most vulnerable state, unable to look back, to project himsel as he wants; asleep.13 Te film is i s “rounded by a sleep sle ep”” again at the end, when Jeff is asleep once more, even more immobilized and unable to assert or project himsel, and Lisa is awake, now even more able to 14

manipulate her own appearance.  (Tis is the beginning o what Lisa will call “rear window ethics,” and, as is emphasized here, it will have something to do with the ethical dimensions implicit in cinema itsel.) As i all that weren’t emphasis enough, the camera shows us, calling attention to what will be important later in the plot and to the cinematic theme, Jeff’s broken 8×10 view camera (no doubt a souvenir o his injury, caused when he stood in the middle mi ddle o an automobile racetrack to snap the photo we are also shown) and, mysteriously, a ramed negative o a woman’s ace, the positive magazine image o which we are also shown on the cover o a stack o the magazines in which it appeared. (Every positive image starts as a negative, and or some reason never explained Jeff keeps the negative ramed and displayed. Is he able to connect the negative with the positive pos itive sides o human existence, or is he stuck in “negative viewing,” especially, as we shall see, a negative view o marriage, o domestic lie, perhaps perh aps o women?)15 And what we are shown involves the narration o a triple plot, a eature that always raises the issue o the meaning o the interrelation o the three. Tere is first the minimal plot, Jeff’s growing obsession with voyeurism. He is recovering, immobilized immobil ized by a broken leg, and he spends his days and many o his nights looking out his window and into the apartments o his neighbors. (Tere is a heatwave and everyone has windows open and blinds up.) He ollows the little dramas o people he gives names to: Miss Lonelyhearts, apparently spinsterstages looki ng looking orlornlyand or love; Miss orso, naively orso, an(but acrobatic dancer usually ina various o undress, apparently not credibly) uninterested uninter ested in who sees se es her twirling, stretching, or wiggling her backside as she bends over; a childless couple who dote on their dog; a amily with children (normal and apparently happy; they do not catch Jeff’s attention and we see very ver y little o them); a newlywed couple; a middle-aged middle-aged woman who lives alone and sculpts; a composer who also lives alone. Aside rom a neighbor who Jeff comes to suspect has murd murdered ered his wie, Jeff, his girlriend, Lisa, and his nurse, Stella, pay most initial attention to the sad plight o the older, unmarried woman, watching her pantomime having a dinner guest, struggling with and rejecting a young, aggressive would-be would-be lover, and contemplating suicide. Tey are all clearly embarrassed by what they see, but they do not turn away and they watch eagerly. In the second plot, they watch a couple across

 

󰀳󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

the way, the wie, an invalid, and her caregiver, her husband, a costume jewelry salesman who seems the object o much criticism by the wie and apparently with good reason. Our early suspicion is that he is having an affair. (Tere are phone conversations that she overhears and becomes enraged at.) Jeff will come to suspect that the man, played by Raymond Burr, finally murdered, cut into pieces, and disposed o his wie, and that becomes the central plot. Almost as important as the murder plot is the third, what appears to be a long-standing long-standing resistance by Jeff to marriage to Lisa, played by Grace Kelly. Kelly, obviously in the running as the most glamorous and beautiul movie star in the history histor y o cinema, and always gorgeously dressed in couture in the film, is nevertheless unable to get Jeff over his deep resistance to marriage. She even seems unable to arouse much sexual desire in the cold fish. He is visibly vis ibly much more aroused “spectatorially “spectatoria lly,,” at a scopophilic s copophilic distance, by Miss orso than he ever is by Lisa, no matter her explicit request or a bed or the night, no matter her negligée.16 Lisa wants Jeff to quit traveling the world photographing disasters and settle down in New York, where he can become a ashion and portrait photographer. He reuses and also reuses to allow her to travel with him, which she claims she is willing to do. Teir relationship appears headed or  or a breakup. What appears to connect all three plots is the issue o domestic married lie, and especially Jeff’s view o its horrors. Eventually what connects the narratives to the allegorical dimensions o film watching and filmmaking will be the problem o spectatorship in human relations, how things look, like romance, gender relations, and marriage, marri age, rom the “outside,” not the “inside.”” When Stella, the side. t he nurse played p layed by Telma Ritter as the voice o common sense, says at the beginni b eginning ng that “we’ve “we’ve become a nation o peeping pee ping oms, oms,” she cannot mean that we literally spend so much time spying on our neighbors through their windows. become notion moviegoers, and beginning at aroundWe thehave, time though, o the film, 1954,a in a wayosuggested by the tiny, ramed windows, television watchers. I don’t think this just means to suggest that filmed drama and comedy interest us because we like to be  voyeurs,  voyeur s, unobserved observers, but that we watch these screens like peeping oms.. Tat is the uninvolved spectatorial  way  we oms  we watch them, as i what we see asks nothing o us, is simply there “or us”; and therein lie both the aesthetic and ethical issues that will be discussed in the next section. Moreover, in a way that will link up to the spectatorship theme, the whole broader issues o gender politics, male power, and the limited options or women’s resistance are all emphasized quite explicitly at the beginning and throughout the film. In a conversation with his editor, who has orgotten when Jeff gets his cast off, Jeff asks the editor how he ever got to be a big editor with such a small

 

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memory, and the editor responds, “Trif, industry, and hard work, . . . and catching the publisher with his secretary.” (Tis occurs as a helicopter hovers over two women who are sunbathing on a roo, and as Jeff watches the scantily scanti ly clad dancer practicing her routines in ront o the window.) Jeff is asked why he doesn’t marry, and Jeff paints a picture o boredom, routine, and a “nagging wie.” wie.” In act, what w hat little we see o the suspect’ susp ect’s, s, Torwald’ Torwa ld’s, s, domestic lie seems to reflect Jeff Jeff’’s view o the typical entanglements entanglements o marriage. From From his point o view, we see a man prepare a meal or his wie, wi e, carry carr y it to her, and and kiss her lovingly, only to see her contemptuously toss aside, with some s ome remark, the flower with which he decorated her tray. He makes a phone call and is then berated by the wie he must attend to constantly. (ellingly, Jeff is just as unappreciative and ungrateul or the elaborate meal Lisa has arranged or him rom “21” as Torwald’ Tor wald’ss wie is or hers. hers . Jeff is as much an ungrateul nag as any wie we see in i n the film.) Tere is thus ample justification or Fawell’s characterization: “Rear “Rear Window represents Window represents an unambiguous, sometimes even vicious broadside on the male ma le psyche and male sexua sexuall insecurity. insec urity.”17 (Tis is all clearly contrasted ironically with the t he act that the cleverest, cleveres t, wittiest, and bravest character in the film is Lisa. Lis a. She also has the most reliable moral compass.) It is also possible that his initial passionate investment in the murder suspicion has something to do with a projected antasy o liberation rom what Jeff thinks marriage is, what he imagines he might be tempt tempted ed to do i married to a “nagging wie.” Te antasy even has two sides, and the less ob vious is more more complex. complex. Tat is, aside rom seei seeing ng in Torwald’ Torwald’ss marriage his possible ate being tied to a wie and yearning to be ree, he sees someone immobilized, like him, being served a meal by a loved one, like him, and he sees her reject it uneelingly; again, like him. He is drawn to attend attend to a scene o what he likely eels is his own ingratitude and insensitivity in the “21” dinner scene justasnoted and ofen in hisnoted, generalseeing whinythings attitude aboutrom Lisa. Jeff’s And more generally, has been so much point o view lets us eel his own anxieties about involvement with women. Virtually every small drama he attends to reflects this concern about marriage and domesticity, as well as a mostly unacknowledged anxiety that, in its absence, one suffers a soul-crushing loneliness. His perception already embodies what it means to him; it is intensely projective intensely  projective in  in a way reminiscent o Proust’s observations in À in  À la Recherche Recherche.. Te distinction embodied in Lisa’s remark quoted earlier, “ell me everything you saw and what you think it means,” is a distinction or separation o moments undermined by what we learn about Jeff in the film. “What it means” to Jeff is is what  what he sees. It is also a convenient diversion rom Lisa’s persistent questions about their uture.18  Given the anecdote about the publisher and what Jeff thinks he

 

󰀳󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

sees around him, it would appear that Jeff much preers his current position, at least as a mode o lie: merely watching, external, photographing suraces, spectacles, only to move on to another visual excitement. But to return to my epigraph, epigraph, in our case cas e as viewers, vie wers, this is all a ll just what we see, or what we think thi nk we see. s ee. We We don’t don’t know enough to have much investment, investme nt, yet, in what we see, so or us, what wh at it all means is another question. questi on. And nothing in Hitchcock goes unqualified. Jeff’s sel-involved, sel- involved, projective voyeurism is also what draws him, probably or the first time, into the lives o the others, diverts him or a while rom the spectacle and danger he preers and orces him to simply look at the human condition in middle-class middle-class urban New York. York. As noted, he at first sees, in effect, only himsel in various possible domestic situations, but that will change ch ange dramatically. Finally, the act that Hitchcock parallels our initial look at the Torwalds at dinner with Jeff’s dinner with Lisa has a number o psychological dimensions. Te invalid parallel with Jeff is a figure o his own anxiety about being “emininized” by domesticity (one o the things he oddly complains about to the editor is the whir o electric appliances on returning home to a married lie every ever y day), and that is no doubt a reflection o his anxiety about his own masculinity, in Freudian terms his ear o his own desire or such eminization, which, finally, seems connected with his own need to demonstrate his masculinity by wild and reckless bravery bravery,, another exaggerated sign that he ears not being as masculine as he should be, and so needs constantly to prove it. “What it means” or us has something someth ing to do with the context o Hitchcock’s Hitchcock’s work, and what we have been discussing thus ar is not an isolated theme in Hitchcock. In what are ofen regarded as his three greatest films, Rear Window  Window  (1954), Vertigo Vertigo (1958),  (1958), and North by Northwest  (1959),  (1959), the central character character is afifymanfive), north o orty (Stewart was in ortyorty-six fify in thetimes first divorced two; Grant fify-five), unmarried (a bachelor thesix firstand two; many inwas the third), no doubt anxious about entering middle age and the uture o his romantic lie, and each o the three is quite skeptical skeptica l o and so deeply resistant to marriage. Tey are all attracted to and attractive to beautiul, younger, blond women, but despite happy-enough happy-enough endings in Rear Window  Window  and North by Northwest , there is little hope that a stable marriage with any o these men will result. Vertigo Vertigo’s ’s ending is o course unqualifiedly tragic.19 And in each, some eatures o moviemaking and even what we might call the ontological presuppositions o cinematic experience and their relation to ordinary lie are present in some way, again suggesting some link between the romantic theme and the cinematic one. In Rear Window, Window, it is the “externality” o the  viewer’s (or most viewers viewers’’ assumed) position and the manip manipulative ulative power

 

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o the director. In Vertigo Vertigo   it is the antasy creation o a fictional character, largely by means o “external” aids, clothes, make up, gait, style. Both Elster and Scottie play the figurative role o director and character-creator. character- creator. And in North by Northwest , the emphasis is on acting and pretense, pretense, Roger Tornhill pretending to be a nonexistent character charac ter,, Kaplan, because some rather rathe r incompetent spies believe the fictional character is real and is the advertising executive Cary Grant, advertising itsel being some sort o figure or the creation o cinematic illusion.20

Rear Window Ethics We’ve become a race o peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in or a change. —Stella, Rear Window 

Te ethical question ques tion Lisa raises rais es when she says, “I’m not much much on rear window ethics” appears to be the straightorward and obvious one that Jeff had just mentioned: is it right, “ethical,” to spy on people just because one can (“even i one proves that someone did not commit a murder”). But the film is raising a deeper and more complicated ethical question, and it is already suggested by Stella’s remark just noted, that one needs to go outside and look in, not  just stay inside and look out. Dramatically Dramatically the issue is introd introduced uced subtly, subtly, in the amous scene when Grace Kelly first appears in the film. Jeff awakens to see her luminous, gorgeous ace, as i conjured up in his dream state (a movie star rom  rom the “dream “dream actory actor y,” but also a aint suggestion sug gestion o her h er antasy status, perhaps her merely antasy status, or Jeff), and he asks what appears to be akiss humorous, question romantic banter“Who and aare slowslow-motion motion (actually ironic a so-called so-called step-afer step-print printsome technique was used): you?” Lisa answers by turning on, one by one, the lights lig hts in the room, as i i  in answer, “illuminating” who she is, and saying, “Lisa. Carol. Freemont” until she stands, posed to-beto-be-lookedlooked-at, at, ashion model that she is, in a lovely thousand-dollar thousand-dollar gown. And that is is the  the answer, or Jeff, at this point anyway. She is a model, a to-betobe-lookedlooked-at at woman. He does not, in other words, immediately imme diately or in most o the film, acknowledge in any serious way her view o him, allow himsel, in any serious sense, to be seen by her, imagine him rom her point o view, see himsel rom the outside, as in Stella’s recommendation. And she is not just a model or him, but a mere type, a Park Avenue, rich, spoiled girl, g irl, he says. Tat deeper ethical question concerns the appropriateness o this sort o spectatorial relation to others in general, not just in spying situations, not necessarily

 

󰀴󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

reiying or objectiying. It is more a matter o blindness and resistance, and it is a blindness toward others that cripples Jeff’s own sel-knowledge sel-knowledge (it insulates him rom others’ view o him, a much more valuable potential source o sel-knowledge sel-knowledge than introspection), leaves him a bit smug and already tending toward that “old, “old, bitter” unmarried man his editor warned him against. O course to a large degree (at this point) Lisa has accepted that role and unction, as have the dancer and Miss Lonelyhearts. But she is already chafing under Jeff’s thoughtless presuppositions about her and what she can and cannot do. She’ll She’ll show s how him soon so on how wrong he is. And all this too is all connected to the cinematic allegory, with Jeff’s position as viewer o those several mini-films mini- films he sees across the courtyard, as that aesthetic theme becomes entwined with this issue o spectatorship. Tat doubling is not just meant as a remark on the th e rather banal explanation ex planation o what attracts attra cts us to cinema, the possibility p ossibility o seeing while unseen. And this is not, at least not wholly, wholly, a cautionary critique criti que o what cinema can do or what a mistake it would be to ignore the limits o cinema. cine ma.21 It is rather, rather, I want to suggest, a critique o a common and not at all necessary or unavoidable orm o cinematic viewership,, o the way  Hitchcock viewership  Hitchcock clearly thinks that people watch movies, especially his movies, what they expect rom them, and most importantly importantly what they imagine (overwhelmingly what they do not imagine) that an intelligent film expects rom expects rom them them.. In this respect a question is being raised that is larger than one specific to cinema and includes all the arts, and embodies a relation to the viewer that also bears on interpersonal relations. But it will take a closer look at some elements in the film beore that claim can be deended. We will need ne ed to prepare or what I want to suggest is the most important i mportant “eth“ethical” question in the film, the one asked by Torwald when he first enters Jeff ’s apartment, “What do you want rom me?” Tis stage o and the film is marked in the enthusias m and excitement that Jeff, Lisa, Stella have eltbyina break figuring outenthusiasm how Torwald murdered and disposed o his wie. Te detective, Doyle, a smug, indifferent presence throughout the film who cannot hide his weary contempt or these amateurs, inorms them that the mysterious trunk was retrieved by Mrs. Torwald afer all. She is very much alive. Jeff and Lisa are severely disappointed. Te murder possibility had obviously drawn them together, given them a bond, in a way that the next scene in the Miss Lonelyhearts Lonelyhe arts drama does not. In their dejection, they watch her bring home a man she has picked up. She lowers her Venetian Venetian blinds, but beore she can close them th em he assaults her and she has to fight him off. Tey watch, do not look away, do not even look alarmed or surprised, but they are clearly embarrassed, and even ashamed o themselves. (Later, Jeff Jeff and Stella see her prepare to attempt what they think is suicide su icide and

 

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they are ready, finally, to intervene in Miss Lonelyhearts’ lie, but by then the plot developments—the developments—the police arriving in Torwald’s apartment—distract apartment—distract them. She might have died i it had not been or a mere accident. She hears what appears to be the finished tune the composer had been working on, and that music seems to turn her rom suicide.) 22 Lisa is also appropriately embarrassed that they are sad that a woman is not  dead.   dead. Tey are, she claims, a couple o “ghouls.” Tey had spent so much o their time together looking out the window, and Jeff had spent so much time avoiding Lisa’s serious attention to their uture, that this is their first serious engagement ace to ace, and about a weighty topic. Tey have begun to deal with each other, rather than co- viewing these little little films. So a phase phase o the film does seem over over.. Tey finally conront the act that the expectation o privacy is a human entitlement, and we sense some closure as, afer this conversation, Lisa Lis a ceremonially closes all three thre e blinds, announces announce s that “the show is over over,,” and prepares or the t he “preview o coming attractions,” her negligée. (She still uses the language o spectatorial cinema to describe their relationship.) relationship.) Jeff even resolves, starting tomorrow, to take seriously the imperative “Love thy neighbor.” But then a neighbor screams. Te third-floor third-floor couple with the little dog has discovered him dead, and Miss Lonelyhearts announces that he has been killed, his neck had been broken. It will turn out that Torwald had buried part o his wie (probably her head) in the garden, and the dog had gotten too curious, was sniffing and digging in the wrong spot. Te wie in the couple then makes a speech decrying the lack o humani humanity ty in the apartment complex, complex, their indifference to each other, the act that they are not at all neighbors, they do not watch out or each other, care at all or each other. Hitchcock clearly stages this as a voice rom an older generation, decrying (rightly we are given to believe) what has has become happened to morerom recent that the younger generation alienated eachurban other,culture: even indifferent to each other. Te couple sleep outside on the fire escape during the heat, figuring that they are the only tenants not so isolated, always inside what Narmore calls cal ls their th eir “doll’s “doll’s houses, hous es,””23 and what Chabrol called calle d “a “a kind o human rabbit hutch, a variety o cages in which humans live in close proximity to one another but in isolation is olation nevertheless. nevert heless.””24 Te speech spee ch is obviously a reflection on Jeff ’s isolated, spectatorial position as well, although he is being drawn out o this isolation by the murder; eventually, literally tossed  out  out o his hi s window. However, what connects all this with the cinema theme emerges when the dog’ss owner, in her justifiable rant about her so-called dog’ so- called neighbors, asks an extremely odd question: “Did you kill him because he liked you, just because he liked you?”

 

󰀴󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

Tis is an extraordinary suggestion about a killing motive. One can (I suppose) imagine killing a pesky dog who is destroying one’s garden, or yapping all day, or biting one’s children, or even a dog so riendly that he bothers one constantly and so orth, but none o that is relevant here. Who would kill a dog “just because” the dog was affectionate? It suggests immediately by contrast a great resistance to being loved. 25 Tat o course brings Jeff and his resistance to Lisa to mind. Tat, in turn, raises again his spectatorial position, looking out but “letting no one in,” enjoying his godlike perch above it all,  just as he had enjoyed enjoyed the kind o action action photography photography that that made up his proproessional lie. And all o that, in turn, returns us not only to Jeff ’s position as a figure or cinema viewing, view ing, but to the question o how how he  he watches. I noted pre viously that, at the interpersonal interpersonal level, our interpr interpretive etive att attempt empt to understan understandd each other, involving as it ofen does an attempt at some narrational sense requiring our own editorial e ditorial skill, sk ill, can be done well, or poorly, lazily, lazily, or simply stupidly, inormed by insufficient experience, little sense o how it might be done. And we can find all sorts o ways o preventing any external intererence with the narrational pattern we have established in the little dramas we have narrated or ourselves. In this case, we have seen Jeff’s overinvestment in the very idea o “Torwald murdering his nagging ball and chain” (we can imagine him saying it i he were ever honest with himsel), himsel ), as well as his overinvestmen overin vestmentt in the sense he thinks th inks he has made o the isolated dramas in each o the apartments he has selected or attention. It turns out that he will be wrong about Miss orso. She was not playing the field, but was no doubt dealing with proessional contacts (“juggling wolves,” as Lisa puts it sympathetically) while awaiting a boyriend’s return rom the army, a short, nerdylooking man whom Jeff would never have anticipated in his clichéd attitude toward her.26 He cannot come up with any view o the composer, invokes a romance magazine or Miss Lonelyhear Lonelyhearts, ts, and clearly (andact it turns out wrongly) thinksstereotype o Torwald as simply a sociopathic killer. Te that he was “right” about the murder is no result o any interpretive finesse. He has the plot  right,  right, just as many viewers o Hitchcock watch and ollow the plot successully, and take great pleasure in the technical brilliance o the editing, pacing, intersecting threads and so orth. But they see nothing else, or they casually adopt some cliché about Hitchcock as their interpretive result, the meaning o the narrative: he is a perverse voyeur, a sadist, a cold, manipulative technician, technici an, a champion o the male gaze, a Catholic director convinced o universal and proound sinulness, a cynic, or even the much more accurate cliché, but still a cliché, cli ché, that he is a “humanist” at heart, and so s o orth. Many o his films, but especially Rear Window and Window and Vertigo Vertigo (above  (above all Vertigo Vertigo), ), seem

 

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to me great protests against this. Te final turn o this screw occurs when the windows, the screens, scree ns, o both apartments, Jeff ’s and Torwald’s, Torwald’s, are breached.

Involvement: Lived and Cinematic Afer the dog’s dog’s death, Jeff and Lisa Li sa notice that th at the only light that did not come on was Torwald’s, Torwald’s, as i, they the y think, he already a lready knew what happened and who did it. As they try tr y to figure out why he would kill the dog, dog , Jeff remembers that he had taken several slides o the courtyard in the weeks o his confinem confinement. ent. As he unpacks the slides, he mutters, “I hope I didn’t take all  leg  leg art.” Tis is a reerence to a shot we had just seen a ew minutes beore o Miss orso’s apartment. All the viewer can see are her two legs exercising. So we know Jeff had been taking photographs, and that he has an overdeveloped interest in Miss orso’s body (not, apparently, in her), but we don’t know why he took no photos recently with his huge telephoto lens: none o any o the potentially incriminating scenes he has seen, and none just now o Torwald washing down his bathroom walls or, soon, packing to leave, his wie’s jewelry and so orth. (He surely must have high-spee high-speedd film and knows how to take photos in low light.) It is as i he wants to keep his involvement pure involvement purely  ly  observational,  observational, as i even the imprint on his film is too much o an intrusion rom the outside. At any rate, it is an odd omission by a proessional photographer, especially since we now learn that he has has bothered  bothered to take photos even o the garden and garden and the row o flowers that were the cause o the little dog’s death. Te two yellow zinnias in i n the flower bed are shorter, and “Since when do flowers grow shorter in two weeks?” Tis realization and the sudden sight o Torwald packing begin the first intervention intervention in the outside world. Jeff writes a note. shifs an with overhead andthe dramatically zooms in as Jeff writesHitchcock writes, , “What have youto done her?” shot and puts note in an envelope with Torwald’s name on it. Tere could be a score o explanations or why the zinnias are shorter, aside rom Torwald having dug up what he had buried there (which (wh ich no one has seen him do), but this “discovery” and the dog’ss death and now the sight dog’ si ght o Torwald Torwal d packing up have moved Jeff to this t his staged intervention. Te first stage is this note, still a pretty non-involved non- involved in volvement,  volvem ent, although it is Lisa, clearly enjoyin enjoyingg the role, as she had called it, it, o o the private pr ivate eye’s eye’s “girl Friday, Friday,” who wh o must deliver del iver the t he note and is almost caught. c aught. When she returns, Jeff obviously looks at her with new respect and desire. (All (Al l o his is going on while Miss Lonelyhearts—noticed Lonelyhearts—noticed by Stella—is Stella—is preparing or her suicide.)

 

󰀴󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

Ten another stage o involvement, a bit closer. Tey need Torwald Tor wald out o the apartment so Stella and Lisa can dig up the flower bed unseen; Jeff, to get Torwald out, calls cal ls Torwald on the phone, p hone, pretends to be a blackmailer, and arranges to meet him. Still no risk to Jeff, as he notices when he stumbles on the word “we” and admits the women are taking all the chances. Meanwhile Miss Lonelyhearts’ suicide preparations go on apace, unnoticed by our thrilled amateur detectives. Te phone call works, Torwald leaves, and the coast is clear cl ear..27 Te final act begins. Jeff keeps watch as they dig. Tey find nothing, but Lisa, in an extraordinarily risky and brave move, climbs up and into Torwald’s second-story secondstory flat, and, given all the associations built up, it is just as i she is leaving one world, the world o the audience, and literally entering the fictional world o the “Torwald movie,” as dramatic a moment as any that has occurred so ar. I don’t know o any way to prove the point, but given the detective theme th eme and this moment, Lisa Lis a’s climbing into the Torwald Tor wald world must be a reerence to Buster Keaton’s great 1924 film, Sherlock, Jr., Jr., where essentially the same conflation o worlds occurs and a character climbs into a movie screen. In this case, we keep our attention divided between the dangerous “merged” world Lisa has created and Jeff, the viewer, helpless, reacting like a terrified movie audience, squirming, grimacing, no longer just a distant spectator,, but unable to help, still in the audience tator audie nce world, connected to his hi s beloved, now in mortal morta l danger. Te involvement/noninvolvement/non-involvement involvement dynamic reaches a crisis level when Torwald discovers Lisa in the apartment and begins to struggle with her. She calls out to Jeff, but, in an astonishing last sign o Jeff’s immobility, distance, reticence, and all that entails, even though or all they know she could be being murdered, neither he nor Stella calls out to Torvald ! Tey don’t yell at him to Jeff leave they seemode,” him, that they have (Perhaps is her still alone, in ull that “cinematic assuming thatcalled doingthe so police. would make as little difference as the person who yells out, “Don’t open that door!” at a horror film. Perhaps he is simply araid o giving away his position.) Te police do arrive, and Lisa indicates to Jeff that she has ound and managed to keep Mrs. Torwald’s wedding ring, but in signaling him, she also alerts Torwald to Jeff’s observing presence, and the most tense part o the film begins. Tat other “outside” world invades Jeff’s. Te phone rings. It is obviously Torwald but he says nothing, is clearly only checking that he has the right apartment, and we soon hear Torwald’s slow, heavy, and or Jeff and or us, terriyingly ever e ver closer ootsteps climbing the stairs to Jeff ’s apartment, and he enters. Lisa has penetrated that outside cinematic world, and now, in a stunning move, the counterpart involvement occurs, as i a character steps

 

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out o the screen sc reen and into the viewer’ viewer’ss world. (We (We are shown that Jeff, with wit h his heavy ull leg cast, can’t get out o his chair to lock his door; he is deenseless against this intrusion.) “What do you want rom me?” Torvald asks, and then, “Your riend, the girl, she could have turned me in. Why didn’t she? What is it you want? A lot o money? I don’t have any money. Say something! Say something! ell me what you want. Can you get me that ring back?” Jeff tells him hi m the police have it by now, now, and Torwald Torwa ld advances at Jeff. As many commentators have pointed out, Raymond Burr’s Burr’s pained, suffering, suffe ring, and pathetic patheti c tone instantly humanizes what Jeff and we had considered a stereotypical monster-murderer; monster-murderer; the voice  virtually create createss another character character,, the real Torwald, not the character in Jeff’s film, albeit still a murderer. Ten in a cinematic staging o astonishing brilliance, Hitchcock enacts visually the culmination o the themes o cinematic viewing and the lived-out lived-out dimensions o the spectatorship/ spect atorship/involvement involvement relation relatio n in a single scene. s cene. Jeff ’s protective strategy is to use what would would normally be his “illuminating” flashbulbs to blind  Torwald   Torwald momentarily, to keep him rom seeing where to advance. Tis o course figures Jeff’s general resistance to “being seen,” to anyone “looking in,” to allowing even Lisa to see him honestly; all this, even though he is o course also trying to save his lie. But or this to work, he must also “blind” himsel , shield his eyes rom the flash so he can see how to work the next flash efficiently. Te extraordinary, even somewhat childish image o Jeff with his hands over his eyes, flashing his blinding bulbs in blinded selprotection, makes a complex point p oint in a densely compressed way, all in a single image: that his hi s “peeping om, om,” external, exter nal, spectatorial spe ctatorial relation relati on to the world has resulted in his own infirmity, a kind o willed sel-blindness sel- blindness to others but especially to himsel.28 And bears directly on athe cinematic asontologically i “the Torwald film film” ” hasthis come alive, invaded world Jeff hadtheme. thoughtItois as s epseparate, sealed off, and has challenged challenge d the way he has watched his h is “films.” “What do you want rom me?” is a question I think o as one Hitchcock poses to his audience, and it implies another: what do you think I, my films, want rom want  rom  you?? “o assault you”—to  you you”—to toss you out o your insulated, sealed-off sealed-off world, to involve you—might you—might be a general answer, but more specifically, here and throughout the film, he appears to be signaling a demand or a kind o cinematic involvement, an interpretive one.29 Troughout, we have seen all sorts o cinematic signs o the limitatio limitations ns and distortions in Jeff ’s mode o viewing, that it is sel-involved, sel-involved, anxious, negative, but mostly everywhere based on an assumption assump tion o a strict, walled-off walled-off separation between the world o the viewer and the movie world, an inside-Jeff inside-Jeff world and an outside-tooutside-to-bebe- viewed world world..

