Marinetti and the Italian Futurists provided artistic circles with a blueprint with which to structure the twentieth century. There would be two principle dictums: technology and kineticism. That the former had published his initial manifesto in 1909 when cinematic forms were just coming into their own is no coincidence. Film was arguably the quintessential modernist statement, and yet simultaneously it was anti-modern in an important respect. Unlike other art forms, film did not encounter an ontological crisis in the early decades of the century. And yet, to say that modernism is at heart a manifestation of a particular crisis of representation in artistic expression is to join the ranks of many critics indeed. Certainly within the traditional means of artistic gesture – literature, painting, music composition, drama – there was indeed a marked conflict between methods of representation and the new modes of production and reproduction made available by modernization. There is little question that photography forever changed the function of ‘realism’ within the visual arts, for example. Photography did something else however, although this accomplishment was certainly not its primary intention. By distilling representation to the capacity of the artist to ‘see’ and consequently to capture his subject, the relative ease with which that moment of subjectivity, between the artist’s gaze and the object of his gesture, could be transmitted (re-presented) to an audience created a new aesthetic for reproducibility which ultimately resulted in the language of cinema. Both cinema and photography emerge from the modern period as perhaps best exemplifying the rupture felt between ‘objective’ reality and subjective experience typical of modernism proper.
There is (of course!) no better place to begin an examination of the aesthetic of film than with Benjamin. Arguably, film is the first mode of expression which counters the notion of authenticity and auratic presence elaborated in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin had examined the historical dimension of a given art piece within the scope of its cultic function, which is its uniqueness as a material and historical object. The sense of time in the work is lessened by means of facsimile, and what was once the mythic history of art – its auratic nature – is lost. One can attempt to contemplate, for example, the particular history of David’s The Oath of Horatii prior to its mechanical reproduction and thus its entrance into popular discourse, creating a list of all the figures of note who stood in its presence as well as all the historical events it witnessed. In this capacity the artwork retains the ritualistic function Benjamin ascribes to it, namely as a singularity which invokes a sense of awe and transport (aesthetic, spiritual, etc) in the viewing subject. The artwork enters into mythical status at this point, achieving a degree of reverence associated with the sacred. The act of experiencing art in this regard is akin to the Christian eucharist, in which the imbibing of a unique artefact of the divine signals a transubstantiation from the flesh to the spirit. Yet this cultic function of art is entirely lost by mechanical reproduction, and as a consequence any artistic gesture which anticipates its future reproduction will itself be altered by this foreknowledge: “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (Illuminations, 224).
Seen in this manner, The Starry Night for example retains and represents the subjectivity van Gogh felt toward “a certain night sky over a small village”; there is no sense that this moment of time is lost as the image is repeatedly consumed. After a process of mechanical reproduction however, it becomes in a sense an infantile photograph (in the sense of a juvenile photographic gesture), standing outside of its original temporality and thus creating a new tradition and history for itself, ignoring even the remnants of the old. Most importantly, this mechanism is performed without the foreknowledge or anticipation by the artist itself. Consequently for the modern viewing subject who has witnessed this image reproduced on everything from mugs and postcards to shirts and desktop wallpaper, the image does not represent an individual’s (van Gogh’s) sense perceptions one night which had been represented in a manner suggesting an aesthetic divergence with the Impressionist and Romantic traditions which dominated the eighteenth century. For many the sense of dread and uneasy anticipation figured by the threatening clouds hovering menacingly over the small village is lost. The work becomes a “beautiful image” and “one of the classics” which ontologically merges with the object on which it is presented, with functions distinctly separate from those ascribed by its original medium. Instead of signifying the original aesthetic gesture of the painting, the reproduced Starry Night signifies the totality of its historical existence in one refigured moment. In other words, van Gogh-on-a-mug alters its history from auratic singularity to art-object, as one consumable good among a mass of others. One experiences not the artist’s subjectivity in relation to the object of his gaze, but rather the history of the image’s representation. The image becomes a sign for its own use as an image always-already consumed, a sign which signifies its own usage as a sign. Thus, one remembers all the times this image has been represented: a shirt worn by someone in the mall, the poster on the wall of a friend’s apartment, and ultimately back to the museum which licences the piece for consumption. In this respect, it is possible to agree with Benjamin’s assertion that in the age of reproducibility, the function of art, no longer ritualistic in nature, “begins to be based on another practise – politics” (224). Sadly, in the case of deceased artists, the only political gesture left to their works is that of consumer consumption and the transfer of wealth.
