Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination 1009396714, 9781009396714
This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema's
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CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY AND THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION
This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema’s debt to ancient Greece and Rome. It explores filmic perspectives on the ancient verbal and visual arts and applies what is often referred to as pre-cinema and what Sergei Eisenstein called cinematism: that paintings, statues, and literature anticipate modern visual technologies. The motion of bodies depicted in static arts and the vividness of epic ecphrases point to modern features of storytelling, while Plato’s Cave Allegory and Zeno’s Arrow Paradox have been related to film exhibition and projection since the early days of cinema. The book additionally demonstrates the extensive influence of antiquity on an age dominated by moving-image media, as with stagings of Odysseus’ arrow shot through twelve axes or depictions of the Golden Fleece. Chapters interpret numerous European and American silent and sound films and some television productions and digital videos. . is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. He has written and edited several books on Roman literature, the classical tradition, and antiquity in the cinema and has published well over a hundred articles, book chapters, and reviews. His previous books from Cambridge are Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (), Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (), and Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions ().
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CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY AND THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION MARTIN M. WINKLER
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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Martin M. Winkler This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Winkler, Martin M., author. : Classical antiquity and the cinematic imagination / Martin M. Winkler. : First edition. | New York : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. : (print) | (ebook) | (hardback) | (paperback) | (epub) : : Motion pictures and literature. | Classical literature–Influence. : . . (print) | . (ebook) | ./–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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DIS
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H S C D A Z E P A A S T. L C R C. V C V P. V M M H A H E QVI PRAECIPVE VARIIS MODIS ARTIS MAGNAE LVCIS ET VMBRAE ITEMQVE FABVLARVM IMAGINIBVS MOVENTIBVS NARRATARVM TAM ORIGINES QVAM ANALOGIAS OCVLIS POSTERITATIS SVBIECERVNT FELICITER
SACER HIC LIBER non est mirum simulacra moveri bracchiaque in numerum iactare et cetera membra. nam fit ut in somnis facere hoc videatur imago. quippe, ubi prima perit alioque est altera nata inde statu, prior hic gestum mutasse videtur. L
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Published online by Cambridge University Press
Contents
Illustrations Preface
page x xv
Fade-In
Antiquity, the Cinema, and New Ways of Seeing Film Directors on Antiquity On Reading and Viewing
:
Douris’ Jason: Reckless Interpretations and the Ongoing Moment
The Literary Background of Douris’ Image Gerhard, Welcker, Robert: Clashes of Academic Titans From Lycophron to Simon and Giangrande Douris’ Visual Narrative and the Aristotelian Now The Now as kairos: Lessing’s “Fruitful Moment” Enter Photography: Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment Aristotle and the camera obscura Francastel and the Birth of Pre-Cinema Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey Heron, the camera obscura, and Damascius Homo cinematographicus: The Cinema as Aristotelian Thought Machine
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Classical Cinematism
Contents
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
Homer the Painter, Homer the Filmmaker Lessing on Text and Image After Lessing: Eisenstein’s Homer Catullus and Virgil
Shadows and Caves: The Cinema as Platonic Idea and Reality
In Plato’s Cave Shadow Play: Mistaking the False for the True Bergson and the Philosophy of the Cinematographic Mind Plato’s Cave on Screen: La Jetée, The Conformist, and Related Films The Cinema Returns to and from Plato’s Cave Light and Shadows The Platonic, Cinematically “The Like Real World” Varda and Ophuls on Memory and History
Static Flight: Zeno’s Arrow and Cinematographic Motion
The Filmstrip and the Arrow’s Flight Zeno and Motion on Film: Pro and Con High-Speed Photography, Bullet Time, and Beyond Zeno’s Onscreen Comedy Cameo
Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
Cinematic Illusions: Lucretius on Dreams Sinsteden and Plateau on Lucretius The Aftermath Lucretius and Screen Media: Varieties and Vicissitudes : A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
The Cinematic Nature of the Opening Scene in Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story
The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Heliodorus’ Opening and Cinematic Technique Heliodorus’ Opening as Screenplay Comments Welles’s Touch of Evil and Hitchcock’s Psycho Classical Rhetoric and Cinematic Style Complex Flashbacks Lying Flashbacks
Tragedy on Stage and Screen Masks and Faces in Tragedy The Emotional Power of Mask and Close-Up
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Contents The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece; or, The Case of the Missing Ecphrasis
The Golden Fleece in Apollonius’ Argonautica Neo-Mythologism: Hercules, The Giants of Thessaly, Jason and the Argonauts () CGI: Jason and the Argonauts () and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters Film Technology and the Supernatural Medea The Golden Thing
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey; or, The Case of the Insoluble Enigma
The Textual Problem From the Verbal to the Visual No Clear Picture Odissea () Ulysses Odissea () The Odyssey () Animation and CGI Homeric Surprises
Peckinpah’s Aristotle; or, How Well Does The Wild Bunch Fit The Poetics?
Peckinpah and the Greeks Peckinpah Scholars on Catharsis Aristotelian Catharsis Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah Peckinpah’s Tragic Protagonist Summation: Visual Poetry
Fade-Out
Cleopatra’s Zoetrope The Cinema’s Paths to the Greeks
Bibliography Index
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Illustrations
. Eisenstein’s temple of cinema. From Neravnodushnaya priroda. page . Douris’ painting of Jason in the dragon’s maw. Wikimedia Commons. . Reconstruction of Douris’ painting in Gerhard’s publication. . Detail of Douris’ painting: Athena’s spear. . Myron’s Diskobolos. National Museum, Rome. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA .). . Triumph of the Will. The dissolve from Myron’s Diskobolos to a modern athlete. Screen capture. . Dancing Maenad by the Brygos Painter. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA .). . Publicity photograph of Tamara Desni. Jerry Murbach Collection. . Publicity photograph of Anne Francis. Author’s collection. . Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in dance sequence from Top Hat. Author’s collection. . Marble relief of Nike. Acropolis Museum, Athens. Wikimedia Commons (CCO .). . Publicity photograph of Carole Lombard. Author’s Collection. . Publicity photograph of Ginger Rogers in Venus de Milo pose. Author’s collection. . Spanish-language poster for Blonde Venus. Author’s collection. . Side A of the Amasis Painter’s satyr amphora. Martin von Wagner-Museum, Wu¨rzburg Wikimedia Commons (CCO .).
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Illustrations . Side B of the Amasis Painter’s satyr amphora. Martin von Wagner-Museum, Wu¨rzburg Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA .). . Fresco of Minoan bull leapers from Knossos. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Wikimedia Commons. . The Roman Alexander mosaic. National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Wikimedia Commons. . The human thought process according to Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen, vol. , Plate . . La Jetée. In the Cave. Screen capture. . La Jetée. The symbolic sunglasses. Screen capture. . La Jetée. The Sibyl’s Cave. Screen capture. . The Owl’s Legacy. Plato’s modern Cave. Screen capture. . Robin Hood. Lobby card of Maid Marian as Butades’ medieval descendant. Jerry Murbach Collection. . The Matrix. An example of bullet time. Screen capture. . Wonder Woman. A bullet in flight. Screen capture. . Wonder Woman. Reverse angle of .. Screen capture. . Helen of Troy. Arrows stopped in mid-flight. Screen capture. . Cupid Productions logo. Screen capture. . : A Space Odyssey. Bowman’s final vision of the monolith. Screen capture. . : A Space Odyssey. Star Child and Earth. Screen capture. . Cover of M. Owen Lee, Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia. . Oedipus Rex. Jocasta realizing the truth. Screen capture. . Oedipus Rex. Oedipus at a crucial moment. Screen capture. . Iphigenia. Agamemnon in his “war mask” after the sacrifice. Screen capture. . Iphigenia. Clytemnestra’s mask-like gaze of doom. Screen capture. . La Llorona. A supernatural gaze of doom. Screen capture. . The Passion of Joan of Arc. Suffering Joan. Screen capture. . Psycho. Marion Crane’s dead gaze. Screen capture. . A Clockwork Orange. Alex’s menacing gaze. Screen capture. . The Blows. Final close-up of Antoine Doinel. Screen capture. . Summer with Monika. The final image. Screen capture. . The Seventh Seal. The face of Death. Screen capture. . Orphée. The Princess, Orphée’s Death. Screen capture.