 

󰀴󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

We saw aspects o that assumption in his relation to his work and to Lisa and certainly certain ly to any romantic romantic entanglement. But the assumption has also been bee n re vealed to be a distortion distortion o o virtually every scene he watch watches, es, and in the terms terms we introduced to at the beginning, this is a result o the simplicity and laziness o his mode o narration, how he attends to what he sees. He can be said to have an impoverished notion o cinematic orm, like a reader who reads “only or plot.” Hitchcock was always so careul in his films to include visual details that repay multiple viewings30 that he is clearly demanding something rom his audiences, audiences , a mode o attending he must eel (on the evidence evidenc e o Rear Window)) that he is not getting, that the ormal devices alone, all o which Window quickly become Hitchcock stereotypes, do not or most viewers (at least until the French discovered him) inspire any depth o interpretive involvement, raise any question about the point o the stories he tells. Te cinematic object is just treated as there to be viewed, an occasion or the viewer’s experience, o significance only or that.31 And o course, i we start star t off assuming that that is what commercial films are exclusively or, objects made or consuming subjects, designed to cause experiences that will entertain in various ways, will cause who cares what sort o experiences so long as they encourage consumption, then, given that Hitchcock was certainly deeply interested in the financial success o his films, and so actively encouraged audiences to think o his films as mere scary entertainment, it might appear that the assumption is justified. But this film itsel suggests otherwise; other wise; it highlights an implicit demand on the part o Hitchcock’s films to be “let in” to the viewer’s world, so that “what we see” and “what it means” can be worked at beyond working at how the plot events fit together, and beyond the sel-involved sel- involved meanings the events seen had or Jeff and audiences like him. And just as in Vertigo Vertigo,, where Hitchcock links the creation o antasy characters by Elster and Scottie with the creation o and antasies by the Hollywood “dream actory” in order show the limitations dangers o such an attitude to others as well as to to cinema, the dynamic o spectatorship and involvement plays out at both levels, cinematic and social, so cial, in i n the film film’’s conclusion. At the film’s conclusion we are shown that the temperature is twenty degrees lower now, now, perhaps a sign that there will be a less everish e verishly ly projective attitude by Jeff toward others as well as to what he sees across the way in the new seven-week seven-week period he will be b e laid up with his second broken leg, suffered when Torvald pushes him out the window. Or at least that this would be possible. Te composer’s song has been finished, and we are reminded that or some artists, the only consideration is the one he expresses: “I hope it’s gonna be a hit.” Tat is not  “what  “what it means” to Miss Lonelyhearts, as she tells him, “I can’t tell you what this music has meant to me.” (Te contrast drawn

 

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between commercial success and another kind o success continues to be made.) Torwald’s apartment is being repainted. Te older couple has a new dog. Miss orso orso’’s boyriend, boy riend, Stanley Stanley,, comes home and, afer a long time ti me away rom his gorgeous gorgeous girlriend, is only interested interested in what she has in her rerigerator. In line with that little Jeff-like Jeff-like joke, the very last dialogue we hear is rom the newlyweds, whose initial romantic flame had been shown to cool to a boring, routine duty, at at least or the husband. Te wie wi e says, “I you had told me you had lost your job, we would have never gotten married.” Much o the Jeff world o boring domesticity and utility seems still available i the mode o attending remains the same. And then we are shown there is little hope o anything really different. Again, as at the beginning, we see Jeff asleep, this time smiling, but now with two broken legs, even more immobile, emphasizing his continued position as mere non-involved non- involved spectator. As we hear the composer’s recording ironically intone its last phrase, “Lisa,” we see her in  jeans, pretending pretending to be reading a book called Beyond the High Himalayas, Himalayas, as i ready to travel the world with Jeff. But when she notices Jeff is asleep, she pulls out a Harper’s Bazaar  and   and smiles. Nothing has changed much, except or the viewers who notice that Hitchcock wants to show us that nothing has changed, that it should have, that that lack o change misses a potential both or the couple and or Hitchcock’s audience—except audience—except or those who see a dierent way to connect what they see se e and what it means.32 Notes   1. An earlier version o this chapter appeared in my Filmed Tought: Cinema as Reflective Form (Chicago: Form  (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2019), 23–48. 23–48.   2. I don’t don’t mean that the director necessarily necess arily has a determi determinate nate “message” “message” or “theme” explicitly in mind, and always constructs everything to making such a point, or that the film must have such a message. (Louis B. Mayer was right: i you want a message, call Western Union.) Te “sense” embodied in the narrative, and so the orm’s determinacy, can be intuitively at work; e.g., simply in seeing that such and such a narrational move would “make sense” in the context o the overall film or that it wouldn’t; that such and such an action on the part o a character should be experienced as troubling; t roubling; that that a kind o sel-blindness sel- blindness should be portrayed as destructive, not merely naive, and so orth. Te idea that a work must be ormally sel-conscious sel-conscious about itsel, bear a conception o itsel, is worth a separate study in itsel. For more on the issue, issue , see my Afer my Afer the Beautiul: Hege Hegell and and the the Philosophy Philosophy o Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: Modernism (Chicago: University University o Chicago Press, 2013). 201 3).   3. Tis has been suggested by by several commentators. commentators. See especially Jean Jean Douchet, “Hitch “Hitch et son public,” Cahiers du Cinéma  Cinéma  19–20, 19–20, no. 113 (1960–61): (1960–61): 7–15; 7–15; John Fawell, “Rear Window”: Te Well- Made  Made Film Film   (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), chs. 8 and 9; John Belton, “Te Space o Rear Window,” Window,” in Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films, Films,

 

󰀴󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

ed. W. Raubicheck and W. Strebnick (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson, “Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Window: Reflexivity and the Critique o Voyeurism,” in A in A Hitchcock Hitchcock Reader , ed. M. Deutelbaum and L. Poague (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986).   4. For the most part, such a cinematic cine matic narrator is, in George Wilson’s Wilson’s phrase, “minimal,” “minimal,” effaced; certainly not usually present in the film, as i a character. And nothing about the biographical details o the actual makers o the film are needed to iner the inten intentions tions o the narrator.. Te intentions are what can be seen narrator se en in the film. See Seeing Fictions in Films: Te Epistemology o Movies (Oxord: Movies (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 2011), 129.   5. Tis all o course mirrors what we see and and largely largely what we we also do when watching a film; we are always implicitly asking what it means that one sequence ollows another, and we orm our hypotheses the same way as Jeff, usually with more tentativeness. Te film itsel is, as usual with Hitchcock, quite cinematic in this sense; 35 percent o it is without dialogue, as noted by S. Scharff, Te Art o Looking in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”  (New  (New York: York: Limelight Limel ight Editions, 1997), 2, 179. It is ofen as i we were watching silent films, and one long scene is even a pantomime. See James Narmore, Acting Narmore,  Acting in the Cinema Cinema (Berkeley:  (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1988), 241. Scharff’s book has a useul shot-byshot- by-shot shot summary o the film’s 796 shots, and is a valuable resource or its subject: Hitchcock’s “symmetries and subsymmetries, contrapuntal arrangements, trigger releases, slow disclosures, amiliar images and those ominous transitions by way o ades; each scene is woven out rom these elements, and their presence is detectable in different combinations— combinations—they they are the poetics o his cinema” (180).   6. Tis must have been his conederate/ conederate/lover lover,, and it takes Lisa, not the detective and not Jeff, to surmise that the woman could have been anyone. (Mrs. Torwald is an invalid and rarely seen.) Te conederate likely got into the building when both Jeff and the super were sleeping.   7. Tis is my my suggestion about why one should be cautious. All Doyle says is, “Tat’s “Tat’s a secret secret,, private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot o things th ings in private they couldn’ cou ldn’tt possibly explain e xplain in public. publ ic.””   8. See again Wilson Wilson on this point in Seeing Fictions in Films, Films, and my discussion in a re view article o Wilson’ Wilson’s book, “Le Grand Imagier  o  o George Wilson,” European Journal o Philosophy , 21, no. 2 (June 2013), 334–41. 334–41.   9. Te scenes are are also separated separated in the film by a black screen, not not dissolves, dissolves, again suggesting the separation o acts in a theater, with the curtains closing.  10. 10. Tere is an illuminating discussion by Belton in “Te Space o Rear Window” Window” o the way Hitchcock makes use o the techniques o both “showing” (as in theater) and “narrating” or “telling” (as in the novel), or mimetic versus diegetic narration, and especially how he mixes the two in his use o the spatial arrangement o the outside apartments and in the inside world o Jeff ’s. See also Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: Te First FortyFour Films, Films, trans. S. Hochman (New York: Unger, 1992), where they call the film “a reflexive, critical work in the Kantian sense,” and state that the “theory o spectacle” implied in the work requires a “theory o space” that implies a “moral idea” that “derives rom it” (124). (Teir sense s ense o the “moral idea” idea” at work is “Christia “Christian n dogma” dogma” [126]. See their t heir all-tooall- toopat summary o their whole app approach roach to Hitchcock [128]. Tat can be contrasted with the approach taken here.)

 

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49

 11. 11. Tere is, though, plenty o music coming rom the apartmen apartments, ts, and it has several se veral unctions at various points in the plot. See Se e Fawell, Rear Window, Window, 120–22. 120–22.  12. 12. Lisa suggests that it is their t heir song, and she is right: rig ht: he is having a lot o trouble “completin “completing” g” it. (She says o the th e music that t hat it’s it’s “as i it’s it’s written writte n expressly or  or us.” us.” It was.)  13. 13. Tis is certainly not the only time Hitchcock reminds the viewer that he or she may be complicit with the actions o a character the viewer may also be b e tempted to judge morally. morally. Te most humorous treatment o the theme the me is our invitation to laugh at Joe and Herb Herb in Shadow o a Doubt  or  or their ascination with gruesome murder plots; this in a film that we have paid to see about a serial killer.  14. 14. Te 360-degree 360-degree pan is repeated as well.  15. 15. For an especially especial ly good treatment tre atment o Jeff ’s obsession obsessi on with “the negative” see George Ge orge oles’ oles’ss fine piece, “Rear “Rear Window as Window as Critical Allegory,” in A in A House House Made o Light: Light: Essays on the Art Art o Film (Detroit: Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), especially this remark: No space or reflection is created in which the mesmerizing labor o the negative reveals its potential or inecting the knowledge and claims o social justice or truthseeking that are its putative higher ends. In other words, Jefferies’s (or anyone’s) capacity to envision the ideal, to act credibly in the name o a truth better than the radically imperect “givens” o the present[,] can be subtly deormed by a consistent reliance on a terminology obsessed with negation and hidden tyranny. tyranny. (169) Te photography photography issue appears to have something to do with the argument between Jeff and Lisa about the uture. Jeff wants to photograph spectacles, events that require no deep interrogation o or involvement by the photographer. She wants him to become a ashion and portrait photographer, a job where, presumably, much more psychological investment in understanding the subject is required. Tat that dialectic between mere spectatorship and involvement will be crucial in the film is an early indication o Jeff’s skepticism that there is much more to know in any such depths than “the negative,” and it is not worth the bother. On the other hand, the ashion photograph is an indication that he can can do  do and has done what Lisa is asking.  116. 6. When she is in his lap and they are kissing at the 45:27 mark in the film, things do seem to be getting romantic, romantic, but she actually has to plead with him to pay attention attention to her, has to say that she wants all o his atten attention, tion, and when he says, smiling, that he has a problem, which seems to be a reerence to an erection, everything changes when he explains his problem: “Why would a man leave his apartment . . . etc.” etc.” Lisa is crestallen. crest allen.  17. 17. Fawell, Fawell, Rear Window, Window, 6.  18. 18. Douchet, “Hitch et son s on Public,” Public,” 8.  19. 19. Tere are a number o deliberate echoes o Rear Window in Window in Vertigo Vertigo,, starting with the act that the same actor plays the marriage-resistant marriage-resistant male. Both men begin the film injured and immobile to some degree (by a back “corset” and a leg cast), both voice satisaction with their bachelor lie, and Hitchcock even echoes in the opening o Vertigo Vertigo at  at the end o Rear Window: Window: the aloo bachelor played by Stewart dangling rom a ledge. See my Te Philosophical Hitchcock: “V “Vertigo” ertigo” and the Anxieties o Unknowingness Unknowingness (Chicago:  (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2017) on Scottie’s resistance.  20. 20. Te “reluctant, skeptical male” and the modern marriage theme is certainly not limited l imited to these three t hree films. Tere is the wie’s poignant speech about her marriage in Shadow o a Doubt  (1943)  (1943) (“You sort o orget you’re you” in a marriage); Cary Grant’s suspicions and

 

󰀵󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

 21. 21.

 22. 22.

 23. 23.  24. 24.

 25. 25.

 26. 26.  27. 27.

 28. 28.

skepticism about Ingrid Bergman’s character in Notorious Notorious,, and, in a class completely by itsel, the strange brutality o the marriage in Marn in Marnie ie (1964).  (1964). It is true, as oles oles notes, that t hat the cinema is limited limite d to what can be made visible, visibl e, but what is made visible can also “show us” what might be invisible, although that requires work on our part. Tis is the issue o cinematic irony. See my “Cinematic Irony: Te Strange Case o Nicholas Ray’s Joh Ray’s Johnny nny Guitar  Guitar ,” ,” in nonsite nonsite 13  13 (September 2014), and “Love and Class in Douglas Dougl as Sirk’s Sirk’s All Tat Hea Heaven ven Allows Allows,,” Critical Inquiry  45,  45, no. 4 (2019): 935–66. 935–66. Tis is in keeping with w ith Hitchcock’s Hitchcock’s own obvious enormous enormou s aith in music, I suppose suppos e one would have to call it, in both its powerul role in narrative and its closeness to what he strove or, “pure “pure cinema,” cinema,” visual images image s packed with content, with w ith as little dialogue di alogue as possible. po ssible. Narmore, Acting Narmore,  Acting in in  the Cinema, Cinema, 374. Claude Chabrol, “Serious Tings, Tings,”” in Cahiers du Cinéma: Te 1950s, New Realism, Hollywood, New Wave Wave,, ed. J. Hiller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University University Press, 1985), 139. Te sculptress also sits outside and even speaks to Torwald, but only to criticize him or the way he is gardening. We We also see her sleeping with a newspaper over her ace. At the end o the film, she is asleep again. Tis o course brings the project o Stanley Cavell to mind, especially especial ly “Te Avoidance o Love: A Reading o King Lear ,” ,” in  Must We Mean What We Say: A Book o Essays Essays   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 267–356 267–356 and his treatment throughout his work o the problem o skepticism as a orm o resistance. But this passage rom Te World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology o Film (Cambridge, Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) seems written with Rear Window in Window in mind: “Our condition has become one in which our natural natur al mode o perception perc eption is to view, eeling unseen. unse en. We We do not so much look at the world as look out at  it,  it, rom behind the sel” sel ” (102). No doubt this is Hitchcock’s Hitchcock’s comment on the viewer’ viewe r’ss expectations expect ations too. Torwald puts on a ridiculous white wh ite hat as he leaves that immediately makes him look ar less threatening, much more ordinary, than in Jeff’s obvious antasy. Tis prepares us or the pathos created when he appears soon in Jeff ’s apartment. oles, in “Rear “ Rear Window as Window as Critical Allegory,” has argued that this image o sel-protective sel- protective blinding is meant to suggest “the drastic limits o the camera’s power to image truth” (179). I have been suggesting throughout that the limit at stake or Hitchcock arises rom modes o attending more than the limits o cinema, but the two positions are not incompatible.

 29. 29. Is it a coincidence that he chose or the actor who plays Torwald an overweight Raymond Burr, or that Burr, thirty-seven thirty-seven at the time, was made up to seem older, perhaps about Hitchcock’ss age at the time, Hitchcock’ t ime, fify-five? fify- five?  30. 30. For some evidence, see D. A. Miller, Hidden Hitchcock  Hitchcock  (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2016), especially his chapter on Strangers on a rain (“Hidden rain (“Hidden Pictures”), and my account o the difference multiple viewings o Vertigo Vertigo makes  makes in Te Philosophical Hitchcock. Hitchcock.  31. 31. Tis touches on a very complica complicated ted problematic prominent prominent in reflection reflect ion on modern art rom the time o Diderot until the advent o minimalism, postmodernism, the rejection o all appeal to authorial intention, and beyond. It is the problematic that Michael Fried has called “theatricality,” and it touches on all sorts o ethical and political issues as well as aesthetic ones. For an account o how, see my “Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry  31,  31, no. 3 (2005), 575–98, 575–98, and ch. 3 in Afer in Afer the Beautiul .

 

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 32. 32. Robin Wood Wood argues argu es that overall overal l the film is “therapeutic” or both b oth Jeff and or the viewer, v iewer, but it is hard to see how, since in his concluding paragraph Wood emphasizes quite rightly the deliberate, almost mocking superficiality o the “loose ends tied up” up” summaries o the  various plots, that the “semisemi-live live puppets enclosed in little boxes” are still subject to the “rustrations and desperations” that “can drive them to murder and suicide” and that “we are lef with the eeling that the sweetness-andsweetness-and-light light merely covers up that chaos world that underlies the superficial order.” See his chapter on Rear Window in Window in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited  (New  (New York: York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 1 989), 107. 10 7.

 

2  Adaptations, Refr  Adaptations, Refractions, actions, and Obstructions The Prophecies o André Bazin Timothy Corrigan

Tis essay is a rather odd look lo ok at a particular shape o adaptation today as what I’ll call a “reractive “reract ive environment,” a look that may seem slightly less peculiar pe culiar i we keep in mind that I’m poaching my undamental terms and ideas and what they suggest rom essays by André Bazin. Alongside my abiding respect or traditional pathways p athways into adaptation adaptation studies, my direction direct ion here has little to do with cinematic adaptation in most o the usual usu al senses. sense s. Instead I want to ollow Bazin’’s terms as dynamic Bazin dy namic metaphors or some ways o thinki t hinking ng about adaptation studies today tod ay and, as a somewhat more provocative move, o o raising some s ome questions about the advancement o adaptation studies into today’s environment as an evolutionary shif that might be best served by looking backward. Here is where I locate the intersection o adaptation and metacinema.1 Here is where the 2002 film  Ada  Adaptat ptation. ion.   becomes a clever allegory or metacinematic adaptation ad aptation studies and a reminder that th at there’ there’s no escaping our cultural environment and that even we textual scholars are capable o sur viving. Spike Jonze/Charlie Jonze/Charlie Kauman film identifies the obstructed danger o adaptationIasthis a psychological and textual narcissism blocked and by its commitment to singularity singularit y, the film ollows that danger along a Darwinian Dar winian path that moves rom a romantic and solipsistic individualism to its commercial transormation, rom passionless fidelity to passionate infidelity. Te twins Charlie and Donald Kauman become both an aesthetic and a biological image o adaptation, two figures whose struggle to define and differentiate themselves madly expands and redirects a tortured character study into a mystery about drugs and death, an action film with car crashes and maneating alligators, and ultimately about the triumph o lie as the triumph o commerce and industry. While infidelity permeates the plot involving Susan Orlean and her orchid thie thie  lover, lover, in the end fidelity is ultimately u ltimately reconstituted in the film as a personal and textual commitment to aithul change, personal Timothy Corrigan, Adaptations, Corrigan, Adaptations, Refractions, and Obstructions  In:  In: Metacinema . Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0003 9780190095345.003.0003

 

󰀵󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

passion, and environmental e nvironmental transormation. I Donald’ D onald’s lesson less on is that “change “change is not a choice,” it is a learned lesson through which his paralytic insistence on authorial expression and textual integrity gives way to the demands o a social and industrial environment as the always-evolving always-evolving prism o both. Te horror o mere duplication embodied in twins becomes the triumph o continual environmental adaptation where to survive is to ollow your passions about “what you love” and, as Donald’s puts it, “not what loves you.” As the strangely hilarious climax o the film suggests, you can adapt to the world or be eaten by an alligator.

Trends since 2000: The Environment of Multiplication For me three recent trends stand out in adaptation practices o the last two decades. First, the prolieration o the adaptation o classical texts rom Shakespeare Shakespe are to Austen Austen and beyond has increased increase d to a noticeable degree across different venues and different cultures. Second, blockbuster adaptations, most notably o the Harry Potter  and  and Te Lord o the Rings series, Rings series, have figured as the most economically and commercially reliable reli able orce in the industry today tod ay,, generating sequel afer sequel, as serial duplications that advance canonized literary texts through a seemingly inexhaustible series o reincarnations. reincarnations. Tird and most distinctive, graphic graphi c novels, comic books, and video games have now become primary and popular sources or films and repositories themselves or adaptations that respond to the unique representational overlap between source and adaptation as they recycle both visual images and graphic mise en scènes. this that last trend theimpacted social and industrial o the lastRelated twentytoyears in turnhave havebeen ofen and providedchanges the environment or these textual textua l directions. Here I’m reerring to the multiplication and prolieration o technologies and contexts, across computer games through internet sites, through which adaptations now circulate as part o a so-called so-called convergence culture, a cultural environment that has inflected, inflecte d, i not defined, how films and other media are now received as a series o “remediations,” “transmutations,” and “intertextualities” that transpose and translate texts as replications, interactive exchanges, and more importantly as “adaptations” in the broadest and most resonant sense. Tis particularly contemporary movement toward prolieration and replication has, I’d argue, been part o the adaptation evolution at least since Bazin’s work in the 1950s. Since the 1940s, in act, modern narrative cinema

 

Adaptations, Reractions, and Obstructions 55

has provided numerous examples o where the activity and thematic o adaptation have been about remediation as survival. Witnessed in Laurence Olivier’s movement between the stage and the cinematic scene at the celebrated transitional moment in Henry V  (1944),  (1944), later in Godard’s crashing o cultures and texts in Contemp Contemptt (1961), (196 1), and more recently in R. W. W. Fassbinder’s Fassbinder’s 1980 epilogue in his Berlin Alexanderplatz  (1980)  (1980) that transorms the Doblin novel into a personal psychic landscape, in each adaptations have aggressively reshaped, distorted, condensed, extended, and repositioned literary texts as a sel-consciou sel-consciouss testings o the material and social limits o those texts and, concomitantly, o the films themselves. For me, these three films act as exempla, calling (exaggerated) attention to a definitive, i less obtrusive, evolution in modern adaptation and its theories: as the redistribution o texts through different technologies, as a recognition that betrayal may be as cinematically productive as fidelity fide lity,, and as the dissipation o authorial expressivity express ivity within the social and material abric o reception. For me, each o these films anticipates the charged state o adaptation today in which adaptation or both filmmakers and critics is ultimately about multiplication, not as repetition or duplication but as a productive reraction that is ultimately an act o criticism, critici sm, an act o criticism in which critics o adaptation have an obvious and important role to play p lay.. A contemporary environment o redundancy and duplication can thus not only be seen as subverting the traditional tradit ional status o adaptation adaptation as a singular dialogue between two primary texts but also, more importantly I think, be seen as bringing into high relie adaptation as an act o critical intervention interv ention in their historical and cultural environment. Rather than some sort o crisis, this state o adaptation might be seen se en as a salutary salutar y call to re-examine questions questi ons o value through the lens o adaptation, to ask in new ways what matters in this cultural field o multiplying adaptation. why. Tismovements becomes noinlonger a theoretical questi question on about source texts orAnd transtextual adaptation. It becomes a question o how adaptation practices, texts, and studies answer or provoke new and old questions about the material world in which we live. It is a question o how the adaptations that today suffuse a cultural environment and o how the adaptation studies that identiy them can and should assume the stance o critical interventionist within that environment. Let’s recall that amous scene in Clueless Clueless where  where that surer o postmodern images, Cher, correctly counters an academic debate about Shakespeare’s Hamlet  by   by assuring her graduate student opponent that while the rival may think she knows her Hamlet , Cher knows her Mel Gibson. Adaptation studies are more important than ever and are more difficult and challenging than ever in our contemporary environment or the very same

 

󰀵󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

reason: adaptation has more shapes, wider boundaries, and much vaguer definitions than ever beore and, in this environment, has become pervasively per vasively about reflecting meaning and values in a ar larger sense perhaps than ever beore.

Backward Evolution: and Aesthetic BiologyBazin, Refractive Cinema, It’s in this It’ th is contemporary context that t hat I wish to draw d raw on what I tongue in cheek che ek reer to as Bazin’s prophetic observations and specifically his notion that adaptation is a “reractive” activity that redirects, multiplies, and disperses dierent texts and perspectives. Writing in the 1950s, Bazin introduces this notion o reraction as a model or a kind o adaptation when he describes Robert Bresson Bresson’’s adaptation o Diary o a Coun Country try Priest  (1951)  (1951) as a “dialectic between cinema and literature” that includes “all that the novel has to offer plus . . . its reraction into the cinema.” He insists that there “is no question here o translation. Still less is it a question o ree inspiration with the intention o building a duplicate. It is a question o building a secondary s econdary work with the novel as oundation. . . . It is a new aesthetic aestheti c creation, the novel so to speak sp eak multiplied by the cinema. cinema.”” Adaptation requires, Bazin says s ays in another essay essay,, “a scientific knowledge” associated with the “field o optics” in which the complexity o an adaptation can be seen as compensation “or the distortions, the aberrations, the diffractions” o the lens. With Resnais’s brilliant 1948 Van Gogh as Gogh as a primary example, adaptation as reraction becomes, in short, a symbiotic multiplication o orms, putting into play a productive interaction o different kinds o what Bazin calls aesthetic biologies. Tis last phrase obliquely suggests o adaptation the evolutionary pressure press ure the thatphysical dog s it. and dogs Morematerial importterms importantly antly,, Bazin’ s sense se nse oand adaptation as reraction anticipates, I believe, a contemporary climate in which hierarchies and precedents precedents lose their privileges as texts as they create a prismatic en vironmentt o intersections, overlappings,  vironmen overlappings, and misdirections. As Bazin notes in another essay, adaptations “do not derive rom the cinema as an art orm but as a sociological sociologi cal and industrial industri al act.” act.”2 Te environmental nature o this reractive climate is spelled out more boldly by Bazin in his essay on adaptation as digest. Te majority o adaptations, he says, “are condensed condense d versions, versi ons, summaries, summari es, film fi lm ‘digests, ‘digests,’’ ” and adaptations as reraction then become not so much about “the actual condensing or simplification s implification o works” as about “the way they t hey are consumed, consume d,” the 3 ease o “physical access” creating “an atmospheric culture.”  Bazin’s example

 

Adaptations, Reractions, and Obstructions 57

o this atmospheric culture and the evolving prolieration o cultural texts and practices within it is radio, whose environment o consumption is a dim oreshadowing o our contemporary technological environment, notably lacking the interactivity o the internet and other delivery systems today. Te emphasis on the consumption o a film adaptation within this environment e nvironment is, however, most critical here, as it relocates the expressive singularity that has always underpinned traditional adaptation in the material environment o its reception. Well beore it became both obvious and ashionable, this environment brought seriously into question the traditional cornerstones o adaptation: “Te erocious eroc ious deense o literary literar y works,” Bazin argues, is to a certain extent, aesthetically justiied; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic conception o the “author” and o the “work,” a conception that was ar rom being ethically rigorous in the seventeenth century and that started to become legally deined only at the end o the eighteenth. . . . [We observe] the birth o the new aesthetic Middle Ages, whose reign is to be ound in the accession o the masses to power (or at least their participation in it) and in the emergence o an artistic orm to complement that accession: the cinema. . . . All things considered, it is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign o adaptation adapt ation in which the notion o the unity o the work o art, i not the notion o the author himsel, will be destroyed.

Sounding a bit like Walter Benjamin here, he argues: “Te aesthetic energy is all there, but it is distributed—or, distributed—or, perhaps better, dissipated—differently dissipated—differently according to the demands o the camera lens”—or lens”—or,, I would add, the t he many other cultural and material lenses through which whi ch adaptations now pass.4 In extending and re-adapting re-adapting Bazin’s term “reractive” and emphasizing a practice deflection or dispersal, differentiating films rom the commonocharacterization o films asI am (sel(sel-) ) “reflexive” orthese “reflective” cinema, according to which works typically turn back on themselves or a literary precedent to comment on their own making. “Reractive” suggests a kind o “unmaking” or disturbance o an equilibrium o the work o art or the film. 5  Like the beam o light sent s ent through a reractive cube, reractive cinema breaks breaks up and disperses the th e art or object it engages, splinters or deflects it in ways that leave the original origina l work scattered and redirecte redirectedd through a world outside. Tis reractive cube o social, s ocial, media, and material challenges provide, provide, I believe, the productive obstructions obstruc tions o contemporary contemporary adaptation. Bazin’’s remarks ask us Bazin u s not to think only about the aesthetics aest hetics o adaptation— the genius behind it, artistic strategies, or its emotional and imaginative communications—but communications— but instead to emphasize value value as  as a undamental part o

 

󰀵󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

adaptation studies. He suggests that adaptation is an additive process, and reractive cinema makes adaptation an exponentially additive process that demands, especially in today’s climate, the additions o critical value.6 As in the films o Olivier, Godard, and Fassbinder, reractive adaptations in our prismatic environment tend, in a variety o ways, to draw attention to where the material and social environment act as productive obstructions obstructions,, a term I’m using in a large sense. Obstructions here test the limits o different kinds o textualitiess and the strategies or understanding textualitie understandi ng o them—rom the technological to the political and aesthetic to the historical subject ormations, ormations, textual, social, and material obstructions clariy that what counts and what doesn’t is a crucial mission or how criticism reacts to and adapts adapts those practices. In one sense, we textual scholars need today to sometimes be sociologists and scientists, discovering the flashpoints and crashpoints that adaptations reveal in the world. o o adapt Bazin’s wonderul wonderu l analogy analog y or the adaptation o theater the ater on film: without a central c entral historical histori cal and critical cr itical chandelier chande lier today, we’ we’d do well to move through media culture with historical and cultural flashlights that choose to illuminate illumi nate our evolutionary uture through a past where adaptation studies had little direction and ewer models. What matters then and now is why adaptation studies are important in a undamental und amental and broad sense.

Surviving Obstruc Obstructions tions In her Teory o Adaptation, Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon has sharply updated Bazin within what she calls ca lls a “continuum “continuum model” that “positi “positions ons adaptations speciically as (re-) (re-) interpretations and (re-) (re-) creations.” At the opposite end o this continuum rom fidelity, adaptation now appears as various var ious orms o “expan“expansion.” expanding her continuum filmical likecommentary Play It Again Sam (1972, At d ir.this dir. Woody Woody Alle n) site Allen) thaton “offers “offers an overt anda critical crit commentar y onSam  an-  other prior film (in this case, cas e, Casablanca Casablanca [1942]  [1942])) finds a place pl ace here,” here,” but so do, Hutcheon Hutc heon continues, “academic criticis criticism m and reviews revi ews o a work.”7 Tis ar end is where the contemporary culture o adaptation seems to be settling, I believe, and I’d extend Hutcheon’s suggestions even urther to include the continual flow o adaptive commentaries and recreations as DVD supplements and other reinventions and interventions as one or more texts, palimpsests, pali mpsests, or social commen commentaries— taries—including including the work we do as critical scholars adapting texts and films to the world and journals we live in. Meanwhile this reractive consciousness and movement find its way into the practice o specific films, not just recognizable adaptations but even less literary literar y films, as what I will call a reractive cinema in an effort to distinguish it rom the usual characterization

 

Adaptations, Reractions, and Obstructions 59

o certain sel-conscious sel-conscious films as reflexive cinema. Sometimes these films do not look or act like adaptations in a conventional sense, yet this is, in large part, because becaus e they work to dramatize the ault lines o adaptation adaptation less as a textual practice than as a social practice, opening itsel up to the obstructions o a material world and its multilayered cultures. Adaptations are about sur viving the technological technological,, social, political, and econom economic ic obstructions, and one o the key opportunities in adaptations studies studie s today, today, I’d argue, is about ab out identiying what the encounter with those obstructions tells us our environment and world. My model or this project might be Lars von rier’s Te Five Obstructions  Obstructions  (2003), a film about a reractive dialogue between von rier and filmmaker Jørgen Leth. A tongue-intongue-in-cheek cheek inversion o cinéma- vérité, the film describes descr ibes an encounter in which von rier rier proposes propose s that Leth adapt his avantgarde classic Te Perect Human— Human—a 1967 film that eatures the minimalist movements and abstracted living patterns o a “perect human” and perect text—adapting text— adapting it to five precisely prec isely defined requirements re quirements or “obstruct obstructions. ions.” Von Von rier quite literally “tests” Leth’s abilities by asking him to remake his original film according to specific experiential conditions proposed by von rier as five “obstructions”: (1) in Cuba with no take longer than twelve rames, (2) in “the most miserable mis erable place in the t he world,” or Leth the th e red-light red-light district o Bombay, (3) as either a return to Bombay to remake his ailed first effort or a film without rules, rules , (4) as an animated film, and (5) as a text composed compos ed by von rier and read re ad by Leth. Te film interrogates Leth’s and by implication the film’s representational system to adequately adapt to a world beyond its prescribed borders. Manuactured appropriately by a Dogme 95 director with a flair or announcing theoretical rules, each o the obstructions or systemic rules or “laws” tests and exposes, “goads” andor “examines” Leth’s Vonwhen rier,itor instance, rejects the second se cond film not ollowing hisaesthetic. instructions shows a crowd o Indian onlookers, and then insists Leth remake it with “complete reedom” by returning to Bombay. Leth, however, wants and needs those rules, and the film becomes punctuated by the director wandering, conused, or dumbounded, caught in his own long takes. With each ailure, von rier demands that Lethe Le the needs to make a film that t hat “leaves a mark on you.” you.” As a series o adaptations that ollow a reractive trail o obstructions, the film becomes at once a game game and a trial: a game in which film, especially the “perect film,” will inevitably lose to its adaptive world and not survive. I von rier’s project is to adapt “a little gem that we’re now going to ruin,” that “plan is to proceed rom the perect to the human.” In this series o adaptations there can be no textual success since the human always always exceeds the aesthetic.