Yet this very transfiguration of the function of art is ritualistic in a manner perhaps not realized by Benjamin. Mass culture and its bastard child consumerism are themselves rituals in every respect, yet they do not signify anything greater than themselves. They are empty signifiers pointing to themselves; the ritual is never consummated, there is no zenith or sacrificial moment, but rather one is left anticipating the return of the ritual. The modern consumer is immersed in a zeitgeist of dissatisfaction as this is the only means for the ritual of consumption to sustain itself. Adorno and Horkheimer attribute the lack of satisfaction in mass culture to its empty aesthetic gestures, which serve to achieve a “surrogate identity” as authentic artworks by means of simple repetition and intertextual figuration. Certainly the cinema is not immune to such commercial gestures, for as stated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “ the universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment” (124). In a very real sense, the rules of film making initially established by the studios – at its inception, films which were not documentaries but rather attempted mimetic gestures were exorbitantly expensive – allowed Hollywood to be a self-sufficient entity, producing consumables which inscribe the studios as monopolies. Until recently, media attention, whether in popular press or television, only recognized as legitimate films which followed certain patterns of production. Any deviation from such preconceptions led to categorization (read: rejection) as experimental, foreign, or B-cinema; as Adorno and Horkheimer posit, those outside the mainstream “are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur”, and also have to accept organization from above” (122). That the rules for production were inherently hegemonic in origin signified the requirement of a vast expenditure of capitol on the part of a film producer, and led to a uniformity which came to be known as Hollywood – sets and locations had to be “realistic”; actors had to conform to certain standards of appearance; only certain forms of cinematography, tied to studio-grade “professional” equipment, were allowed. Works could in fact be accomplished outside of the studio system, yet a wide exhibition of the film was another matter, for the studios owned both the distribution channels and the majority of theatres. Consequently, avant-guard or “outsider” films remained marginalised to rep cinemas, underground theatres, art galleries, and other equally disreputable venues. Film reception, like production, itself became standardized under the studio monopolies, most evident in the yearly Oscar presentations, reflecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that “the culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product” (127). The Hollywood film merges product/consumption and aesthetic into a singular entity stripped of its autonomous value: “under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.... Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce” (121).
To return to Benjamin, is there then no ritual function for cinema, for home music (re)performance, or for interactive entertainments? Must we, as early critics of the culture industry suggest, relegate film to the monotony and mediocrity of commercialism? While certainly not auratic in the sense Benjamin suggests, there are other opportunities for a ritualistic existence outside of the mere totemism implied by the singularity and historical uniqueness of the art object. In its sociological function, cinema suggests, for example, the ritual death of both the mass subject and the pre-eminence of the individual subject. The darkened space and the loud volume of the theatre certainly immerses the viewing subject into the images presented, and one achieves that coveted ‘escape from reality’ which every film magnate espouses. The presence of others within the theatre merely underscores the need for an individual experience with the film; one may forgive the noises of snacking (itself part of the ritual), yet conversations and other noises invariably interrupt and annoy the viewer. Yet this experience, despite its gestures towards interiority, is indeed a collective one, a shared death experience made even more vivid by the re-emergence into the lobby where (hopefully) the film is discussed. This ritualized death is further manipulated by moments of comedy and pathos in their respective film genres, which serve to unite the reactions of the audience into a single emotional gesture. The unified laugh of an audience is the moment of catachresis when the individual realizes its position as individual-within-the-mass, an ontologically different position than either the recognition of individuality or of the mass as ‘other’. In an interesting postmodern twist to this conception of the ritual of the cinema, the home viewing experience is fundamentally different, and consequently the rather empty ritual of commercialism is further emphasized as the only one left linking the viewer to other human subjects. Most stimulating from a Marxist perspective is the DVD format for home viewing, which engages the viewer with extra features as the only reason to buy and not to make a copy of the film, which are almost invariably the marketing materials used to promote the film in the first place. The postmodern consumer thus willingly subsidizes the entire process of cultural production, and endlessly enacts an empty ritual.