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. Queen Christina. The beautiful zero of Garbo’s face. Screen capture. . The face of Apollo from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Author’s collection. . Hercules. Apollonius of Rhodes’ English-language credit. Screen capture. . Hercules. The Golden Fleece on its tree. Screen capture. . Hercules. The Golden Fleece behind Aeson’s throne. Screen capture. . The Giants of Thessaly. First view of the statue holding the Golden Fleece. Screen capture. . The Giants of Thessaly. Jason with the Golden Fleece in the statue’s palm. Screen capture. . Jason and the Argonauts (). First view of the Golden Fleece. Screen capture. . Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece in its glittering beauty. Screen capture. . Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece: desecration. Screen capture. . Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece on its tree. Screen capture. . Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece above the abyss. Screen capture. . Jason and the Argonauts (). Pelias wearing the Golden Fleece. Screen capture. . Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. The Golden Fleece in white. Screen capture. . Medea. The Golden Fleece in its sacred space. Screen capture. . Medea. The Golden Fleece: a profane touch. Screen capture. . Medea. The Golden Fleece: now worthless. Screen capture. . The Golden Thing. Medea displaying the Golden Fleece. Screen capture. . Odissea (). Telemachus, holding Odysseus’ bow, and Odysseus. Screen capture. . Odissea (). Odysseus (extreme l.), the axes, and the suitors. Screen capture. . Ulysses. Odysseus and the arrangement of the axes. Screen capture.
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Illustrations . The axes according to Delebecque, “Le jeu de l’arc de l’‘Odyssée.’” . The axes according to Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey. . Ulysses. The axe set-up. Screen capture. . Ulysses. Odysseus’ arrow (top. r.) going through the helve holes. Screen capture. . Ulysses. The arrow’s progress. Screen capture. . The axes and the trench according to Stubbings, “Crafts and Industries.” . The axes and the trench according to Pocock, “The Arrow and the Axe-Heads in the Odyssey.” . Odissea (). The hall and the stairs, with maids (l.)., Telemachus (ctr.), and Odysseus and Antinous (both r.). Screen capture. . Odissea (). Odysseus setting up the axes, with Eurycleia watching him. Screen capture. . An “abnormal” axe shape according to Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey. . The shape and arrangement of the axes favored by Page. . The Odyssey. Eumaeus setting up the axes. Screen capture. . The Odyssey. Odysseus aiming, watched by Telemachus. Screen capture. . The Odyssey. Before Odysseus’ shot: the perfect moment. Screen capture. . The Odyssey. The arrow (front l.) flying through the rings. Screen capture. . Troy: The Odyssey. A non-Homeric set-up. Screen capture. . Troy: The Odyssey. The arrow in flight (to screen r.). Screen capture. . Ulysses . The axes set up on the suitors’ banquet table. Screen capture. . Ulysses . The axe arrangement: frontal view. Screen capture. . Ulysses . The arrow, its fledging visible (extreme l.), flying through the axe arrangement. Screen capture. . Odissea (). Side view of some of the axes. Screen capture. . Odissea (). Odysseus aiming. Screen capture. . Odissea (). Reverse angle: view through the axe holes. Screen capture.
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. Ulisse (). The arrangement of eight axes. Screen capture. . The Animated Odyssey. A familiar axe arrangement. Screen capture. . Axe arrangement from Morrison, A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey. . Curved Minoan axe from Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey. . Clash of the Gods. Odysseus aiming. Screen capture. . Clash of the Gods. Odysseus in close-up, with axe blades and handles dramatically out of focus. Screen capture. . Clash of the Gods. The arrow tip seen head-on. Screen capture. . Clash of the Gods. The arrow in flight. Screen capture. . The Odyssey D. The axe arrangement, with Odysseus preparing his shot. Screen capture. . The Odyssey D. Reverse angle: the arrow beginning its flight. Screen capture. . The Odyssey D. The arrow in flight. Screen capture. . L’Odyssée. Another familiar arrangement. Screen capture. . L’Odyssée. The axe set-up before an anachronistic target. Screen capture. . L’Odyssée. A unique view from inside one of the axe rings. Screen capture. . A version of the TSG logo. Screen capture. . The Wild Bunch. The machine gun: pots and pans. Screen capture. . The Wild Bunch. The machine gun: death and devastation. Screen capture. . The Wild Bunch. The ecstasy of death. Screen capture. . The Wild Bunch. “The high air hushed” and the Bunch “staring everywhere.” Pike Bishop ctr. l., back to camera. Screen capture. . The Wild Bunch. “Shepherd of the people”: the dissolve from Pike Bishop to the Bunch riding into the distance. Screen capture. . A camera obscura with its Latin distich in Zahn, Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium. . Seven Wonders of the World. The Acropolis on the mighty Cinerama screen. Screen capture.
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Preface
This book complements and extends my studies on classical antiquity and the cinema by presenting new approaches to some fundamental topics. These range from filmic perspectives on classical literature and visual art to the cinema’s engagement with antiquity. The book demonstrates how and why modern technologies, which make possible complex visual narratives, can enhance our understanding and appreciation of ancient works long considered familiar. It also shows how extensive the influence of antiquity has been on the cinema and related media. I have divided the topics to be addressed into five separate parts, according to larger thematic aspects. Part consists of an introductory chapter, a fade-in that prepares the ground for the more advanced and specific topics that will follow. The two chapters of Part are in the nature of what classical rhetoricians called progymnasmata: preparatory exercises. These are intended to alert readers living in an age dominated by image media to contemporary ways of seeing ancient art and literature. Thus Chapter is a detailed analysis of a Greek vase painting that is as unique as it is mysterious. From its discovery until now, traditional scholars have never reached a consensus about its meaning and have proposed contradictory and mutually exclusive interpretations. On the basis of a critical survey of the reception history of this image, my chapter proposes an approach that has been entirely ignored so far. The chapter’s aim is to offer a view of this painting that builds on earlier scholarship but extends it into the age of moving images. The chapter is as detailed as it is in order to be able to offer, as convincingly as possible, a first but fundamental introduction to, and justification of, my approach in the following chapters: a new look at the old. Even long-established irresolution about an ancient work may be overcome when it can be related to later ones, even those of a kind not yet in existence at the time the original was created. The result is a deeper appreciation of the original artist’s sophistication. By focusing on one ancient artwork, this chapter in particular exemplifies, and is xv
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representative of, my intent with the present book as a whole. Serendipitously, the case I am attempting to make was already stated, both eloquently and concisely if without any thought of our media, well over a century earlier. In a lecture to students of history at Oxford, British historian, archeologist, and professor of Greek Sir John Myres put it like this: It is . . . one of the rare privileges of the historian, as of the poet, and the painter, to be always interpreting old facts, old problems, and old situations, to new minds; and to be interpreting them always, too, in the light of new knowledge, cast upon them from a fresh point of view. It is our duty, therefore, as well as our temptation, to take full toll of current knowledge, and the fresh discoveries of our time.
Chapter takes us to what has been regarded as the classical precursors of the cinema and its origin: Aristotle and the camera obscura. On the basis of the latter, the chapter then surveys what Pierre Francastel termed “precinema” and what, before him, Sergei Eisenstein called “cinematism” in connection with ancient and later literature and visual arts: their implied cinematic nature avant la lettre (et avant la chose elle-même). This chapter could be expanded significantly. Many of my earlier publications have dealt with aspects of classical pre-cinema. Here I provide a kind of summa praecinematographica classica. The six chapters of Part then offer detailed interpretations of cinematism in regard to major aspects of classical literature in epic and epyllion, a kind of brief epic (Chapter : Homer, Catullus, Virgil), philosophy (Chapters –: Plato, Zeno, Lucretius), the novel (Chapter : Heliodorus), and tragedy (Chapter ). In this central part of the book, I adhere to Eisenstein’s views, summarized in Chapter , of the coherent development of all creative endeavors and technological progressions. These chapters also reveal a side of classical authors – poets, philosophers, novelists, technical writers – that may surprise some readers: their modernity even more than their timelessness. Such surprise could be observed in
John L. Myres, The Value of Ancient History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), –. I turn to him again in Chapters and . Cinematism, the English version of the French noun cinématisme, corresponds to Eisenstein’s original coinage kinematographichnost’ (“cinematographicity”). Cf. the title of a French collection of Eisenstein’s essays: S. M. Eisenstein, Cinématisme: peinture et cinéma: Textes inédits, tr. Anne Zouboff (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, ; new ed.: Dijon: Les Presses du Réel / Paris: Kargo, ). On the terms see Ada Ackerman, “What Renders Daumier’s Art So Cinematic for Eisenstein?” in Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), – and – (notes), at note .