 

󰀶󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

As one commentator put it, Te Five Obstructions is Obstructions is “a hall o mirrors, shot through with ambiguities” that aims “to open open the cinema cine ma to the outside, to the flesh-andfleshand-blood blood richness o human lie,” and so becomes a “work o thinking as problematizing.”8 Or in von rier’s words, the film seeks “to see without looking, to deocus!”9 I suppose what I’m suggesting here is to think o adaptation studies as a critically deocused deocus ed activity. A critical rerain in both the original film and von rier’s game o adaptation is “I experienced something today that I hope I understand in a ew days,” and the relentless urging o that understanding to think through the aesthetics o adaptation and the experience o adaptation is all that remains when one is orced to see onesel finally as Leth does as an “abject” human being, constantly “obstructe “obstructed” d” and excluded rom some essential truth, truth , where the essence ess ence o knowledge knowled ge may be only, only, as the film fil m’s conclusion indicates, indic ates, “how the perect per ect human alls. a lls.” I the commentator c ommentator o Leth’ Leth’s original origi nal perect per ect human concludes wondering, “What is the perect p erect human thinking? th inking?”” and von rier’ rier’ss film opens with the query “What was I thinking?” the unspoken question that lingers at the end o von rier’ rier’ss film and points p oints or me toward adaptation studies today might be “How now do we rethink the imperect artist through the resistant medium that is our world?”

Conclusion Although we are still some decades decade s away, away, Bazin provides us with this thi s proleptic suggestion, slyly sneaking in a uturistic reerence reerence to the film film Adap  Adaptati tation on:: the “critic o the year 2050,” he says, “would find not a novel out o which a play and a film had been ‘made,’ but rather a single work reflected reflec ted through three thre e art orms, an artistic with three sides, all equal thefigure, eyes owhich the critic. Te ‘work’ would pyramid then be an ideal point at the top ointhis is itsel an ideal construct. constr uct. Te chronological precedence precede nce o one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence o one twin over the t he other is a genealogic ge nealogical al one.”10 Tat three-sided three-sided pyramid has expanded appreciably appreciably in the fify years since Bazin imagined the next fify years o our uture; and now, with still orty years to go, it may be better conceived as a many-sided many-sided prismatic cube through which films and other texts adapt and reract rerac t continuously. continuously. What we look at and the paths o adaptation we critically critica lly engage are now more varied and less predictable. pred ictable. We We need to explore the cube, as it tells tel ls us about the environment in which we live and the best ways to adapt to it. We We need to encourage the t he reractive rerac tive spread o adaptation studies where evolutionary progress can also be a return to positions that

 

Adaptations, Reractions, and Obstructions 61

we may have archived too quickly—rom quickly—rom Vachel Lindsay and Béla Balázs to Bazin and Bellour and well beyond. For one way to see and value adaptations is as part o a project o survival in which we need to find what historically matters, not just textually but as the intellectual and social material o our lived experience. exp erience. Remember Donald’ D onald’ss words: that it’s it’s “what you love, not what loves you” that counts; remember, as von rier rier suggests, su ggests, seek s eek out adaptations whose obstructi obst ructions ons “leave a mark on you” as a mark on our culture. Tat may may be, I think, thin k, the best way or all o us to avoid that alligator. alligator. Notes   1. For an anticipation o this metacinematic oundation in Kauman’s films, see David LaRocca’s “Inclusive Unscientific Postscript: Late Remarks on Kierkegaard and Kauman,” in Te Philosophy o Charlie Kauman, Kauman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: University o Kentucky Kent ucky Press, 2011), 269– 269–94. 94.   2. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? , trans. Hugh Gray, Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: Uni University versity o Caliornia Press, 1967), 143, 42, 69, 142, 69.   3. André Bazin, “Adaptation, “Adaptation, or the Cinemas Digest,” Digest,” in Film and Literature, Literature, 2nd ed., ed. imothy Corrigan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 57–58. 57–58.   4. Baz Bazin, in, “Adaptat Adaptation, ion,”” 60– 60–62. 62.   5. Bazin, What Is Cinema? , 68.   6. Bazin, What Is Cinema? , 70, 75.   7. Linda Hutcheon, Hutcheon, A  A Teory Teory o Adapt Adaptation ation (New  (New York: Routledge, 2006), 172, 171.   8. Hector Rodriguez, Rodrigue z, “Constraint, Cruelty, Cruelty, and Conversation, Conversation,”” in Dekalog 01: On the Five Obstructions,, ed. Mette Hjort (London: Wallflower Obstructions Wallflower Press, 2008), 53, 40, 55.   9. Hjort, Dekalog 01, 01, xvii.  10. 10. Baz Bazin, in, “Adaptat “Adaptation, ion,”” 62.

 

3  A Met Metacinema acinematic tic Spectrum Techniq echnique ue through th rough Text Text to Context C ontext Garrett Stewart 

Mirror Mirror Mirror . . . It is surely among the handul o most amous shots in American film history. Charles Foster Kane (in the person o Orson Welles—or Welles— or vice versa, in the mirror o screen impersonation), deserted by his wie and destroying her bedroom in a blind ury, then trudges robotically past the byzantine arched moldings o a vast hall o mirrors in his mansion as the camera tracks his rightward dead march. 1 But wait—back wait—back that up, not in reverse action but in the retracing o its flamboyant optic recess in those Xanadu mirrors. Rather than lumbering numbly past the camera in a steady rightward motion, Kane immediately disappears rame lef behind behi nd a pillar, pillar, the camera holding in place until his mirror image emerges rom that stone occlusion into the dropback o its optic recess. It is only then that his actual  body  body (though it’s one ontological notch harder, now, now, to think thi nk o it that way) ollows behind, and up on, the reflected double into a nearer close-up close-up on his stricken person as sole (but already compromised) anchor o this infinite regress. Te camera’s clean-edged clean-edged rectangular bordering—stabilized, bordering—stabilized, afer its initial lateral glide, only at this turning point in the record o external motion—is motion—is thus passively assertedoagainst (though in figurative association with) the lightinset Moorish raming the other   reflective  reflective suraces receding inside its own sensitive mechanical rectangle. Tis gripping ocular parable o subtracted spatial presence—and presence—and its renewal as embodied image—has image—has turned the abyssal abyssa l hall o mirrors not just into a generalized generalize d figure or cinema as an apparatus o secondary imaging imag ing but into a metanarrative mirror mi rror o the film fi lm’’s abiding irony as fictional fic tional biopic. Tere Te re are indeed more parallels, narrative narr ative rather than optic, than those confined to these imprisoning parallel p arallel mirrors. mir rors. For the film’ film’s antihero Kane—seldom Kane—seldom more than a mere image, even to himsel—has himsel—has earlier been mirror mirrored ed in dancing celebracelebration (phantom-like, (phantom-like, as mobile vanishing point) in the reflective window glass o his newspaper office between the flanking heads o his two chie minions in debate over his motives and methods. Moreover, this redoubling (even while Garrett Stewart, A Stewart, A Metacinematic Spectrum  In:  In: Metacinema . Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0004 9780190095345.003.0004

 

󰀶󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

thinning) o image is a moti o derivative rectangular depiction depicti on that has been with the film rom the beginning be ginning o its real plot. It is sprung rom the jump-cut jump-cut launch o the narrative’s epistemological quest by our drastically sudden side  view o the screen on which the working draf o Kane Kane’’s documentary obit (or “News on the March”) is blaringly projected in the production screening room—in room— in all its superficial thinness, material and journalistic. And beyond a first sense o the iconic mogul in repeated ironic reduction to a skin-deep skin- deep optic mirage, this film-beorefilm-beore-thethe-film film is one to which all subsequent montage answers as meta metacinema— cinema—in in deep-ocus deep-ocus tropes about  its  its own contrastive powers o penetration. So it is that this canted angle on the newsreel screen delimits, by synecdoche, the whole outward field o the movie’s beveled narrative mirroring. Tis is the rame o reflex reerence through which we see not just the eponymous American Americ an tycoon but, at our own spectatorial sp ectatorial off- angle, the expose e xposedd celebrity etish o a mass attention that the imaged fictional Kane shares, or instance, with movie stars (like Welles) in their larger-thanlarger-than-lie lie aura, optic duplication, and limitless visual distribution. In all these camera-angle camera- angle trick reramings (in reverse order across Kane Kane’’s plot: p lot: mirror mir ror,, window wi ndow,, screen)— s creen)—and and to anticipate the template proposed and developed in this chapter—medial chapter— medial technique directs technique  directs each episode o narrative text  toward   toward its reflex context  not   not  just as machinated machinated specular object object but as stargazing stargazing American American mythography mythography in visual realization. In the tilt o story toward the inerences o its mass mediation, technological on one side, ideological ideologic al on the other, other, the real issue begins. beg ins. When mapped rom fiction onto supposed biographical biogr aphical orensics in the documentary documentar y picture show within Citizen Kane, Kane, what can such a mere set o edited pictures really show? And show orth about their own process in doing so? How, within the larger o Kane Kane’ ’s narrative fiction, do we understand underst the actual rame trajectory o optical replication, including the and placeemblematically o both reflective glass and earlier sideways screen within the broader pattern o iconic newspaper shots and election elect ion posters? Te vectors vec tors o irony are quite pointedly ours to track: rom inaugural inset screen acutely  viewed—debunking   viewed—debunking the metaphoric windowed vista on history it might be thought to simulate—through simulate—through the enorced reminder o superimposed reflection rather than transparency in that triangulated office shot midway through the plot. From there, with that optical pivot point o public man versus mere image, visual narrative drives on down, right beore be ore the end, to the nadir o Kane’s splintered authenticity authentic ity in that climactic shot o his mansion’s mirror setting—and setting—and figural setup. Deadending there is not just the stark replication o a actitious public profile in multiple delivery. Although the mirror recession is angled just barely to miss

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 65 A Metacinema

the cinematographer’s exposed position in our imaginary place, what we see “captured” nonetheless—at nonetheless—at a calculated ca lculated angle o viewer implicature—is the th e raw ascination o our own spectatorship at risk o being thrown back in our ace: in reflective recognition. For what we’re teased with by the chance o seeing it in the just-deflected just-deflected angle o incidence—in incidence—in that later hall o mirrors that is is Xanadu—  Xanadu—is is not our image, o course, but nonetheless, in near-miss, near-miss, a glancing reminder o any naive hope we may have harbored about even this surrounding narrative film, let alone the skin-deep skin-deep “News on the March,” working to single out the “real Kane” rom his mass-media mass-media image. erminolog erminologyy is o no decisive help in all al l this— except when placed under unde r investigation in its own right. Metacinema? Even or starters, the tired quip takes us nowhere: I never met a cinema I didn’t like. For one thing, its categorical ambiguity gets immediately in the way: cinema as place versus visual event, movie palace versus motion picture, screen site versus screened sights. Tough preventing the jejune wordplay, metafilmic metafilmic will  will no longer do, either, in marking certain moments o sel-reflexivity sel-reflexivity in motion pictures, since the pictures move via pixels now rather than filmic rames, algorithmic code rather than celluloid. More flamboyantly all the time, movies are postfilmic. Even in the consideration o mainstream cinema, then, a sense o the meta meta   needs to be more specific (medium-specific) (medium- specific) about material causes as well as narrative gestures or their extratextual reverberations. Any one “film” (as such projections are still atavistically called), or say each movie, is o course unique—even unique— even as it may choose to avow, or generalize about, its own status as image system, narrative ormat, or cultural artiact. arti act. Adducing just those three aspects in adjacency and overlap—image overlap—image flow, storyline, sociopolitical or commercial context—this context—this chapter ocuses on how cinematic motion, with its machine-gunning machine-gunning o images, pictures its dramatic narrative show only by show a typical elisionIt o exactly the separate that nonetheless sometimes through. is in this sense that the rames anomalous maniestations—these maniestations— these apparitions o the apparatus—seem apparatus—seem to have exceeded what they narratively constitute: to have become meta meta.. But even then the unique nodes—rather than just modes— modes—o o such acknowledgment or generalization are too various to categorize, and sometimes too intertwined to isolate. Increasingly in Hollywood blockbuster cinema, or instance, the palpable orce o “production values” tends to collapse a narrative’s admitted status as socially embedded commercial product into its material generation as digital composite. And quite apart rom brandished CGI (computer-generated (computer- generated images) when their the ir maniest financial outlay, in its ull extravagance, is implicitly taken up in the layout o screen action, cinema has ofen tipped its technical hand in more traditional ways as well. Familiar orms o dissolve, dis solve, match

 

󰀶󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

cut, slow motion, rear projection, what have you, are to be numbered, especially when exaggerated, among the most pointed local triggers o cinema’s reflexive recognitions recognitions in the movies-aboutmovies-about-movies movies vein—when vein—when that category is understood more broadly than just to include backlot narrative storylines. And to speak o such a tipped hand is, o course, to imply the kind o narrative reflex that, in the momen momentary tary override (or revealed underwriting) o plot, gestures back to the structuring technical image even while beyond it to supgestures plemental plemen tal cinematic inerences or the sociopolitical s ociopolitical setting—or setting—or reception— o the story thus visualized. A question is thus lef open. What “about” the movies—in movies—in such metacinematic recognition—is recognition—is being noted or negotiated? About which conditions o their existence as motion pictures do the techniques o visual generation, the arcs o plot, or some third term o socioeconomic socioe conomic context tend to deliver a reflexive inerence? Or ask again what, in the first o the threeold distinctions distinct ions floated earlier, a given film can (to repeat the triad) triad ) work to manmaniest about “its own status as image system, narrative ormat, or cultural artiact”? Put otherwise—though otherwise—though still stil l with an emphasis on that orienting division divis ion o labor—to labor—to what possibilities does a given screen effect, text, or cultural (as well as corporate) product tend to revert, turn back upon in reflex? Te issue can’t be determined in advance, but the embedded structural mirror is likely to be angled in one o those three suggested directions: toward pronounced  visuals, narrative narrative pressures, pressures, or or industrial disseminatio dissemination n without without a monetized monetized sociall arena. Optical process, story, socia story, manuacture and distribution: these, thes e, then, anchor the artiact in its theatrical display. Materiality, narrative depiction, exhibitionary circuit: such a cross section can, o course, be variously sliced and tested. raversing the image system, the storyline generated by it, and its public interace, one may thereore cut the distinctions, i seldom cleanly, this way: screen effect   context  as technique, narrative text   as audio  as audiovisually visually storyline, circulation circulatio n  as   as social  as space o reception, even asarticulated that third public dimension may open out by allusion to the broader surround sur round o its own spectatorial spect atorial moment in relation to mass culture or political politica l climate at large. In my our books on narrative cinema in particular, rather than on the broader aesthetics o time-based time-based imagery, ew episodes o concentrated discussion have ever been more than a page or two away rom some measure o metacinematic uptake or speculation o this sort: regarding first, in Between Film and Screen, Screen, the mechanical evolution o celluloid film rom its chemical basis in photography, as evinced by the recursive returns o that still medium within the screen image; next, in Framed ime, ime, concerning the transormation o screen practice in a postfilmic cinema’s new orientation, among other cognitive adjustments, both in i n rame shifs and in narrative narr ative topics, toward the

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 67 A Metacinema

much-debated “time-image” much-debated “time-image” in the work o Gilles Deleuze; then, in Closed Circuits,, ocusing on the relation o fictional visualization to surveillance— Circuits rame to rame-up, rame-up, montage to espionage, passive spectatorship to bodies spied/eyedspied/ eyed-upon upon inside the narrative world—including world—including all the inset secondary screens (increasingly the banks o remote digital monitors) arrayed to thematize just this correlation; and then, in i n Cinemachines Cinemachines,, involving an explicitly methodologica meth odologicall reassessment, reassess ment, under the 2name “apparatus “apparatus reading,” reading,” o the approach I had come to call cal l “narratography. “narratography.”  In this mode o applied narratology, the apparatus itsel becomes legible leg ible in tracking the microplots mi croplots articulated by disclosed gestures o cinematographic device—what device—what Stanley Cavell calls “assertions in technique” tech nique”3—and not least in their reflexive connection to the wider parameters o screen imaging. Afer that book’s renewed emphasis on the machinations o the celluloid, then digital, digit al, apparatus in sustaining and inflecting the cinematic mirage, the present effort effort is to widen urther the pur view in categorizing categorizing the basic threeold threeold range o o metacinematic metacinematic eatures eatures that this shifing shif ing image system tends to oreground. oreground.

Metamedial: Meta medial: A Sliding Scale Again the partitioned but interpenetrating template in this spectrum analysis: technique; its textual maniestation at the narrative level; then its contextual reverberation in industrial production or programmed reception (contemporaneous allusions included, where text finds its dominant terms o interpretation). raditional narrative cinema can be understood as medial  in  in all three dimensions—and dimensions—and directions: whether pointed inward to the technology o its material support, orward along the narrative arc o its storytelling conveyance (genre mediating (industrial distribution, on the included), one hand,or oroutward political to topicality, oncontext the other). Increasingly, as noted, this third register may also appear to be pointing back again—inward— again—inward—at at the same time, via the manuactured audiovisual composite, to scrutinized material conditions: as when a movie is ound adverting to—and to—and advertising—its advertising—its own implicit CGI budget in relation to a broader spectrum spectr um o computer computer technology in social soc ial deployment. (Much more more subsequently.) So it is worth stressing, up ront, not just the slippage rom technique to text to context, but the comparable drif, exerting a reverse pressure upon narrative textuality, when some tacit contextual surround is understood first o all via technical reflex: edging the inerence o the narrative toward a zone o auto-imaging auto-imaging that connects in that way with the round and about  o  o

 

󰀶󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

metacinema as structuring given. So what sort o thing does narrati narrative ve have to project, i not explicitly to say, about the medium by which it is maniested, either technically or industrially? Once plastic and electric in the era o celluloid mechanics, since then electronic and pixel-driven— pixel-driven—and and ofen showcased as such in either phase—this phase—this technical aspect o the motion picture medium has perhaps never been more baldly asserted than in recent ranchise cinema. Canonical ormalism speaks o “baring the device,” exposing the works o a given work. Tat sense o device isn’t limited to technique. All three dimensions o response proposed here have their way o devising their own bearings in response, orienting us as we go. In the exponential computerization o the Hollywood action picture, certainly, an overt subteruge o CGI in the deploym deployment ent o VFX (visual special effects) can be readily exposed, then reincorporated, by some denaturalized twist o narrative sequence that may also incorporate a knowing sidelong nod at genre slotting or cultural intertext. All may reflect back on cinematic operations in a ormative i not ormalist manner manner.. Even i one were to orce the proposed dovetailed triad involved in metacinematic registration (technical\textual/contextual) (technical\textual/contextual) into the more amiliar ormalist dichotomy o orm versus content, style versus substance, all subtlety o gradation would not be lost. When movies are ound reflecting on either their manuacture as image system or their maniold narrative complex, the either/or either/or doesn’t doesn’t stay put. In undoing und oing this dichotomy dichotomy,, or instance, there is always the “content o the orm”—where densities dens ities o style spill s pill over to narrative increments in their the ir own right; or, in turn, the orm o the content—where content—where broader structuring unctions o genre and social coding come into play. So we’re back with the triadic schema afer all: call it, under a speciying adjustment, technique\text/intertext, technique\text/intertext, with that third term locating the very process o contextual inerence— narrative reflexesand o montage the textualtechne system pointing eitheinerence—and either r out towardand it orwith backthe upon the material techne   o plot’s own composition. And while we we’r ’ree at it, in this th is consideration conside ration o a ormative versus a ormalist logic, note how one may rethink another structuralist touchstone in cinema studies that olds any bared device back into narrative as an adjunct o operational process. In David Bordwell’s influential definition o screen narration narration,, as opposed to the extractable narratives it transmits, “Narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet   and style [sequential structure plus technique] interact in the process o cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction o the abu the  abula la [the  [the able, the story].”4 Under the adjusted lens o the threeold reraction rerac tion I’m I’m proposing, style can momentarily divert structure str ucture away rom its ongoing ongoing story unction unc tion and back to the reflexive exhibition o screen s creen narration’s own technical technic al provisions. So, S o, too, may story at

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 69 A Metacinema

any moment reveal, by metanarrative aside, its shaping conditions in certain contextual rather than technical “cues” that also operate in “channeling” urther inerences—cinemat inerences—cinematic ic and social so cial alike—beyond alike—beyond the ormatting o plot. Subtlety o gradation, then, even though not intrinsically orgone in taking on board the binaries o ormalist ormali st analysis, remains a matter o overlap rather than delimitation, where one level o sel-reflection sel-reflection transgresses upon and energizes another. Te metacinematic leverage entailed may well give new purchase on theme or its cultural memes. Tat leverage, that “moment” in its sense rom physics, is precisely the reflex exertion at stake in metacinematic detection. But “precisely” is too easy there—except there—except on a case-bycase-by-case case basis. How does one really think the “meta” in sel-reflexivity? sel-reflexivity? Te dictionary might seem at first too democratic on this score to be definitive, but in act its spread o derivation helps subdivide subdiv ide a whole range o effects. It can, though, certainly appear rather amorphous at the first scanning o options.  Met  Metaa: “a prefix appearing in loanwords lo anwords rom Greek, with the t he meanings me anings ‘afer afer,,’ ‘along with,’ with,’ ‘be‘ beyond,’’ ‘among,’ ‘behi yond, ‘b ehind. nd.’ ” When translate tr anslatedd to the field (or ( or plane) plan e) o the t he scree screen n’s material origins and effects, that array o prepositions samples the various pre-positioning prepositioning (or premising) aspects o the cinematic condition (however defined) in regard to the multiaceted screen object. Tis is the “meta” in its ull shifing spread o maniestation. Afer  maniestation.  Afer  but   but along with: with: the so-called so-called internal supplement, where some cinematic sel-acknowledgment sel-acknowledgment completes the narrative picture. Beyond , among , behind : exceeding while underlying and interleaved, involving a certain broad sense o underlay underl ay or support (electronic substrate, generic ormat, financial backing, cultural moment, etc.) made immanent on screen. Recall here the rhetorical device o metalepsis—as metalepsis—as when authors suddenly appear as speaking characters in their own stories, intervening to interrogate to redirect action. First cause level, is thereby maniest in a secondaryanother effect, atorthe narrative narra tivethe rather than stylistic in any such mode o author interpolation—or interpolation—or in its more common kindred effects on screen. Famously in film, or inamously, a character’s breaching the “ourth wall” by apostrophizing the audience is one way to expose the public-address public-address system o cinema at large—as large—as a set o directed narrative messages, couched ordinarily in dramatic enunciations, and rendered commercially available in the transmit o projection. But there are, o course, other disclosures o cause in effect, technical techni cal rather than overtly rhetorical, that pivot cinema back on itsel in reflexive twists within the narrative flux—other, flux—other, many, innumerable, and not easy to categorize. But the effort alone can clariying. So ar, this chapter has been organized to correlate related terminological distinctions across several sliding triadic scales, all o them parallel to

 

󰀷󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

each other in their linkages. With each triad separately, the adjacency—or adjacency— or tangency—o tangency— o emphasis locates a latent transposition rom one zone o notice to another: call it an internal “othering” o cognitive strata. Such an othering o effect rom within its own maniestation maniest ation is what may well give rise to a sense o these metacinematic nodes as allegorical: not just figuring some cinematic given but emblematizing it in the orm o a circumscribed minor parable. Te dictionary’s received wisdom once more: “allēgoria “allēgoria,, rom allos allos ‘other’  ‘other’ + -agoria agoria ‘speaki  ‘speaking. ng.’ ” And since, etymologica etymologically lly again, agai n, the th e “behind, “b ehind,”” “beneath, “b eneath,”” and “afer” “afer” o the t he meta meta,, as well as the “among” and “between,” “between,” are all versions o the other within—operating within—operating as flashpoints o resident alienation on the dematerialized demat erialized underside o unolding process—it process—it is clear why metacinema ofen comes across as a mode o auto-allegory. auto-allegory. Te variable bandwidths o registration distinguishing the technique\ text/context text/ context nexus are not hierarchical or even topological; they are logical, categorical, and thus permeable—open permeable—open across each e ach other’s other’s delineations delineati ons (not borders) to a perception analogical or metaphoric. One may best think o the recurrent schemata here in terms o Venn diagrams. Such is the unique interpretive value o the metacinematic when conceived according to this overlapping triadic model, where the turns o its reflexes may coincide with—or with—or incur—each incur—each other at certain points o perceptual riction. Accordingly, when the reflexive axis o a given dimension o response reverts, or instance, rom the immediacy o generated image or event—optical event— optical technique or narrative text—to text—to its abstracted parameters as such, its “turn” may also at the same time be outward to context (to commercial, social, or political conditions as well as to genre norms) along a linked scale o calibration and implication. implication. Linked—and Linked—and interpenetrating. It is in this sense that one stratum o apprehension “tropes” the other in the etymological sense, diverts diverts  it, or, another etymological route o figurative understanding, is   into carried over by , trans erred    (meta- erein  erein) ) to it. An obtruded technical gesture ofen, that is, becomes not just a nudge to plot, or a roughening o its route, but a metaphor or some organizing dynamic or building theme in the storyline. At the same time, a narrative paradox may trope some political contradiction in the contextual (become intertextual) field. Such, then, are the metatropes at play across continuous dimensions o response, trans-erried trans-erried rom one field o recognition to another in an auto-allegorical auto-allegorical circuit o inerence. Tink (by seeing) Kane Kane   again. As ar as the eye can see se e via incremental distortion, there are are still ar ewer visible mirror duplicates o Kane on screen than are required in nearduplicate duplica te photograms, photograms, or photo cells, on the strip (technique) to track these ew seconds o irony (text) in their epitomizing o a narrativ narrativee moti—sel as

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 71 A Metacinema

image—whose capitalist valence (context) is the very world o media circuimage—whose lation in which Kane and Welles Welles together togeth er participate. parti cipate.

