Angela Dalle Vacche. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Film Studies used models derived from literary theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxist criticism. By the 1990s, it had become apparent that these methods privileged a literary/verbal/textual- over a perceptual/visual/object-based training. One brief example might illustrate the point: whereas a film analyst or a literary theorist would teach about film narrative as a system of differences and repetitions, an art historian may require students to hold a textile in their hands to assess its weight, or to look at an image for hours to decide about the quality of lighting. Thus, for art historians, storytelling does count, but equally important, if not more so, are the visual forms of narrative, namely all the various ways of seeing based on style, authorship, period, philosophical stance, ideology, genre, and so forth. To make things even more complicated, cinema is about perceiving, absence, distance, and projecting, while art history, which also involves looking, is built around solid, concrete entities.
In the wake of the emergence of cultural semiotics (cultural studies), usually in literature departments, Film Studies has demonstrated the usefulness of popular sources, on the one hand, and the value of critical theory (Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault) on the other. This is why art historians such as Norman Bryson, MichaelAnn Holly and Keith Moxey (Bryson, 1983; 1988; Bryson et al., 1994), Jonathan Crary (1990; 2000) and Carol Armstrong (1999), have broadened the horizons of art history into the ‘new’ art history (see also Mitchell, 1994). A second group, led by Nicholas Mirzoeff (1995; 1999), have tackled the study of visual culture in the wake of British cultural studies (Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson) by defying the traditional separation of high and low registers and by discussing territories such as advertisements, gender roles, and ethnographic images next to historical painting or the nude. Both the visual culture group and the new art history have inspired the psychoanalytic and semiotic breakthrough achieved by Film Studies. More specifically, visual culture in relation to film counts illustrious precursors, for this kind of multimedia research has been practised as early as the 1960s and 1970s by British critics such as John Berger and Peter Wollen. To this day, regardless of any trend, their two books, Signs and Meaning (Wollen, 1969-72) and Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1977), hold up and have become classic texts.
Such a shared appreciation of popular culture across Film Studies and art history, however, has focused on formulaic, mainstream examples. Much work in Film Studies, for example, has denounced Hollywood cinema by underlining its strategies of rhetorical persuasion for the sake of social consensus. Again, some art historians find this way of reading below the surface of the filmic text—a veritable hermeneutic of suspicion—difficult especially when they have been trained in areas such as minimalism or abstract expressionism. These kinds of specialist cherish tactile, kinetic, chromatic, and experiential variables whose common feature is to challenge verbal discourse. A recent exception to this dichotomy between phenomenological art and predictable Hollywood films is Chromophobia (2000) by David Batchelor.
In this book, Batchelor’s history of colour pokes fun at the minimalist obsession with white, while it also charts the weight of ancient and canonical manuals celebrating the crisp pencil of drawing over the painter’s volatile brush dripping on and mixing the world in unpredictable ways. Significantly, Batchelor includes a whole section about colour in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (US, 1939) next to a discussion of Kenneth Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (US, 1954; re-cut 1966), an avant-garde film which well illustrates all the fears associated with chromatic power. Short, beautifully illustrated, and easy to understand, Chromophobia is the kind of book that proves the advantage of shuttling between an art historical training and Film Studies scholarship.
It is well known that art historians who teach the Renaissance period or nineteenth- century Impressionism are very interested in narrative. And yet, even these two groups appear to value the visual dimension through art theory. In fact, they spend a lot of time distinguishing many kinds of perspectival systems: one-point perspective, two- point perspective, and three-point perspective. In contrast, film specialists worry about Leon Battista Alberti’s monocular model discussed by Jean-Louis Baudry (1985). Thus, while Renaissance painting often refers to Biblical or mythological tales, spatial diagrams about perspective techniques loom large in the art curriculum. Likewise specialists of Impressionism are well aware that their images narrate the stories of modernity, yet they nevertheless place great emphasis on the history of colour theory or on the development of motion studies in order to teach students how to discern a landscape by Alfred Sisley from one by J.M.W. Turner.
All this classroom effort about two- or three-point perspectives and about colour theory confirms that drawing and painting are not mechanical activities, but the result of highly manual skills which have been painstakingly acquired. No wonder that even art historians open to popular culture and mechanical reproduction are, in the end, unwilling to let the word ‘art’ (meaning artistry) completely disappear. To be sure, they fear that their artefacts’ peculiarities will disappear as soon as they are overwhelmed by broad and, worst of all, vague terms such as ideology and representation. This fear is especially real because, in contrast to film analysts, they are not working with projected, but intangible, moving images on screen.