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the comment by a scholar of classical novels on a previously published version of Chapter : “A bold but convincing ‘screenplay.’” Part IV applies a reverse angle, as it were, to the preceding. In what could be called a kind of cinematic classicism, its three chapters examine specific ways in which filmmakers have interpreted complex, even enigmatic, text passages in Hellenistic epic (Chapter : Apollonius), in Homer’s Odyssey (Chapter ), and in Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapter ). Like the subject of Chapter , the texts here dealt with have posed great difficulties of interpretation. I examine my two epic passages in reverse chronological order of composition because the topic of Apollonius’ missing description of the Golden Fleece is meant as preparation – again a kind of progymnasma – for the next one: Odysseus shooting an arrow through twelve axes. Neither my own points in these two chapters nor the films that I adduce or their makers’ approaches contain any definitive solutions, but all can contribute, in some cases significantly, to our understanding of the fascinating nature of the originals. Chapter addresses the topic of cathartic violence and juxtaposes The Bacchae by Euripides to The Wild Bunch, a controversial work by a filmmaker who had been fascinated by Aristotle’s Poetics since his student days. This chapter differs in execution if not in approach from those preceding it since it deals with a single film. Part V is a brief fade-out, with Chapter returning to the camera obscura and closing with a few favorite moments, one never seen, in my final films. Anyone writing about an extensive topic like mine inevitably encounters a dilemma: what to include and what to omit – in other words, where to draw the line in pursuing a particular theme or aspect. (In homage to Eisenstein, I might call this my own montage principle.) Different readers
Silvia Montiglio, Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, ), note . Her assessment is charming and welcome; I have only a small quibble about her but. Chapters – and have been revised, expanded, and updated from earlier publications: “The Face of Tragedy: From Theatrical Mask to Cinematic Close-Up,” Mouseion, no. (), –; “The Cinematic Nature of the Opening Scene of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” Ancient Narrative, (–), –; “Apollonius and the Golden Fleece: A Neo-Mythological Screen Legacy,” Archai, (), –; “Peckinpah and the Problem of Catharsis; or: How Well Does The Wild Bunch Fit Aristotle’s Poetics?” in Sue Matheson (ed.), The Good, The Bad and the Ancient: Essays on the Greco-Roman Influence in Westerns (Jefferson, : McFarland, ), –. Parts of Chapters and are based on “Cinemetamorphosis: Toward a Cinematic Theory of Classical Narrative,” Dionysus ex Machina, (), –, and on the first chapter in Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ). The range of dates indicates how long I have been thinking about this book. Additionally, there are some briefer connections to other publications of mine.
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are likely to react in different ways to my choices. Those who believe that I have drawn my line at the right place will be few at best. But this kind of dilemma is in the nature of the subject I pursue. In general, I have adhered to the practice advocated for ancient rhetoricians: to persuade or convince by force of example. Less is not more. Consequently, I have preferred to err on the side of inclusion rather than concision, and I quote or adduce more material than may be strictly necessary. For instance, what various film directors (and others) have said about Homer or about the power of the close-up would carry little conviction if I had cited only a few. Such a procedure would be wholly insufficient to indicate Homer’s persistent importance even to filmmakers who did not film the Iliad or Odyssey. Similarly, if on a larger scale, the scholarly background to the topics examined in some chapters, especially , , and , places films within the continuum of classical receptions. In this regard, Chapters and in particular complement each other: they systematically document the history of different and conflicting interpretations of, in one case, an image and, in the other, a text. These histories in turn are the basis for cinematic analyses. What some readers will consider an excess of details will, I hope, amount to greater persuasiveness for others. Mine is therefore an intellectual process that Eisenstein, my model and inspiration, has exemplified. His enthusiasm, which is in evidence throughout his extensive writings, is irresistibly infectious. Eisenstein’s writings have recently been characterized in these terms: Reading Eisenstein can be daunting and intellectually bracing. The range of his learning and the ambition of his theoretical aims are both staggering (if not always entirely consistent), while his sheer enthusiasm for ideas comes through, even in translation, in an affective way that is quite consistent with his own theorizing. Further, the structure and style of his prose often reads like a cinematic montage sequence.
As a result, Eisenstein is my spiritus rector. Accordingly, my book presents, in a way, a kind of textual-philological montage sequence on static and cinematic images, although, I hope, not a daunting one. In view of its inherent duality – cinema for classical scholars, antiquity for film scholars – my book contains various comments on the ancient
Quoted from Matthew Solomon, “Sergei Eisenstein: Attractions/Montage/Animation,” in Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.), Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, ), –, at . As he was throughout my Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), where see especially –, –, –, and –.
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cultures from directors, critics, and others who were not classically trained. What they said or wrote about the ancients was not necessarily au courant and may occasionally even be wrong. But my book is largely about the reception of antiquity, and in this regard the decisive factor is not whether something is true or false but how and why it arose and became influential. The variety, often conflicting, of interpretations of tragic catharsis and of what Aristotle called hamartia, both addressed in Chapter , is an example. The latter, generally understood as meaning “tragic flaw” in someone’s character, is something quite different, as is indicated by Herodotus, i.e. long before Aristotle. Still, a critical misperception such as this has in turn influenced subsequent works of literature and their screen versions. A case in point is Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (), whose credit sequence is followed by a textual quotation about “the stamp of one defect” leading to “corruption / From that particular fault.” This is followed by Olivier’s voice-over: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” This indecision on Hamlet’s part, however, identified as his character flaw and deduced from the text but not expressed in Shakespeare’s words, is nonexistent. Another, Roman, example, is the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid and the scholarly contests – intellectual battle lines, duels even – that have resulted. Altogether, then, readers’ reasoned and reasonable dissent from any of my propositions or conclusions can only help stimulate further explorations of individual topics or the book’s overall perspective. Such explorations I hope to initiate with these pages. After all, interpreting antiquity through the lens of cinematic modernity can grant us important insights into the complexity and depth of Greco-Roman visual and literary arts. I have previously advanced the terms – and concepts – of classical film philology and cinemetamorphosis as general descriptors. This approach
Herodotus, The Histories .–. (the story of Cambyses shooting and killing Prexaspes’ son), with Cambyses’ ên de hamartô (“if I miss”) at .. Shakespeare, Hamlet ..–; my partial quotations of lines and are according to Harold Jenkins (ed.), Hamlet (The Arden Shakespeare, rd ser.; London: Methuen, ; several rpts.), –. On this passage see the editor’s eye-opening note (Jenkins, –) on its literary background and Shakespeare’s change. A convenient summary and retrospective, pro and con the “Harvard School,” as it has come to be called, may be found in the various essays, not always unpolemical, collected in The Classical World, no. (). To this now add Hans-Peter Stahl, “Vergil Clearing Emperor Augustus’ Access to the Kingship of Troy: Aeneid, Books ,” Wu¨rzburger Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r die Altertumswissenschaft, n.s., (), –, especially the “Methodological Excursus” at –. Respectively in my Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), – (chapter titled “A Certain Tendency in Classical Philology”), and Ovid on Screen, – (“Cinemetamorphosis”).
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must be based on close familiarity with classical and cinematic sources across their respective histories. I adhere to the spirit of ancient authors from the eighth century (Homer) to the fourth century (Heliodorus) when I emphasize that classical philologists ought to consider the perspective advanced here (and previously) as useful and helpful in approaching their texts, just as they ought to consider all forms of moving-picture adaptations – variants of Frank Kermode’s “accommodations” adduced in Chapter – of classical narrative texts and images as integral to their intellectual responsibilities. The classical tradition and classical receptions, which began in Hellenistic Greece if not earlier, and classical scholarship, which began at that time as well, mutually reinforce each other. Rudolf Pfeiffer rightly spoke of a philologia perennis. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for film and media scholars who deal with classical myth, history, philosophy, or literature. What Irving Babbitt wrote well over a century ago in the preface to The New Laokoon still applies, even if Babbitt had classicism and neoclassicism vis-à-vis Romanticism in mind. These he approached from a comparative-literature perspective: “It should be the ambition of the student of comparative literature to make all attempts to define these movements in terms of one literature seem one-sided and ill-informed.” Except in quotations from and references to publications by others, I use common Latinized transliterations of Greek personal names and titles of works. I also use spellings of Greek terms that are now common in English, such as ecphrasis and catharsis. I use more literal transliterations elsewhere, e.g. ekplêktikon. I write Heracles and Ketos, Heron but not Hero, and Plato and Zeno but not Platon or Zenon. Complete consistency is not advisable, anyway. Translations from sources not in English but quoted in English without attribution are my own. I am indebted to Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho (prima inter pares) and to Frederick Ahl, Horst-Dieter Blume, and James Clauss for support and numerous helpful suggestions, information, and advice. Sonya Nevin sent a thoughtful reply to my query about a possible animation of Douris’ dragon vase painting. Chiara Sulprizio informed me about a little-known animated Odyssey. Experienced archers Peter Kalt and Jim Perry gave me valuable pointers. Readers for Cambridge University Press saved me from some errors and infelicities, as did
Rudolf Pfeiffer, Philologia perennis (Munich: Beck, ). Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), xi. Lessing’s Laocoon will appear in Chapters and .