Testing: 1941, 1979, 2019 o clariy urther, in its metamedial scope, the scalar triad technique\text/ context in screen narration— narration—or or,, i preerred, to certiy certi y an alternative ormulation as substrat substrate\structure/ e\structure/intertext— intertext—let let me briefly subdivide such terrain in examples rom three motion pictures approximately our decades apart across the technological eras o celluloid, video, and CGI. Tese initial i nitial exhibits are, to say the least, technically invested screen narratives—ranging narratives—ranging rom the prewar Citizen Kane again Kane again (1941, (194 1, dir. Orson Welles) Welles) through t hrough the topical Vietnam epic  Apocalypse  Apoc alypse No Now w (1979, dir. Francis Ford Ford Coppola) to the postfilmic postfi lmic dystopian spectacle o Blade Runner 2049 (2018, 2049 (2018, dir. Denis Villeneuve). Te substrate in each case, the materiality o audiovisual record, sets off a kind o figurative chain reaction in their variable cinematic allegories. In Kane Kane,, we can back up now to the beginning rather than the end o the “News on the March” March” film, the latter marked with that diminishing dimi nishing sidesi de-angled angled screen view just as the projector was gratingly turned off. In contrast, the first moving ootage o the newspaper newspape r magnate is introduced to viewers (to us and to those, within the plot, privy to this rough cut o the documentary metafilm made just afer his death) only once a dossier o headline photographs and a childhood daguerreotype have been filed past, along with the loot o his wealth, in a series s eries o rapid cross-ades cross-ades and wipes that figure—in figure—in a deliberately clichéd rhetoric o transience—the transience—the blatant ephemera o his ortune. Te photojournalist ironies o these two montage sequences are, in their tumult, also mixed quick cutstechniques between static images o his discrepant aggregations. All told,with three distinct o cinematographic punctuation, serial and fixative, operate in a correlated intersection o media metaphors. All is image image,, display, including the simulated paparazzi shots o the title figure under the contradictory voice-over voice-over “aloo, seldom visited, never photographed,” its shaky ootage filmed through the orbidding X o protective wire encing. Internally reramed in this way, (1) the figurative reflexivities o technique are then immediately equivocated by the metatext o filmic access to the pri vate confines confines o wealth wealth and power power.. Tis happens when when the flat grainy grainy images images o invaded privacy are put in contrast with the deep-ocus deep-ocus treatment o the “News on the March” production team in the screening room, to which we cut abruptly across that satiric view o the documentary’s skin-deep skin-deep scrim. At an emerging metanarrative level, then, with the reflexive ironies o technique

 

󰀷󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

behind it, this is where (2) the first-draf first-draf storyline o the film-withinfilm-within-thethe-film film is postmortemized along with its human subject, the commer commercial cial journalistic purpose being to deepen its narrative charge—and charge—and by this motive precipitating the five-part five-part rame structure o separate investigative interviews that organize the rest o the main narrative, with no return to any screen-withinscreen-withinthe-screen. thescreen. Te resultin resultingg puzzle-piece puzzle-piece ensemble o subsidiary points o view vie w (3) tropes in turn, and not just through the intertext o William Randolph Hearst’s similar career, the broader social context o ame and overexposure in pursuit o the American dream, where the superficial trappings o public figures yield themselves up, metafilmically or otherwise, to no stable explanatory gaze. Afer Kane, Kurtz, where (quite apart rom the act that Welles wished to play both Kurtz and his double Marlow in a film version o Conrad’s Heart o Darkness) Darkness) we can trace out a metamedial domino effect that ends up maniested in Coppola’s version o the same classic novel. Crucially, an early reflexive flashpoint in Apoc in Apocalypse alypse No Now w is ignited rom  rom a clutch o mere images divorced rom recorded voice. Even beore this, however, in the technical salience o the opening scene, (1) an unorthodox blitz o figurative jump cuts submits Captain Willard (the new Marlow) to the racturing o his screen image afer he bloodies himsel in smashing its (and his) mirror equivalent in a Saigon hotel room. From there we move to an equally thematized technology in that crucial—because crucial—because technologically primal—dichotomy primal—dichotomy o image and sound, where Willard, recruited or a new murderous assignment, is made privy to separate visual visua l and audial audial inormation regarding a proudly uniormed Colonel Kurtz. On the one hand, he is offered dossier photographs (actually 8 × 10 1 0 publicity shots o Marlon Brando’s previous roles as disturbed disturbe d or brutal military officers); on the other, he is unnerved by reel-toreel-to-reel reel tape (spinning in close-up) closeup) omainstream the colonel’s intercepted mad (this,produchistorically backdated, beore digital recording in ravings Hollywood tion, and thus invoking the spools o film that will finally use voice with image i mage in the plot’s climactic phase). Tese definitive medial ingredients in picture and speech, divided against themselves, thus pass rom technical conditions conditions to the guiding terms o (2) the ensuing narrative text, where it is only with the vanishing point o closure in sight hours later, afer the ongoing fissure between Willard’s Willard’s sometimes violent expedients expe dients on screen and his hi s own intermittent voice-over voice-over in the reading re ading o Kurtz’s Kurtz’s dossier dossie r, that convergence will have been achieved. Only when plot’s trajectory has brought Willard into Kurtz’s compound—and compound— and quite literally ace to ace with the soliloquies o his rogue derangement, through sutured chiaroscuro close-ups close-ups and their biurcating shadows—will shadows— will the divided audio/ visual  visual matrix o that launching scene have

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 73 A Metacinema

been dialectically resolved. And only then will both dialogue and voiceover have been suspended suspe nded together in the intercut execution exec ution montage to ollow. ollow. All o this, o course, in its Vietnam Vietnam update o the imperial violence in the Arican colonial setting o Joseph Conrad’s source novel, operates as revisionary narrative text within (3) its contemporary context o genocidal conflict and the ravages o American power. Moreover, this outward turn is punctuated reflexively by a pointed intertextual trope. Tis is a amous fleeting moment o documentary metalepsis (rather than, as in Kane Kane,, affording an entire raming motive). Whether Whet her we tag it as contextual or intertextual, the moment transpires when Coppola himsel, cast as a video documentarian, appears on a beachhead instructing his own cast not to look at the camera, but just to look like they’re fighting. As a dramaturgic more than a technical turn—a turn—a metamedial irony cinematographic, yes, but only because on camera as such, as a second-order second-order filming—the filming—the effect lodges within the plot a metamedial reminder o the t he Vietnam mayhem and its video vi deo spectacle spe ctacle as the “first V  V war. war.” Afer Kane and Kurtz, K, the replicant hero o the Blade Runner  sequel.  sequel. He negotiates a world o uturist audiovisual technology well beyond the screenencased pleasures o the cinematic, whether filmic or digital, being solaced s olaced in his humanoid emptiness only by a hologram housewie housewi e more penetrable than desire necessitates. His fleshly satisaction remains balked at the level o the audience’s own beore her sheer (both senses) scintillating image. (1) Te uneven shimmer and variable transparency o Joi’s digital maniestation in the inhabited space o the film’s 3D world, whether she is beamed rom a “home entertainment” projector or later streamed remotely, comments via contemporary media options on the post-millennial post- millennial telos o optical technology as well as AI. Her speaking image, her hologram, serving K his dinner, dinner, represents the phonorobotic kitchen helper as erotic surrogate. At the same time, the riveting autoauto-allegorical) specter her(2)CGI and break-up breakupmetamedial up is a reflex(or that, we allegorical) may say, tropes over o  into  into the hovering vexed cyborg narrative o K’s existential crisis, the hero clutching at the possibility o his lone humanity among a cadre o replicants—with replicants—with Joi only a more pointed reminder that you can’t tell by looking (on screen or off) what someone really is, or even whether, in an anthropocentric sense, they really are. Tis is a sustained dramatic irony centered, in terms o classic narrative epistemology, e pistemology, on tactical flashbacks to a human past that are discursively real or us (as a staple o narrative anachrony) whether they are the hero’s own or an implanted memory. At the metatextual level, this technique o flashback montage works to expose the inevitably constructed constructed storyline that makes up any supposed autonomous lieline in retrospect. But the narrative reflex is sociocultural socioc ultural as well as biographical and existential. Tis is to say that the plot-bound plot- bound ruse o alse

 

󰀷󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

memory as visual illusion in the text is at the same time (3) rendered urther metaphoric—in metaphoric— in contextual extrapolation to the exponential electronic inrastructure o our own social systems—or systems—or the proverbial crisis o authenticity in a wired culture o rampant simulacra, prosthetic virtualities, and vicarious affordances. o say nothing o VR’s reflex action in regard to the Hollywood audience’s ongoing inculcation into the ruses o postfilmic screen imaging— in ways that come to a dead d ead end in our final exhibit, exh ibit, to ollow. ollow. In summarizing the sliding scale o these three differently “medial” examples so ar, beore looking more closely at the latest extravagance o metamedial CGI, CGI , we may say that (1) the maniestation or emblem o the material medium—at medium—at whatever stage in its evolution rom photography through celluloid projection, then on past videotape to digital and laser streaming, and by however dramatic an eruption o technique—may technique—may at the same time become (2) a metaphoric reflex within the encompassing textual structure struc ture o the narrative medium as plot ormat. And it is there that (3) an extra contextual torque may urther evoke a specific cultural intertext or zone o association (the opacity o ame, the artifices o staging in photojournalism, the corruptions corrupti ons o power, financial or military, the ragility and lurking misnomer o electronic “presence”) “presence ”) in the media surround sur round o a given historical moment—as moment—as typically exaggerated exaggera ted in the scis ci-fi fi genre by its uturist projections—projections projections—projections ofen in the double reflexive sense: optical and historical. In the variant configurations o such a threeold breakdown as applied so ar, the stratum o marked technique, in its disclosed medial substrate, is exactly the ocus o my methodological argument or “apparatus reading”—as reading”—as distinct rom the kind o psychoanalytic apparatus theory, and its ideological critique, that once put a film like Hitchcock’s Vertigo Vertigo through  through its paces as a parable o the phallic gaze. Looking back briefly to that classic text, I would instead out a central moment that—to that—in in ayielding almost inevitably to apparatus call reading— reading—is is readily extrapolated metacinematic crux as well, the  visuals o its plot twist triggering a orce orceul, ul, almost flagrant, reflexive signal. Apparatus theory to one side, there is no question that Hitchcock’s narrative allegorizes the way in which the seductions o a plot artifice (the husband’s contrived narrative o the Carlotta haunting) can induce investments in a character (the hero hero’’s fixation on Madeleine) that exceed exce ed the reality principle— and that may urther produce a desire to make another emale body over into the image o the idealized mystery woman. Spurred by the aked conspiratorial backstory, the film’s unolding plot proceeds by tacitly reflecting on its own erotic etishism in ueling our ascination with the blonde emme blonde emme mortale— mortale —and precisely in metafilmic connection with Hollywood standards o coiffed and costumed glamor (including the insider Hollywood intertext

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 75 A Metacinema

about remolding Kim Novak hersel rom shopgirl to star). Yet the storyline as text repeatedly ties these narrat narrativeive-cumcum-industrial industrial inerences back to cinematographic ironies, pins plot to image, in aspects at least as technological as psychological. One turning-point turning-point example. At the crisis o identification between the hero’s libido on lie support and the supposedly sel-slain sel-slain object o his desire, when his surrealist nightmare retraces Madeleine’s all rom the mission bell tower onto the tiled roo below, the oneiric image recalls the several previous process shots (or rear projections), with their undisguised artificial backdrops, that have rendered equivocal—and equivocal—and figurative—the figurative—the nature o the hero’s own erotic “projections.” Now, as his own imagined body is about to splatter against the tiles, his slamming s lamming awake is figured by a sudden switching off o the rear projection behind his artificial ar tificial dream avatar (a kind o emblematic cardboard cutout). In the medial irony induced there, we revert in a single sing le split second rom narrative dreamscape at the textual level to the technical abyme o abyme  o the production site, where cinematic “special effects” are exposed at the machinated basis o the so-called so-called dream machine. Again Again the triadic spectrum becomes a vicious circle—as circle—as is the case even more unabashedly in my coming example rom the ar more “sophisticated” (and, in narrative context, infinitely less subtle) trick effects effec ts o Marvel Marvel Universe CGI.

Paratext as Metatext Few films are more amous or their main title sequence than is Vertigo Vertigo or  or the spiraling vortices o Saul Bass’s animated graphics, the film’s one-word one- word title emerging rom a giant eye, as does “Directed by Alred Hitchcock” at the end o therom dizzying (vertiginous) sequence— Suspense directing   the gaze within as usual. Insequence—the this way a the filmMaster about o disabling voyeurism opens, in its extranarrative paratext, with the look o looking per se. Such a common interace between cinematic technique techni que and main narrative narrative text, brokered by the technical inflections o copyright and credit sequences, has, long since Vertigo Vertigo,, entered a new millennial phase. Now this technical and thematic bridgework has been edged back into tampered with corporate logos as well, a tendency begun with the apocalyptic darkening and warping o the Warner Brothers studio s tudio image in digital distortion or 1999’ 1 999’ss Te Matrix  (dir.  (dir. Lana and Lilly Li lly Wachowski). Wachowski). In Vertigo Vertigo,, or all the credit sequence’s ront-loaded ront-loaded optical disorienta disorientation, tion, the Para/mountain Para/mountain remains intact, even as overlain by the VistaVision logo. In the latest iteration o this branding icon as punning “mount,” however,

 

󰀷󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

abstract geometric stars sweep into view rom the sky behind its gleaming peak, orbiting as a kind o halo in this upgraded industrial imprimatur. Such was the case, or instance, in the first our films in the ransormer  series,  series, with only tantalizing hints o alien cyber noise on the soundtrack accompanying the whizzing astral shapes. But by 2017, or ransormers: Te Last Knight , with its chivalric throwback twist, the same cookie-cutter cookie-cutter star-shaped star-shaped orms now hydroplane toward toward the mountain on a reflective reflect ive body o water extending ex tending out toward the theater audience audie nce beore creating creati ng the logo’s star-power star-power aureole. Ten suddenly, rom the distant zone o these astral graphics, a barrage o meteor-like meteorlike orms rocket toward us rom behind the mountain— easily mistaken or asteroid visitations or, o o course, attacking extraterrestrial extraterres trial weaponry weaponr y. But they are actually catapulted balls o fire vaulting not just the mountain but straight into a flashback on a medieval battlefield—as battlefield—as millennial prequel to the alien invasion master plot. Primitive aerial weaponry undergoes digital maniestation (o course) in order to snap us out o our high-tech high- tech expectations—only expectations— only momentarily (o course)—and course)—and then only at the plot level, doing nothing (o course) to impugn the credibility, just obtrude the ingenuity,, o those impinging CGI fireballs. nuity firebal ls. Again, imploding the threeold th reeold nexus o the metamedial spectrum, collapsing its sliding scale into a sel-confirming sel-confirming circuit, in this case (and others like it) a text , as i jumping its own narrative gun, has broken through—by through—by oregrounded technique technique— —into the raming corporate context  itsel  itsel as an extra advert or (and to) its own high-tech high-tech finesse.5 Looking back ba ck or a moment to the latest Blade Runner —and returning there all the way to its opening credits as well, we note how, how, more histrionically histrionical ly than ever, they manipulate manipul ate the production produc tion company logos that flash past—Warner Brothers, Alcon, Sony, and Columbia. Each seems to be invaded in anticipation by the diegesis—this diegesis—this through a digital glitching easily read as leaked in advance romevocation the instabilities instabilit ies odata a high-tech hightechand dystopia the plot to come,maniwith its repeated o optic fields their in ragile electronic estation. Here, as the industrial advertising logos seem themselves to advertise, is a plot so intense that it can’t be contained, its metatechnical blowback already elt on merely routine corporate approach. Tis amiliar trope o a narrativized paratext, so to say, together with its thematized technique— oregrounding the electronic apparatus at its inaugural apparition—is apparition—is in danger lately o becoming a distribution cliché: in our terms, the studio imprimatur already imprinted with the technical technica l traces o a text still stil l in promotional abeyance. Yet such slick involutions o corporate “investment” in the narrative’s own technological intensity find understandably little place, up ront, in the latest overblown and metamedial VFX spectacle. It would be too much, too soon, by

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 77 A Metacinema

way o CGI chicanery chicaner y. As it unolds, the film in question questi on marks a quantum leap in thematized technique even beyond Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, 2049, risking as such a kind o dead end or this mode o showcased computer graphics— even i not, o course, or the Marvel ranchise already proleptically rebooted by the film fil m’s final credits with an in-built in-built teaser. I reer to Spider-Man: Far rom Home (2019, Home  (2019, dir. Jon Watts), which settles in its precredit logo or the cycle’s routine kinetic montage o graphic rames rom the comic series, digitally shuffled but bearing no electronic wear and tear. Never in the amiliar studiobranding o this ranchise, however, has this quarantine o pulp source rom CGI plot been more apt, even tactical. We’ll soon see why. Te only logo irony this film can sensibly permit itsel seems based on Steven Spielberg’s amous match ade, in Raiders o the Lost Ark (1981), Ark (1981), between the Par Para/ a/mountain, mountain, still untampered with as in Hitchcock, and its imposing diegetic double in the exotic precincts o the launching scene. scene. In Spider-Man Spider-Man,, we ade even more quickly rom the Columbia torchbearer to a briefly glimpsed outsize statue o the Virgin Mary, driven rapidly past, at the site o Mexican devastation afer a recent and mysterious weather disaster. Any erosion o the emale Columbia icon by digital noise, or instance, would have compromised too soon another kind o optical aith—with aith— with which the film narrative is multiply caught up through its timely story o a manuactured global menace acilitated by electronic data subteruge. Reflecting the escalating CGI aesthetic o the Hollywood action film over the last two decades, here is a movie that comes down to the wire o this present media-reflexive media-reflexive commentary almost by being cornered on the ropes o its own technical expertise, slapped all but silly in the ricochet o the special-effects specialeffects ironies it unleashes. And it can best be comprehended in this ramework under one final rephrasing o the sliding scale o such reflexive unctioning—with unctioning— with technique\text/context technique\text/context translated on the spot to apparatus\plot/ ratus\plot/productio n, each oreverb—with these zones response as a urtherproduction, zone o contextual reverb— withointertextual intertext ualbeing links shot to thethrough— epidemic o mass manipulation in contemporary politics. Tis outer range o contextual reerence is secured only once a midpoint reveal has reset our terms o engagement with the film: namely, that in regard to (1) the VFX bravura on display so ar, we’ve been watching the medium’s digital apparatus generate, as in the normal operation operation o VFX, a cataclysmic series o trick effects to materialize (2) narrative threats that are in act, diegetically, just that: deceptive effects, tricks—or, tricks—or, in other words, (3) explicitly projected illusions o Hollywood-style Hollywoodstyle industrial technique, as well unded but unreal as the selstyled superhero who vanquishes (vanishes) them. Te overriding trick o the plot, then, can only be to banish the risk o tech disaffection by a metaphorics o damage control within a amiliar genre gen re pattern o unrest and restoration.

 

󰀷󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

Optical Allusion: Causes and F/X F/X One rule o action genres—western, genres—western, detective, and sci-fi sci-fi especially—is especially—is that they melodramatize broader cultural anxieties beore laying them to artificial rest through some variety o heroic intervention or sacrifice. Franchises, a kind o subgenre all their thei r own, work somewhat differently. differently. In this they resemble serial V. With the “tag scenes” amiliar rom the final credit rosters o the Marvel series, these loose ends—despite ends—despite intermittent narrative plateaus o resolution in a single film plot—keep plot—keep reueling the cycle rom within its own peripheral flexibility flexibility.. It is all the more likely, likely, then, that broader cultural cu ltural parameters o intended audience response—rebooted with each new wrinkle o geopolitical anxiety—will anxiety— will coincide with narrative and technological reflexivity in a ranchise devoted almost exclusively to digital “marvels” at the cutting edge o technological empowerment—or empowerment—or its revenge upon us. Certainly this is the case with this latest Spider-Man Spider-Man,, including its trumpeted critique o rump-era rump-era demagoguery linked directly to global technological deception (think Russian hacking) in a plot o nearious VFX technique. Te distinction this chapter began with, between cinema as mediatized spectacle (once filmic, now digital) and cinema as designated site o exhibition, has perhaps never been more reductively addressed than in this film’s plot about Hollywood-style Hollywoodstyle illusionism in its strategically remote deployment. Plot, did I say? Intertwined with a thin rom-com rom-com about a high school trip through European tourist sites—attended, sites—attended, among the usual typecast suspects, by our secret spiderboy, s piderboy, a sidekick or two, t wo, and a would-be girlriend— girl riend—is is the rail narrative thread o the story’s thriller premise. According to which: a maestro o technological illusions generates and projects the CGI mirage o monstrous urban (Venice, Prague, London) that only he can end comingcatastrophes in the process a global hero. Te unleashed Spider-Man, withoff, all behis teen powers on offer, is recruited to the villain’s assistance beore the ormer, our true hero, discovers the ruse. Reduced Reduc ed to the simplest logic o genre showdown, and to near pun on the prosthetic efficacy o the eponymous hero (his web--spinning miracles)—as web miracles)—as well as backed in turn by much repeatedly loaded loade d dialogue to this end—the end—the auto-allegory auto-allegory o trucage trucage (what  (what Christian Metz saw as the “special effect” that is cinema all told)6 is impossible to miss. Te panic ostered by high-tech high-tech “propaganda” (in this case the illusory images o elemental orces out to destroy de stroy the world as we know it)—a paranoia to which w hich a sel-styled selstyled ascistic superman and avenging scourge is the ake antidote—can antidote—can in the long run be bested rather than abetted, in its campaign o big-budget big-budget illusory disinormation, disi normation, only by the spidery spider y net o our web webmaster master hero.

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 79 A Metacinema

Anything we might call the apparatus disclosures o the metacinematic spectrum in all this are so sureited and manic, almost comic, in their Hollywood overtones that one eels compelled compelle d to work backward rom (3) the production end o the sliding scale we’ve been contemplating toward (2) the plot-transacted plottransacted structural sense o its own (1) generative electronics. Tough deliberately avoiding any logo contamination by a glitched d/effect— d/effect—precisely precisely the pixel break-up break-up that will be climactically incarnated in the plot—this plot— this latest Spider-Man enterprise Spider-Man  enterprise wallows in an almost uncontainable level o digital reflexivity. Computerized technique has swallowed all action. Tis is just where the overarching paranoia plot must kick in, displaced rom its own comicbook source, so that now the updated glancing barbs at earmongering and ake news never let le t up or long. long. When the wunderkind Spider-Man—ostering Spider-Man—ostering in his own right a alse cover story to keep one o his heroic interventions under wraps so as to protect his empowering anonymity—suggests anonymity—suggests that people should always believe what they see on the news, the audience’s mild sniggering is merely de rigueur. In the age o “post-truth,” “post-truth,” the plot’s whole premise, including a villain pretending to hail rom a supposed parallel uni verse within a wide array o “multidimensional “multidimensional worlds,” eels pitched at the idea o rump-era rump-era alternate realties—and realties—and not just when this ake superman is anointed as patron saint o terrestrial border deense in deense in coming to society’s collective rescue. Duping the news outlets with his announced arrival rom another version o Earth, where Elemental E lementalss have slain the populace, the con artist Mysterio is the embodiment o group-think group-think mystification. And what he promises, one simulated alien invasion afer another, is only a protective ballistic scrim, exposed expos ed eventually as a mere CGI interace, between the spectacle sp ectacle o encroaching horrors and its riveted but vulnerable public audience. With climate change unsaid but inescapably pressing in the allegory, the worldwide elemental disasters— disasters—explicitly explicitly and subdivided as those o heat)—all air (emissions), earth (quakes), water (floods), fire (exponential heat)— all “have a ace” in Mysterio’s artificial mobilization o their threats. All are incarnate as oversized demons. But here, as so ofen, is where sci-fi sci-fi dystopias can get caught up in inverted transpositions o the anxieties they are maniestly extrapolating rom. Paranoia is a double-edged double- edged sword. Te enormity o Mysterio’s trumped-up trumped-up threat is rendered with an enormous and vaguely humanoid orm, that is, not because rampant cataclysmic orces are the embodiment o human-induced human-induced meteorological disaster, but rather because in this case (phew!) they are all ake:  ake: staged flashpoints flashpoints in a climat climatee o ear itsel, stoked with advanced electronic enhancements by the wannabe Avenger. In a no doubt accidental acet—and acet—and allout—o allout—o a typically lightweight lightweight political parable, climate deniers may thus take some cold comort even rom within

 

󰀸󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

the denigration o their parodied hero. “I control the truth,” boasts Mysterio (aka Beck, who thinks he has the world at his beck and call). “It’s easy to ool people when they’re th ey’re already kidding themselves. themse lves.” Finally overmastered by the “web”-adept “web”adept Spider-Man once the latter wins back his billion-dollar billion-dollar experimental upgrade o Google Goo gle Glass, it is up to Mysterio to repeat repe at one more more time, with his dying words, his earlier confidence in mass gullibility. “People need to believe,” says this vicious genius o a computer-boosted computer-boosted confidence game, and “nowadays they’ll they’l l believe belie ve anything.” anything.” Especially their own eyes. What tucks all this limply scripted topicality back into the coils o cinematic ci nematic selsel -reerence in the t he cognitive cognit ive orce field o the postfilmic screen apparatus is that Mysterio is, in act, a maestro o what one o the teen heroes calls, calls , in knowing industry industr y lingo, “illusion tech.” tech.” So designated is the whole panoply p anoply o marauding demons and heroic resistance that gets staged—make staged—make that virtually screened—beore screened—beore gullible mass crowds in Mysterio’’s digital Mysterio digit al enactment enact ment o his own image i mage as savior. He accomplishes this sci-fi scifi eat by manipulating, rom a remote electronic hub, a collaboration o weaponized weapon ized drones (military(military-industria industriall anxiety du jour) and gargantuan laser holograms. Tese we see him testing out under laboratory conditions in the CGI rendering room—and room—and then implementing in real-world real-world capitals by the remote voice-activation voice-activation o such Hollywood Hollywoo d argot as “cue the lightning. li ghtning.”” Beyond narcissistic megalomania, his particular vendetta stems rom a estering resentment against his ousting by onetime boss Iron Man. Tis detail marks the film’s most obvious strategic dodge, at the plot level, in avoiding what would have been too explicit expl icit a corporate reflex i i  drawn rom the villain vi llain’’s actual backstory backstor y in the Marvel Marvel comic source. In his original paper incarnation, incarnati on, Mysterio’’s perverse Mysterio per verse illusionist i llusionist credentials cre dentials are more, so s o to say, say, medium-specific medium-specific in their visual deceits than the film would be likely to withstand without toppling intodouble-threat satire threat or black the original pages, Mysterio is an unlikely doubleas comedy. maverickInagent: having serial lost his Hollywood jobs as at once a top FX engineer and a valued stunt man (combining Christian Metz’s separate categories o visual and invisible tricks: the antastic illusions you do see, and the substitutions su bstitutions you don’t). don’t). In that original commix premise, premis e, Beck’s deceptive tech becomes the incarnate revenge o the system against its own benign commercial spectacles, turning them to a new kind o con viction and notoriety as global terror terrors. s. But the movie doesn’t doesn’t offer up such Hollywood employment practices to be sacrificed on the altar o plot, just its hallowed VFX technology to be implicitly borrowed rom—and, rom—and, o course, signally misused. In his filmed version as antihero, Mysterio’s CGI stunts, both physical and pyrotechnical, are nonetheless studio signatures: eats o motion capture, green screen, CGI infill, and the rest. Incautiously enough,

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 81 A Metacinema

in this version o the Marvel Universe, Universe, everything keeps reverting to a reflex o its own electronic marvelous. So it is that orm and content implode upon each other, with any clean delineations in the matter o social or political critique being the first victims o this collapse. Even the immediate narrative backstory (rather than comic-book comic-book genealogy) o the ranchise confirms such metacinematics—and metacinematics—and does so explicitly at the border between technological and corporate contrivance, CGI and the casting department. Explicitly rehearsed, rehearsed, early in this Spider-Man Spider-Man plot,  plot, is its position in the wake o Te Avengers: Infinity Wars (2017), Wars (2017), where superpower heroes suffer pixelated decimation along with hal o the human race. Tese dissipating ash-gray ash-gray digital variants o a dust-todust-to-dust dust paradigm in mortal disintegration remind us, o course, that the splintered, then obliterated, heroes have in act been constituted, in their flashiest exploits, by CGI simulation to begin with. Five years later in narrative time, though only one year in the ast turnaround o the lucrative ranchise, we learn o a remission in this galactic “Blip.” Te chronological mismatch is itsel, one suspects, part o the metanarrative inerence. Te act that many other victims o the Blip have been restored (afer this hal-decade hal-decade hiatus) to their ormer stations, their bodies unaged, and thus lagging behind their cohorts, is a kind o industry in- joke. It It doesn’t doesn’t take much much to see this as a reflection o such ranchise filmmaking at large, which can only keep rebooting itsel (the James Bond cycle being quintessential quintessential and exemplary) i it replaces plot agents agents every ew years with younger actors in comparable roles. But it isn’t just the age o the narrative agents, but that o the intended audience, that is figured in this film as well. What turns out to be the ultimate threat to Mysterio’s computerized disinormation campaign is part o the closely calibrated Hollywood metatext, around which the last phase o the plot wo riends o Spider-Man come to learn, along with him, that revolves. the humungous Elemental predatorshave are just digital simulations beamed by a “very “ver y advanced projector projec tor,,” some highhi gh-powered powered portable gadget (streamlined progeny o the lumbering lumberi ng apparatus o IMAX 3D). What it can generate are looming hallucinations that are finally discerned, under climactic duress, as “coming apart” by explicit pixel break-up— break-up—and and thus confirming, or all to see, their basis in mere optical trickery. Tat, plus more. For these three teen agents o potential debunking—in debunking—in a kind o tacit generational parable— serve to concentrate the audience demographic whose aggressive doubts (as opposed to merely suspended disbelie) would demolish the whole Marvel Universe, Uni verse, let alone the thrills, thri lls, however deceptive, o this one plot. I these kids don’t all or the spectacle, who will? Tey are in this regard, aptly enough, the intended victims o Mysterio’s final lethal retaliation: the renegade target

 

󰀸󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

audience as target. Again, in the variable interchange o this chapter’s threeold template, the corporate logic, even as it enolds (3) the political intertext o ake territorial invasions invasions and their sels el-appointed appointed superman o nativist resistance, circles back via (1) the CGI screen’s own technical apparatus when “read”—that “read”— that is, when figured or troped in the plot, or say allegorized— allegorize d—as as (2) a narrative reflex, at the textual level, o aggressive aggress ive computer manipulation (not  just on on Facebook Facebook or in the voting voting booth, but as the very specter  o  o mass paranoia).7 At the plot level, o course, redemption is pure pu re Hollywood celebration in the ormulaic happy ending—yet, ending—yet, in this extreme case, won rom within the surprise vilificatio vi lification n o its own industrial selling point in compelling special effects. In my earliest writing on cinema, I had occasion more than once, in identiying the reflexive escalation o visual technology in the sci-fi sci-fi genre, to observe that “movies about the uture tend to be about the uture o movies.” I one were tempted to update this or the transition transiti on rom the hologram in 1956’ 1 956’ss Forbidden Planet  to  to Mysterio’s digital demons, in positing that “VFX cinema is about the uture o illusions,” the question would remain, in the ace o the present dead end, what uture? In the normal run o CGI spectacle, we in the audience, like a credulous public at large, will believe anything too, as long as it’s expensively enough generated on screen—and screen—and not least, in the closed circuit o the an appreciation sublimated here, when it parades itsel as such. In the digital poetics o the Marvel ranchise in general, cinema loses nothing in brand loyalty by adverting to the artifice o its own signature effects. But the risk exposed by an unavoidable “apparatus reading” o the pixel substrate in this hypertrophic case has been, i almost too obvious to mention, all the more serious or that. Where can sci-fi sci-fi screen invention possibly go rom here— in bringing bringi ng VFX along a long in motivated motiv ated genre tow—when plot has become be come all apparatus? What persuasions remain once the tail has wagged the dog in this blatant way—or way— or the metatale been so egregiously flagged: exposing the rayed heels o narrative originality dogged by exclusively industrial resources in “illusion tech”? What story is lef to tell, what narrative challenges lef to ace, but those o industrial production and its sel-congratulatory sel-congratulatory sleights o hand? Tat’s one question such an exacerbated case o pop metacinema can’t avoid being met with. But to rescue the structural rom the judgmental, clear the mind’ss eye o Spider-Man mind’ Spider-Man by  by thinking back to Coppola, Copp ola, or to Kane Kane:: to the genuine orce o their optical flashpoints both o cinematography and o nearmiss viewer address by the camera. And here’s the main point to stress. Just as there was, is, no way to speciy in advance what exactly about literary fiction the classic metafiction is about—or about—or what in respect to narrative orm the

 

Metacinematic tic Spectrum 83 A Metacinema

sel-reerential narrative, even at its postmodern cynosure, sel-reerential c ynosure, tends to put under tacit study—so study—so too, in movies beore or since, with any hermeneutic attention to the localized “reflex action” o incorporated stylistic response. Te node o cued intake—as intake—as sel-conscious sel-conscious uptake—reflects uptake—reflects back on itsel in i n ways not just ad hoc but already incorporated by orm. Yet not disappeared into it. Such moments are the uniquely legible way film has o “picturing back” to us the paths o meaning unique to its own medium. Notes  1. 1. “Quoted” here in i n its ull “textual” complexity: complexit y: Citizen Kane  Kane  (1941, dir. Orson Welles), 01:51:04–24. 01:51:04– 24.  2. 2. Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis; Synthesis ; Framed ime: oward a Postfilmic Cinema; Cinema; Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance; Surveillance ; and Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method  (Chicago:  (Chicago: University University o Chicago Press, 1999, 2007, 2015, 2020), with a subsequent turn to motion picturing as a gallery aesthetic in Cinesthesia: Museum Cinema and the Curated Screen (Montreal: Screen (Montreal: caboose, 2020). Regarding the media-ocused media-ocused method o Cinemachines Cinemachines— —with its stress on the techno-historical techno-historical actors o the t he apparatus apparatus in the “reading” o its technique as text—I’m text— I’m not not advertising advert ising that study (any more than the th e pre vious commentaries commentaries o mine that led to and ed into it) as a necessary preliminary reading on the shif rom celluloid to postfilmic cinema reviewed in summation here; I’m merely borrowing the gist o its uller account to license a discussion propelled in this case by a more recent instance o medial disclosure turning up in the digital machinations o the Marvel ranchise.  3. 3. Stanley Cavell, “Assert Assertions ions in echnique echnique,,” ch. ch . 18 1 8 o Te World Viewed : Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 133–45. 133–45.  4. 4. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film  Film  (Madison: University o Wisconsin Press, 1985), 53.  5. 5. Tese metabrandings— metabrandings—these these above-andabove-and-beyonds beyonds o the logo—are logo—are variants o the small-scale small-scale corporate allegories detected by J. D. Connor in Te Studios afer the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood Holl ywood (1970– (1970–2010) 2010) (Stanord,  (Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 2015) and closely related to the exploration o studio (rather than authorial ) intentionality in Jerome Christensen,  America’’s Corporat  America Corporatee Art: Te Studio Author Authorship ship o Holl Hollywood ywood Motio Motionn Pictures Pictures   (Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 2011).  6. 6. Christian Metz, “rucage rucage and  and the Film,” trans. Françoise Meltzer, Critical Inquiry  3,   3, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 657–75, 657–75, his work revisited and marginally revised in my Cinemachines Cinemachines..  7. 7. In exploring such meta-or(ens)ic meta-or(ens)ic “beyonds” “beyonds” o the t he image system, one notes as well that the teen conviction dramatized in deault in this Marvel installment would extend to a courted willingness to “play along” in the ranchise’s interactive gamer tie-ins. tie-ins. It is in that context— along that corporate spectrum rom computerized screen action to digital interactivity— that the desire to inhabit the virtual, vir tual, versus the will to expose it, is the organizing tension o Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018). One (2018).