In short, the state of affairs regarding the interdisciplinary dialogue between Art History and Film Studies is more and more promising, but still hugely unresolved. This is why it is worth noting that during the annual conference sponsored by College Art Association (CAA), it is difficult to find many panels where Film Studies specialists present their work. This sense of separation, however, is mutual, since at the annual meeting of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), few participants work across film and art history, and if they do, they are likely to be on a panel about early cinema or the avant-garde.
Scholarly Examples and Film Paradigms
And yet, the possibility of a more structured interdisciplinary dialogue is becoming more and more of a reality. Let us now look at some examples where individual scholarship overrides institutional constraints. The attempt to link early cinema to art theory characterizes one recent contribution to the intersection of Film Studies with Art History: Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (2004). In the footsteps of Aby Warburg, Michaud takes the reader through boxing and dancing scenes shot in W.K.L. Dickson and Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. This first section is followed by Warburg’s meditation on movement in regard to the use of the serpentine line in Sandro Botticelli’s Florentine paintings. Warburg’s inquiry into motion, and especially its corporeal choreography, concludes with an analysis of mystical writing systems, snake iconography and ritualistic dancing among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Michaud’s final argument is that Warburg’s fascination with the depiction of movement finds a sort of proto-cinematic framework through his lifelong project Mnemosyne. There, the montage of a wide range of iconographic sources triggers an undeniable kinetic energy in the shift from picture to picture, while it also anticipates Sergei Eisenstein’s use of the frame as a combinatorial unit in the wake of his research on Japanese ideograms and haiku poetry in Film Form (1949).
In my view Michaud’s book is courageous, but scattered across loosely linked areas of inquiry. Whether we deal with Warburg’s Mnemosyne or with Andre Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’, a sort of history of art in several volumes based on his own sequencing of photographs (1949), the mystery of what happens perceptually and emotionally in the interval or interstice from one image to the next remains unresolved. Is it collage, montage or assemblage? And which ones of these constructs lean towards an allegorical direction instead of an analogical one? And what are the implications of Eisenstein’s allegorical montage versus Jean-Luc Godard’s analogical, collagist impulse? How do these filmic examples relate to Warburg’s mnemonic atlas or to Malraux’s eccentric, historiographical rethinking of art history through his extensive use of the humble medium of photography? The answers are not easy to reach.
Museums are beginning to rethink their whole installation practices in order to accommodate exhibitions on the interconnectedness of art and film. In this respect, the two most famous exhibitions have been Hall of Mirrors (1995), curated by Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, and Fatal Coincidences: Hitchcock and Art (2001), a project begun by Guy Cogeval at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and continued by Dominique Paini at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (see Brougher and Ferguson, 1996; Cogeval, 2000). For a reading list on art and film, I especially recommend the MOCA catalogue (Brougher and Ferguson, 1996), because the various essays cover a wide range of visual artists who have commented on the cinema in their works. This co-edited catalogue from MOCA is precious because a whole course on contemporary art is not always included in film graduate programmes. The same could be said of classes on the intersection of film and photography, another possible point of encounter between Art History departments and the Film Studies curriculum.
Having thus outlined the institutional constraints which Film Studies (a fifty-year- old discipline) experiences in relation to the History of Art (a one-hundred-year-old enterprise) I shall now list the most important paradigms of intersection between these two domains of study. The first can be called ‘The Famous Citation’ and it concerns films which have faithfully restaged a famous painting: for instance, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s use of Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ (1480-90) at the very end of Mamma Roma (Italy, 1962), or Bernardo Bertolucci’s reliance on Giuseppe Pellizza Da Volpedo’s The Fourth State (1898-1901) in Novecento (France/Italy/West Germany/US, 1975). The second paradigm concerns ‘Historical Films’ which use art historical sources to bring back to life a whole epoch through a particular period’s atmosphere. In this group, we can mention Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (UK, 1975) with his extensive references to John Constable and Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Federico Fellini’s Casanova (Italy/US, 1976) replete with allusions to eighteenth-century Venetian painters such as Rosalba Carriera, Pietro Longhi, Francesco Guardi, and Antonio Canaletto. The third paradigm concerns the ‘Biographical Mode’, adopted whenever the lives of famous painters are recreated on the screen. Albert Lewin structured The Moon and Sixpence (US, 1942) around Paul Gauguin’s adventures in Southern France and Polynesia, for example; Jacques Becker devoted his Montparnasse (France/Italy) to Amedeo Modigliani in 1958, and American painter-turned-filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, reconstructed Jean Michele Basquiat’s career in Basquiat (US, 1996). The list could be extended, but I shall stop here by pointing out that Vincent Van Gogh’s biography has a special status having been the subject of at least three films: Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (US, 1956); Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo (Netherlands/UK/France, 1990); and Van Gogh (France, 1991) by Maurice Pialat.