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Jacqueline French, my careful and conscientious copyeditor. Michael Sharp, my editor, once again provided his customary support. An exclusive league of sophisticated banqueteers in Washington, , continues to furnish its members with more than intellectual sustenance. Jerry Murbach gave me access to his extensive collection of Hollywood images. Other illustrations are either in the public domain, taken from my own collection, or screen captures from films and appear in accordance with fair-use rules and regulations. The dedication page indicates my greatest debt of all: to those among the ancients without whom this book could never have been conceived. They are, of course, not the only ones who have never failed to give me intellectual or emotional pleasure – and usually both.
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Prolegomena
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British novelist, artist, art historian, and filmmaker John Berger once summarized a fundamental change, which came with photography and continued into the age of the moving image: The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless . . . the camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual (except in paintings) . . . The camera – and more particularly the movie camera – demonstrated that there was no centre . . . The invention of the camera changed the way men saw.
Berger was chiefly concerned with modern times, but there is no reason why his point should not be applied equally to the arts of the past, not excluding its verbal arts. Visual and verbal storytelling has become exponentially more complex after and because of photography and with cinematography. Film scholar James Monaco echoed Berger in : Film and the electronic media have drastically changed the way we perceive the world – and ourselves – during the past century, yet we all too naturally accept the vast amounts of information they convey to us in massive doses without questioning how they tell us what they tell.
The invention of the camera equally changed the ways of writing. This is itself a fascinating topic, but it is not part of my book. As a brief reminder, here is what British novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen concluded in about the short story: “The cinema, itself busy with a
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC / Penguin, ; several rpts.), . Berger’s immediate context (“the centre”) is that of perspective in painting. Beaumont Newhall, “Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (), –, is a classic introductory account of early photography (Daguerrotypy, Talbotypy) and its connections to depicting movement. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond: Art, Technology, Language, History, Theory, th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), (from preface to second ed.).
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technique, is of the same generation: in the last thirty years the two arts have been accelerating together. They have affinities – neither is sponsored by a tradition; both are, accordingly, free; . . . both have, to work on, immense matter.” A few years later, H. E. Bates, British author of stories and novels, agreed: “This is strikingly true. Indeed, the two arts have not only accelerated together but have, consciously or not, taught each other much.” The best example for the fusion between literature and cinema is modernist French novelist, screenwriter, and director Alain Robbe-Grillet. He is, of course, not the only one.
Antiquity, the Cinema, and New Ways of Seeing Greek filmmaker Antoinetta (or Antouanetta) Angelidi said a few years ago: as the main function of art is to produce new language and to offer new ways of seeing, the gift of poetic cinema to the world is double: it discovers what cinema can do and reveals the world anew.
In an essay titled “Visibility,” Italo Calvino observed about the close ties between reading and cinematic viewing: We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression. The first process is the one that normally occurs when we read . . . according to the greater or lesser effectiveness of the text, we are brought to witness the scene as if it were taking place before our eyes, or at least to witness certain fragments or details of the scene that are singled out. In the cinema the image we see on the screen has also passed through the stage of a written text, has then been “visualized” in the mind of the director, then physically reconstructed on the set, and finally fixed in the frames of the film itself. A film is therefore the outcome of a succession of phases, both material and otherwise, in the course of which the images acquire form. During this process, the “mental cinema” of the imagination has a function no less important than that of the actual creation of the
Elizabeth Bowen, “Introduction,” in Bowen (ed.), The Faber Book of Modern Stories (London: Faber & Faber, ; rpt. ), –, at . H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey (London: Nelson, ; several rpts.), , after quoting Bowen. Quoted from Rea Walldén, “Conversing with Dreams: An Encounter with Antoinetta Angelidi,” FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, (), –, at . I return to Angelidi in Chapter .
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sequences as they will be recorded by the camera and then put together on the moviola. This mental cinema is always at work in each of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. Nor does it ever stop projecting images before our mind’s eye.
Berger’s dictum, Angelidi’s view of her artistic medium, and Calvino’s elegant summary may be regarded as general guidelines for my chapters. Another one is the following passage that forms the opening paragraph in a critical survey of the history of film theory; I quote only the most relevant parts: One of the founding images of Western philosophy has also provided film theory with a key metaphor for the cinema. In Book of The Republic [the Cave Allegory, my subject in Chapter ], Plato projects a kind of moving picture of the relationship of human beings to reality . . . This image seems to anticipate and correspond to key aspects of the classic cinematic experience . . . The classic experience of cinema . . . is also a philosophical fascination that makes us ask: what is going on here? What is its relationship to our wider life in the world? Is it, perhaps, a microcosm of that life, the modern version of Plato’s cave? It is these questions, and others like them, that have led film theorists to create cinemas of the mind: philosophical models of the nature and operation of film.
On the next page Plato reappears in juxtaposition to John Locke and Jacques Derrida, neither of whom is said to have superseded Plato. The final page of this book’s main text even calls the Cave Allegory “one of the oldest philosophical movies.” More significant, however, is the following point: the key problem of film theory remains the problem illustrated by the image of Plato’s cave: the relation of representation to reality. That problem takes us into all the other questions of cinema.
Quoted from Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, tr. Patrick Creagh (; rpt. New York: Vintage, ), . Calvino next turns to the Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola. Quoted from Nicolas Tredell (ed.), Cinemas of the Mind: A Critical History of Film Theory (Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books / Totem Books, ), (in editor’s introduction). The book is an annotated textual anthology. Tredell (ed.), Cinemas of the Mind, . The accompanying endnote ( note ) is both instructive and amusing. Tredell (ed.), Cinemas of the Mind, . Tredell (ed.), Cinemas of the Mind, . The subject of representation or imitation – mimêsis in Greek – is too important and vast for me to deal with adequately in this book. Even so, it is always present. Readers interested in pursuing the matter might wish to start with Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), from Plato to Neoplatonism. See further Fabio Massimo Giuliano, Platone e la poesia: Teoria della composizione e prassi della ricezione (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, ).
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This question acquired a crucial new importance in with the presidential election in the United States and its concomitant Fake News, Deep-State and other conspiracies, the Big Steal of the election, and much more. Most of these phenomena center on visual media, now inescapable and ubiquitous. Here is one commentator’s summary conclusion: It [the Steal] testifies . . . to the sheer animal spirits of the media beast Donald Trump, who still [after losing the election] effortlessly dominates the news cycle, seizing the spotlight from his successor . . . That American politics was destined to be absorbed by television and the communication and entertainment media it spawned could be foreseen as far back as John F. Kennedy, but the “reality star” Donald Trump is this new world’s first grand apotheosis.
Classical antiquity developed a body of works and concepts that, in principle, anticipated what the cinema achieved in reality much later. André Bazin, one of the preeminent and most influential critics in the history of the cinema, once practically pointed this out. He wrote in : “The cinema is an idealistic phenomenon. The concept men had of it existed, so to speak, fully armed in their minds, as if in some platonic heaven, and what strikes us most of all is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers.” Bazin illustrated his point with a classical reference: “the myth of Icarus had to wait for the internal combustion engine . . . But it had dwelt in the soul of every man since he first thought about birds. To some extent, one could say the same thing about the myth of cinema.” Conversely, the cinema can gain in understanding or appreciation when considered alongside antiquity. The one illuminates the other. The result I hope for with this book is a greater appreciation of the nature of ancient and modern artistic achievements. Ultimately, my goal is twofold. On the one hand, I hope to show by examples not only that but also how something old – the classical cultures – can be approached from new perspectives, ones which reveal that well-known and well-understood
Quoted from Mark Danner, “The Slow-Motion Coup,” The New York Review of Books (October , ), –, at . André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema? New ed., ed. and tr. Hugh Gray, vol. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –; quotations at and , slightly corrected. Tom Gunning, “The World in Its Own Image: The Myth of Total Cinema,” in Dudley Andrew (ed.) with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –, argues for a different interpretation of Bazin’s essay from mine (and others’). His points are worth keeping in mind, but the earlier views of it fit the wider context I propose in this book quite well.
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works are more fascinating than they have previously been considered to be. This we may call a cinematic approach to antiquity. On the other hand, a new technological and artistic medium, the cinema, stands to gain in anybody’s appreciation when it is being considered alongside Greece and Rome. As we shall see, this is especially the case when films turn to specific, and sometimes problematic, aspects of ancient texts. Readers hesitant to see the ancient past and the modern present side by side may consider the following observations by film historian Charles Musser as providing a kind of historical – and cultural-artistic-technical – bridge: The origin of screen practice – as distinct from either earlier uses of projected images or the later introduction of cameras – can be traced back to the mid s . . . The much later invention of motion-picture projection was only one of several major technological innovations that transformed screen practice in the course of its history . . . Cinema did not emerge out of the chaos of various borrowings to find its true or logical self: it is part of a much longer, dynamic tradition, one that has undergone repeated transformations in its practice while becoming increasingly central within a changing cultural system.