 

4 Recursive Reflections Types, Modes, and Forms o Cinematic Relexivity Daniel Yacavone

Relection on relexiveness, like the topic itsel, can be a labyrinthian experience or both writer wri ter and reader. —Don Fredericksen

Tere is considerable consensus concerning cinematic reflexivity in broad terms. Few, i any, critics and theorists are likely to dispute that Man that  Man with a  Movie Camera Camera,, Breathless Breathless,, and Mulh and  Mulholland olland Drive Drive are  are highly reflexive films; that the film within withi n the film and breaking the proverbial proverbia l “ourth wall” are con ventional  vention al reflexive devices; and and that there are substan substantial tial differences, differences, whether o nature nature  or degree degree,, between reflexive and non-reflexive non-reflexive films, styles, and their experiences. Beyond such general characterizations, however, one finds a marked diversity o views on the detailed workings o reflexivity as a orm o signification, communication, and artistic expression. Tese include its specific onand viewers; its historical historica andpolitical stylisticand evolution; its relation to cinematiceffects realism illusionism; and lthe p olitical social critical dimensions o reflexivity reflexiv ity.. Over a number o decades film theorists have addressed these and related issues through the creation o more or less detailed typologies o reflexivity rooted in various, ofen implicit, ideas and assumptions concerning it. As one would expect, together with reflecting shifing movem movements ents in the tectonics o film and media theory, these schemes have mirrored changes in reflexive practice in cinema and allied orms o moving-image moving-image representation. Recognizing, like David Bordwell, that “in any discussion o reflexivity reflexivit y as a theoretical concept, a great many distinctions distincti ons have to be made,” literary and media me dia theorists, theori sts, narratologists, and semioticians have also provided typologies o reflexivity, Yacavone,Recursive Recursive Reflections  In:  In: Metacinema . Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Daniel Yacavone, Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0005 9780190095345.003.0005

 

󰀸󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

sel-reerence, and “metareerence” in works and media.1 Some o these exsel-reerence, plicitly encompass cinema, ci nema, and others are applicable to it. Tis chapter offers a critical overview o certain o these classifications o types o cinematic reflexivity, reflexivity, under the headings o which all a number o reflexive devices. As is typical o all classificatory enterprises, what these rameworks leave out is in some cases as instructive as what they include; and the points where they overlap are as illumina i lluminating ting as where they diverge. Divided here, or the purpose o analysis, into three general categories— ocused on reflexivity’s reerential content, communicative structures and unctions, and intended effects on viewers— vi ewers—together together these typologies highlight recurring tendencies in its theorization, including certain lacunae with respectt to some o reflexivit respec reflexivity’ y’ss underanalyzed underanalyze d eatures and effects. In the interest o beginning to fill in a ew o these theoretical gaps, and as one step toward a more comprehensive account o cinematic reflexiveness, I will also sketch ske tch the outlines o a new, transmedial typology typolog y.2 Tis is centered on reflexive “orms,” as distinct rom  rom specific devices dev ices and general modes. modes . So as to not put the conceptual cart beore the th e horse, however, it is best to begin with wit h some general definitions and distinctions concerning reflexivity and related processes. It is only once we have a clear handle on what cinematic reflexivity actually is, and what connects connec ts it with, and differentiates it rom, other eatures o films, that we may begin to better understand underst and its diverse maniestations.

Reflexivity and Self-Reflexivity Self-Reflexivity Amid what Robert Stam aptly calls the “swirling galaxy o satellite terms pointing to specific dimensions o reflexivity,” some writers have sought 3

to distinguish it rom overlapping and practices. include metafiction, metafiction , metacinema metacinema, , metalepsis metalepsis,concepts , selsel-consciousness consciousness, , mise Tese en abîme, abîme , and allusion//intertextuality . More basic still, the terms selallusion sel-reflexivity  reflexivity   and re flexivity  are   are most ofen used interchangeably. Nevertheless, one may, like Jean-Marc JeanMarc Limoges, attempt to separate them. For Limoges, selsel-reflexivity  reflexivity   entails a film specifically oregrounding its own artiactual nature and technological and significatory sign ificatory “apparatus.” Whereas reflexivity  is  is any reerence on the part o a film to “the medium” in general. 4 Te suggested distinction immediately runs into conceptual difficulties, however. “Reflexivity” (sans prefix) still involves a film drawing attention to itsel as a film, film, even i implicitly. Since any film, as a specific instance o cinema in general, stands in close metonymic relation to it; and thus, a ortiori, to any medium properties, aspects o filmmaking and viewing, screen history and culture, and

 

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87

other generic eatures o cinema a given film reerences. Moreover, the only  vehicle at a film film’’s dispos disposal al or evoking these in the minds o viewers is its concretee audiovisual presentation, concret presentation, aspects o which it oregrounds oregrounds or this th is purpose. purpos e. In this sense sens e the reflexive reflexi ve “signi “signified” fied” always contains the “signifier.” Or, as Christian Metz puts it, while extranarrative, cinematic reflexivity is always “textually enclosed” within withi n the work.5 Entailing all o the circularity, recursiveness, and double articulation requently associated with reflexivity in other artistic and non-artistic quently non-artistic contexts, such combined reerence to cinema through sel-reerence sel-reerence   and selsel-reerence reerence through reerence to cinema on cinema on a film’s part is perhaps as suitable a general definition o all cinematic reflexivity as is possible. 6 And, strictly speaking, it renders the term “sel-reflexivity” “sel-reflexivity” redundant. Certainly, in practice there is considerable co-presence co-presence and fluidity between a film drawing special attention to eatures o itsel, and to cinema more generally, at times through the same image, sequence, and device. For these reasons, I shall maintain the tacit convention and conceive o these as poles o the same basic phenomenon (reflexivity) rather than insisting upon what would amount to a rather artificial categorical distinction between them. Nonetheless, in the analysis o the specific emphasis and primary unction o reflexivity in individual cases the reflexive/selreflexive/sel-reflexive reflexive division is a useul one. It is also a clear example o categorizing cinematic reflexiveness on the basis o its reerential content , an approach to which we will shortly return. Tankully, differences among reflexivity in general and ofen related eatures o films are somewhat more straightorward. Although here, again, one finds a number o contrasting concepts and definitions.

Metafiction and Metacinema Some literary texts address their own fictional status. Frequently termed metafiction,, as, most basically, “fiction about fiction,” this is widely considered to afiction be a defining eature o “postmodern” literature.7 Exemplified by Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Fire, Calvi Ca lvino no’’s I on a Winter’s Night a raveler , and John Barthes’ Barthes’ss Lost in the Funhouse, Funhouse, among other novels and stories, metafiction, Patricia Waugh maintains, is a sustained exploration o the “relationship between the world o  the  the fiction and the world outside outside o  o the fiction, ficti on,” which necessitates ne cessitates a higherhi gherorder level o discourse within works on the model o metalanguage, as language used to speak about language.8 Numerous films oreground aspects o their own narration and fiction, and fictionality and storytelling, more generally. Tis sometimes extends

 

󰀸󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

to generic, stylistic, and technological actors germane to constructing and experiencing film and television narratives and storyworlds, as seen in the metafictional play o Crichton’s Westworld   (1973) and Nolan and Joy’s large-budget large-budget television remake o it (2016– ). In both cases, the conspicuously high-tech high-tech narrative world-making world-making taking place within within   the fictions—providing certain characters in the eponymous antasy themepark with a genre cinema-like, cinema-like, yet three-dimensionally three-dimensionally immersive and interactive experience—closely experience—closely parallels paral lels the high- tech (or the respective resp ective times) narrative world-making o their productions.9 While here and elsewhere cinematic metafiction has a clear reflexive aspect, not all, or even most, reflexivity in films is metafictional. Some works oreground medial, ormal, stylistic, or contextual eatures that do not turn on fictional reerence making and storytelling.10 Clearly  Clearly,, it is on these other aspects asp ects o filmmaking/ vie making/  viewing wing that reflex reflexivity ivity in nonfiction nonfiction   cinema, both documentary and experimental, is ocused. Tus, metafictional reerence, where present, is best thought o as a particular parti cular sort o cinematic c inematic reflexivity, broadly broadly construed. While some writers employ the term metacinema metacinema   as shorthand or cinematic metafiction, other “meta-” “meta-” descriptions o films with different, i sometimes related, meanings have been put orward.11 Tese include Marc Cerisuello’s understanding o a “metafilm” as one that “deals explicitly  with   with cinema through representing those responsible or production” (my italics). And Metz’s diametrically diametr ically contrasting contrast ing employment o “metafilmic” to reer ini nsteadd to a film’s implicit  evocation stea  evocation o cinema, or example through visual mise en abîme figurations abîme figurations (as will be discussed shortly).12

Metalepsis Citing Marx Brothers Brothe rs comedies, comedies , Allen’s Te Purple Rose o Cairo, Cairo , and an d Altman’ A ltman’s Te Player , among other films, the widely influential French narratologist and literary theorist Gérard Genette (2014) extends his concept o narrative metalepsis metalepsis to  to cinema.13 Subsequently modified modifie d in various ways by other writers, in Genette’s original ormulation metalepsis is a “paradoxical . . . transgression between the world o the telling and the world o the told” 14  resulting rom “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse.”15 As John Pier, Marie Laure Ryan, and Werner Wol, amongg others, point out, metalepsis is a highly transmedial narrative device. amon It is ound in some plays, films, television televisi on shows, graphic novels and comics,

 

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and video and computer games. Like metafiction, metalepsis is particularly prevalent in postmodern post modern fiction ficti on and drama. However, However, as modern and modernist novels and plays like Sterne’s ristram Shandy  (adapted,   (adapted, with cinematic equivalents or its metaleptic conceits, in Winterbottom’s ristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story ), ), Gide’s Te Countereiters, Countereiters, and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search o an Author  demonstrate,   demonstrate, it is by no means confined to it. Metalepsis is undoubtedly a useul concept in theorizing the reflexive structure struc ture and content content o films where there is such direct and specifically speci fically “paradoxical” movement between ontological and narrative levels, on the part o a narrator, narrator, characters, or the narration n arration itsel.16 Extended (as in Genette’ G enette’s analysis) to certain occasions o actors stepping out o their roles and real people appearing as themselves in films, metalepsis is still too restrictive a concept and occurs relatively too inrequently in film practice to be the basis or a general theory or classification o cinematic reflexivity. Which, as already mentioned, also takes ta kes many other and quite quite different orms.

Self-Consciousness SelfConsciousness Since the mid-nineteenth mid-nineteenth century, it has been common to regard some artworks as figuratively evidencing selsel-consciousness consciousness,, or selsel-awareness awareness,, analogous to the reflexive capacities o human thought and consciousness; a relation between art and mind influentially elaborated by Hegel and Friedrich Schiller. Schil ler. In film theory and criticism, crit icism, however, and with an analogue in literary studies, sel-consciousness sel-consciousness has another, more precise sense. Here it reers to styles and techniques that draw particular attention to themselves. Tus, one finds requent descriptionsthe o Max Ophüls’s and Stanley selconscious camera movements, sel-conscious, sel-conscious, tableautableau-like likeKubrick’s compositions o Peter Greenaway’s Greenaway’s and Wes Wes Anderson Ande rson’’s films, and so on. Film theorists have associated such ormal and stylistic sel-consciousness, sel-consciousness, which varies widely in degree, intent, and effects, with cinematic modernism (versus classicism), ormalism (versus realism), and contemporary, “post-classical” “post-classical” Hollywood cinema in contrast to the so-called so- called invisible style o classical Hollywood productions. Some scholars, including Stam, deem such sel-consciousness sel- consciousness to be a general type o reflexivity. I so, it represents a low grade, or what Metz calls “weak,” reflexiveness. Consider the relevant differences between the equally unconventional and attention-drawing, attention-drawing, long-take long-take traveling shots that open Welles’s ouch o Evil  and   and the aorementioned Te Player . In keeping with

 

󰀹󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

Stam’s notion o reflexiveness as a matter o degree, and o films’ variable “coefficient o reflexivity,” the latter is considerably more reflexive, quantitatively and qualitatively (i.e., experientially), than the ormer. Since Te Player ’s ’s traveling shot also depicts a film studio, occurs in a film explicitly about filmmaking, and includes includes characters discussing the length and intricacy o ouch o o  Evil ’s opening openi ng shot. When sel-conscious sel-conscious presentation is pervasive throughout a film, it may translate into what Bill Nichols identifies as “stylistic reflexivity” as a category in its own right. Disrupting “received conventions” through “gaps, reversals, and unexpected turns that draw attention to the work o style as such,” it is contrasted with the less emphasized operation o style typical o more illusionistic,, plot and story- centered, cinema.17  Nevertheless, in their basic sionistic orms, the primary difference between reflexiveness and stylistic/narrative stylistic/ narrative sel-consciousness selconsciousness is that the latter, as pertaining to the way in which a which a film presents what it does and tells a story, story, is contentless, in this sense. sens e. Whereas, in broadly semiotic and cognitive terms, reflexivity is is (sel (sel-)reerential )reerential content, in the orm o a symbol o the th e film, or a part o it, as a film. 18

Mise en  Abîme Abîme Te French term mise en abîme, abîme, “put into [the] abyss, abyss ,” traditionally traditi onally denotes (a) images embedded within the same or similar images, as in some heraldic emblems; emblem s; or (b) stories within stories. In cinema, by extension, ex tension, it pertains  visually  visual ly to images, screens screens,, and rames contained within the film film’’s image and rame, and the screen on which it is viewed; or narratively, to nested sequences and stories and attendant attendant narrative narrative raming  raming devices. Films Fi lms such as Weine’s Cabinet o Dr. Caligari Caligari, , Has’s, and Te arantino’s Saragossa Pulp Manuscript  Buñuel’s TeTe Discrete Charm o the Bourgeoisie Bourgeoisie, Fiction,  Fiction  indicate the wide range o innovative ways in which filmmakers have employed the latter latter.. Whether or not all visual mise en abîme  abîme  structures in films—such films—such as the multiple mirror-reflected mirror-reflected images within images o central characters in Welles’s Citizen Kane and Kane and Te Lady rom Shanghai— Shanghai—are reflexive, or i this meaning depends on the narrative and thematic thematic context in which they occur, hinges on how cinematic mise en abîme and abîme and reflexivity are more specifically theorized. Beyond a mere duplication and mirroring o elements, some writers, like Stam, build a strong microcosmic aspect into the very definition o mise en abîme (“by abîme (“by which a passage, a section, or sequence  plays out in miniature the processes o the text as a whole” whole” [my italics]). Tis

 

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entails that at a minimum such eatures always amount to sel-reerence sel-reerence on the part o the films that contain contain them, regardless o whether and how they are urther oregr oregrounded. ounded.19 I, however, however, one places emphasis emphasi s on the spatialspatia ltemporal and narrative situation o the mise en abîme compositions abîme compositions in the two Welles films, or instance, and their range o possible (non-reflexive) (non-reflexive) diegetic and thematic meanings—and meanings—and works with the general definition o cinematic reflexivity I have suggested—in suggested—in these and other cases it represents represents another relatively weak orm o it. 20 Something closer close r to what Metz Metz analyzes as “metacinematographic “metacine matographic enunciation. e nunciation.”” Wherein an element o a film’s mise mis e en scène “mer “merely” ely” duplicates duplicates certain perceptual characteristics o the cinematic image (e.g., its rectilinear raming;  raming; the rectangularity o the screen s creen on which it is viewed), vie wed), amounting to a “semi“semi-invol involuntary untary witnessing o the cinematic mechanism. mechanism.””21 Most o the images o the doorway o the Edwards’s homestead in Ford Ford’’s Te Searchers, Searchers, raming the view vie w outside it, are examples examples o what Metz seems to have in mind. Tis stands in contrast contras t to what he terms “metafilmic” mise en abîme structures, abîme structures, including some “secondary screen” configurations. 22 Such structures generate much stronger, i still figurative, reflexive associations with cinema, and with the film as a whole, not only through their visual orm, but through aspects o their represented content, content, and  the   the narrative and thematic context in which they appear. Te final appearance o the doorway, and the image- within-thewithin-the-image image it rames in silhouette, in the last shot o Te Searchers  Searchers  –beore the door ceremoniously closes in i n the film’ film’s equivalent equival ent o a final curtain curt ain – clearly belongs to this latter category. In actual critical practice, historical, stylistic, and interpretative context ofen has the last word, i there is one, on the matter in more borderline, or open, cases (a point that Francois Jost stresses repeatedly). 23  Nonetheless, while too large ainvolves topic toabecontextual adequatelyinterpretation addressed here, and while whil e all  reflexivity  reflexivity (as reerential) o what appears on screen and on the soundtrack, such ambiguity—i seldom outright outri ght indeterminacy— indetermi nacy— also indicates a need to try to distinguish in principle eatures eatures and devices in films that, to borrow an Aristotelian distinction, distincti on, are intrinsically  reflexive  reflexive and those that are instrumentally , that is, contingently and contextually contextual ly,, reflexive. 24

 Allusion/Intertextuality  Allusion/ Intertextuality Whether characterized as quotation, allusion allusion,, or, bracketing issues o authorial intention, intertextuality , a film’s reerence to another film (such as, ouch o Evil   in Te Player ), ), is ipso acto reflexive on the general definition

 

󰀹󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

I have offered. Tis may or may not be the case concerning a film’s reerence o works in other media and art orms, or representation o those media/ orms more generally. Te test here, again, is whether such cross-modal cross-modal reerence and representation on the part o a film involves significant sel- and cinema-related cinemarelated meaning, even i implicit, and the spectator’s corresponding awareness o it. Bearing this in mind, Stam is right to maintain that together with drawing attention to their “production,” “authorship,” “reception,” and “textual procedures,” reflexive films ofen oreground their “intertextual influences.”25 Tis may center on adaptation, as he points out with reerence to Godard’s Contempt , in relation to its film-withinfilm-within-thethe-film’s film’s adaptation o Homer’s Odyssey , and Reisz’s Te French Lieutenant’s Woman, Woman, scripted by Harold Pinter, in which Fowles’s eponymous novel is presented as a film in the process o being made.26 Also at work in these films, and highly significant both theoretically and historically, are what may be termed intermedial   and transtrans-art  art  reflexivity.  reflexivity. Tese reflexive orms, to which I will return, operate through the cinematic representation repres entation o other art orms and media media as vehicles vehicle s or reflection on cinema cine ma rom at least one ontological remove. Proceeding rom these basic definitions and distinctions to more detailed classifications o cinematic reflexivity, reflexivity, these may be divided into three main areas o ocus: the representational and reerential content  o  o reflexive eatures; their effects on viewers, or reception reception,, in this sense; and the communicative structures and unctions o unctions o reflexivity, understood in terms borrowed rom linguistic semantics and pragmatics. pragmatics. Just as these these working, higher-order higher-order categories unavoidably overlap, overlap, so to do the specific sp ecific typologies I have placed under these headings. Tis is not surprising, given g iven that past theorists have tended to repeatedly classiy, classiy, and reclassiy, reclassiy, many o the same reflexive phenomena, including in some some o the same films, ofenmodifications. making relativel relativelyy minor but nonetheless significant sig nificant conceptual conceptual and descriptive

Reflexivity as Reference Since reflexivity is, among other things, a reerential process, it seems natural to analyze its cinematic occurrences according to that to which they reer. In other words, to the semantic content o reflexive eatures o films, to the extent that it may be generalized. o this end, Don Fredericksen appropriates a distinction originally proposed by Gilbert Cohen-Séat, Cohen-Séat, later taken up by Metz, between the “filmic” and the “cinematic.” Some films fi lms reer to “cinematic “cinematic acts” that, strictly speaking, sp eaking, are outside o their thei r own “signi “signiying ying discourses. discours es.”27 

 

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Such reerence may pertain to filmmaking and film projection (or playback) technology; the people involved in the work’s creation (a common ocus o the Hollywood-filmHollywood-film-aboutabout-Hollywood Hollywood genre); the rituals and context o film  viewing; narrati narrative ve and genre conventions; conventions; historical and cultural actors o context and reception (e.g., the phenomenon o film stardom); and the logistics and economics o production. Tis last category calls to mind Gilles Deleuze’s provocative, i clearly Deleuze’s cle arly reductive, notion that t hat at base all cinematic cine matic reflexivity concerns the time and the money required to make a film and their special, ofen conflictual, equivalence in this context.28 Alternatively,, a film’s reflexivity Alternatively reflex ivity may be centered on “filmic acts”  acts” pertaining per taining to its status as a perceptual and “signiying object.” 29  Writing in 1979, Fredericksen observes that it is this latter category category o reflexivity that is o most interest to film theorists who, drawing on structuralism, poststructuralism, and semiotics, are “concerned primarily with constructing the codes and systems that explain how and why messages and texts are meaningul.”30 Tis is certainly certain ly true o the narrationnar ration-ocuse ocused, d, textual “enunciation” “enunciation” paradigm paradig m under which reflexivity has long been subsumed in French film theory. From a contemporary vantage point, however, the pendulum has swung some way in the opposite “cinematic” direction. Film scholars are increasingly attuned to films’ engagement with extra-work extra-work (i.e., real world) cultural, historical, and technological realities o production and reception—including reception—including those sometimes lumped together under the heading o “industrial reflexivity”—in reflexivity”—in a postmodern, and what is now reerred to as a “post-cinema,” “post-cinema,” moving-image moving-image environment.31 Aside rom evolutions internal to academic film and media studies, part o the reason or this is a general shif in reflexive film practices over the past orty years, as conjoined with wider stylistic and technological developments. As Tomas Elsaesser, Steven Shaviro, and others observe, this includes a movement away rom a selregarding, ormand mediumoriented reflexivity characteristic o the global cinematic modernism o the 1950s and 1960s 196 0s “New Waves,” and toward a more outward-looking outward-looking engagement with film cultural and contextual dynamics. Te latter has sometimes taken the orm o a substantial critical exploration o these realities. Far more commonly, however, in mainstream narrative cinema and television, they are acknowledged through mere duplication, pastiche, homage, playing with genre conventions, and copious intertextuality. inter textuality. Such broad generalizations aside, as is clear rom Fredericksen’s examples o both categories o reflexivity, the history o cinema is too long and varied with respect to reflexive content to be divided in binary ashion chronologically, stylistically stylistical ly,, or on any other basis. Moreover Moreover,, highly high ly reflexive films fi lms rom all periods ofen combine combine visual and/ and/or or aural reerence to the “filmic” and the

 

󰀹󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

“cinematic,” sometimes in a single shot or sequence. Furthermore, and as is cruciall to remember crucia remember in these contexts, while watching films viewers are sometimes well aware aware o what alls under both o these headings in the absence o any reflexive signaling o them on them on the part o films. Bordwell also provides a reerence-based reerence-based typology o reflexivity, albeit o a metatheoretical kind. It orms part o his polemical critique o “implicit” and “symptomatic” interpretations o films, centered on “symbolic” and “repressed”” meanings seen to reflect various social and cultural processes, and the pressed workings o the unconscious, respectively. respe ctively.32 On Bordwell’s Bordwell’s view vie w such readings requently lack empirical empir ical alsifiability als ifiability and a selsel -critical dimension, d imension, and ofen neglect close historically-inormed, analysis analysis o film orm and style. Tey are supported and sanctioned, however, by various constructed “semantic fields” o meaning, that is, interpretative paradigms, which film criticism and academic film studies have institutionally accepted as valid. Reflexivity, which licenses “the critic to link virtually any object on-screen— on-screen—windows, windows, curtains, light bulbs—to bulbs—to some aspect aspe ct o cinema,” cinema,” is singled si ngled out by Bordwell as the “most powerul semantic field shared by all schools o criticism,” including psychoanalytic, semiotic, eminist, Marxist, and auteurist approaches.33 In this context, Bordwell identifies seven “attributes o cinema” that critics and theorists routinely appeal to in diagnosing reflexivity. Partly overlapping with Fredericksen’s designations, these are the film industry, film technology, film history, his tory, the “role o the filmmaker, fi lmmaker,” the th e film “screeni screening ng situation,” situation,” the spectator, and “doctrines or theories concerning cinema.”34 His examples o such interpretations, drawn rom writings stretching back to the 1920s, confirms the prominent role o reflexivity in film theory and criticism rom its early stages. While other film theoretical approaches have since superseded those Bordwell targets, scholars and critics continue to regard films as oregrounding these same parttotothebuttress their avored conceptual rameworks. Tey attributes, requently in point metaphorical representation o cameras, projectors, and screens; films’ reerences, sometimes disguised, to the lives and works o their makers as a key to unlocking their deeper meanings; and to their purported meta-level meta- level address o cinematic history and filmmaking technolog technologyy. Exempliying Exempli ying the latter latter,, Amy aubin aubin and Zara Dinnen separately read the plot o Fincher’s Zodiac Zodiac   (2007), involving characters’ decoding cryptic bits o inormation contained in the eponymous serial killer’s cyphers, as a “coded” commentary on its and other films’ then innovative use o digital image manipulation (i.e., also through coded bits).35 With reerence to the last o Bordwell’s categories—films’ categories— films’ suggested evocations o theories o   cinema—despite cinema—despite his skepticism concerning overarching reflexive interpretations o films, he elsewhere appeals to the

 

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now canonical reading o Hitchcock’s Rear Window as Window as an allegory o cinematic spectatorship in using the film to illustrate illustr ate (rather persuasively) his own constructivist account o cinematic narration.36 Setting its metatheoretical agenda aside, Bordwell’s classification, like Fredericksen’s, helpully indicates the very wide—and, wide—and, by virtue o cinema’s ceaseless evolution, continually expanding—range expanding—range o aspects o cinema that films, and those who think and write about them, may engage with as the “target domains” o reflexive reerence, to borrow the terminology o metaphor theory. Even i, as some o his choice examples o ar-etched ar-etched interpretations demonstrate, these sometimes say more about the interpreter and his or her theoretical-critical theoretical-critical biases than about the work in question. However, like all other exclusively reerential classifications o the signified content o reflexivity separated rom its visual and auditory orm (i.e., the “signifier”), and diverse intentions intentions and unctions, this typology is undamen undamentally tally partial.