Painting in film can also become a ‘Hypertext Device’ in relation to the rest of the narrative, whenever it provides a commentary on the difference between two media. I am thinking, here, about the disappearance of the pictorial frame in Dreams (Japan/US, 1990) by Akira Kurosawa. Another case in point is Bertolucci’s emblematic use of Francis Bacon’s portrait with a male figure in pain at the beginning of Last Tango In Paris (Italy/France, 1972). The ‘Chromatic Paradigm’ is worth mentioning because films which explore colour inevitably raise questions about the relation of film, painting, creativity, and femininity. The most famous titles in this category are: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (Italy/France, 1964), Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (China, 1984), and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours series, Blue (France/Poland/Switzerland/UK, 1993), White (France/Poland/Switzerland, 1994) and Red (Poland/France/Switzerland, 1994).
Besides these paradigms about direct citation, period-atmosphere, meta-cinematic commentary, history, biography, and colour, there are also modernist films about the limits of painting in the sense that cinema can show how this medium tied to mechanical reproduction refuses to deliver all the psychological comforts linked to the concept of pictorial aura: plenitude, beauty, aesthetic contemplation. This is why Godard’s Passion (France/Switzerland, 1982) and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (France/Switzerland, 1991) demonstrate that the filmic reconstruction of a famous work by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, L’Odalisque (1839), or a nude portrait with a beautiful model, fail miserably. Thus, these modernist films about the arts fit in the ‘Crisis Paradigm’ to comment on the ruptures of modernity, and postmodernity, respectively at the beginning of the twentieth century and immediately after World War Two.
Historically one of the most obvious, but also most important, paradigms of the intersection between film and art has been the one devoted to ‘Avant-Garde Movements’. Any serious film curriculum is likely to involve a class on German Expressionist film with all the appropriate readings and references in theatre, painting, and architecture. Likewise, Surrealism is often taught as a film class with plenty of slides to illustrate the variety of media (photography, painting, sculpture, and collage) used by Surrealist artists. But there are additional and more complicated paradigms that inform recent books of film and painting. Both Brigitte Peucker and David Pascoe rely on the ‘Body Paradigm’ and on a postmodern definition of cinematic representation. In Museums and Moving Images (1997), Pascoe argues that Peter Greenaway makes films about the human body being eventually destroyed by competing representational frameworks based on either mechanical or digital reproduction. In The Belly of an Architect (UK/Italy, 1987) the protagonist repeatedly photocopies his own stomach. Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), an architect from Chicago, visits Rome for the first time. There, Kracklite faces not only his terminal gastric disease, but also his failure to impregnate his wife. The film ends with the protagonist’s suicide.
Like Pascoe, in Incorporating Images and, more recently, The Material Image (2007), Peucker argues that cinema neither incorporates life, nor is its lifelike simply because of its alleged ability to a show movement. In contrast to the live beings which it reproduces, cinema is really a machine for cutting and dismemberment. It is only through editing and piecing back together images from painting and stories from literature that cinema can simulate a moving body that does not exist in the first place. Put another way, for Pascoe and for Peucker, no matter which art forms are brought inside the boundaries of film, the moving body is the uncanniest of fictions and the most indispensable centrepiece for cinematic illusion to occur.
Undoubtedly this postmodern emphasis on a filmic body that functions as a surrogate self and ensures the pseudo-materiality of the filmic image itself is a powerful argument. In a sense, I have developed a similar approach to Pascoe and Peucker for the ‘National Paradigm’ in my own The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (1992), in which I argued that all sorts of art historical sources were used by Italian filmmakers to bring to life a body politic that would overcome internal divisions due to class, region, and gender.
For my second book on film and art history, Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film, I relied on ‘The Ranking Paradigm’: history, portraiture, landscape, and still life. According to Sir Joshua Reynolds, this canonical sequence is based on levels of authority so that the historical painting is the domain of male artists, while female painters should devote themselves to the more modest depiction of genre scenes or even flowers (see also Dalle Vacche, 2002). It was interesting for me to discover that film directors keen on innovation, such as F.W. Murnau with the European art film, and Vincente Minnelli in the Hollywood studio system, chose to embed within their narratives modes of painting heavily based on subjective or even visceral responses such as landscape painting or abstract expressionism. These two strategies of hiding art and private emotional issues inside cinematic storytelling, horror film like Nosferatu (Germany, 1922) or whether in a musical like AnAmerican in Paris (US, 1951), suggest a desire to reject the much more spectacle-bound and public cluster of figuration, body, and history that sits at the top of Reynolds’ scheme for art historical genres.