Such is not an entirely new phenomenon, however. In twentieth century capitalism, film becomes a glorification of the mode of its production, and thus the list of the top five grossing films rightly enters the news archive of the week. By emphasizing the pleasure the audience receives from registering the leisure and wealth required to produce the film, the audience is itself affirmed as legitimately consuming an art which is itself legitimately produced. Any notion of authenticity – or even Adorno’s conception of autonomy, which he himself put into perspective: “the emphasis on autonomous works is itself socio-political”(AP, 194), which, inverted on Adorno himself, suggests the impulse to seek autonomy in art as itself a function of bourgeois leisure – must be put aside for the moment, for late capitalism has in a sense folded subjective experience in upon itself as yet another element of the process of commodification. Seen from that perspective, all products reflect the reality which created them for precisely the reason that reality as such (or, even more precisely the hyper-reality proposed by Baudrillard, Eco, and others) is merely the narrative creation of a ‘reality’ from the framework of a reflective act post temporum of the product itself. When viewed within the context of the rising uniformity of consumer culture – the wealthy are not distanced culturally from the petit bourgeoisie or the working class, but rather all experience the same television, popular music, and films to a more or less equal measure – it could be argued that there is no longer a bourgeois culture to which the avant-guard reacts. In other words, there is no longer a divide between resistance and affirmation of the dominant modes of production. The pop-art movement in the visual arts had anticipated just such a trend in the 1960s, with both Warhol and Lichtenstein acting as principle negotiators between commercial and artistic expression.
It is here that I would like to put the rather infamous debate between Lukács and Bloch into a contemporary perspective. The former had posited that capitalism was a totalizing front which brought the masses into the same aesthetic space (production or reception) as the elite. Only by artistic gestures towards realism can the masses access the truly revolutionary and come to realize their political situation: “the large-scale, enduring resonance of the great works of realism is in fact due to this accessibility, to the infinite multitude of doors through which entry is possible....The process of appropriation enables readers to clarify their own experiences and understanding of life and to broaden their own horizons” (AP, 56). One cannot avoid the thoroughly bourgeois examples Lukács uses, for all belong to the standard canon of texts which have been the subject of numerous attacks from the 1970s onward by those seeking to expand the canon and redefine the process of canonization. Indeed, Lukács’s thought serves to exemplify Jameson’s notions of the narrativization of history in A Singular Modernity, and one must question the priviledged position from which Lukács’s realism developed. Alternately, Bloch forwarded the notion that the avant-guard could be located precisely in the fissures between social reality and subjectivity. Accordingly, the alienation experienced by subjects under capitalism was made manifest by the individual artwork, and no totalizing concept of art production is possible within a linear framework. For Bloch there is no such thing as a progression for art; rather he posits a more useful (from the perspective of the post-modern) conception of Erbe, which suggests a myriad of potentialities and possibilities for the reception and production of art. There is no truly authentic sense of ‘reality’ within this conception, for such a gesture merely reflects a specific ideological narrativization of a field of texts within the Erbe. Thus, Lukács’s appeals to a certain material reality which one can either represent (authentic art) or avoid (popular art), and is certainly not objective: “Lukács’s thought takes for granted a closed and integrated reality that does indeed exclude the subjectivity of idealism, but not the seamless ‘totality’ which has always thriven best in idealist systems.... Whether such a totality in fact constitutes reality, is open to question” (AP, 22). In this respect, we can view Bloch’s conception of the artist negotiating the Erbe as approaching Benjamin’s notion of a progression towards a universally citable history: Benjamin’s “redeemed mankind” for which “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost” (Illuminations, 254). There is no truth as to the progression of artistic expression except that which emerges with the individual artist; no history for art exists save that which an artist creates through their work.