Reflexivity as Reception raditionally, discussion o reflexivity in cinema has been preoccupied with its effects on viewers’ attitudes and belies, or convenience sake here termed reception.. Bound up with notions o illusionism, medium awareness, and reception films calling attention to their artiactual status, this concern is one o the persistent legacies o the ideology-centered ideology-centered perspectives o French apparatus theory, “Screen “Screen theory,”  theory,” and related writings, which have been collectively labeled “post-structur “post-structural al film theory. t heory.”37 In these contexts, emphasis is placed on reflexivity’s role in ostering a more critical attitude toward narrative cinema, especially on the classical Hollywood model and what Noël Burch calls its 38

“Institutional Mode o Representation. Rimmersion epresentation.  Tis prioritizes t he viewer’s the viewer’ perceptual and psychological immersio n in a”film both as a simulacrum o sordina ordinary ry spatial-temporal spatialtemporal experience and as an autonomous storyworld. In breaking this illusion— variously reerred to as “diegetic” (Burch; Metz), “aesthetic” (Limoges; Wol ol), ), and “projective” (Richard Allen)— o an unmediated, alternative reality, some films’ reflexive orms and devices draw contrastive attention to its audiovisual manuacture.39  While simultaneously laying bare their own counter-operations counter-operations in what may be perceived as a more honest way,, the most radical “political modernist” way moder nist” films, to borrow bor row D. D. N. Rodowick’ Ro dowick’s phrase, also deconstruct the problematic (e.g., Western, late capitalist, imperialist) cultural-ideological cultural-ideological attitudes seen to underpin the representations o characters and situations in most popular cinema. Tese attitudes, on this  view,, are reflected not only in the represen  view representational tational and narrative content content o

 

󰀹󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

many Hollywood and Hollywood-style Hollywood-style films, but in their realist-illusionist realist-illusionist style. A style that is the moving-image moving-image descendent o Western perspectival painting and nineteenth-century nineteenth-century realist literature and drama, with its effet de réel  (reality  (reality effect), effect) , in Roland Barthes’s Barthes’s amous phrase.40 While agreeing on these perhaps intuitively plausible and yet, in their details and suggested implications or film theory and practice, contentious, premises, certain writers have sought to urther delineate this use o reflexivity in contrast with others. Nichols orwards a primary distinction between “ormal” and “political” reflexivity, applicable to narrative, documentary, and experimental cinema.41 Citing the precedent prec edent o Peter Wollen Wollen’’s and Dana Polan’’s arguments, he Polan h e understands this division d ivision in i n two ways.42 Te first is the difference Polan emphasizes between political reflexivity and that motivated by “purely ormal” concerns, including the playul sel-reerentiality sel-reerentiality o some classic Warner Brothers cartoons (in ( in Polan’ Polan’s example). Te second, se cond, ollowing Wollen, is a way o thinking about two different sorts o political reflexivity and their respective “materialisms.”43 One, more ormal in orientation, centered on the “materiality o the cinematic signifier,” is embodied in the panEuropean avant-garde avant-garde cinema o the 1920s. Te other, a “second “second avant-garde” avant-garde” exemplified by the “Brechtian cinema” o the 1960s and 1970s, is concerned with “the materiality o social practices including that o viewing and o the cinematic apparatus.”44 Like Wollen, Wollen, Nichols sees se es the spirit o the th e first avant-garde, avant-garde, which attempts in a romantic, “visionary” ashion to alter the world through creating new ways o perceiving it, as continuing in the works o experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.45 Tis dovetails with Noël Carroll’s description o the “apperceptive reflexivity” o Brakhage’ Brak hage’s works, Snow’ Snow’ss Wavelength Wavelength,, Frampton’ Fra mpton’s (nostalgia nostalgia), ), and other orm- and medium-center medium-centered ed experimental exp erimental films.46  In what amounts another unctional, reception ocused  theorization,  ocused    theorization, Carroll emphasizes howtothese works’ oregrounding o perceptual processes involved in film viewing opens a privileged window or viewers onto perception, and perception-derived perceptionderived knowledge k nowledge more generally. As acknowledged in such distinctions and categories, just as reflexivity per se is compatible with some orms o realism, as well as escapist entertainment—as entertainment— as its long, varied history in the popular comedy and musical genres att attests— ests—its its intended effects effec ts are by no means confined to explicitly or implicitly political ones. Stam places particular emphasis on these acts, and they are reflected, i in a very ver y general way, way, in his division o all “reflexive art” ar t” into three broad, sometimes s ometimes overlapping, overl apping, modes: “didacti didactic, c,” “aggressive,” and “ludic.”47 Corresponding to the aorementioned conceptions

 

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o modern political reflexivity, reflexivity, the didactic didactic is  is here understood in the terms o Brechtian “materialist “materiali st fiction. ficti on.” Exemplified, Exemplifie d, or Stam, by out va bien b ien,, one o Godard’s most overtly Brechtian works, in cinema it involves “exposing” the technological and cultural apparatus o film viewing: an idea that was elevated to the point o “etishization” in 1970s film theory, as Metz retrospectively observes.48  An equally transmedial category, aggressive aggressive   reflexivity, is characterized by an attempt to shock viewers into critical awareness through “modernist dehumanization,” among other means, as in a number o Buñuel’s films (L’Age (L’Age d’Or ; Te Exterminating Angel ). ).49 As something o a catch-all catch-all category or any reflexivity that is not primarily political or satirical, and thus in need o finer parsing, what Stam terms ludic ludic reflexivity  reflexivity is characterized by aesthetic and conceptual playulness. Familiar across narrative film styles, modes, and periods, or example silent film comedy, as well as television, it takes both popular and more intellectually challenging orms. Nichols astutely observes that the same same reflexive  reflexive tropes and devices—such devices—such as the actor’s/character’s actor’s/character’s address o the spectator, the visible presence o the (or a) film crew and camera, and certain voyeuristic situations mirroring the conditions o filmmaking and viewing— vi ewing—may be part o either political polit ical or nonpoliticall (e.g., ormal) reflexivity. politica reflexivity.50 And this is equally equal ly true o Stam Stam’’s suggested suggeste d modes. In metatheoretical terms, this underscores that no matter how closely wedded, indeed inseparable, they may be within films and their experiences, in theory it is necessary to logically differentiate differentiate reflexive devices devices,, modes modes (in (including those defined by their purported effects), and what I will go on to describe as reflexive orms reflexive orms,, together with classifications operating on these three distinct levels. Likewise approaching the subject rom a transmedial perspective, media theorist Wol providesinwhat is likelymedia, the most comprehensive account oWerner reflexivity operating numerous including cinema and television. He does so, however, under the more specific term and concept o “metareerence,” as the process underlying the seemingly evere ver-increasing increasing “metaization” o all media. Metareerence is distinguished rom (1) basic “sel-reerence,” “selreerence,” whereby a work draws attention to its ormal eatures, such as through repetition and contrast o elements; and (2) basic “semantic” (content-based) (contentbased) “sel-reflection,” “sel-reflection,” or example, when characters or narrators in a novel or film reer to other characters. Metareerence, in contrast, is semantic sel-reflection sel-reflection with an additional “metadimension.”51  Tis enables a work to oreground its medium and its “fictionality” (where present), “rom a higher level o reflection . . . that exists or is implied to exist in the

 

󰀹󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

work.”52 As well as transmedial, Wol’s metareerence is yet another unctional, reception-based reception-based category. Since the suggested evidence o its presence is the generation o substantial “medium awareness” awareness” on the th e reader’s reader’s or  viewer’ss part. In act, Wol  viewer’ Wol identifies no less than twenty twenty (!) distinct aims and effects o metareerence and the resulting awareness in works. All Al l applicable to cinema, these thes e include undermining undermini ng aesthetic illusion; a work’s work’s attempting to assert the truth and “authenticity” o its representations; providing perceptual and cognitive amusement; gratiying gratiy ing the audience’s audience’s intellect as being capable o grasping the reerence in question; inculcating a more sophisticated awareness and appreciation o media; serving the social unction o creating “expe experts, rts,”” and generating ge nerating “a particu par ticular lar inin -group pleasure” ple asure” as a rere sult; and attuning audiences to the ways in which we live in an increasingly media-constructed mediaconstructed reality.53 As this partial list indicates, a merit o Wol’s highly detailed detaile d scheme is its acknowledgment o at least some o reflexivity’ reflexiv ity’ss emotional and affective qualities. In sum, many o these and other reception- centered categories are applicable to both fiction and nonfiction cinema. Tey thereby remind us o the pan-cinematic pancinematic nature o a number o reflexive modes and techniques. And also o currents o influence and imitation in this respect across narrative, documentary, and experimental film practice. Finally, this spectator-based spectator-based approach to the topic highlights an array o ideas and attitudes that reflexive eatures may prompt in audiences, as desired by filmmakers or a similarly wide range o reasons. Wol’s broader classification aside, however, it is o most use in better understanding films that are clearly intent on communicating relatively specific messages. ypical o politically motivated and, as Stam’s term implies, “didactic” reflexivity, this diverges rom more subtle, semantically ambiguous, or polysemic maniestations o reflexivity, including as part o a film’s aestheticdiversity explorations expression. Tis said, in rightly recognizing the maniest o theand ormal, stylistic, and tonal means o critical-political critical-political reflexivity specifically, some o these classifications also wisely caution against any overly monolithic conception o it in cinema and beyond. O course, like all reception theories, those mentioned here are confined to broad intuitions and hypotheses concerning spectators’ psychological responses to reflexiveness in films. Given the perpetually evolving habits, knowledge, and expectations o cinema audiences—along audiences—along with amiliar problems concerning generic appeals to “the “ the audience,”  audience,” and both the “average” and “ideal” viewer, including in the absence o empirical research – such approaches are open to considerable challenge on methodological and conceptual grounds.

 

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99

Reflexivity as Communication Discussions o reflexivity’s intended effects on spectators emphasize that, like other orms o cinematic meaning, it is, at base, a communication—alcommunication—albeit o a very particular kind—rom kind—rom the work and its makers to audiences. Semiotic theory, as the analysis o (the structures o) communication through material signs, together with allied linguistic, narratological, and rhetoricall concepts and categories, is thus prima acie well suited rhetorica suite d to provide provide means o classiying reflexive constructions. Metz, in his last major work, critically critic ally (re)appropriates Émile Benveniste B enveniste’’s and others’ aorementioned aorementi oned concept o “enunciation,” “enunciation,” as the act ac t o “utterance” by an “enunciator” “enunciator” or an “addressee. “addresse e.” Enunciation Enunciat ion is understoo unde rstoodd as a relation o subjectivities marked by shifing deictic deictic   (context-dependent) (context-dependent) personal pronoun positions; or example, in Francesco Casetti’s cinematic model, “I” (the filmmaker), “you” (the spectator), and “he/she” “he/ she” (characters).54  In light o Bordwell’s, Edward Brannigan’s, and other theorists’ objections to applications o traditional enunciative rameworks to cinematic narration (criticisms that Metz largely endorses), Metz argues that cinema instead involves acts o “impersonal  “impersonal   enunciation” on the part o the filmic “text” itsel. Embedded in the work during its creation, and reflecting back upon it, the acts in question are oregrounded as such. Avoiding appeals to implied narrators and other such projections o subjectivity onto films (the pronoun-based nounbased and anthropomorphic, or “humanoid enunciation,” approach to cinema Metz rejects), this sel-reerential sel-reerential address is a one-way one-way stream o communication rom film work to spectator. Encompassing, although not limited to, reflexivity, reflexivity, as traditionally understood, understoo d, it operates either through a film’ film’s fictional storyworld or outside o it (i.e., nondiegetically), but always by wayover o conventional, historically evolved semiotic devices.varieties Tese include  voice voice-over narration, intertitles, direct address, and several o the film-withinfilmwithin-thethe-film, film, the use o which Metz traces rom early cinema to the time o his writing in the early 1990s.55 Predating Metz’s account, in theorizing cinematic reflexivity Don Fredericksen draws on Roman Jakobson’s synthesis o C. S. Peirce’s and Ferdinand de Saussure’s oundational semiotics semiotics   and language-based language-based semiology , respectively. Unlike Saussure, who amously brackets the actual speech spee ch act and its pragmatic pragmatic contexts, instead ocusing ocus ing on the historically unchanging, “synchronic” structures o language (langue (langue rather  rather than paro than parole le)— )— but in common with Peirce—Jakobson Peirce—Jakobson was concerned with its concrete uses. Fredericksen transposes Jakobson’s posited six basic unctions o language to suggested unctions o reflexivity. Although both Bordwell and Stam cite the

 

󰀱󰀰󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

resulting, and still highly high ly relevant, “six“six-old old categorization o reflexive modes” in cinema (able 1) or its undamental approach to the subject, it has not received the attention attention it deserves. deser ves.56 o briefly summarize each o the modes in question, in “emotive” speech acts, emphasis is on the expressed e xpressed state o the speaker, sp eaker, that is, his or her eeling or attitude. Fredericksen takes t akes this to correspond to the “attitude” “attitude” o a film, as 57

reflecti ng that o the filmmaker, reflecting fi lmmaker, and expressed through th rough its “tone.”  Following Elsaesser’s characterizations o the “indirect” reflexivity o a good deal o post–New post– New Wave art cinema, he regards the tone in question as reflexive i it is ironic, understood as creating a perceived distance between the filmmaker, or narrator, and what appears on screen. 58 As is also discussed dis cussed by Nichols, in relation to documentary cinema, such sel-reerential sel-reerential irony implicitly raises “the question o the author’s own attitudinal relation to his or her subject matter.”59 aking many different, more or less reflexive orms, this expressed authorial distance has increased markedly since Fredericksen’s writing. It is now widely regarded as a characteristic trait o postmodern cinema, with its tendency to place story stor y and narration in figurative quotation marks. Jakobson’s “conative” unction o language is the opposite o the emotive in that it is the listener who is the object o the message, as in a command or a question requiring response. Fredericksen identifies this unction with a character’s/actor’s character’s/actor’s address o the camera and with voice-over voice- over narration. In both instances, the cinematic fiction is bypassed in avor o a more direct Table 1  Fredericksen’s Six Relexive Modes (rom Jakobson’s Jakobson’s Semantic Functions o

Language)

 

Recursive Relections 101

communication between film and audience. He links Jakobson’s third category, the ubiquitous “reerential” (or “denotative”) unction o language— e.g., to convey actual inormation about the world—with world— with a film’s drawing attention to the ontology o the cinematic image i mage and o fictional characters and events. In other oth er words, this thi s is a film film’’s probing o “existence relations” between cinematic representation and fiction, on the one hand, and extra-work extra- work reality and standards o truth – as correspondence with this reality – on the other hand.60 In common with a good deal o modern film theory, this reflexive mode is concerned with the “psychological and ideological” ramifications o these relations. For Fredericksen it is requently overtly political and ofen involves films’ use o Brechtian-style Brechtian-style alienation (Verremdungseffekt  (Verremdungseffekt ) devices.61 Te social relationship between speaker and hearer, and the channel o communication itsel, is the object o Jakobson’s “phatic” unction (similar to the conative one, yet less direct). Fredericksen associates it with various ways that films acknowledge the audience as engaged engage d in an active relationship with them and with cinema more generally general ly.. Tis includes characters charac ters watching films (within the film) and other represented situations that circularly mirror the activity o the viewer. Here we may add that some films oreground their dynamic relationship with spectators in a highly conrontational way: less a figurative conversation than an all-out all-out assault on the audience’s senses and belies. Such is the case in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, Games, both the original German-language Germanlanguage film and Haneke’s own Hollywood remake, whose aggressive reflexivity is centered on its depiction o graphic, senseless violence as a means o exploring the raught ethics o film spectatorship. Under the phatic heading, Fredericksen Freder icksen also al so aptly singles out a film’s invitation or demand, as it were, or more more active viewer participation par ticipation than is otherwise other wise common, thereby 62

placing the viewerorinwhat the position a virtual vir tual co-creator. co-creator. strategy has a special relevance has beenomore recently analyzed Tis as the contemporary (i.e., post-1990) post-1990) “puzzle” and “mind game” film.63 Te reflexivity quotient o the cognitively challenging narratives o Nolan’s Memen Nolan’s  Memento to and  and Te Prestige,, Carruth’s Primer , Villeneuve’s  Arrival , and other works that have Prestige been placed in these categories may be useully understood in such participatory and ludic terms. Like other semioticians and linguists, Jakobson identifies a specific “metalingual unction” whereby a statement reflexively reers both to itsel and to the codes o language it instantiates. In common with Metz, Barthes, and other theorists, Fredericksen sees a cinematic equivalent in reflexive films that oreground their semiotic structures o signs and codes or, contrastively, those o conventional illusionist cinema. Unlike the ontological nature o

 

󰀱󰀰󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

the “reerential” reflexivity mentioned previously, this mode, which notably overlaps with others, is cast as largely epistemological , concerned with knowledge and meaning relations. Given metalanguage’s demonstrated subversive capacities, such reflexivity is also requently critical-political. critical- political. It may involve the previously noted audiovisual deconstruction o the connotative codes o classical Hollywood cinema, which (on this view) not only shape the viewer’s understanding o what is represented on screen but the realities to which they reer.64 Widely credited as a highly original and influential contribution to semiotic and semantic theory, Jakobson’s last posited unction—the unction—the “poetic”—applies etic”— applies to the specifically aesthetic aesthetic use  use o language l anguage or other system o communication. Here Here the signifier does do es not disappear in the signiying sig niying process, as a transparent pointer to the signified, but draws attention its own expressive perceptual p erceptual orm and “materiality, “materiality,” thereby deliberately rendering renderi ng the signiying relation opaque.65  Owing to its aesthetic emphasis and its stress on language language’’s concrete materiality (e.g., read and spoken rhythms), in many respects this t his is the most directly applicable o Jakobson Jakobson’’s categories to cinema. Fredericksen allies it with a film film’’s drawing particular par ticular attention to the “material” “ma terial” aspects o the medium. Tese include spatial, temporal, rhythmic, and graphic eatures, and, more literally, the celluloid film strip.66  o his examples o avant-garde avant-garde films o the 1920s 192 0s and parts o canonical New Wave Wave works (Persona (Persona;; Breathless Breathless)) we may add the mature films o Ozu, which in this way amously diverge rom the conventions o classical Hollywood-style Hollywood-style cinema and the institutional mode o representation (IMR);67 together with ormally experimental twenty-firsttwenty-first-century century narrative films, such as Lynch’s Inland Empire, Empire, Glazer’s Under the Skin, Skin, and Wheatley’s A Wheatley’s  A Field in England   (to cite a ew English-language English-language cinema examples). Fredericksen associates such ormalormal-poetic poetic their reflexivity withtowhat the Russian critics and Bordwell, applying concepts cinema, describeFormalist as deamiliarization (ostranenie ostranenie). ). In the sense o a work’s use o unconventional orms and techniques that disrupt disr upt habitual patterns o perception and provoke heightened awareness o the conventions conventions violated, as well as o the ordinary realties artistically transormed. Reflecting upon this schema as a whole, Fredericksen justly maintains maintains that it is a mistake to confine reflexivity refle xivity and “metacinema” to the “meta“meta-discursive discursive unctions” alone.68 In other words, to the phat the phatic ic,, reerential , and metalingual , as the ocus o most semiotic, structuralist, and post-structuralist post-structuralist accounts, in contrast to the poetic the poetic,, conative conative and  and emotive emotive ones.  ones. Clearly, Clearly, all six posited posite d modes o cinematic communication and expression may be the significant object/  vehicle o reflexivity reflexivity..

 

Recursive Relections 103

Along with this and other insights, Fredericksen’s classification also useully identifies a specifically “rhetorical” “rhetorical” category category o reflexivity—comprising reflexivity—comprising the conative conative and  and pha  phatic tic— —alongside tonal, ormal, ontological, and semiotic types.69 As my supplementary examples in the oregoing indicate, all are very much present in contemporary fiction (and nonfiction) cinema. Where they also appear in the complex, overlapping combinations that Fredericksen acknowledges. Some, such as ontological reflexivity, have gained added impetus and a new significance s ignificance amid the sea change rom celluloid to digital filmmaking and viewing—including viewing—including specific technologies like CGI, HD ormats, and contemporary 3D—and 3D—and filmmaker’s, filmmaker’s, as well as theorist’ theorist’s, s, explorations ex plorations o constitutive properties o both o these moving-image moving-image media and their experience. In this vein, Laura Mulvey analyzes the deliberately anachronistic use o celluloid rear-projection rear-projection techniques in some contemporary films. Tese oreground conventional relations among cinematographic representation, stylistic realism, and three-dimensiona three-dimensionall reality in the current digital era.70 A chie merit o Fredericksen’s account is its showing that the “reflexive film can address addres s itsel to all constitutive parts o the ‘film event.’ event.’ ”71 Like other semio-linguistic semiolinguistic approaches to cinema, more generally, however, his classification does cation  does not, and cannot, address numerous perceptual, expressive, and affective aspects o the “film event.” As many writers over the past decades have pointed out rom their respective cognitivist, phenomenological, and Deleuzian perspectives (among others), linguistic semiology does not map directly onto the cinematic orm, which in the first instance shows shows rather  rather than says,, with the crucial and much-discussed says much-discussed differences this entails (this being, ultimately, the crux o the debate concerning the applicability o enunciation theories to cinematic narration). Tus, his classification gains its value (as Metz, or instance, admits) only at the price o considerable omissions and a high de gree o degree abstract abstraction ionsrom any film’ film’so presentation expe Although Frederi Fredericksen’ cksen’ identification an emotiveand modexperience. mode e orience. reflexiveness is salutary given theorists’ underemphasis o its multiple eeling dimensions (beyond humor and amusement), he unduly restricts it to tone and irony. In both mainstream and art cinema, however, reflexive orms and devices device s sometimes generate, or are entangled with, a wide range o spectator emotions. Closer to tone, but not identical with it, reflexivity reflex ivity may be a major contributor to non-objectnon-object-speci specific fic constellations o eeling, eeli ng, or “affect, “affect,”” as Shaviro suggests sug gests with respect res pect to some twenty-first century centur y “post-cinema” “post-cinema” works. But it may also create eeling specifically toward, and about, the represented worlds o films. As orben Grodal has argued with an emphasis on interlinked processes o cognition and emotion, V. F. Perkins has shown in relation to film style and fictional worldhood, and some empirical research also supports,

 

󰀱󰀰󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

some reflexive orms and devices may result in greater emotional “intimacy” with a film’s characters and drama, and a consequent psychic immersion in its diegetic reality.72 Tis stands in sharp contrast with the pro proverbial verbial critical distance and orced imaginative and emotional removal rom the fictional storyworld with which reflexivity and medium awareness are ofen simplistically associated.73 Although an accurate extrapolation ext rapolation o Jakobson’ Jakobson’s definition definiti on o the emotive mode o language as pertaining to the eelings o the speaker , hence figuratively the filmmaker, rather than the listener— listener—on on this model, the spectator—the spectator— the restrictiveness o this unction  unction in the context o cinematic reflexivity is indicative o a larger methodological methodological issue. Cherry-picking Cherrypicking only those aspects o films that somehow match up with Jakobson’s general semantic categories, this scheme is also straitjacketed by them. His careul qualifications qualifi cations aside, any attempt attempt such as that o Fredericks Fredericksen en to fit all cinematic reflexivity into the preabricated preabric ated mold o a theory o largely practical communication in another medium, especially discursive language, seems bound to entail considerable consi derable conceptual tensions. Not least as a result o the numerous points at which cinema and language, artistic and non-artistic non-artistic representation, and reflexive and non-reflexive non-reflexive communication sharply di verge. For For these reasons, although although along with with Metz’ Metz’s typology o enunciative enunciative devices, Fredericksen’s remains the most detailed and systematic classification o cinematic reflexivity reflexi vity yet offered, it presents an at once admirably broad (in strictly communicative, i not experiential, terms) and problematically narrow picture o the phenomenon ph enomenon in toto.

Reflexive Forms: A New Typology A differently oriented cinematic reflexivity involves positing recurrent recurren t types, which,understanding although theyorequentl requently y eature in the analysis o individual films, are not identified explicitly in any o the classificatory schemes that have been surveyed here. As we have seen, theorists have largely written about reflexivity as i there were nothing in between, so s o to speak, conventional reflexive devices devices,, on the one hand, and highly general unctional modes modes,, on the other. A amiliar and of-remarked of-remarked example may suffice to show the plausibility and useulness o a mid-level mid-level classification that is neither inappropriately abstract nor limited limite d to work- or creator-specific creator-specific orms and meanings. One widely suggested suggeste d unction o the multilayered reflexivity reflex ivity o Antonioni’s Blow-Up BlowUp is  is to probe and problematize the nature o perception as affording access to objective truth and reality. As in Fredericksen’s reerential and semiotic-epistemic semioticepistemic reflexive modes, this questioning notably extends to the

 

Recursive Relections 105

perception o art, cinema, and the film itsel. Building upon elements present in Julio Cortázar’s eponymous short story upon which the film is loosely based, Antonioni and his collaborators employ a number o conventional reflexive devices to achieve this aim. Tese include physical objects within the mise en scène figuratively signiying cinema and its technological apparatus; numerous images-withinimages-within-thethe-image image and rames-withinrames-within-thethe-rame; rame; and highly sel-conscious sel-conscious staging, camera movement, and editing. Te last o these culminates in the iconic final sequence, in which, harkening back to the trick effects o Georges Méliès, Tomas, the photographer protagonist, disappears rom  rom a field o o grass (i.e., the ‘visual ‘vi sual field’) via a slow dissolve and is replaced by the film fi lm’’s end title— title—aa dramatic instance o extradiegetic enunciation as theorized theorize d by Metz. Metz. Additionally, however, BlowBlow-Up Up   eatures a markedly reflexive use  use  o (a) space, location, l ocation, and ambiance, or example, the photographer’s photographer’s studio and darkroom with connotations o film studio, editing suite, and viewing space; the London park and adjacent tennis courts, as circumscribed spaces o voyeurism and perormance, p erormance, including includi ng in ront o Tomas’s camera; (b) other oth er art orms and media (still photography; abstract painting) explicitly and implicitly contrasted with the photographic photog raphic and cinematographic image; and (c) varv arious mystery and suspense film conventions, which recall the mystery-based mystery-based reflexivity o Feuillade’ Feuil lade’s A ragic ragic Error  (1912)  (1912 ) and Marston and Tanhouser’s Tanhouser’s Te Evidence o the Film (1913), Film (1913), made some s ome fify years earlier, as much as they anticipate that o Coppola’s Te Conversation  Conversation  (1974) and De Palma’s Blow Out  (1981).  (1981).74 As in Antonioni’s L’Avventura L’Avventura and  and Te Passenger , BlowBlow-Up Up sel selconsciously subverts amiliar elements o these genres to consistently undermine viewer expectations. Te film also includes (d) a surrogate directorial figure (Tomas) involved in proto-cinematic proto-cinematic creation and a filmmaking-like filmmaking-like manipulation sequential images images; and who, other characters in the film, shares certain o known interests and;traits withlike Antonioni; and (e) various acts o sel-aware sel-aware perormance and role-play role-play on the part o the protagonists and other characters, including the student mime troop, reflecting and reracting cinematic perormance. Beyond their specific operations in BlowBlow-Up Up,, these aspects correspond to certain reflexive ormations that are amiliar across a broad range o films. Based on their characteristics, and with reerence to the above, they may be correspondingly termed   ( a ) Environmental   (b) “ran “ranss-art” art” and intermedial   ( c ) Generic

 

󰀱󰀰󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

  (d) Creator centered   ( e ) Perormance based Each o these orms, which are also notably transmedial, have, in turn, a number o distinct, classifiable subtypes.75  CreatorCreator-centered  centered   reflexivity, or instance, ranges rom directors’ major roles and cameo appearances in their own films and others to their thei r acting act ing as voice-over or on-screen on- screen narrators; rom actors playing filmmakers (or characters metaphorically representing them) to the most reflexive pole o films’ use o “ree indirect” narration;76  among other orms o reerence to the lives, personas, and works o creators and collaborators. Reflexive “ormations” or simply “orms” are here understood as complex configurations o elements—representational, elements—representational, ormal, thematic—rather thematic—rather than structures lacking content. Tey are more akin to literary tropes tropes,, as ound in numerous guises across a number o works, genres, and styles, styl es, than to modes modes.. As means and maniestations o reflexive meaning in films, these orms are likewise distinct rom specific reflexive devices devices,, including those through which these the se orms work and which the th e latter may modiy. Te first point to notice is that different devices devic es may be part o the same reflexive orms in their instantiations in specific films. Second, with reerence back to the typologies we have surveyed and their principal ocuses, and as the terms “orm” and “ormation” are also intended to suggest, the specieslevel types proposed differ rom reflexive modes defined primarily in terms o their intended  unctio  unctions ns,, as in Stam’s and Fredericksen’s reception- and communication-centered communicationcentered classifications. Tus, in different films a given orm may be utilized to different purposes: ormal or political, intended to oreground ontological or ethical realities, generate humor or irony, comment upon cinematic so on—with on— withattention different effects.conventional Last, while some s ome o thepractices, orms thatand I wish to draw att ention toresultant speciy the representational and reerential content o reflexive eatures, they also implicate themes, structures, stru ctures, styles, styles , and interinter- and transmedial aspects aspec ts o works. ypically, these orms are integrated with conventional reflexive devices and with the other reflexive, or sometimes reflexive, eatures discussed earlier (such as allusion and sel-conscious sel-conscious presentation), to orm complex reerential wholes. A ew relevant examples illustrate these sorts o relations. Te amiliar film-withinfilm-within-thethe-film film figuration is instantiated in all o the orms identified. With respect to intermedial  and  and transtrans-art  art  reflexivity  reflexiv ity,, it ofen takes the alternative guise o a television broadcast or internet stream within the film (Te (Te ruman Show; Show; Demonlover ); ); the play within the film (Opening ( Opening Night ;  Ma  Marat/ rat/Sade Sade); ); the novel or screenplay within the film (Providence (Providence;;

 

Recursive Relections 107

 Adaptation  Adaptati on.), .), and so on.77  In creatorcreator-centered  centered   reflexivity, the film within the film telescopes connections between it, the work containing it, and the filmmaker’ss (or maker’ filmmaker’ maker’s) s) lie li e and/or and/or other works. Tus in Fellini’ Fellin i’s fictionalized fictionali zed cinematic autobiography Intervista Intervista (1987),  (1987), ramed as a documentary being made on the director, one o the multiple (fictional) films shown in the process o being made at Rome’s Cinecittà studios is a magical realist account o the young Fellini’s first experiences o the film industry; while the projection o sequences o his La Dolce Vita (1960) Vita (1960) on a makeshif screen in Anita Ekberg’s villa brings “the maestro’s” earlier and later style and career into the same experiential field or both the audience and Intervista Intervista’s ’s motley crew o fictional and real-lie real-lie personages watching it. In reflexivity’s  perormance perormance-based  based   maniestations, the film within the film draws special attention to diegetic and nondiegetic roles, casting, and perormances. In arantino’s Once Upon a ime . . . in Hollywood  and  and its partial inspiration, Rush Rush’’s Te Stunt Man, Man, the witnessed making o a Hollywood television televis ion series and a film, respectively respect ively,, affords the opportunity to explore the curious relationship between actors and their stand-ins stand-ins and stunt-doubles, stunt-doubles, within the narratives and in production practice. In Intervista Intervista,, the primary narrative ocus o La Dolce Vita’s Vita’s above-mentioned above-mentioned screening is its stars, Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni (here playing versions o themselves) nostalgically watching their younger selves. As also pertains to other reflexive devices, along with whatever ideas and eelings a film within the film structure  per se se may  may generate, its meaning and experience in given works are shaped by the higher-order higher-order orms o reflexivity enumerated, which (shades o Plato’s orms and their copies) films partake in concretely actualizing. As Intervista Intervista and  and Once Upon a ime … in Hollywood  also  also demonstrate, the orms o reflexivity that I have specified, and likely others, are requently combined in filmsand and experientially even in individual sequences. Anddynamics. their conjunctions create conceptually powerul reflexive Te epiphanic conclusion o Scorsese’s Raging Bull  is   is a clear instance o overlapping, or in contemporary parlance, networked, creatorcreator-centered  centered , perormance perormance-based  based , and allusive/intertextual  reflexivity,  reflexivity, as perceptual perceptually ly conveyed through a secondary screen device, also with echoes o a film within the film. Near the end o his method-acting method-acting tour de orce perormance as Jake La Motta, Robert De Niro sits in ront o a mirror in which the ormer boxer is rehearsing a set piece or his one-man one- man nightclub act prior to going on stage. o his own reflection, captured c aptured in a medium-close medium- close shot, La Motta / De Niro enacts ormer boxer erry’s (Marlon Brando’s) hal o the back-seat back-seat conver conver-sation with his brother Charlie C harlie in Kazin Kazin’’s On the Waterront , one o the most celebrated sequences, and method-inspired method-inspired perormances, in American

 

󰀱󰀰󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

cinema. De Niro here plays both La Motta and  La   La Motta playing Brando/ erry. Trough association, the pair o physically and emotionally wounded ormer boxer characters (La Motta and erry), the real Jake La Motta, whose story Raging Bull  tells,  tells, and the two screen s creen acting greats (De Niro and Brando) are brought together in a fiveold configuration o intertextual and perormance-based perormancebased reflexivity. Tis not only occurrs in the same extended sequence-shot and diegetic situation, but the same embedded image and sequence-shot “screen,” that is, the dressing room mirror, raming De Niro’s / La Motta’s ace and voice. Into this bravura, audiovisual mise en abîme construction, abîme construction, the thematic implications o which are ar too numerous to be detailed here, comes Scorsese, credited as the club club’’s stagehand. Glimpsed in the mirror and calling to mind his haunting appearance with De Niro’s ravis Bickle in axi Driver , he gives La Motta a five-minute five-minute warning that the show is about to start, just as the film, and its portrayal port rayal o La Motta, is about to end: with a dramatic ade to black, a titled quotation rom the Gospel o John, and a dedication to Scorsese’s film teacher. In an instance o creator-centered creator-centered reflexivity, the auteur, auteur, as an “intercessor” (in Deleuze D eleuze’’s term) within his own cinematic world, metaphorically announces the conclusion to his film and, thereby, urther underscores unders cores its intensely personal nature, as maniestly inormed by Scorsese’s customary themes, proessed religious belies, film school experience, and so on. On the whole a ar more reflexive film than Raging Bull , in Intervista Intervista (“an  (“an almost unequaled source or enunciative moves and reflexive fireworks”), the amount o reflexive orms and suborms, and their thei r combinational complexity, complexity, was exceptional, i not wholly unprecedented, in narrative cinema. 78 oday, however, such a dense, global, and ofen deliberately bewildering abundance o reflexive orms, modes, and devices throughout films, both comic and dramatic, is nces increasingly common. together with emphasis the affective valences vale o reflexivity, this isIndeed, one o the defining eatures o theon transgeneric cinematic phenomena I have elsewhere labeled twenty- first-century first-century “hyper-reflexivity.” “hyperreflexivity.” 79 Te orms o reflexiveness I have mentioned work through ormal, representational, medial, narrative, and perormative eatures and capacities o cinema. While not inherently reflexive, all al l o these aspects aspec ts o films have a powerul, latent potential in this direction that some works actualize. Although more specific in their empirical reerence than the theoretical postulation o general reflexive modes, again like literary tropes these orms resist the degree o systematization and inventory to which more concrete, sel-contained, sel-contained, and conventionalized reflexive devices are amenable. Nonetheless, there is much more to be said about them in theoretical terms and as exemplified in

 

Recursive Relections 109

particular films and bodies o work. Moreover, mapping the mutable dynamics between such orms and reflexive unctions, devices, and objects o reerence, including those recognized in existing classifications, may significantly aid in the analysis and interpretation o reflexive films. Finally, as appearing in works in other art orms and media, these types provide clear ocal points or comparing reflexiveness in cinema with that ound in novels, plays, paintings, comic books, new media productions, and so on. In affording common common variables by which to gauge differences, they may thereby reveal possible cinema- and moving-imagemoving-image-specific specific reflexive properties and effects. In sum, despite its greater utility in these respects, or the reasons indicated this classification, which requires urther elaboration, neither can nor should replace any o the typologies I have here briefly appraised. Rather, it is offered as one more systematic viewpoint rom which the conspicuously multiaceted, and—in and—in the ace o perpetual stylistic and technological change change in screen art and media—remarkably media—remarkably persistent phenomenon o cinematic reflexivity may be ramed  ramed and contemplated. Notes   1. David Bordwell, Maki Bordwell,  Making ng Meaning: Meaning: Inerence Inerence and Rhetoric in the In Interpreta terpretation tion o Cinema Cinema   (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11.   2. Tis chapter chapter is part part o a larger project project devoted to rethinking the theory and practice o cinematic reflexivity as the subject o a orthcoming monograph.   3. Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Jean-Luc Godard   (New York: York: Columbia Colu mbia University Press, 1992), xiv xiv..   4. Jean-Marc Jean-Marc Limoges, “Te Gradable Effects o Sel-Reflexivity Sel-Reflexivity on Aesthetic Illusion in Cinema, Cine ma,”” in Meta in Metareer reerence ence across Med Media ia,, ed. Werner Werner Wol (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 392. 3 92.   5. Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or Te Place o Film  Film  (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 19.   6. See also Daniel Yacavone, “Te Cognitive and Affective Dimensions o Cinematic Reflexivity,” in La uria umana (multilingual umana (multilingual quarterly o the theory and history o cinema), orthcoming 2021.   7. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), 27.   8. Patricia Waugh,  Meta  Metafiction: fiction: Te Teory and Practice o SelSel-Conscious Conscious Fiction  Fiction  (New York: York: Routledge, Routle dge, 1984), 1984 ), 3.   9. Long beore the sophisticated CGI effects that the Westworld   limited television series showcases, Crichton’s film holds the distinction o being the first eature film to contain entirely computer-generated computer-generated images.  10. 10. Based on these and similar considerations, considerations, some literary theorists also suggest a distinction between metafiction and “selsel-reflexive, reflexive,”” or “sel“sel-conscious, conscious,”” fiction, which wh ich Stam extends to cinema. See Stam, Reflexivity , 73–74, 73–74, 127–31. 127–31.