Even if the origins of screen practice go back “only” to the s, the origins of screen thought go back much further, as we will see in Chapters to and elsewhere. As great a cinema figure as Sergei Eisenstein provided a shining example of extensive, if necessarily unsystematic, intellectual and emotional engagement with the pre-history of screen practice. At this point I should address a perspective on the nature of cinema from which I heartily dissent. In a presumably unconscious echo of Bazin, Jacques Aumont, a well-known French scholar of film and visual culture, once stated: “Nothing about the cinema, neither its invention nor any of the detours of its history, has descended from the heavens, as our historicist age continues to discover. . . a genuine film history . . . has begun to establish new foundations.” This is, in principle, unobjectionable. What immediately follows, however, is a different matter: Whatever progress will be made in the historical study of film . . . it remains difficult to speak in historical terms of the cinema as an art of representation – that is, in relation to the other neighboring arts. There are of course minimal demands easily satisfied. No one any longer employs hyphenated formulations suggesting a unilinear filiation such as “painting-photography-cinema”;
Charles Musser, History of the American Cinema, vol. : The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to (New York: Scribner’s, ), – (in chapter titled “Before Cinema”).
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Fade-In fortunately neither does anyone still invoke the mediocre notion of “precinema,” which justifies the discovery of “cinematographic” procedures in Homer, the Bayeux tapestry, and Shakespeare.
Pre-cinema – the term was coined by French art historian Pierre Francastel – is the subject of my Chapter . Homer, seen from Eisenstein’s point of view, will be discussed soon; he will appear again in Chapter . Both chapters will attempt to demonstrate that what Aumont dismisses out of hand is anything but mediocre to readers and viewers who keep an open mind. Nor does it presuppose any unilinear filiation. Aumont’s is a curious case. How can someone exclude a visual narrative from long before the advent of the cinema – his example is a medieval tapestry – and still maintain: “Canaletto painted with a ‘camera,’ but it was Constable who made cinema”? No less a towering figure than Eisenstein coined the term cinematism, a synonym of pre-cinema, and did the very thing Aumont disparages: finding filmic aspects in Homer, Shakespeare, and a slew of others. Aumont’s dismissal of pre-cinema becomes nearly inexplicable since he is himself a leading Eisenstein scholar. In his book on Eisenstein Aumont wrote, appropriately and appreciatively: there is no one else in film history who has so intricately combined filmmaking, film teaching, and film theorizing; no other director has written as much, has commented on his own work at such length, or has so obviously thought of himself as an aesthetician, a journalist, a philosopher, a semiotician, and a draughtsman.
It seems unlikely that someone described in such glowing terms should have been capable of the low intellectual level that Aumont imputes to
Jacques Aumont, “The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze,” tr. Charles O’Brien and Sally Shafto, in Dudley Andrew (ed.), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), –; quotations at . This article originally appeared as a chapter in Aumont, L’oeil interminable: Cinéma et peinture (Paris: Séguer, ). Revised and augmented edition: L’oeil interminable (Paris: La Différence, ). Aumont, “The Variable Eye,” note , quoted in its entirety. Why does this note not appear in the edition? Aumont, L’oeil interminable ( ed.), note , adds the comment that Eisenstein did not consider cinematism teleologically – correctly so, but with this he either contradicts or corrects himself, as we will see in Chapter – but as “the comparative mode of similarity of formal processes.” I see little if anything objectionable in Eisenstein’s perspective on literature and the arts, least of all anything worthy of dismissal de haut en bas, even if his enthusiasm may occasionally carry him a bit farther than some of his readers may wish to follow him. Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, tr. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross (London: BFI / Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). The French original, based on Aumont’s dissertation, was published in . On the book see Daniel Fairfax, The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (–), vol. : Aesthetics and Ontology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), – (in chapter on Aumont). Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, vii (in “Preface”).
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pre-cinematists, not least since Francastel was among the many from whom Aumont himself had learned: Aumont’s research has probed the vast constellation of art history and theory, taking succor from the writings of twentieth-century figures such as Arnheim, Panofsky, Warburg, Gombrich, Francastel and Auerbach.
Moreover, Aumont’s dismissal of pre-cinema neglects one of Eisenstein’s chief works: Method, a comprehensive study of culture across history. It has been characterized in the following terms: Method is Eisenstein’s search in world history, literature, ethnography, psychology, medicine, and biology for examples of sensory-emotional thinking and its appeal for us. It explores the ways conscious and unconscious modes of perception are joined in the production and perception of art forms of all kinds . . . Along with montage, this is Eisenstein’s key contribution to aesthetics, and it underlies everything he wrote from about until the end of his life . . . Since the early s . . . Eisenstein had been fascinated by the presence of the past, in all its forms, in our individual and collective lives, examples of which he found seemingly everywhere he looked . . . Most of his subjects came from classical European myth and ethnographic studies of “primitive” peoples of Asia, indigenous Americans and Latin Americans, Africans and Pacific Islanders.
Sensory-emotional thought was, to Eisenstein, archaic and pre-rational; he identified it as ecstatic and Dionysian, i.e. classical. All this was what Eisenstein called (in German) the Grundproblem: the “fundamental problem.” His own thought was nearly all-encompassing. He was not only a filmmaker, not even in the many facets that the term implies. Two classical examples that illustrate Eisenstein’s astonishing range when addressing the Grundproblem through various artistic manifestations and complement each other are what he called the “montage sequence” in Homer, discussed
So Fairfax, The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (–), . It was left unfinished and was never published during Eisenstein’s life but is now available in two scholarly editions (Russian only): Metod, vols., ed. N. I. Klejman (Moscow: Muzej kino: Eijzenshtein-tsentr, ); Metod, vols., ed. Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin: PotemkinPress, ). Various excerpts from Method have appeared, unsystematically, in English. An extensive selection is now in Sergei Eisenstein, The Primal Phenomenon: Art, ed. Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth; tr. Dustin Condren (Berlin: PotemkinPress, ). There is also a German-language edition of the latter. So Joan Neuberger, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –.
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below, and his filmic understanding of the sequential architecture on the Acropolis of Athens as a visitor would experience it. In his introduction to Eisenstein’s understanding of montage, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith gives a concise summary explanation of montage that specifically refers to the Acropolis: Eisenstein’s original concept of montage was that meaning in the cinema was not inherent in any filmed object but was created by the collision of two signifying elements, one coming after the other and, through the juxtaposition, defining the sense to be given to the whole. The obvious vehicle for such a form of meaning-construction is the shot . . . montage exists not only in time but in space, and not only in the object but, crucially, in the perception of it. Montage as a principle is not limited to cinema: it is found in literature, in theatre, in music, in painting, even in architecture. But it is in cinema that it finds its highest expression . . . In the Athenian Acropolis Eisenstein finds an example of the disposition of masses in space which can only be grasped in its ensemble through a montage effect.
In view of the preceding, one may be justified to ask: How defensible is it summarily to throw out a major side of art-historical and cinematic theory, one which has been documented in Eisenstein’s writings over many years? And: Whose perspective deserves greater credence or carries greater conviction – that of a critic of cinema or that of one of its greatest artists? To me, Aumont’s is a case of sit pro ratione voluntas. What I conclude, at least for myself, from the preceding, I here put into an allusion to the Latin version of a famous Greek saying: Amicus Admontanus sed magis amicus Ferrisilex. Reference to another great French scholar and, like Aumont, an academic is appropriate here. At just the time when Francastel’s concept of
Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. : Towards a Theory of Montage, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor; tr. Michael Glenny (; rpt. London and New York: Tauris, ), –. This translation had appeared earlier, with an introduction by Yve-Alain Bois, in Assemblage, (), –. Bois’s introduction (– and – [notes]) contains valuable information and references. The title “Montage and Architecture” may not be Eisenstein’s. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Eisenstein on Montage,” in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. , xii–xvi; quotation at xv. Juvenal, Satires .. The original Latin is about Plato: amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas (“Plato is my friend, but the truth is a greater friend”). It adapts a Greek saying about Socrates (attributed to Plato) that was in turn applied to Plato (attributed to Aristotle; cf. Nicomachean Ethics a). On this see Ingemar Du¨ring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, ), (on the late-ancient Vita vulgata ). Comparable sentiments are at Plato, Phaedo c and Republic c.