Finally, any cultural based paradigm for the dialogue between film and painting, involves issues of visual form. Such an expanded definition of film style or, better, such a conceptual handling of the filmic image, summons into the discussion religious philosophies as traditions of thought shaping all kinds of image-systems. For example, icon painting with all its rules and peculiarities becomes Andrei Tarkovsky’s inspiration for handling objects, architecture, the construction of character, and so forth, in Andrei Rublev (USSR, 1966). Structured around the life of a medieval monk and a famous Russian icon painter, this film achieves a great hypnotic power and spiritual energy, instead of falling into the category of the flat and secular Hollywood biopic.
Lacunae
The ‘Theoretical Interdisciplinary Paradigm’ is probably the least developed and the one most needed at this juncture. This is the case because all the paradigms I have listed are helpful, but not pivotal in regard to the ontology and the epistemology of the filmic image as a visual form, as a storytelling agent and as a component of the cinematic apparatus. And this is really the time to ask the question quite clearly why bother with art history at all from the standpoint of the cinema? It is not so much because filmmakers cite paintings or have unconsciously appropriated images from the history of art. The reason is that without art history and its knowledge about the history of vision that pre-dates the nineteenth century, film specialists risk missing out on valuable arguments about looking. Art History should function for Film Studies as a database about the history of ideas on perception, word and image, style, genre, ideology, spectatorship, looking, and visual form. Film colleagues may want to pick and choose, criticize and expand on this body of knowledge, but abetter dialogue between the two disciplines can only be enriching.
Within the dialogue of between Art History and Film Studies, this theoretical move is necessary in order to understand better how the ontology of the cinema is about both time and space, word and image, fantasy and reality, to such an extent that cinema can be said to have ‘two eyes’ that seem to combine into one singular, monocular source of vision from the projector to the screen. Whether these two eyes conspire to hide one another, so that they may seem only one, or whether they are antithetical to each other in certain films, or whether, again, they may produce an oxymoron, remains to be assessed case by case. The point here is that we have a range of representational possibilities which are assumed but not explained, and eventually forgotten in the language that we use to write about film.
The language of film theory is so rich, but also so dense, that it remains somewhat obscure. In ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, for example, Baudry explains how vision in the cinema is the result of a combination of two ways of seeing, the eye of Renaissance perspective and the shadow-like images captured by the camera obscura:
Fabricated on the model of the camera obscura, it permits the construction of an image analogous to the perspective projections developed during the Italian Renaissance. Of course, the use of lenses of different focal lengths can alter the perspective of an image. But this much, at least, is clear in the history of cinema: it is the perspective construction of the Renaissance which originally served as model . The dimensions of the image itself, the ratio between height and width, seem clearly taken from an average drawn from Western easel painting.. [T]he painting of the Renaissance will elaborate a centered space. (1985: 288-9, my italics)
Originally published in 1970 by Cinethique, Baudry’s essay argues that the technological features of the medium are not neutral, but inherently biased. Considering that Baudry begins his first sentence with a reference to the camera obscura, he strangely downplays the fact that cinema is a medium characterized by a double perceptual lineage, namely that the cinema involves two equally active eyes. The reader goes along with the metaphor of ‘centering’, to the point of understanding less and less, especially when Baudry refers to the ‘combined inertia of painting, theater and photography’ (1985: 289).
The question Baudry does not ask is: granted that both the mobilization of space and the visualization of time produce movement in film, which is the more important to the specificity of the filmic medium, space or time? Whereas Eisenstein would answer space, Andre Bazin would choose time. Of course, both space and time are of paramount importance, but different kinds of cinemas emerge when one dimension tends to prevail over the other.
Within the framework of this dilemma, I shall try to explain how the collapse of Renaissance perspective with the camera obscura produces a tight marriage in which it is the photographic side that makes visible the invisible, namely time. The access to this fourth dimension is an unprecedented event in the history of vision, the central topic for avant-garde, modernist movements striving towards utopia beyond space and time, and the fundamental problem of modernity. But there is more. With photography and cinema, time does not only become visible for the first time, but it also displaces the humanist subject of Renaissance perspective from the role of artist. In other words, time in photography amounts to light, and thus nature becomes the artist. It is only in certain kinds of cinematic traditions and with specific filmmakers, that this humanist Renaissance subject manages to re-centre itself (hence Baudry’s terminology, ‘centering’), and risks misrepresenting a complex combination of technological features pulling in different directions.