 

󰀱󰀱󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

 11. 11. Fernando Canet, e.g., e. g., suggests sugge sts that reflexivity reflexiv ity is a defining eature o “metacinema, “metacine ma,” as the larger category. Canet, “Metacinema as Cinematic Practice: A Proposal or Classification,” L’Atalante,, July–December L’Atalante July–December 2014, 24.  12. 12. Cerisuello quoted in David Roche, Ro che, Quentin arantino: Poetics and Politics o Cinematic  Meta  Me tafict fiction ion  (Jackson: University o Mississippi Mississippi Press, 2018), 8; Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, 55.  13. 13. Gérard Genette, Me Genette, Metalepse: De la figure a la fiction (Paris: fiction (Paris: Seuil, 2014).  14. 14. John Pier, “Metalepsis, “Metalepsis,”” in Te Living Handbook o Narratology   (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2011), http://wikis.sub.unihttp://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/ hamburg.de/lhn/ lhn/index.php/ index.php/Metalepsis, Metalepsis, no pagination.  15. 15. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method , trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 234–35, 234–35, quoted quot ed in Pier, Pie r, “Metale “Metalepsis. psis.””  16. 16. See, or instance, Jeff Toss, When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film, and Comics (Leiden: Comics (Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, Brill-Rodopi, 2015) and Dominic Lash, Te Cinema o Disorientation  Disorientation  (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University University Press, 2020).  17. 17. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality   (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 70. Accordingly Accordi ngly,, or Bordwell, B ordwell, a high degree o sel-consciousness sel-consciousness is a defining eature o what he posits as “art cinema” narration, in contradistinction with “classical [i.e. Hollywoodstyle] narration". See Narration in the Fiction Film  Film  (Madison: University o Wisconsin Press, 1985), 209–13. 209–13.  18. 18. On this basis b asis Metz distinguishes disti nguishes reflexivity re flexivity rom  rom a film’s narrative or stylistic st ylistic “commentary.” See Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, 133–34. 133–34.  19. 19. Stam, Reflexivity , xiv. On these points, see s ee Werner Werner Wol, “Metareerence across Media: Te Concept, Its ransmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions,” in Wol,  Metareeren  Meta reerence ce across across Media Media,, 60.  20. 20. Tis is not to suggest that a given g iven aspect o a film cannot have both significant reflexive and non-reflexive non-reflexive meaning. But to the main point here concerning mise en abîme, abîme, Wol helpully points out that “it would be difficult to argue that all  instances  instances o this device are at the same time metareerential , that all  reflections  reflections o (a part o) o ) a work or perormance [in a work] are also reflections on its mediality, structure and so orth” (my emphasis). Wol,  Metareeren  Meta reerence ce across across Media Media,, 60.  21. 21. Metz , Impersona Impersonall Enuncia Enunciation tion,, 55.  22. 22. Metz , Impersona Impersonall Enuncia Enunciation tion,, 55.      

́

      

̀

 23. 23. In Francois Jost, “Te “ Te Authorized Narrative,” Narrative,” in Te Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind , ed. Warren Buckland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995).  24. 24. Tis is in addition to recognizing that reflexive eatures may be more or less significant with respectt to a film’ respec film’s experience, experie nce, intentions, and interpretation, interpret ation, as a whole.  25. 25. Robert Stam, Film Teory: An Introduction  Introduction  (Oxord: Blackwell, 2000), 150; Stam, Reflexivity , xxi.  26. 26. Stam, Film Teory , 27–32. 27–32.  27. 27. Don Frederickse Frede ricksen, n, “Modes o Reflexive Refl exive Film, Fi lm,”” Quarterly Review o Film Studies 4, Studies 4, no. 3 (1979): 306.  28. 28. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Te ime Image, Image, trans. Hugh omlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: (Minneapo lis: University o Minnesota Press, 1989), 77– 77 –78.  29. 29. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film, Fi lm,”” 307. Partially Partia lly inverting Fredericks Fred ericksen en’’s dichotomy, dichotomy, or Caneton “cinematic reflexivity” is centered(“Metacinema on the “creative itsel,” and “filmic flexivity” film history and intertextuality as process Cinematic Practice,” 18). re-

 

Recursive Relections 111  30. 30.  31. 31.  32. 32.  33. 33.  34. 34.

Frederick sen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Fredericksen, Film,” 307. See Steven Shaviro, Shaviro, PostPost-cinematic cinematic Affect  (New  (New York: York: Zero Books, B ooks, 2010). 201 0). Bordwell, Mak Bordwell,  Making ing Mea Meaning  ning , 8–10, 8–10, 250–55. 250–55. Bordwell, Mak Bordwell,  Making ing Mea Meaning  ning , 252, 110–11. 110–11. Bordwell, Maki Bordwell,  Making ng Meaning  Meaning , 113. Categorizing objects o reflexive reerence according to Étienne Souriau’s posited seven levels o “filmic reality”—o reality”—o which the “diegetic” and the “profilmic” are the most cited—results cited—results in a classification similar to Bordwell’s.  35. 35. See Amy aubin, “Nerds on a Wire,” Sight and Sound   17, no. 5 (May 2007): 24–26; 24–26; Zara Dinnen, Te Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (New Culture  (New York: Columbia University Press), 2018. aubin thus places Zodiac Zodiac in  in a category o “films that contain metaphors or their own making” (24).  36. 36. See Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 40– Film, 40–47. 47.  37. 37. Warren Buckland, Te Cognitive Semiotics o Film  Film  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  38. 38. For an early account account o IMR, see Noël Burch, o the Distant Dist ant Observer: Observ er: Form and Meaning in  Japanese  Japa nese Cinema Cinema (Berkeley  (Berkeley:: University University o Caliornia Press, 1979).  39. 39. See Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression o Reality   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). From a perspective sympathetic to its wider interests and goals, D. N. Rodowick and Jacques Rancière, together with Metz, have analyzed various tensions and contradictions concerning the suggested role o reflexivity in the film theory theor y discourse in question on its own ideological terms, whereas Carl Plantinga (among others) has challenged it rom a cognitivist perspective. See, e.g., Rodowick, Te Crisis o Political Modernism (Berkeley: Modernism (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1995); Rancière, Te Emancipated Spectator , trans. Gregory Elliott El liott (New York: York: Verso, Verso, 2011); and Plantinga, Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics o Engagement   (New York: Oxord University Press, 2018). On the numerous problems entailed in theorizing medium awareness, and pronounced psychological immersion in cinematic fiction, in strictly st rictly binary, oppositional terms, see se e Yacavone Yacavone “Te Cogntive and Affective.”  40. 40. See, e.g., e.g ., Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Space,” Screen Screen 17,  17, no. 3 (1976): 68–112. 68–112.  41. 41. Nichols, Representing Reality , 64.  42. 42. See Peter Wollen, “Te wo AvantAvant-Gardes,” Gardes,” Studio International  190,  190, no. 978 (November– December 1975): 171–75; 171–75; and Dana Polan, “Brecht and the Politics o Sel-Reflexive Sel- Reflexive  43. 43.  44. 44.  45. 45.  46. 46.  47. 47.  48. 48.  49. 49.  50. 50.  51. 51.  52. 52.

Cinema,” Jumpp Cut  Cinema,” Jum Cut  17  17 (April 1978): 28–32. 28–32. Nichols, Representing Reality , 64. Nichols, Representing Reality , 64. Nichols, Representing Reality , 64. Noël Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image  Image  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 306. Stam, Reflexivity , xii, 9. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, 55. Enunciation, 55. Stam, Reflexivity , xi, 7. Nichols, Representing Reality , 69. Wol, “Metareerence “Metareere nce across Media,” 30. Wol, “Metareerence “Metareere nce across Media,” 30.

 53. 53. Wol, “Metareerence “Metareerenc e across Media,” Media,” 66–68. 66–68.

 

󰀱󰀱󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

 54. 54. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation,  Enunciation,  1– 1–24; 24; and Francesco Casetti “Face to Face” in Te Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, ed. Mind,  ed. Warren Buckland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 118–40. 118–40.  55. 55. See Metz, Impersonal ; and Daniel Yacavone, “Te Expressive Sign: Cinesemiotics, Enunciation and Screen Art,” in Te Anthem Handbook o Screen Teory , ed. Hunter Vaughn and om om Conley (London: (Lond on: Anthem Press, 2018), 20 18), 245– 245 –62.  56. 56. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” 305; Bordwell, Mak Bordwell, Making ing Mea Meaning  ning , 111 n. 29.  57. 57. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 308.  58. 58. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 308.  59. 59. Nichols, Representing Reality , 73.  60. 60. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 309–10. 309–10.  61. 61. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 309–10. 309–10.  62. 62. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 313.  63. 63. See, e.g., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Cinema, ed. Warren Warren Buckland Buckl and (Oxord: Blackwell, 2008); and Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh: Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).  64. 64. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 307.  65. 65. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 316.  66. 66. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 316.  67. 67. See Burch, o the Distant Observer  Obse rver ; and Bordwell, Narration Narration,, 285–89. 285–89.  68. 68. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 305.  69. 69. Frederic Fredericksen, ksen, “Modes o Reflexive Film,” Film,” 305.  70. 70. Laura Mulvey, “Rear Projection Projecti on and the Paradoxes o Hollywood Holly wood Realism, Re alism,”” in Teorizing World Cinema, Cinema, ed. Lucia Nagib, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Dudrah (London: IB auris, 2012), 207–20. 207–20.  71. 71. “Modes o Reflexive Film, Fil m,” 306.  72. 72. V. F. F. Perkins, “Where Is the World? Te Horizon o Events in Motion Pictures, Pictures,”” in Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis o Film, Film , ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 36–38, 36–38, 40 n. 6. See Plantinga, Screen Stories;; orben Grodal,  Moving Pictures: A New Teory o Film Genres, Fee Stories Feelings, lings, and Cognition   (New York: Oxord University Press, 1999). Within a cognitive psychologCognition ical ramework there has been some relevant empirical study o the effects on viewers o reflexive devices, such as breaking the ourth wall’s impact on narrative absorption and spectator emotion. See Daniela M. Schlütz, Daniel Possler, and Lucas Golombek, “ ‘Is He alking to Me?’ How Breaking the Fourth Wall Influences Enjoyment,” Projections Projections 14,  14, no. 12 (2020), 1–25. 1–25.  773. 3. For urther analysis o emotion generating and ampliying ampliying reflexivity in films, including a number o examples, examples , see Yacavone, “Cognit “Cognitive ive and Affective Dimensions. Dimensions.””  74. 74. My thanks to Livio Belloï or bringing these early e arly films’ similarities to BlowBlow-Up Up to  to my attention through his presentation at the reflexivity and metafiction conerence hosted by Université Blaise Pascal / Université Clermont-Ferrand, Clermont-Ferrand, in Auvergne, France, November 14, 2019.  75. 75. Elsewhere I discuss a number o distinct types o creatorcreator-centered  centered  and  and transtrans-art/ art/intermedial  intermedial   reflexivity work in von rier and Leth’s Te Reflexivity, Five Obstructions and Obstructions  and Clouzot’ Clouzot’s Te creation Mystery o Picasso. Picasso.atSee S ee Yacavone, “Doubled Visions: Refle xivity, Intermediality, Intermedial ity, ands Co-

 

Recursive Relections 113

 76. 76.

 77. 77.  78. 78.  79. 79.

in Te Mystery o Picasso and Picasso and Te Five Obstructions, Obstructions,” New Review o Film and elevision Studies 18, Studies  18, no. 4 (2020): 452–79. 452–79. See, e.g., e. g., Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Te “ Te ‘Cinema o Poetry Poetr y,’” ’” in Heretical Empiricism, Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 167–78; 167–78; and John Orr, Contemporary Cinema  Cinema  (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). See also Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, 85. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, Enunciation, 82. Yacavone, “Cognitive and Affective Affect ive Dimensions. Dimensions .”

 

5 Méliès, Astruc, Astruc, and Scorsese Authorship, Historiography, Historiography, and Videographic Styles Eleni Palis

When the title character in Hugo Hugo (2011,  (2011, dir dir.. Martin Scorsese) repairs his mysterious, inherited automaton, the machine springs to lie with a pen at the ready. Extreme close-ups close-ups catalog moving cogs and gears beore resting expectantly on the poised pen. Reaction shots o Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) provide an emotional barometer or the scene, prompting us to mirror their excitement when the th e automaton automaton moves and then crestallen conusion when the machine sputters and stops. Both on-screen on- screen characters and audience expect written prose because, in flashback, Hugo’s ather introduced introduce d the automaton saying, “Tis “ Tis one can write. w rite.” Te automaton disappoints these thes e authorial expectations expect ations when it alters afer only only a ew, ew, seemingly random marks on the page. p age. When the automaton magically moves again, Hugo exclaims with wit h relie, relie , “It’s not writing, it’s drawing!” Yet this th is is not entirely true. Te automaton draws and signs the synecdoche or Georges Méliès’s A Méliès’s  A rip to the Moon (1902): Moon (1902): the man in the moon with a spaceship piercing one eye. In recognition, recogn ition, Hugo exclaims, “It’s the movie movi e my ather saw!”— s aw!”—citing citing an inheritedd cultural memory, though neither Hugo nor Isabelle can identiy the inherite source text or writes filmmaker through image alone. Fortunately orpen them, theback automaton both writes both and draws. Afer a brie pause, the poised p oised clicks into motion and writes with wit h a flourish: flouri sh: “Georges Méliès.” Méliès.” Te central conflict here, inspiring hope, disappointment, and relie, rests on the technological capability or simultaneous word and image, or rather authorial signature and image. Narratively, the signature is the crucial clue, revealing the disgruntled toyshop owner, Isabelle’s Papa Georges, as silent cinema auteur Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley). Metacinematically, however, this moment hyper-literally hyper-literally approximates the cinematic apparatus in general and auteur theory rhetoric in particular. With varying rigor, popular and scholarly auteurist discourse ofen cite the “signature” as the auteur’s metaphorical mark. John . Caldwell summarizes this trope, remarking, “Authorship assumes that artist works are signed (explicitly, implicitly, or Eleni Palis, Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese  In:  In: Metacinema . Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0006 9780190095345.003.0006

 

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figuratively).”1 Here, Hugo and Isabelle take authorial identification via signature literally. French film theorist Alexandre Astruc is ofen credited with the idea o filmmaker as signatory si gnatory,, wielding the camera as a pen. pen . Astruc’s Astruc’s “Te Birth o a New Avant-Garde: Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo Caméra-Stylo,” ,” an early work in the French auteur theory canon, proclaims that “[the cinema] is gradually becoming a language . . . a orm in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. Tat is why I would like to call this new age o cinema the age o the caméra-stylo caméra-stylo (camera (camera-pen).” pen).”2 Astruc continues, demanding literal rather than metaphoric interpretation; inter pretation; he is not comparing the camera to a pen, pen , but rather, rather, “Direction is no n o longer a means o illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act o writing. . . . Te filmmaker/author filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen. pen.”3 In the scene described describe d earlier, the automat automaton on literally writes with writes with his pen p en to reveal both the film image and  its  its filmmaker/author filmmaker/ author.. Te pen pe n perormatively peror matively stands in or Méliès’s camera, mechanically reproducing the image and marking its author as signatory. Hugo at once metacinematically demonstrates Astruc’s caméracaméra-stylo stylo,, staunchly upholds Astruc’s gender pronouns (and emphasizes male lineage ar more than its literary source text), and, most troublingly, uses its metacinematic caméra-stylo camérastylo to  to present myopic and exclusionary exclusionar y historiography historio graphy.. Hugo’s Hugo ’s plot unolds along a “paper trail” o books, writing, drawings, and quotations, a journey through personal persona l and official official archives. Jennier Clement Cle ment and Christian B. Long diagnose “Hugo “Hugo’s ’s bibliophilia” evinced by the books, scholarship, and written words cluttering screen and narrative space. spa ce.4 More to my point, a search or authorial identity propels Hugo Hugo’s ’s bibliophilic preoccupations. Scorsese’ Scors ese’s narrative returns obsessively obs essively to authorial authoria l identity and ownership. Hugo is a young orphan living clandestinely in Gare Montparnasse in 1931, who supports hims el by himsel stealing trainstation stationtoyshop vendors.toIn Inrepair his spare time, he secrets mechanical parts romrom the train the mysterious automaton. Hugo’s deceased ather (Jude Law) “adopted” the automaton afer finding it abandoned in a museum. When Hugo finally repairs the automaton, its combination o word and image reveals Isabelle’s godather, “Papa Georges,” as silent cinema auteur Georges Méliès. With the help o riendly film historian and author René abard (Michael Stuhlbarg), the Film Academy recovers many Méliès films and restores Méliès to his rightul film-historical filmhistorical glory. Te film ends with the gala celebrating Méliès restored auteur status. Te automaton, automaton, producing words and images, provides one metacinematic met acinematic representation o the digital caméracaméra-stylo stylo.. Scorsese transposes Astruc’s caméra-stylo camérastylo   into the twenty-first twenty-first century, demonstrating digital cinema’s

 

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capacity or writing on film about film through film through what I call “film quotations,” or ragments o past film reappropriated and recontextualized into subsequent films. Film quotation as a label deliberately invokes the rich interdisciplinary discourse mapping literary strategies onto film—rom film—rom auteur theory and Astruc, to film semiotics, to adaptation theory, and beyond. Catherine Russell’s etymological definition o “archiveology” invokes similar linguistic metaphors, saying that archiveology “when applied to film practice, . . . reers to the use us e o the image i mage archive as a language.”5 Hugo Hugo’’s metacinematic met acinematic camérastylo writes stylo  writes with Méliès’s Méliès’s image archive, especially espe cially the manman-inin-thethe-moon moon synecdoche, and other early cinema ragments.6 Scorsese’s metacinematic film quotations constitute what Russell calls cal ls “critica “criticall cinephilia, cinephi lia,” when filmmakers filmma kers creatively use “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented.”7  Hugo Hugo’s ’s deserves interrogation or the way Scorsese “writes” with his metacinematic, “critically cinephilic” caméracaméra-stylo stylo.. His use o “archival material to produce knowledge” is neither politically neutral nor historiographically historiogra phically objective. Hugo marks Hugo  marks a departure rom Scorsese’s other metacinematic “essayistic” works. imothy Corrigan theorizes the “essayistic” as “a kind o encounter between the sel and the public domain . . . [that] acts out a perormative presentation sentatio n o sel as a kind o sel-negation sel- negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process o thinking through a public experience.”8 Corrigan highlights the personal, the in-progre in-progress, ss, the selsel-conscious conscious perormance o authorial subjectivity acting through essayistic work. Drew Morton delineates between the subjective subject ive essayistic mode and “videographic” style. Videographic works, which re-edit re-edit ootage rom preexisting films, ofen adding either on-screen on-screen text or explanatory voice-over, voice-over, to reinterpret, rerame, or reconsider the moving images under consideration. Discussing the evolving labels or digital videographic work (sometimes called videoexplains essays, audiovisual essays, and now ofen videographic criticism), Morton that he “[does] not view [his] expository videographic efforts (supported by research and vigorously structured) as being be ing particularly partic ularly subjective.” subjective.”9 Morton then turns to “Scorsese’s essayistic moments,” when characters offer selconscious, subjective commentary on on-screen on-screen action.10 For me, Hugo Hugo as  as a metacinematic treatise writes videographically rather than essayistically. Like Morton’s videographic work, Scorsese’s caméracaméra-stylo stylo is  is expository, exp ository, “supported “supported by research and vigorously structured, str uctured,” and wields wi elds enunciative authority authority.. Positioning videographic criticism as a digital maniestation o Astruc’s caméra-stylo camérastylo situates  situates Hugo Hugo within  within a larger conversation about new technologies and film studies. Christian Keathley connects connects Astruc and videographic criticism in “La “La Caméra-Stylo Caméra-Stylo:: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia,”

 

󰀱󰀱󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

published the same year that Hugo Hugo hit  hit theaters. Terein, Keathley argues that “due to developments in digital digita l technology, film scholars also find themselves the mselves in a position positi on to respond to Astruc’s Astruc’s call—using call—using new technologies technologie s to invent new audio- visual critical orms.”11 Tese critical orms now populate digital, scholarly orums, like the peer-reviewed peer-reviewed [in]ransition: Journal o Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.  Studies.  In [in]ransition [in]ransition’s ’s inaugural issue, Laura Mulvey transposed her written analysis o Gentlemen Preer Blondes (1953, Blondes (1953, dir. Howard Hawks) rom her book Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the  Moving  Mo ving Im Image age   into videographic criticism—demonstrating criticism—demonstrating the productive overlap and shared aims across textual and videographic film-scholarly film- scholarly “writing.” Central to both Mulvey’s book and videographic work is the concept o “delay.” Mulvey argues that delaying the film image is “the essential process behind beh ind textual analysis. analy sis.””12 Te analytical opportunity in i n “delaying “delaying the image, extracting it rom its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deerred meaning.”13 Hugo Hugo “  “delays” delays” a single, central ce ntral image—the image—the man in the moon with the rocket in his eye—subjecting eye—subjecting it to repeated scrutiny as central clue, as artistic signature, as synecdoche o A o A rip to the Moo Moonn.14 Reading Hugo Hugo’s ’s auteurist enunciation expands existing scholarship on Scorsese’s authorial signature. As Sandra Annett summarizes, “Te media has tended to position [Hugo [Hugo]] through auteurist discourses, working with or against Scorses Scorsesee’s signature style. style.””15 Guerric DeBona DeB ona fits this model, arguing that “Scorsese has lef his indelible imprint in Hugo Hugo..”16 Attention to Scorsese’s signature ultimately obscures Hugo Hugo’s ’s considerable metacinematic writing, which demonstrates the caméracaméra-stylo stylo’s ’s historiographic capabilities. Victoria Duckett comes closest when she hesitantly remarks, “Hugo “Hugo is  is largely a story about how we need to find and make sense o drawings and other visual 17

records. It’sismetacinematic also . . . perhaps aboutis precise re- writing re-writing o film history.” argue that Hugo Hugo’s writing isthe  precisely  ly  about   about rewriting film  Ihistory. As Janet Staiger argues, “filmmakers are involved in canon ormation. Tose films chosen to be reworked, alluded to, satirized”—here satirized”—here I add, quoted— “become privileged points o reerence, pulled out rom the rest o cinema’s predecessors. predecessor s. As ideal i deal athers, these select films are given homag homagee or rebelled against.”18 Staiger’s paternal invocation precisely fits the characterizations o patriarchal authority in both classical auteur criticism and Scorsese’s characterization o Méliès in Hugo Hugo.. Hugo Hugo participates  participates in canon ormation through metacinematic, quotational caméracaméra-stylo stylo   “writing” that wields totalizing,  videographic confidenc confidence, e, presentin presentingg film historical “acts “acts”” that argue or both Méliès’s and  Scorsese’s  Scorsese’s status as auteurs. Or, said another way, Scorsese evinces no “awareness o the politics o the chosen criteria” or o “a politics

 

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o eliminating power o some groups over others, o centering at the expense o marginalizing classes, genders, sexual orientations, or cultures.” 19  Such “awareness” or “politics” would demand authorial sel-consciousness, sel-consciousness, an authorial subjectivity and awareness more aligned with the essayistic, rather than videographic, mode. Tis chapter expands studies o Scorsese’s auteurism, analyzing Hugo Hugo’s ’s metacinematic demonstration o Astruc’s camérastylo and the canon-orma stylo and canon-ormation tion politics videographicall videographicallyy expressed. Following the man-inman-in-thethe-moon moon image across Hugo Hugo   reveals a pedagogy crafed through repetition. Scorsese’s metacinematic writing affirms Astruc’s claim that film is “a means o writing just as flexible fl exible and subtle as written w ritten language.”20  Te man in the moon’s progressive reveal—rom reveal—rom description to drawn sketch to still image to moving image—primes image—primes Scorsese’s audience to experience a rush o amiliarity when A when A rip rip to the Moon Moon is finally projected as a motion picture.21 Tus, Scorsese constructs constructs his  his filmic readers, preparing spectators with planted visual “memories” that abricate collective expectations that pay-off pay-off when the spaceship finally collides with the moon. Or, in Patricia White’s terms, Scorsese crafs an experience o “retrospectatorship,” a “film reception which is transormed by unconscious and conscious past  viewing experience.”22  In a totalizing way, Scorsese supplies “past viewing experience” via descriptions, sketches, and stills that prefigure and precede moving-image movingimage quotations rom A rom  A rip to the Moon Moon,, simulating re- viewing and rediscovery or Scorsese’s young audience, even i most had no pre vious experience o Méliès. More neariousl neariouslyy, the pleasurab pleasurable le amiliarity o “retrospectatorial” recognition coners cultural capital and canonical status upon Méliès by abricating collective collect ive cultural memory around him. Te first mention o A o A rip rip to the Moon invokes Moon invokes masculine genealogy and inherited spectatorial memory. Strolling through Paris with Isabelle, Hugo explains, “Myheather took He mewent to theinto movies allroom, the time. me screen about the first one ever saw. a dark and He on told a white he saw a rocket fly into the eye o the man in the moon. . . . Te movies were our special place. . . . Where we didn’t miss my mum so much.” Tis introduction to the man-inman-in-thethe-moon moon synecdoche fits larger film critical/theocritical/theoretical assumptions in which, as Duckett argues, the “moon-ace “moon- ace has largely come to represent the magic and illusion o film. [om] Gunning’s article “Te Cinema o Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde” Avant-Garde” is largely responsible or this. this.””23 Te correlation between film scholarship and narrative eature film quotation (here as description descripti on rather than appropriated appropriated ootage) emphasizes the caméracaméra-stylo stylo’s ’s capabilities or critical, theoretical enunciation. As Hugo speaks these lines, he and Isabelle cross a bridge over the Seine, visually evoking how the movies bridge the chasm between past

 

󰀱󰀲󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

and present, lie and death, ather and son. Hugo inherits cultural memory, remembering through his h is ather’s ather’s eyes, and thereby genders the movie theater the ater as a “speci “special al place” or ather and son. Tis gendering extends to all film fi lm institutional spaces in Hugo. Hugo. As  As a respite rom “miss[ing] mum,” Hugo Hugo’s ’s cinema is a boys’ club o escapism and masculine camaraderie—almost camaraderie— almost predicated on mother’s absence. In contrast, Brian Selznick’s novel keeps Hugo’s cinematic memories quiet. Selznick’ S elznick’ss Hugo silently thinks “about the times he had h ad gone to the movies with Father.”24 Later, talking with Isabelle “made Hugo remember something Father had once told him, about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new.” 25 No mention o “special” male bonding or maternal absence. Scorsese’s emphasis on masculinity and paternity fits with the tone o Astruc’s polemic, as encapsulated in the statement: “Te filmmaker/author filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his his pen. pe n.”26 Te traditional Romantic filmmaker/author filmmaker/author wields masculine pronouns. Scorsese emphasizes masculine gendered art/artistry art/artistry by literally and metaphorically giving Hugo the keys—or keys—or rather, the power to break in—to in—to the movie theater. In the novel, Isabelle beckons, “Follow me,” defly picks the lock, and “then [holds] the door open or Hugo.”27  In contrast, Scorsese’s Hugo picks the lock and shrugs off Isabelle’s trepidation (“We could get into trouble!”). Allowing Hugo to “break in” casts the cinema as a male dominated space and metacinematically reflects Scorsese’s movie brat past “breaking into” post-classical post-classical Hollywood. Te theater’s controlling masculinity maniests again in the t he angry theater the ater manager, manager, who discovers and expels exp els Hugo and Isabelle. Masculine oversight echoes across the film’s institutional spaces: the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen) patrols the train station; Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee) imperiously surveils the bookstore in aggrandizing low angle; Rin-theenethe-moon abard abard access to the archive. Te synecdochic man-Rene man-inmooncontrols image next appe appears ars in the automaton’ automaton’s pen-andpenand-ink ink drawing, described at the outset, and continues metacinematic contemplation o the cinematic apparatus while upholding its consistent masculine gendering. Te caméracaméra-stylo stylo,, represented as a pen drawing the cinematic image, also reflects Méliès’s own auteurist pronouncements. o publicize the gala gal a in his honor, Méliès published a theory theor y o film authorship in 1929, almost twenty years beore the Cahiers du cinema writers’ cinema writers’ polit  politique ique des auteurs,, saying, auteurs The author must know how to work out everything ever ything by himsel himse l on paper, and consequently he must be the author [scriptwriter], director, designer, and ofen an actor i he wants to obtain a uniied whole. The person who devises the scene ought to