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pre-cinema was en vogue, the very period Aumont disparages, Henri Agel published an article on the Odyssey from a pre-cinematic point of view. Agel referred to some of his earlier publications from the late s, in which he had taken a comparable approach to literature and had taught it to his students. Agel was probably more significant a scholar in his time than Aumont became later, as may be seen, for example, in Agel’s influence on Christian Metz.
Film Directors on Antiquity
Perhaps we should turn to practitioners rather than critics of the cinema for a better understanding of the theme addressed in this book. A number of major filmmakers have, across several decades, expressed views sympathetic to my own. Here are some examples. Their words about the cinema and classical culture may serve as amicus curiae briefs from committed experts on behalf of what I hope to show throughout. French filmmaker Abel Gance, best known today as pioneering director of screen epics on historical (Napoleon, ) and contemporary (La roue, ) topics, once poetically described the cinema as a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, a consummate work that combines various art forms in an ultimate synthesis: It is music in the harmony of its visual turns, in the very quality of its silences; painting and sculpture in its composition; architecture in its construction and ordered arrangements; poetry in its gusts of dreams stolen from the soul of beings and things; and dance in its interior rhythm which is
Henri Agel, “L’Odyssée et le pré-cinéma,” L’Age nouveau, no. (April–June ), –. The article includes filmic analyses of specific lines. This is Eisenstein’s own method, as we will see in Chapter in connection with the Iliad. This issue of L’Age nouveau was devoted to pre-cinema and will become important in that chapter. See on this André Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier, “De la filmologie à la sémiologie: Figures de l’alternance au cinéma,” Cinémas, nos. – (), –. On Agel as educator see, e.g., Pascal Laborderie, “L’enseignement du cinéma dans le Précis d’inition au cinéma (Agel H. et G., ),” Mise au point, (); unpaginated. This article is chiefly on an influential book by Agel and his wife Geneviève. Fairfax, The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (–), , reports that Aumont’s application for an academic post was once rejected because of a letter of denunciation he believed written by Agel. See Jacques Aumont, “Mon très cher objet,” Trafic, (Spring ), –, at note (where Aumont calls Agel a bien-pensant notoire). Could this matter be connected with Aumont’s rejection of Francastel’s stance toward pre-cinema via Agel’s, who had adopted it, even if Aumont was influenced by Francastel? Fairfax, note , adds: “Aumont now cautions . . . that he has no direct proof that Agel wrote this letter.” The now is left unspecified, but Fairfax elsewhere refers to interviews he conducted with Aumont for his book. I return to Aumont in Chapter .
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Fade-In communicated to the soul and makes it leave your body and mingle with the actors of the drama [on screen].
Gance was by no means alone in this. Eisenstein, as we already know, held a similar view. Gance’s description reflects Italian futurist Ricciotto Canudo’s graphic models of cinema and the arts that appeared in the Gazette des Sept Arts, a new French journal which he edited and whose subtitle was “ .” In its “Manifesto” Canudo wrote: “Today, the ‘moving circle’ of esthetics finally closes triumphantly with the complete fusion of the arts mentioned: the Cinema [le Cinématographe] . . . The Seventh Art thus reconciles [in itself] all the others.” Jean Renoir, one of the cinema’s great humanists, turned to the ancient Greeks – in his case, their theater – to explain the importance of style and genre in the cinema. He began with an insight he had achieved only after a quarter century of experience. In a letter to actress Ingrid Bergman, he put it first into quasi-classical and then into specific ancient terms: the Gods . . . teach you that in Art, ‘only the form counts’. They know that the cult of great ideas is dangerous and may destroy the real basis for great achievements, that is the daily, humble work within the framework of a profession . . . In a structure that is always the same, you are free to improve what alone is worthwhile the detail in human expression. [I learned] something that proved a revelation to me – it is that the Classic Greek theatre was very much helped by the fact that the authors were dealing with the same stories, the same characters, and having to tell them to a public who already knew the action from A to Z, and was intimately acquainted with the characters. When the Athenians sat down in the theatre to listen to Oedipus and what was going to happen to him, they knew very well beforehand who he was and what would ensue. Hence, Sophocles didn’t have to get busy with . . .
Quoted from G.-Michel Coissac, Les coulisses du cinéma (Paris: Les Éditions Pittoresques, ), . In Gance had written the script for a film to be called La légende de l’arc-en-ciel (“The Legend of the Rainbow”), in which Juno sends her messenger Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, down to earth to collect seven colors representing individual concepts expressed in characters or stories. Violet refers to poetry; its representative is Homer. The film was never made. A summary is in Paul Cuff, Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema: Sounding Out Utopia (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer, ), –. [Ricciotto] Canudo, “Manifeste des SEPT ARTS,” Gazette des Sept Arts, (), , including three diagrams making Canudo’s case.
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useless explanations . . . He was free to deal with the details of human expression.
Renoir’s terms from the visual arts (framework, structure) for the cinema are appropriate. He was, after all, the son of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. But there is an even wider perspective on cinema as representative of the realm of art (or Art, as Renoir put it). In the words of Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave and a film critic before he turned director: There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like [Erich von] Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain Resnais, who sculpts. And like Socrates, [Roberto] Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy. The cinema, in other words, can be everything at once . . . Misunderstandings often arise from the failure to remember this truth.
In an interview conducted in , Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira said the following about what he termed “the cinematographic monument” as a visual and aural structure: It’s a Greek monument, which consists of four columns: the first is the image, the second is the word, the third is the sound, and the fourth is music . . . The image is the visible, the structure of the visible. Word and sound remain like the image . . . the image is always present, the image is present in everything . . . Each [element] has its place and its very force in the equilibrium of expression.
These words were spoken during the director’s centenary year and at a time when he had been active in the cinema for a full eight decades. So his summa cinematographica should carry special weight since they come from the cinema’s greatest elder statesman. (He died at age .) As a complement we may consider two brief comments by famous filmmakers. In connection with his film Voyage to Cythera (), a title reminiscent of classical antiquity and a painting by Watteau and poem by Baudelaire, Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos said: “I have a soft spot for the
Letter of August , (written in English), to Ingrid Bergman; quoted from Jean Renoir, Letters, ed. David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco (London: Faber & Faber, ), –, at . Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, tr. and ed. Tom Milne; new ed. (New York: Da Capo, ), . Godard said this in connection with his film Une femme mariée (), which he contrasted with genre films. The interview, conducted in French, is included in the American DVD release of de Oliveira’s film Belle toujours ().
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ancient writings. There really is nothing new. We are all just revising and reconsidering ideas that the ancients first treated.” Before him, Renoir once observed about film directors: “We find ourselves in the same position as the Greeks, who had the custom of writing, again and again, the same stories for a public who knew them by heart.” Eisenstein had already affirmed such a perspective. He was one of the greatest and most influential of filmmakers and a prolific writer on the theory and aesthetics of his medium. Eisenstein saw the cinema as the culmination, at his time but not necessarily forever, of a continuous history of artistic expression that began with the ancients and encompassed visual means of creativity (painting, sculpture, architecture) and verbal ones (epics, novels). In a long essay on filmmakers’ ancestors, as he called them, Eisenstein traced the history of cinematic storytelling back to antiquity: Let Dickens and the whole constellation of ancestors, who go as far back as Shakespeare or the Greeks, serve as superfluous reminders that Griffith and our cinema alike cannot claim originality for themselves, but have a vast cultural heritage . . . Let this heritage serve as a reproach to these thoughtless people with their excessive arrogance towards literature, which has contributed so much to this apparently unprecedented art, and most important, to the art of viewing.
In a sketch he called “The Building of Film Theory,” Eisenstein anticipated Oliveira. Eisenstein’s building was in the shape of a Greek temple (Fig. .). Its caption, written in English, is “The Building to be
Quoted from www.theoangelopoulos.com/voyagetocythera.htm. Jean Renoir, “Auto-Interview,” tr. Serge Grunberg; in Renoir, Le passé vivant (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile / Cahiers du Cinéma, ), –, at . Renoir’s English text was first published in London in . My quotation here is translated from Grunberg’s French. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves,” in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. : Writings: –, ed. Richard Taylor; tr. William Powell (; rpt. London and New York: Tauris, ), –; quotation at . American film pioneer D. W. Griffith is generally credited with discovering the grammar and syntax of film language. A brief exposition, with practical application, of Eisenstein’s approach to Dickens (and beyond) is in William C. Wees, “Dickens, Griffith and Eisenstein: Form and Image in Literature and Film,” The Humanities Association Review / Revue de l’Association des Humanités, (), –. Source: Sergei Mikhaylovitch Ejzenshtejn, Neravnodushnaya priroda, vol. : Chuvstvo kino, ed. Naum Kleyman (Moscow: Ejzenshtejn-tsentr, ), . The following description is from Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, . He adds a version of Eisenstein’s temple with translations of its inscriptions (slightly different from mine) and a translation of Eisenstein’s comments. Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergej Eisenstein – drei Utopien: Architekturentwu¨rfe zur Filmtheorie (Berlin: PotemkinPress, ), , reproduces Eisenstein’s entire page. The drawing has frequently been reproduced. But it does not appear in Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, tr. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), which is an incomplete translation of Eisenstein’s two-volume book. Bulgakowa, , calls the drawing ironical. So it may have been at first, but it is best understood seriously, as she herself makes immediately clear. Her description is partly incorrect, as when she identifies the door as an altar.