So where does this leave the cinema? I wish here to state the somewhat precarious notion that the editing process itself, montage if you like (although I do wish to avoid the genre convention of ‘montage’ as such), is precisely the creation of a new temporality which more realistically (in Bloch’s sense, not Lukács’s) represents the fissure in modern culture between social reality and subjective experience than traditional media have been able. Whether or not one wishes to make the value judgement whether film is therefore more important to the twentieth century than literature or painting is beside the point and, as Jameson points out, is regardless simply a matter of taste. The intersection of disparate images during montage is the moment when the pleasure experienced by the viewing subject during the act of imposing a continuous temporality, and thus a narrative, upon those images is met with the interruption of the entire process by the objective temporality of the film itself. In other words, a multiplicity of temporalities coexist within the space between frames: one the sense of objective time, and others corresponding to an internalized sense of time, which can of course be manipulated by the director/editor of the film. The former can be exemplified by a sense conveyed in Kubrick’s 2001 of the precision required for movement in a zero gravity environment by the long time it takes for objects to move onscreen (and the resultant boredom among many viewers, as “nothing happens” narratively speaking). The shower sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho is perhaps the best example of the latter, in which the rapidity of movement and shot juxtaposition serves to pull the moment, and by extension the viewing subject, out of time. The shock experienced by the viewer is influenced less by content (as the ‘guilty’ pleasures of horror film fans can attest, smiling as body after body is mutilated in ever more graphically exciting ways) than by its presentation.
This process is akin to Barthes’s notion of the punctum in photography, which is the detail in the image which forces a rupture in temporalities between the viewing subject and the photographic image, bringing the former tangentially to an infinitude of reflection while atemporalizing the latter. In this sense the original moment represented in the image is destroyed and cannot be recovered. No degree of ‘realistic’ intentions will therefore represent the original subject in its entirety, but rather gestures toward realism cause the phoenix-like rise of the subject to figure itself as an allegory for its own termination. It was precisely this realization which photography imposed on the visual arts, causing them to modify their representational capacity. If an artist attempts to crystalize a moment by a representational gesture, it can only be judged successful if it takes this death-of-the-subject into account. To recognize this rupture is to historicize the subject, to create it upon reflection. It is difficult to ignore the pleasure this figuration of reality folding upon itself (as the hyper-real), and indeed one can liken it to Barthes’s jouissance, or the moment of death-creation in which the subject becomes a fetish for itself. The fetishized subject will lose its own sense of history by destroying time, entering an atemporal space of pleasure anticipation. This is in a sense both a blessing and a curse, for the subject of the gaze will be at its most pure – aesthetically, politically, etc – at the same time that it annihilates itself. The fetish looks back onto itself, continually trying to recreate the remembrance-of-the-past-anticipating-the-future, and thus becomes temporally displaced from itself. When controlled, the fetish instinct reifies the subject as a sacrificial one, and consequently legitimates the artistic gesture. The history of this (self)control becomes the structure of the artwork itself.