According to Helen Gardner’s, Art through the Ages, a standard text book on many introductory Art History survey courses, during the age of daguerreotypes, photographic images were lively and entropic: ‘There was a view of Paris …the minutest details, the interstices of pavement and the brickwork, the effect of humidity from falling rain—all were reproduced as in nature’ (1959: 739). In contrast to Alberti’s perspectiva artificialis, where nothing is left to chance, everything in photography, planned or random, controlled or left to chance, contributes to making visible time’s richness, namely the passing moment.
In her ground-breaking book, The Art of Describing (1983), Svetlana Alpers explains that with Alberti, the painter is worthy of praise as long as historia, that is a Biblical, or mythological, or historical tale, emerges from the way the pictorial composition reorganizes the space. To some extent, the good painter must be a good storyteller in a spatial sense, so that position and scale, colour and posture, costume and objects, size and gesture will clearly convey the story to any viewer at one glance. In contrast to this spatial-narrative approach, the descriptive power of the camera obscura relies much more on the unpredictable intersections of light and time. Put another way, the temporal-descriptive power of the camera obscura is based on receiving inside the box the shadow of a slice of time, so that this mechanical—rather than manual—reproduction—will reappear on top of the box because an internal mirror reverses the upside- down-projection. The hustle and the bustle of lived experience going by in the world, outside the box, characterize the ‘photographic’ core of the reproduced image.
Yet there is even more to renegotiate between film and art history, photography and Renaissance perspective, as soon as we pay attention to the ways in which art historians use the metaphors of window and mirror when they differentiate between Johannes Kepler’s proto-photographic way of seeing and the perspectival Albertian eye. In Film Studies, specialists have applied the window metaphor to the screen, when they describe the nineteenth-century realist style of classical Hollywood cinema. In contrast, they often turn to the analogy of mirror and screen in order to discuss European modernist filmmaking. Generally speaking, Hollywood’s window is associated with a passive and yet highly involved spectator, while the modernist mirror of the European art film is linked to self-referentiality in the sense that the spectator is encouraged to think about how the film is not just a narrative, but also a meditation on the medium itself.
Switching again to the art historians’ bookshelf, it is interesting to note that the mirror applies to the camera obscura, whereas a gridlike window fits the model of Renaissance perspective. But, the most important point, here, is that the comparison of the camera obscura to an uncharted mirror implies a certain degree of passivity in contrast to the geometrical virtuosity of Alberti’s ideal painter. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci—who also worked on the camera obscura—implicitly criticized a certain kind of Northern painting that limits itself to describing, or recording, the world with incredible precision, but without narrating a story:
The painter who draws merely by practice and the eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it, without being consciousof their existence. (quoted in Friday, 2001: 356)
Assuming that the students of the history of vision diligently consult books in the two separate disciplines of film and art history, the transition from Alpers to Bazin’s famous statement in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ resonates with strong Keplerian implications. In fact, in contrast to Leonardo’s parallel between mirroring something and lacking originality, Bazin celebrates the disappearance of the human hand, of style, resemblance, mapping and signature, for the sake of likeness, passivity, reception, and a photo-chemical process in which time and light, that is nature, are the new agents of creativity: ‘By the power of photography … nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist’ (1967a: 15).
But there is more to my re-reading of Baudry in light of a re-balancing act between photography and painting. It is this kind of intertextuality between Alpers and Bazin that can help us understand how the French critic distinguishes between two kinds of realisms: one Albertian, addictive and illusionistic, and relevant to classical Hollywood cinema; the other Keplerian, with less individual control, and ultimately more improvisational and phenomenological. Worth noting, is the fact that nature, for Bazin, does not mean ‘natural’, in the sense of a status quo to struggle against, the way it does for Eisenstein. The Soviet theorist, in fact, speaks of ‘non-indifferent nature’, where the word ‘nature’ does not mean rivers and mountains, but society and class issues (Montani, 1981). Understandably, Eisenstein believes in the power of the revolution and cinematic activism to change a state of affairs that is taken for granted as ‘natural’ when it is instead a cultural construction.