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Film Directors on Antiquity
Figure . Eisenstein’s temple of cinema. From Neravnodushnaya priroda.
built.” The explanatory texts written into the diagram and his comments below it are in Russian. Eisenstein drew a tetrastyle temple that stood on a foundation called method of dialectic. Two steps titled expressiveness of man lead up to the building. Its four columns are called, from left to right, pathos, mise-en-scène, mise-en-cadre, and the comic. The roof rests on sensory thinking; its left and right are sociology and technique. The pediment is inscribed philosophy of art. Below it and between the two inner columns, there is a door called montage. The second column and the door appear hatched; in this way Eisenstein indicates that he had already addressed mise-en-scène and montage in his writings about the cinema. Those identified in the other parts of the temple were yet to be completed: the building to be built. Above the door and at the top of the three open spaces between columns, Eisenstein wrote the word Image in the largest letters of all. Since it appears exactly at half the height of the building (excepting its foundation) and in close proximity to the door, it characterizes the temple as a whole: the montage of images. A banner or large flag on top of the temple’s roof is inscribed method of cinema. Here we see classical architecture symbolizing the nature of cinema as synthesis of man’s expressive and creative capabilities. Eisenstein’s temple is not modeled on any actual building but is meant as a generic illustration. For this reason the merry flag on the roof should not be dismissed as playful anachronism; rather, it indicates that a synchronic perspective on culture was congenial to Eisenstein, who regarded the whole of culture as one.
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Now Eisenstein’s Homer. In an essay on Lessing’s Laocoon, to which I turn in Chapter and in which Homer plays a prominent part, Eisenstein intended “to demonstrate the similarity between the methods of montage and this ancient, seminal epic,” the Iliad. The “montage sequence” in Homer, he wrote, has its own breaks, its compositional juxtapositions or the rhythm of the montage series in aiming at the image we wish to attribute to an event and by which we want to represent that event . . . we [take] the starting point of cinema aesthetics to be the psychological phenomenon of creating an image, as being the conscious human content of this primary cell of ‘the technical marvel’ of cinematography.
In antiquity, Augustan poet Manilius pointed out that all storytelling begins with Homer. Wolfgang Petersen, director of Troy (; director’s cut, ), has added this modern comparison: “If there is something like a tree of storytelling, on which each book, each film, is a tiny leaf, then Homer is its trunk.” Similarly, Italian director Sergio Leone saw in Homer the origin of virtually everything: “Homer interests me not so much as bard of an archaic and heroic society with its epic battles as for the reason that he lets me understand, with immediate profundity, the fundamental feelings and powers of man.” At the time his largest epic, Once Upon a Time in America (), was released, Leone commented: “I began to realise that the American myth – ‘America on the screen’ – belongs to a worldwide patrimony” and that Hollywood films are “functioning like a modern Greek myth.” Homer was the first of filmmakers, as it were, to Eisenstein; he was the source of all narrative to Manilius, Leone, and Petersen.
Sergei Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. , –; quotations at and . Manilius, Astronomica .–. For the context of Homer as bringer of culture tout court, see the survey in Richard Hunter, The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, with references. Tobias Kniebe, “Homer ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht: ‘Troja’-Regisseur Wolfgang Petersen u¨ber die mythischen Wurzeln des Erzählens und den Achilles in uns allen” (interview), Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung (May , ); www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/petersen- interview-homer-ist-wenn-mantrotzdem-lacht-. (no longer freely accessible). Quoted from Marcello Garofalo, Tutto il cinema di Sergio Leone (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, ), . The book first appeared in . A new edition of Garofalo’s book is titled, serendipitously in this context, Il cinema è mito: Vita e film di Sergio Leone (Rome: Minimum fax, ). Quotations from Christopher Frayling, Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece (London: Reel Art Press, ), .
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On Reading and Viewing
On Reading and Viewing Today, few if any will deny, although many did until not too long ago, that psychoanalysis, structuralism, feminism, narratology, and several other areas of modern scholarship that did not exist in the past have succeeded in significantly advancing our understanding and appreciation when applied to the study of classical literature and culture. So does the cinema. My observations on specific aspects or individual works of ancient literature and the arts and on related aspects of the art of telling stories in moving images will reveal numerous affinities. Antiquity can help us appreciate the cinema and related media beyond the work that film and media scholars have been engaged in; the cinema can interpret antiquity beyond the work done by classical scholars. Both sides stand to gain from the perspectives that this book addresses. One classical scholar’s comment on Homer’s Iliad, for example, is appropriate in this context. He referred to “the larger process of the reader’s being appropriated by the Iliad (learning to respond to its world and its ways of understanding that world), and appropriating the Iliad (bringing it into one’s own world and one’s own ways of understanding).” That modern approaches to the ancient cultures often yield fruitful results has repeatedly been demonstrated: “when we discuss the specific features of a past culture, we assume a continuum that allows us to access its artifacts and describe them in our terms . . . comparisons of ancient material with modern texts and pictures will suggest that there is enough common ground to grant these points relevance beyond their original cultural frame.” As my book’s title indicates, I consider classical parallels to, indeed anticipations of, narrative and stylistic strategies of the cinema. This is what we can call, with Bazin, the approach to an idealistic phenomenon. It is complemented by a practical phenomenon: the cinema’s approaches to antiquity, based on its necessity to put on the screen what in classical contexts could be left out: not told, not shown. From its beginnings and on through the ages of gigantic widescreen, color, stereophonic, and eventually D historical and mythological tales, the cinema has recreated ancient Greece and Rome in different ways. Some of the results have been highly accomplished, others downright deplorable. Here a point once
Quoted from Andrew Sprague Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, ), . Quoted from Jonas Grethlein, Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity: The Significance of Form in Narratives and Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), –.
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made by Frank Kermode about the nature of what constitutes a classic work of literature may be extended to other areas of artistic or cultural achievements. What Kermode wrote goes to the heart of the matter that my book addresses: There are, to speak very broadly, two ways of maintaining a classic, of establishing its access to a modern mind. The first of these depends on philology and historiography – it asks what the classic meant to its author and his best readers, and may still mean to those who have the necessary knowledge and skill. The second is the method of accommodation, by which I mean any method by which the old document may be induced to signify what it cannot be said to have expressly stated.
And further: over and over again in time those old books are accommodated to the sense of readers whose language and culture are different. Here we deal in dispositions, not essences. The paradox – that there is an identity but that it changes – is made more difficult by the certainty that it can in some measure be redeemed from change, by an effort of interpretation rather than of simple accommodation, the establishment of ‘relevance’. It seems that on a just view of the matter the books we call classics possess intrinsic qualities that endure, but possess also an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions.
Alastair Fowler, adducing and briefly commenting on these passages, concludes, pithily but correctly: “The classic lives, if one may so put it, at the cost of losing itself. From this point of view it is only partially ‘above’ history. . . . consciousness, to say nothing of methods of interpretation, seems to alter in accordance with cultural changes.” Serendipitously for my purpose, Bazin had made comparable points in a long essay of . I quote only a few decisive passages: If film were two or three thousand years old, we would undoubtedly be able to see more clearly that it is not exempt from the laws common to the evolution of all arts . . . Film is young, but literature, theatre, music and painting are as old as time . . . film’s evolution has of necessity been inflected by long-established arts. Its history . . . is thus the product of
Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), and –. Kermode took his cue from T. S. Eliot, What Is a Classic? An Address Delivered before the Virgil Society on the th of October (London: Faber & Faber, ; several rpts.). Kermode’s book had its origin in the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures of ; its first edition appeared in . Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –.
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On Reading and Viewing
specific determinants in any art’s evolution and of the influence of more evolved forms of art.
Later in this essay, Bazin anticipated Kermode’s term accommodation, if rather briefly: To adapt, finally, is not to betray but to respect . . . The reason film today is capable of effectively taking on the domains of literature and theatre is because, first of all, it is master in its own house and has enough confidence in itself to yield to its subject. Finally, it can lay claim to fidelity . . . through an intimate understanding of its own aesthetic structures, which is a necessary precondition for respecting the works of literature it adapts.