 

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese 121 direct, or it is absolutely impossible to make it succeed i ten different people get involved.28

Conceptualizing the film author as director, scriptwriter, designer, and actor, Méliès anticipates Astruc’s claim that “the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather, rather, that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, or in this kind o filmmaking the distinction between author and director director loses all meaning. . .29. Te filmmaker/author filmmaker/ author writes with his camera as a writer writes wr ites with his pen. pen.””  For Méliès and Astruc, the t he auteur’s auteur’s totalizing control blurs conventionally distinct dist inct production roles. Méliès’ emphatic individualism, “work[ing] out everything by himsel on paper,” and the textual language o paper and pen invoke the classical,l, Romantic author that Astruc’ classica Astru c’s caméracaméra-stylo stylo uses  uses nineteen ninete en years later. later. Te automaton scene’s pacing also signifies metacinematically. When the automaton initially grinds to lie, making indecipherable markings on the page, Hugo sinks into despair. Just when Hugo loses hope, the th e automaton automaton unexpectunexpe ctedly continues to draw, draw, contextualizing the previously previ ously illegible illegi ble markings. Tis two-step twostep process creates dramatic tension and, more importantly, reflects the temporality and construction o cinematic writing; like these pen-andpen-and-ink ink markings, ideas ide as written on film rely on assemblage, on the joining o disparate images to create cumulative meaning. Echoing the rhetorically rh etorically masculine mas culine author in Astruc’s Astruc’s and Méliès’s Méliès’s writing, writing , the automaton wields a “paternally inused” pen. 30 Te automaton sutures paternal lineage across an odd interplay o abandonment and adoption: like a metaphoric mechanical son, Méliès creates and then abandons the automaton, and then th en Hugo’ Hugo’s ather athe r adopts it. Hugo’ Hugo’s ather  ather introduces introduce s the th e automaton, saying, “I ound him hi m abandoned in the attic at the museum, mus eum,” immediately immedi ately gendering the inanimate object.31 Later, when Hugo expects the automaton to transmit a message rom stares his ather athe , Isabelle receiveswriting/drawing a paternal paterna l message In strange kinship, Isabelle at rthe automaton’s writing/ drawing andtoo. wonders, “Why would your ather’s machine write Papa Georges’s name?” Te unaccountable association o paternal signifiers, the moon image, and the signature creates something like shared paternity between Isabelle and Hugo. Tis oreshadows their official kinship by film’s end, when Méliès adopts Hugo, making Isabelle and Hugo adoptive siblings. Oddly, Hugo’s happyending adoption achieves sole male parentage. Afer the station inspector apprehends Hugo and the automaton (despite Hugo’s offensive, ableist appeal to the inspector), Méliès appears just in time, bellowing, “Monsieur! Tis child belongs bel ongs to me!” Tis speech act ac t constitutes Méliès’s unilateral decidec ision to adopt Hugo, without any input rom or consideration consid eration o Méliès’s Méliès’s wie, 32 “Mama Jeanne” (Helen McCrory).   Tus, Méliès achieves asexual, solely

 

󰀱󰀲󰀲  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

male reproduction. Méliès embraces his progeny, cradling the automaton in one hand and Hugo in the t he other. Méliès’s own goddaughter godd aughter and ward, Isabelle, stands awkwardly behind, the embodiment embodi ment o an aferthought. aferthought. Following the man-inman-in-thethe-moon moon’’s progressive reveal, rom  rom spoken descripdes cription to sketch (and eventually to stills, moving image, and then 3D rendering), crafs Hugo Hugo’s ’s deliberate pedagogy. With lesson-plan lesson-plan orchestration, Scorsese shepherds his h is audience to increasing amiliarity, approximating approximating a student’ stude nt’s re viewing study study tactic. Metacin Metacinematicall ematicallyy, moving moving rom rom spoken spoken word word to to sketch sketch to still to moving image reflects the progressive techno-historical techno-historical capab capabilities ilities or quoting film on film in general, and across Scorsese’s oeuvre in particular. Scorsese integrates film quotation into almost all his films. His directorial debut, Who’s Tat Knocking at My Door  (1967)  (1967) begins this career-long career-long preoccupation and anticipates Hugo Hugo’s ’s quotational aesthetics. Produced beore Scorsese had industry contacts, lawyers, and budgetary capability to license film quotations, Who’s Tat Knocking  Knocking  resorts  resorts to describing Te Searchers  Searchers  (1956, dir. John John Ford).33 Protagonist J. R. (Harvey Keitel, in his first film role) chats up a girl (Zina Bethune, named only “Girl”) holding a “French movie magazine,” invoking i nvoking but not naming Cahiers du cinema, cinema, the publication that 34 popularizedd auteur theory. popularize Scorsese continues continues his metacinema metacinematic tic film pedagogy with a glimpse inside an unofficial, early film archive. Isabelle and Hugo take the automaton’ automaton’s signed sig ned sketch to the Méliès household, seeking the auteur behind the signature, and while hiding in a bedroom, they discover an armoire’s secret compartment. When Isabelle topples rom a chair, the compartment bursts open and a swarm o paper erupts. Te explosion both showcases digital 3D capab capabilities, ilities, as papers fly toward the viewer (no such explosion appears in the Selznick text), and models proto-cinematic, proto-cinematic, paper-andpaper-and-ink ink toys: the flipbook and the thaumatrope. Tese optical games,inpopular decades beoreocinema, combine drawn images and paper motion in to the create the illusion movement. Te thaumatrope combines images drawn on the ront and back o a card by alternating rapidly between the two sides (ofen by twirling a string). One o Méliès’s fluttering pages somersaults, end over end, and at first, like the thaumatrope, each flip o the page makes the drawn image move. But enhanced by 3D, the winged girl on the first side magically becomes a butterfly and takes flight. Integrating digital and proto-cinematic technologies te chnologies positions 3D within a longer history o technological and aesthetic innovation.35 Metacinematically, Scorsese models proto-cinematic proto-cinematic toys to a young audience o digital natives. Yet Scorsese’ Scors ese’s most pronounced change in adapting this scene s cene rom  rom novel to film concerns gender gende r. In the novel, “Within moments [o the paper explosion] e xplosion]

 

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese 123

the bedroom door flew open. ‘Isabelle!’ yelled her godmother as she ran to the girl.”36 Tis scene centers emale interaction, expressing the action between “godmother  “god mother ,” and “girl. girl.”” In the film, fi lm, however, this scene hinges on “ather-son” “ather-son” betrayal. Afer Méliès’s angry outburst (the same in the novel), ripping and crumpling the strewn sketches, he points and speaks directly to Hugo in low, wounded tones, saying, “I trusted tru sted you. Tis is how you thank me?” From a medium shot o Méliès, the reverse shot rames r ames Hugo in close-up. close- up. What began as an interaction among our people shrinks to one-onone-on-one one conrontation. Te ocus on Hugo is surprising. surpris ing. Shouldn’t Shouldn’t Méliès’s greater trust, tr ust, and thus greater g reater betrayal, rest with Isabelle? Instead, Mama Jeanne and Isabelle ade, visually and metaphorically, into the background. A subsequent long shot positions Hugo and Méliès closest to one another, while Isabelle stands behind Hugo and Mama Jeanne sits timidly behind Méliès. Physically and metaphorically, Scorsese sidelines the women, oregrounding conflict in masculine lineage and archive. Afer this altercation, Hugo collides with Monsieur Labisse, the bookseller, who leads Hugo to an “official” archival space: the Film Academy Library. Here, Hugo Hugo’s ’s metacinematic engagement with Astruc’s caméracaméra-stylo stylo   and “filmic writing” comes to greatest ruition. Paired with an extreme long establishing shot, Labisse’s imperious drawl introduces the space, “Te Film Academy Library,” conveying gravitas, solemnity, “authority,” and masculinity, repeating and emphasizing each word. Whereas in the novel, Labisse simply suggests, “You might have more luck [finding books on early cinema] at the Film Academy library,” in Scorsese’s adaptation, Labisse provides a  voice-o voiceo-God God sound-bridge: sound-bridge: “You’ll find all you need to know about movies there.”37 Te inflated, totalizing claim o completeness is striking, even or an auteur as sel-aggrandizing sel-aggrandizing as Scorsese. As Janet Staiger argues, “Claims or universality disguises or achieving or suppressing through the power oare canonic discourse optionaluniormity, value systems. . . . It is a politics o power.”38 Te Film Library sequence demonstrates Scorsese’s auteurist politics o power, written with a metacinematic caméracaméra-stylo stylo.. Scorsese’s library conveys a rustratingly misleading “illusion o consensus.”39 Labisse’s voice-over voice-over guides Hugo and Isabelle through the library, intoning, as i rom  rom memory, memory, “second “second level, leve l, ourth row, row, section secti on three, and, yes, top shel.” Unlike the novel’s parallel scene, in which a riend “helped Hugo navigate the card catalogue so he could find the book he needed,” resources in Scorsese’s library seem accessible only through inherited or oddly wordo-mouth omouth inormation, rather than any organizational system.40  Labisse’s  voice-over  voiceover continues, intoning book title, t itle, author, author, and subtitle: “Te “Te Invention o Dreams  Dreams  by Rene abard, Te Story o the First Movies.” Movies.” Authorship is

 

󰀱󰀲󰀴  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

central: inserted between title and subtitle. Tis single volume, offering “the story o the first movies,” ulfills Labisse’s problematic claim to contain “all you need to know” and ulfills Astruc’s aspirational caméracaméra-stylo stylo with  with hyperliteral accuracy—this accuracy—this paper book integrates film quotation within its pages, demanding to be read as historiogr historiographic aphic film writing . Scorsesee’s metacinematic Scorses metaci nematic book o filmic o filmic writing on film film springs rom a reallie childhood film book. In “Introduction to Modern Library: Te Movies,” Scorsese explains, “When as a small boy I first ell in love with the movies, I discovered a book bo ok by Deems aylor aylor entitled A entitled A Pictorial Pictorial His History tory o the Movies Movies   at our local branch o the New York Public Library. It was the only film book that I knew about, and I borrowed it time and time again. . . . It was the first course in my film education.”41 While a “first course” o film study suggests that this book was only Scorsese’s starting point, Hugo Hugo perorms  perorms Scorsese’s boyhood mistake by positioning this single volume as “the only film book” Hugo/Hugo Hugo/ Hugo knows.  knows. Even Deems aylor acknowledges his limitations, introducing the book with “no pretense o being a critical survey, nor is it, except in the most summary sense, a history o the movies . . . the series is inevitably incomplete and ar rom detailed.”42 However, its cinematic corollary, Te Invention o Dreams, Dreams, makes no such disclosure, and conversely, claims to contain “all you need to know about the movies. movies.”” Scorsese’s real-lie real-lie Pictorial History   also sutures film writing and authorial signature. Scorsese explains that Pictorial History   spent years out o print, and he eventually ound a copy previously owned by child actor Roddy McDowall, who would take it on the set and get the cast and crew to sign the stills o the movies on which they had worked. The How Green Was My Valley  page,   page, or instance, was eventually signed by John Ford, Maureen O’Hara, and Walter Pidgeon. This treasure book awoke in me the desire to collect as many ilm books as possible. There are one thousand or so books in my library, covering the past one hundred years o movie history, which I use constantly or inormation and inspiration. 43

Scorses e describes Scorsese desc ribes in prose what w hat Hugo’ Hugo’s automaton draws on paper, paper, a decade beore Hugo Hugo   was made. Te aylor volume becomes a “treasure book” by combining film image and signature. Te signature’s auratic power mimics the largely bygone autograph book collections o celebrity signatures (replaced by the “selfie” visual record o sel and celebrity). For Scorsese, the autograph-filmautographfilm-book book awakens a voracious “desire to collect as many film books as possible,” a personal archive o stills and signatures, words and images—or images— or,, iterations o the automa automaton ton’’s prototype: visual sign and authorial

 

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese 125

inscription. For Scorsese, then, the greatest inspiration springs rom the imbrication o film text and authorial trace. As Hugo flips through the Invention o Dreams, Dreams, film stills like those in A in  A Pictorial History  spring  spring to lie as ull-screen ull-screen film quota quotations, tions, perorming a deceptively inaccurate pedagogical pedagog ical historiography historiogr aphy.. Te sequence begins with Te  Arrival o a rai rainn at at La Ciot Ciotat at Sta Station tion (1895,  (1895, dir. Auguste and Louis Lumière). In a smoothly edited sequence, the paper-andpaper-and-ink ink still becomes a quotation, quotation, and the camera pulls back to reveal the diegetic, 1895-audience’s 1895- audience’s apocryphal “group flinch” as the train approaches the camera; as Duckett remarks, Scorsese “enact[s] a film historical myth.”44  Méliès’s reminiscing flashback later dramatizes this cinema legend a second time, providing another pedagogy o repetition, teaching one o the most well-worn well- worn cinema legends. Next we see several film quotations, including W. K. L. Dickson’s early sound test, a boxing match, Te May-Irwin May-Irwin Kiss (1896, Kiss (1896, Edison, dir. William Heise), and the final, jarring head-on head-on shot rom Te Great rain rain Robbery  Robber y  (1903,  (1903, dir di r. Edwin S. Porter)—the Porter)—the latter two also appear in the first firs t pages o A o A Pictorial His History  tory .45  While these quotations appear and disappear quickly, pacing deliberately slows on a tinted extreme ex treme long shot rom D. W. W. Griffith’s $2 million Intolerance Intolerance   (1916) set. Scorsese urther underscores the Griffith quotation by immediately inserting inserti ng a reverse shot o the book’ bo ok’s “spectators” Hugo Hugo and Isabelle who, wh o, delighted and engrossed, engross ed, marvel “Wow!” “Wow!” in unison. Griffith’’s privileged Griffith privi leged place in montage reflects similar adulation a dulation in Scorsese’ Sc orsese’ss written prose—and prose—and many other canon-orming canon-orming critics. Writing in 2015, Scorsese credits Griffith and Intolerance Intolerance   with “cross-cut[s] “cross-cut[s] through time, something that had never been done beore. [Griffith] tied tie d together images not or narrative purposes but to illustrate a thesis.”46 Scorsese’s language echoes Astruc’s, attributing literary (specifically, “thesis”-driven) “thesis”-driven) enunciation into Griffith’s filmmaking. Scorsese rehearses whatfilms Janetand Staiger calls canonical “sloppy thinking,” in which “Griffith’s eature contemporary publicity (or which he was in part responsible) led some writers to the conclusion that he was first to achieve a number o technical innovations and, ollowing that, that he was the only one and thus influenced the rest o the industry.” 47  While Staiger roundly reutes such claims, Scorsese’s “sloppy thinking,” perpetuated more than twenty-six twenty-six years afer Staiger’s writing, upholds an exclusionary, inaccurate, prejudicial canon. Falsely positioning Griffith as a ather o “thesis”-driven “thesis”-driven filmic writing fits Scorsese’s myopic obsession with white masculine authorship. Alice Guy-Blaché’s Guy-Blaché’s magical gags, Lois Weber’s splitscreen cinematography, achieving simultaneity across disparate locations in Suspense (1913, Suspense  (1913, three years beore Intolerance Intolerance), ), or Oscar Micheaux’s racially revisionist cross-cutting cross-cutting in Wi Within thin Our Gates Gates (1920)  (1920) has h as no place in Scorsese’ S corsese’ss

 

󰀱󰀲󰀶  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

historiogr aphy.. I risk belaboring this point historiography p oint because Hugo Hugo continues  continues to be used as a pedagogical tool , co-opting/ co-opting/ampliying ampliying Scorsese’s metacinematic pedagogy or students in high school and college film studies classrooms. Only by interrogating the caméracaméra-stylo stylo’s ’s uses, and the prejudices perpetuated therein, can Hugo Hugo render  render truly thoughtul thoughtu l students o film history and the film canons being upheld. Hugo and Isabelle continue “reading” the quotation-filled, quotation- filled, metacinematic text, and the sequence accelerates into a montage o flipping pages and dizzying silent cinema survey quotations. A page turn prompts a ull-screen ull-screen film quotation o Te General  (1926,  (1926, dir. Buster Keaton). Another page turn, and Louise Brooks springs to lie. Intercut with quotation and book pages, Hugo’s upturned, awed ace appears, illuminated in flickering projector light (Isabelle temporarily orgotten). Montage integrates the reading and viewing experience into a hybrid reader-spectator reader-spectator or the metacinematic film. Te montage crescendos to its culmination, the printed film-still film- still o the “man in the moon.” Emphasized with jarring stillness, Méliès’s still is the pinnacle among preceding legends, conerring unequivocal auteurist pedigree. Crucially, Selznick’ss novel does not integrate film quotation into Selznick’ i nto book ormat. Te many stills rom  rom Méliès Méliès and others appear on discrete, ull pages, pages , held apart rom the novel’s drawn diegesis. diege sis. Scorsese’ S corsese’ss adaptive addition add ition demonstrates the th e camérastylo’s stylo ’s capacity to meld literary orm and film quotation into metacinematic historiography. Accepting Te Invention o Dreams  Dreams  as “all you need to know about the movies” teaches a deceptively limited film history. As Isabelle reads aloud, “Te filmmaker Georges Méliès was one o the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams.” However, However, “I the film fi lm became the main manipmanip ulator o the American Ameri can dream,” Ralph Ellison E llison writes, wr ites, “or Negroes that dream 48

contained strong dose o(and suchMéliès’s) stuff as nightmares arehistory made depends o.”  Ellison reminds usathat Scorsese’s dream o film prooundly upon the dreamer’s identity and unconscious. Te metacinematic book’s claims totalizing completeness (containing “all you need to know”) and access (the author appears afer this montage, welcoming Hugo and Isabelle to his Méliès archive) and imagines a history histor y that orgets the problems o historiography, archive, and inclusion to which Ellison alludes. Scorsese conveniently flips past the decades o exclusion, excision, and caricature perpetuated against the raced, gendered, classed, and abled Other, o silent cinema’’s requent cinema reque nt orays into blackace, minstrelsy, mi nstrelsy, and whitewashing, and o the film medium’s technological prejudices—especially prejudices—especially white-balancing white-balancing or Caucasian skin tones. As Richard Dyer notes, “All technologies are at once technical in the most limited sense (to do with their material properties and

 

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese 127

unctioning) and also always social (economic, cultural, ideological),” and photographic media were “developed with white people pe ople in mind and habitual use and instruction instruc tion continue in the same vein, so much so that photographing non-white nonwhite people is typically construed as a problem.” 49  Scorsese avoids this “problem” by including only white actors and quoting only white, male filmmakers. Scorsese’s metacinematic, videographic claims clash with recent works like the Women Film Pioneers Project, a collaborative digital archive that “eatures silent-era silent-era producers, directors, co-directors, co-directors, scenario writers, scenario editors, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, and more to make the point that they [women film pioneers] were not just actresses.”50  Tis evolving, multiauthored work emphasizes emale film pioneers’ multiplicity and multiaceted multiace ted work and proves, or me, that the most accurate volume o film-quotational film-quotational writing is that which dramatizes the impossibility o compiling “all you need to know about movies” in any single volume—or volume—or film. Scorsese’s metacinematic book provides intellectual, visual, and physical access to the film archive. As i summoned by the visual “reading” experience, experie nce, the author appears. Fittingly, abard is revealed as the author by the insideback-cover backcover author photograph. As a white man, he looks the part. When Hugo and Isabelle insist that Méliès is alive and well, contrary to the book’s claims, abard invites them to his private archive. Te archive doors open as i by magic, creaking but untouched. abard’s archive, which has no corollary scene in the novel, models Scorsese’s own archival interests, and abard  ventriloquizes Scorsese Scorsese’’s pedagogical tone througho throughout, ut, showca showcasing sing Méliès Méliès’’s cameras, handbills, and photographs. At one point, abard exclaims, “Tis is one o his actual  cameras!”   cameras!” Scorsese’s videographic explication o Méliès and his works showcases Méliès’s caméracaméra-stylo stylo implements.  implements. Further, abard as filmand scholar emphasizes Hugo’51’s videographic Hugo videogr aphic investment in research, pedagogy, enunci enunciative ative authority. Finally, A Finally,  A rip to the Moon Moon   appears in moving image quotations during an at-home at-home screening, bookended between two flashback sequences—first sequences—first through abard’s memory and then through Méliès’s—providing Méliès’s—providing pedagogical contextualization and production history or the  A rip to the Moo Moonn  quotation. abard’s reminiscence introduces Méliès’s glass studio, elaborate set-work, setwork, and layered rames, which explicate and enrich the A the  A rip to the  Moon   quotations about to unold. Méliès’s flashback details his “substitu Moon tion trick” strategies, his background in magic, and his development o mechanical and cinematographic special effects. As Kyle Meikle points out, the substitution trick, ollowed by Méliès cutting and splicing rames around the trick, tr ick, is “redundant—Méliès’ trick is i s complete when wh en he asks the t he actors

 

󰀱󰀲󰀸  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

to step out o the rame and then resumes filming—but filming—but it is intentionally redundant. Scorsese seeks to show us how film, in its earliest incarnations (and or much o the twentieth century) was film, was material, was tactile.” 52 Tis intentional redundancy fits Scorsese’s pedagogical aims throughout, as these flashbacks unction like metacinematic, instructional “lessons.” Ten the  videographic, pedagogical tone gives way to an oddly gendered screening space. abard abard convincing Mama Jeanne to screen scree n A rip rip  to the Moon diverges Moon diverges markedly rom the novel. In the source text, curiosity prompts Mama Jeanne to permit the screening, as “her eyes shimmered momentarily with curiosity. At least that’s what Hugo thought he saw . . . then she shook her head and said, ‘Be quick with it.’ ”53 In Scorsese’ Scors ese’s version, versi on, abard abard makes two significant sign ificant gendered appeals. Te first, as in the novel, articulates Hugo Hugo’s ’s auteurist reverence, as abard acknowledges “the proound debt o gratitude I owe your husband . . . your husband is a very great artist.” When this auteurist appeal does not sway Mama Jeanne, abard continues, “I do hope you’ll orgive me or saying, you are as lovely now as you were in the movies.” Mama Jeanne warmly demurs, smiling more widely than ever beore and saying, “It was a long time ago, children. It was another time. And I was another person.” abard replies, “Would you like to meet her again?” and then, emphatically, “We have a film.” In short, abard alienates Mama Jeanne’s past and present selves and articulates the paradigm that still warps much film representation: men command the artist’ artist’ss gaze, women are gazed gaze d upon. Tis moment upholds Laura Mulvey’s diagnosis o “the patriarchal order in which we are caught” and which classical Hollywood film perpetuates, in which the male gaze looks upon the white emale subject.54 Mulvey explains a gendered split between spectacle and narrative, saying, “Te man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative o power in a urther sense:to asneutralize the bearerthe o extra-diegetic the look o thetendencies spectator,represented transerringbyit woman behind the screen extradiegetic as spectacle.”55  abard appeals to Mama Jeanne as spectacle, persuading her by invoking her power as an image—rather image—rather than her husband’s authorial status. Tough Mama Jeanne contributes a ew pedagogical asides, including brie explanation o rame-byrame-by-rame rame tinting tinti ng and the star system s ystem (“We (“We weren’t movie stars like they have today”), the screening emphasizes her scopophilic scopophi lic allure. wice, wice, the screening scre ening demonstrates “extra“extra-diegetic diegetic tendencies” o “woman as spectacle” by interrupting Méliès’s action or two (abricated) close-ups close-ups o Mama Jeanne as a emale constellation presiding over the sleeping lunar explorers.56 Te inserted close-ups close-ups demonstrate Mulvey’s claim that “the presence o woman . . . tends to work against the development o a story line, to reeze the flow o action in moments o erotic contemplation.” 57 

 

Méliès, Astruc, and Scorsese 129

Te close-ups close-ups also highlight Scorsese’s addition to Méliès’s mise en scene, re vealing a used authorshi authorship. p. When Méliès appear appearss in the living room at the end o the screening (much like abard, the author magically appearing just afer “reading” his text), Méliès answers Isabelle’s breathless admiration o Mama Jeanne (“You (“You were beautiul”), beauti ul”), saying, “She still is. i s.” Te auteur treats his star st ar as “spectacle,” even in lie, enacting the patriarchal, classical cinema gendering that Mulvey describes in i n prose. No such exchange appears in the novel. Te diegetic A diegetic  A rip to the Moo Moonn  screening, eaturing the newly restored 2011 print, uses silent and post-classical post- classical film aesthetics.58 Te cutaways to Mama Jeanne are only two o Scorsese’s many manipulations o the A the  A rip rip to the Moon quotation. Moon quotation. Perhaps ironic or the archivist-auteur, archivist- auteur, in the restored rip quotation, rip  quotation, Martin Bonnard argues, “Martin Scorsese doesn’t ollow the rules o film preservation, reely altering the archival material in Hugo Hugo..”59  Scorsese both expands and collapses rip rip,, beginning the quotation with the rocket being loaded into the canon—excising canon—excising more than five minutes rom the film opening, cutting thirty seconds rom lifoff—and lifoff— and then expands the synecdochical man-inman-in-thethe-moon moon moment by intercutting Hugo’s awestruck reaction without losing any screen time rom the original. In all, Scorsese condenses an eleven-andeleven-and-aa-halhal-minute minute short film into roughly sixtythree seconds o on-screen on-screen quotation. In other words, Scorsese perorms a metacinematic “translation” o silent cinema or easier “reading” by contemporary audiences. Scorses Scorsesee’s “translation” “translation” ollows David Bordwell’ B ordwell’s claim that  visual storytelling “hasn’t “hasn’t undamen  undamentally tally altered since the studio days days”” and that “new style amounts to an intensification intensification o  o established est ablished techniques. tech niques.””60 Tis intensification includes “interrelated tactics,” including “more rapid editing” and “closer ramings,” which Scorsese uses liberally on the rip rip quotation.  quotation.61  Bordwell remarks that “the triumph o intensified continuity reminds us that 62

as styles change so do viewing skills.”  Or as so Astruc might say, as (caméra(Scorsese camérastylo penmanship?) stylo  penmanship?) enunciative styles change, do “reading skills.” “intensifies” Méliès or contemporary “readers” through selective quotation, choosing the flashiest, most ast ast-paced paced moments o A o A rip rip to the the Moon Moon, leaving no room or the exploratory or subjective-input subjective-input o essayistic film. Rather, Scorsese quotes deliberately delibe rately and strategically, strategically, crafing a moving image argument as orceully written as any auteurist diatribe in prose. Scorsese concludes his metacinematic auteur-theory auteur-theory argument by conerring the “authority” and canonicity o the “auteur” label: dramatizing the 1929 gala in Méliès’s honor. abard provides a sound bridge rom the maleadoption scene to the gala, saying, “I am proud to welcome you to this gala,” addressing a diegetic and extradiegetic “you,” over an iris-in iris-in on the manin-theinthe-moon’s moon’s single eye. Te moon-eye moon-eye image hangs on the stage curtain,

 

󰀱󰀳󰀰  Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation

dwarfing abard and Méliès in enormous reproduction, like a visual proo o auteurist genius. By now, Scorsese’s quoting caméracaméra-stylo stylo has  has so exhaustively cataloged the image across description, sketch, and moving image that the man in the moon communicates the authorial signature that previously accompanied it in i n the automaton scene. Like Li ke Peter Wollen Wollen’’s description des cription o the t he auteur critic’s metaphoric task, Scorsese’s metacinematic writing “deciphers” authorial signature, modeling the discovery o “a hard core o basic and ofen recondite motis.”63 Scorsese’s caméracaméra-stylo stylo assembles  assembles and then strategically, progressively reveals Méliès’ auteurism, modelling the auteur-critic’s auteur- critic’s experience o “decipherme “decipherment” nt” that culminates in this final fin al scene, conerring cone rring Méliès’s Méliès’s authorial status. During Méliès’s address to the crowd, an extreme long shot catalogs the applauding auditorium and Méliès dwared by the enormous man in the moon—evoking moon— evoking the “KANE” and Charles Foster Kane image that dwar Orson Welles during Citizen Kane’s Kane’s (1941) political rally scene. Further, Citizen Kane’s Kane’s rally marks the heights o Kane’s political powers in his quest, as Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton) says, to win “love on [his] own terms.” Similarly, this auteurist conclusion, whether sel-consciously sel-consciously or not, marks Méliès’s bid to be loved on his own terms, to appeal to a crowd or recognition, or privilege, or status as auteur. Tis auteurist echo, stages Méliès in a lineage, not unlike the lineage suggested in the Film Academy Academy Library scene s cene (which included other actor-auteurs actor-auteurs Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin). abard mentions, almost casually, that Méliès is “the newest member o the Film Academy aculty” (an increasingly harrowing gauntlet in contemporary academia, especially or the historically under/ununder/un-represented), represented), conerring legitimacyy and authority. legitimac authority. A subtle dolly-zoom dolly-zoom during Méliès’s gala speech shows Méliès grow in relative size while o theauthor moonand seems to rise image. up behind him.byTis visuallyopairs the ascendance authored Backed his “proo authorship,” Méliès thanks the “auteur critic” or discovering him. As always, authorial masculinity and paternity remain central, as Méliès begins, “I am standing beore you tonight because o one very brave young man, who saw a broken machine and against all odds, he fixed it. It was the kindest magic trick that ever I’ve seen.” Shot-reverse Shot-reverse shot between Méliès and Hugo solidifies paternalistic ondness, and the mention o magic and machines links adoptive ather and son in vocational union. Yet is the “kindest magic trick” auteur-theory auteurtheory enunciation? Writing that transorms a metteurmetteur-enen-scène scène into  into an auteur? Historiography that honors one’s artistic contribution? Or simply Hugo’s help or Méliès to rejoin the film industry? As Joshua Clover pithily points out, “I romances once ended with everybody in the right marriage,