For Bazin, nature is indifferent, because we are smaller than the environment we live in, in the sense that we shall never be able to control it completely. Cinema acts as a sort of special antenna or sounding mechanism that is meant to be in touch with our unconscious and with worlds beyond our temporal finitude. To be sure, something, somehow, will always escape, or remain impenetrable to us.Although subject to human control, of all media invented untill now cinema is the one that is best attuned to some cosmic mystery in daily life. In Bazin’s words, cinema is ‘the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen’ (1967c: 107). Put another way, it is nature’s indifference towards human control that guarantees the world’s creative independence in an artistic sense. Hence Bazin compares photography to nature and nature, namely light during the photographic process, to a non-human kind of artist.
Neither Bazin in 1945 nor Baudry in 1970, forgets that the two different eyes of Alberti and Kepler always operate together in the case of narrative cinema, since description (time) goes hand in hand with narrative (space). In fact, at the very end of ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Bazin writes: ‘On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language’ (1967a: 16). And, as a system of differences and repetitions, language requires the weave of space and time, I would add. Bazin’s awareness of the linguistic nature of cinema takes us back to Alberti’s stress on historia and storytelling. And this is necessary because cinema does involve the two eyes of the camera obscura and Renaissance perspective. The French critic distinguishes between the constructed realism of Renaissance perspective in which the director reshapes the world (Hollywood, Soviet montage), and a more phenomenological notion of realism in which the world uses the medium, while the director participates in this event.
While Leonardo Da Vinci speaks of Alberti’s historia thinking about static scale, size, and composition, for Bazin, language means that the articulation of space and time involved in editing is at the heart of storytelling, especially in classical Hollywood cinema. As such, the more Baudry’s spectator is ‘centered’, in relation to narrative development, the more intense the experiences of illusionism, identification, suspension of disbelief and ideological consensus. There is, however, one more reason why, in relation to mainstream, commercial, mostly Hollywood cinema, Baudry’s ‘centering’ is correct. Yet the word is too dense and broad; it needs to be further unpacked not only through art history, but also via art theory.
The philosopher Jonathan Friday observes that the Albertian window and the Keplerian mirror imply two kinds of spectatorships respectively. The Albertian spectator looks at the world as if all the space was outside the window frame and ready for mastery. In contrast, Friday continues, the Keplerian spectator sees the world as if it were around the figure reflected inside the mirror (2001: 351-62). Ironically, the great claim of perspective is ‘objectivity’, even if the image is built on a mathematical grid that has nothing to do with the surprises of the world out there. On the contrary, the situation of the Keplerian eye involves ‘subjectivity’, because the viewer’s figure is implied inside the image, so that becomes objectively part of the world’s fabric.
Think, for instance, of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434), where the entire room, including the bridal couple, is reflected on the surface of a convex mirror. Yet this looking-glass is positioned in such a way that were two ordinary viewers to peer into the pictorial space from the threshold, they would either displace the painting’s protagonists or superimpose their own reflections on them. Likewise, in Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656-76), the mirror in the background of the painting, behind the painter painting and looking at us, contains the reflection of the royal couple. At the same time, the positioning of the king and the queen is such that it also matches the end of the eye-line-match trajectory leading from the painter’s look to the viewer’s on the threshold of that world looking in and about to join that whole scene.
How, therefore, can Baudry rely on the theme of ‘centering’, after Friday argues for such a contrast between external control leading to subjective mastery and peripheral involvement opening out to actual participation? My answer is that Baudry’s metaphor of ‘centering’ is not really about the ontology of the cinema, but about its epistemology. In other words, it refers to the suspension of disbelief which any spectator is willing to activate, regardless of which kind of film unfolds on the screen. But this suspension of disbelief begins with seeing uninterrupted movement instead of separate frames going by, so that the two eyes of the cinematic apparatus are grafted together on the so-called phenomenon of persistence of vision at the level of the retina.
Let us now shift from this basic retinal illusion to a higher level of illusionism. We need to reflect further on Bazin’s distinction between two different kinds of realism: on the one hand, nineteenth-century-based classical Hollywood realism, and, on the other, the twentieth-century-based approaches of French Poetic Realism in the 1930s the Italian neorealism of the 1940s, and the French Nouvelle Vague of the 1960s. It is now time to ask how these two completely different traditions of realism might be, in any way, compatible with art history’s distinction between the Keplerian eye for movement and temporality, and the Albertian eye for space and narrative.