Kubrick recognizes this process in both Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut. Roughly halfway through the former, a scene in which Lady Lyndon is presented lying in her bath contemplating the infidelities of her husband is shot with the focal point of the camera slowly zooming out from a close-up of her upper body, eyes askew, to a neo-Rembrandtian composition with her at the centre. At the end of the camera’s movement, Lady Lyndon glances straight at the camera (this gesture itself a further reference to the Rembrandtian subject). This moment is the point at which the subject becomes aware of her own annihilation as subject (and by means of a structural analysis, a realization by the actress Marisa Berenson herself of her in situ vulnerability), and accordingly she arrests the viewer’s attention to this moment in time. The subject is made immortal by this gesture, which forces the viewer to reconsider their subject-position in relation to the film; the viewer becomes the watched and is made aware of the predatory nature of this relationship, reflecting back upon Lady Lyndon’s subjection to the emotional violence perpetrated by her husband. A similar occurrence – and one which perhaps more directly exemplifies the conception of jouissance that I wish to invoke – happens in the first half-hour of Eyes Wide Shut, during a scene in which Dr. Harford and his wife Alice are kissing in front of a mirror. Alice is focussing on their image in the glass as their ‘passion’ rises (this act itself an analysis of the simulacrum which I do not wish to engage with here), and just prior to a fade from scene Alice (Kidman?) glances directly at the camera with a look of utter contempt at the moment she is taken along with her husband to ‘rapture’. Alice, or perhaps more accurately the Alice-subject, for this process is not one directly linked with the narrative of the film, realizes the pleasure experienced by the viewing subject, in a manner at her expense, and appropriately involves the audience in her ritual slaughter. As a somewhat related aside, Robert Mapplethorp’s 1975 photograph Self Portrait is just such a gesture, a recognition of the ontological absurdity of subjecting himself to the photographic process. His death is met with a smile – I cannot help but amusingly wonder whether Camus would either roll in his grave or laugh triumphantly at this particular realization that suicide is indeed the most pressing of philosophical issues. Mapplethorp’s phallus/arm thrust across the white backdrop playfully reifies the conception that the death of the subject brings about the artistic ‘life’ of the image itself, while his mostly out-of-frame body suggests that the literal insertion of such an obviously generative metaphor conceals the artist himself from the ritual he is simultaneously mocking and invoking.
So we return to the experience of (death-as-) pleasure by the audience. Is it possible to view the conditions under which the film is experienced as preparing the audience for the ritualized deaths to be presented, ‘onstage’ as it were. I wish to return to Benjamin’s comments in this regard, for, as stated above, he believed that mechanical reproduction – here the mediation of the image by the camera – removed the cultic value of the art: “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.... This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed” (Illuminations, 228-9). And yet in the very next section he describes the experience of acting before the camera in the very terms implied by the ritualized death outlined above. Quoting Pirandello, “with a vague sense of discomfort [the film actor] feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality [and] life”. Then, in a passage foreshadowing Kubrick’s sentiments: “The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera ... is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public” (230-1). This instance of transport is the ritualized death of the subject, the process of mediation of the original moment by the cinematic process. For a film with only commercial intentions, there is no need for transport or ortherwise transcendental gestures, but simply entertainment. The ‘outer’ ritual of the sociological process of film viewing is enough to sustain the entire mechanism. Is it possible to suggest an avenue for mediating the commercial and the artistic without falling back on the pop-art aesthetic, which by definition was non-political (although I would here agree with Lenin that everything is political)? The commercial product is a fetish, which as outlined above is a temporal discontinuity between the ‘presentness’ of an object and its relocation in the anticipatory gestures of the relating subject. Consequently, if the anticipation of pleasure is in a reductive sense the product being sold and consumed, it is pleasure itself which remains unconsumable and thus the last bastion for the avant-guard, but such is largely outside the frame of this present examination.
Addendum
Robert Mapplethorp: Self Portrait (1975)
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment’. Trans. Francis McDonagh. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken, 1968.
Bloch, Ernst. ‘Discussing Expressionism’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.
Horkheimer, Max & Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cumminng.
New York: Continuum, 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.
Lukács, Georg. ‘Realism in the Balance’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.
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