The answer to this question comes from Anne Hollander’s Moving Pictures (1989), a book surprisingly about the Keplerian lineage of Hollywood cinema which until now we have associated with Alberti’s Renaissance perspective. The fact is that Hollander works in the footsteps of Robert Rosenblum’s (1975) model of a continuum that runs from Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko, from northern landscape painting and the sublime to abstract expressionism turning colour into a quasi-mystical experience. Considering that it is customary to discuss the realism of classical Hollywood cinema exclusively in the light of Alberti and Baudry’s illusionist models, a short foray into Hollander’s research fills another lacuna about the history of vision in film through the lens of art historical training. In fact, Hollander’s thesis parallels Robert Rosenblum’s argument that Dutch art resonates in American art. In Hollander’s Moving Pictures, the links between Northern European art and the invention of the cinema do not only go through the camera obscura, but also through the diffusion of black-and-white illustrations in popular journalism. In her introduction, the art historian writes:
Many of the artists I discuss here followed the original example set forth in the Northern Renaissance, directly or derivatively or obliquely. At the same time they seem to a modern, post- cinematic eye to have prefigured the way movies work as pictures in the modern world. I see the rise of film as a natural continuation of their special kind of illustrative impulse, which appeared in serious painting of all kinds as well as in less serious graphic work. (1989: 7)
Leonardo Da Vinci’s statement, that a mirror is only a humble tool for mechanical reproduction with no storytelling power, falls short of Hollander’s enthusiasm for Northern art’s descriptive power. The missing link between Baudry and Hollander can be found, once again, in a footnote in Bazin’s ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Right after a sentence on ‘the tortured immobility of baroque art’, Bazin offers the perfect transition to Hollander’s argument:
It would be interesting from this point of view to study, in the illustrated magazines of 1890 and 1910, the rivalry between photographic reporting and the use of drawings. The latter, in particular, satisfied the baroque need for the dramatic. A feeling for the photographic document developed only gradually. (1967a: 11)
From the ancient Greek word ‘drama’ for action, ‘dramatic’ is key, here, because it invokes Alberti’s narrative mobilization of theatrical space within the grid of Renaissance perspective. The word ‘dramatic’ also demonstrates that the emotions attached to historia need the graphic intensity of black-and-white illustrations in order to compensate for the fact that the nineteenth-century viewer felt that photography was optically precise, but somewhat too scientific or cold. As soon as we remind ourselves of the fact that the words ‘dramatic’ and ‘theatrical’ are closely related, we understand that the photographic eye of the cinema seeks help from the theatre, in order to warm up its traces and make them look believable or artificially ‘objective’ as much as the images of Renaissance perspective.
Baudry talks about the combined ‘inertia’ of painting, theatre and photography, but I hope I have demonstrated there there is no inertia. On the contrary, each one of these media is energetically involved in the invention of the cinema. The problem is to shift from the collapse of camera obscura and Renaissance perspective to a choice about which one of these three media (painting, theatre, and photography) is most crucial to the specificity of the cinema. And the answer is photography, because of this medium’s special kinship with capturing an otherwise unstoppable, death-bound, indifferent time in contrast to painting and theatre’s man-made, artificial reconstruction of time.
All this goes to show that the history of cinematic vision is far more complicated than an overarching metaphor about a centred kind of spectatorship. There are many different kinds of films, but the answer to what is cinema, in a technological sense, has been found by Gilles Deleuze who calls it ‘a spiritual automaton’ (1989; see also Bogue, 2003: 177-8). In plain language, Deleuze’s ‘spiritual automaton’ is a time-machine that reminds us not only of our temporally-finite status as humans, but also of our creative abilities to represent the unrepresentable or the unthinkable that surround us in daily life and in the cosmos alike. In summary, Hollander’s claim that the cinema comes from Northern painting is too slanted towards that tradition, while Baudry (1985) leans too much towards what Alpers calls the Italianate mode of painting which was originally informed by Renaissance perspective.
Baudry’s ideological take does not tell the full story of the historical past and future potential of the medium, were it to become a source of inspiration for young contemporary artists. Thus, my final example begins in the Church of the Gesuati in Venice. At the very centre of the church, under an amazing ceiling painted by Giambattista Tiepolo, the Australian-American artist, Andrew Huston, has found a sort of tourist-toy in the guise of a mobile mirror. The latter is framed in exactly the same way the Venetian painter has framed his own ceiling. The purpose of this playful alignment between the frame of the mirror and the frame of the painted ceiling is to encourage the visitor in the church to position the mobile mirror exactly underneath the painting on the ceiling and look at it on the glass surface, without having to bend their head backward too much.
In line with Baudry’s theme of ‘centering’, classical Hollywood cinema does not want viewers to make too much effort and provides them with images that seem to centre the floating chaos of events in the world. But there is more to the mirror at the centre of the Venetian church, because this object happens to be far more interactive and unpredictable than the Hollywood screen. In fact, trapped in their seats, film viewers cannot play around with a gadget in order to change their placement. They can only rely on editing and camera movement to mobilize their point of view. In contrast, the mobile mirror inside the church can be turned away from Tiepolo’s work towards the corners of the building. In all these areas, there is a great deal of architectural ornamentation that sits there, in an off- centred, subordinate position.
While reflecting on his own projects torn between ornament and painting, architecture and colour, Huston begins to speculate about a possible story of rivalry between painting and architecture, Tiepolo and Giorgio Massobrio, the builder of the church between 1726 and 36, whose finished work, in a sense, is challenged by Tiepolo taking over the ceiling’s project in 1737. The mobile mirror seems to be there in an ambiguous way: on the one hand, to glorify the ceiling and the centre, and, on the other, to allow the corners with no painting to steal the show and enable a full appreciation of Massobrio’s quasi-sculptural decoration on each side. Needless to say, the upside-down image reflected in the looking glass below the corner wall hitting the ceiling, strikes a note of similarity with the reversed orientation of the camera obscura’s shadows in relation to their referent.
Why is this mobile mirror a helpful prop to rethink the history of the arts in relation to the birth of the cinema? All of a sudden, the mirror’s mobility brings architectural ornament under the spotlight, so that the idea that decoration is minor is turned upside down. In his essay Baudry has piled up major arts, theatre, and painting—all of them subservient to cinematic illusionism. In contrast, Bazin’s phenomenological realism is not only comparable to the usher’s little flashlight, but it is also in tune with minor and low arts such as photography and Hollander’s black-and-white journalistic illustrations. The tourists’ mirror at the Church of the Gesuati helps us to understand how cinema’s humble origins have more to do with ornamental, that is, superfluous work in the margins, than with the search for heavenly transcendence and eternal power coming out of Tiepolo’s dynamic figures. As a matter of fact, it is meaningful that Saint Dominic himself falls off the sky-bound frame back down onto the earth below. After receiving the rosary from the Virgin, his mission is to spread this tool for prayer among the masses.
Stimulated by his own visit to the Church of the Gesuati, Huston began working with a variety of mirrors. These are not mobile in and of themselves, but they can be used in such a way as to explore marginality, randomness and the ephemeral, by reversing architectural ornament into a quasi-camp practice of urban and rural landscape-installations. In the footsteps of innumerable tourists visiting one Venetian church after another and possibly inspired by Robert Smithson’s Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan (1969), Huston’s mirrors have made sudden appearances on a window-shop mannequin in Munich wearing a pair of short, leather hiking pants, the stereotypical Lederhosen of yodelling German tourists. Another mirror has sprung up unexpectedly in the middle of the Venetian lagoon.
It features a yellow band that does not match any functional traffic sign of the waterways. Hieratic and mysterious, the reflecting surface of this camera obscura-like object intercepts the lagoon’s ever-shifting waves, while the boat traffic enters the labyrinthine canals of the historical centre. During an exhibition at Sydney Non-Objective (15-30 December 2006), an art gallery in Sydney, Australia, Huston came up with a mirror that sat in the corner of one room. Thus, Huston demonstrates that the predictable angle produced by the meeting of two blank walls can become so pivotal that it deserves a mirror of its own.
Finally, back in the United States and mindful of Tiepolo’s earthbound protagonist, Huston has come the closest to Tarkovsky’s idea that cinema is ‘sculpting in time’ (1989). Besides owning the Russian director’s famous book on film theory, Huston has decided to continue his work on mirrors between painting and architecture, heaven and earth, by going to the Long Island countryside. Once the artist gets there, a series of installations begins to unfold. Planted in the mud, Huston’s mirror mimics the moving image, it intercepts the ever-changing motion of the waves. For Tarkovsky, the filmic image itself is comparable to the reeds in a river, bending, disappearing and swelling up again, the way only the frailest vegetation can record the story of a flowing river.
Of course, Baudry is well aware that neither the viewer nor the filmic image is ever static. The very intentional choice of the gerund ‘centering’ is all about process, tendency rather than result or product. But the point here is not to prove a brilliant French theorist wrong, but simply to unpack the system of the arts in film. By planting a mirror inside a riverbank filled with reeds and mud and by photographing this sort of re-sculpturing of the environment through its changing reflection, Huston has dramatized the camera obscura’s keen awareness of existential temporality. The specialist in visual culture, the film historian, and the art critic are going to be in a better position to appreciate the historical implications of Huston’s work and many other artists’ creative gestures the more familiar they are with both film theory and the history of art. It is only through an interdisciplinary training that they can revisit and rekindle the explanatory power of a whole set of critical terms.