No film, even one based on a great poem, play, or novel, can adequately, much less accurately, be judged by literary criteria. Russian theater and film director and screenwriter Grigori Kozintsev, best known internationally for two films of Shakespeare (Hamlet, ; King Lear, ), once put the matter with admirable concision. If we make a few adjustments, we can extend what he said about filming Shakespeare to filming any other forms of narrative: The cinema is first and foremost a visual art. A screen version entails a decisive alteration of the play’s structure. The problem is not one of finding means to speak the verse in front of the camera, in realistic circumstances ranging from long-shot to close-up. The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture has itself to be transformed into a visual poetry, into the dynamic organization of film imagery.
This is objectionable only to self-appointed keepers of Shakespeare’s flame. One major precondition for the differences Kozintsev here lays out is, however, often overlooked and directly applies to classical authors: their very greatness as poets. Kozintsev mentioned the “absence of a decorative setting in the Elizabethan theatre.” We may regard a reader’s mental – that is to say, unconscious – imaginings or visualizations of narrative texts
André Bazin, “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema? tr. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, ), –; quotations at – and –. This is the second English translation of Bazin’s most detailed statement on adaptation. The first (), with some corrections, is now in Bazin, “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” in Bazin, André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema’s Literary Imagination, ed. Dudley Andrew (Oakland: University of California Press, ), –, with source references and editorial comments on the translations and Bazin’s own textual revisions at –. The passages here quoted are on pages – and – (in different wordings). Grigori Kozintsev, “‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear’: Stage and Film,” in Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (eds.), Shakespeare : Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress Vancouver, August (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –; quotation at .
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(epic, novel) as analogues. To the Elizabethans, Kozintsev said, the poor visual quality of their stage was “the result, less of the poverty of technical means, than of the richness of the verse.” The stylistic and rhetorical décor of a literary epic, for instance, usually makes detailed descriptions of rich scenery, such as architecture or costumes, superfluous. In the cinema, this circumstance has to be reversed: settings and costumes must be on full display. The textual richness of a Homer, Virgil, or Ovid, to mention only antiquity’s most prominent epic poets, has to be rendered visually. The verbal elegance of the original is expressed – and, ideally, matched – by the visual elegance of the film. This elegance or eloquence is not primarily dependent on decorations, sets, costumes, or the proverbial casts of thousands but on a director’s will to style. Kozintsev again: “The cinema demands a different visual technique [from that of the stage]. A different kind of convention is necessary.” Equally, the cinema demands a different visual technique from that of epic, drama, or any other literary genre. Kozintsev’s point about a play’s alteration is decisive, especially if we remember that the ancient epics had originally been composed for oral performance and that silent reading was far less common in Greece and Rome than it has been in modern times. It is with good reason that Kozintsev speaks about a transformation from the aural to the visual and especially to images in motion. As a Shakespeare scholar has observed with approval about Kozintsev: “In Hamlet Kozintsev repeatedly demonstrates how a collaborator [i.e. an author’s artistic adapter] can be true to the original by altering it.” The Italian Odissea (), to which I turn in Chapter , is an example concerning classical literature: a film accomplished as a visual epic and faithful in spirit to Homer. Michael Cacoyannis’s Electra (), a film after Euripides’ play, may be another example. It once elicited the following comment from British classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones: I’m a keen filmgoer – I love Antonioni – and ‘Electra’ is certainly the best film of a classic I’ve ever seen. Cacoyannis has a touch of genius. He’s kept the spirit of Euripides’s play and put it into film terms. In fact, he may have improved it. I used to think Sophocles’s version of ‘Electra,’ with its wonderful poetry, was the better play of the two – but now I’ve seen this film I’m not so sure. Cacoyannis’s changes are quite justified – especially cutting most of the
Quotations from Kozintsev, “‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear,’” and . Quoted from Jack J. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (; rpt. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, ), .
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On Reading and Viewing
Chorus, which Euripides, unlike Aeschylus and Sophocles, found rather a burdensome convention. Removing the stagy prologue by the farmer, and the deus ex machina ending, are also improvements, and so is the rearranging of the stiff passages of stichomythia [one-line duologue].
And: A lot of nonsense has been talked about Euripides’s ‘modern’ approach. He is not putting forward moral views, he is not judging his characters, he is simply exploiting a narrative and letting the dilemma speak for itself. The film brings this out.
All this is strong praise. But is it justified? Perhaps not, as the slight vagueness in the phrase “improved it” may indicate. (Does “it” refer to the play or to its spirit?) But regardless of how we may decide, the possibility that a film can call forth such a statement should give us pause. Lloyd-Jones’s judgment applies even more to Cacoyannis’s third and final film of a Greek tragedy: Iphigenia (), after Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. Lloyd-Jones’s appreciation for a film of an ancient work of literature expresses a perspective that screenwriters and directors have often voiced. Cacoyannis himself once said: Plays . . . are based on dialogue and character . . . As long as filmmakers are not absolutely tied down by a text, they are not making “film theater,” which was never my intention . . . I . . . took liberties. I edited or rearranged the text. I took liberties particularly with the chorus . . . In Electra . . . I didn’t add any characters unrelated to the plot, but visually I explored what on stage only happens in the wings . . . With film, I don’t feel limited to the few actors of ancient theater. I can bring in the people who are being mentioned and make them real. If Euripides had written the script himself, I don’t think he could have left those characters offscreen.
One of the first assertions of this kind by a film director had come in , when Ernst Lubitsch wrote about his version of Noel Coward’s play Design for Living:
Both quotations are from John Ardagh, “Improving Euripides?” The Observer (April , ): “Weekend Review,” ; bracketed explanation in original. Ardagh reports that Lloyd-Jones had watched the film with him the preceding week and “was quite bowled over . . .” This ellipsis occurs at paragraph’s end in the original, presumably intended for additional emphasis. Quoted from Marianne McDonald and Martin M. Winkler, “Michael Cacoyannis and Irene Papas on Greek Tragedy,” in Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –, at –.
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Fade-In In my experience as a director I never have observed a motion picture photographed with an eye to absolute fidelity of stage form which reached within a mile of the quality of that play. The reason for this is that the screen is an art form in itself. True that it is related to stagecraft, but it is by no means the same. With this in mind, I analyzed Design for Living before the . . . script was written, and decided on an individual treatment which preserves the plot and essence of Noël Coward’s drama and at the same time affords an expression that is distinctly cinematic. A strictly photographed copy of a stage play, regardless of how excellent it may be as such, is[,] to me, a second-rate substitute for the original.
Accordingly, and similarly to Cacoyannis’s Electra, Lubitsch’s Design for Living “represents a considerable improvement over Coward’s original.” Readers who agree with what I have adduced so far will, I hope, have no hesitation to follow me further into related filmic aspects in the classical cultures and in classical sides of the cinema. Other readers beware: They are not my intended audience. To them, but not only to them, I quote what Lev Tolstoy said about the cinema around . His perspective, which I quote at some length to emphasize its signal importance, contrasts with that of Maxim Gorky’s of , quoted in Chapter . Tolstoy was more progressive than Gorky had been when he commented as follows in a conversation: You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary . . . But I rather like it . . . It is closer to life . . . The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.
If a new form of writing will become unavoidable, so will a new form of seeing, including a new way of seeing the old – in our case, the very old. That screen adaptations of literary works – cinemetamorphoses – can take pride of place alongside the originals has been demonstrated on
Quoted from Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (New York: Columbia University Press, ; rpt. ), ; source reference at –. So McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? . McBride, –, argues his case in detail, with special emphasis on Lubitsch’s different portrayal of Coward’s female protagonist. Cf. below on Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Quoted from Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – (“Appendix : Lev Tolstoy”), at . Tolstoy also mentioned Homer. The conversation may have occurred on Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday in , although his wife denied it (Leyda, note). Leyda, , provides source and translator information.
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On Reading and Viewing
various occasions, even if this circumstance is not encountered as often as one may wish. Cacoyannis’s Electra as understood by Lloyd-Jones is an example: its quality and possible superiority to its source. Another example, based on a classic (but not classical) stage play, is Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (). Filmed in the silent era, it does not use any of Oscar Wilde’s famous witticisms but, astonishingly, preserves the essence of Wilde purely in visual terms. It has been called a “tour de force, capturing the Wildean spirit without the use of a single Wildean epigram. Lubitsch . . . substituted visual epigrams for the spoken Wilde wit.” More recently it has been said about “Lubitsch’s paradoxically free yet faithful cinematic adaptation” that director and screenwriter, with their “sheer audacity of turning it into a silent film . . . arguably improved upon this classic work in transforming it from stage to cinema.” Lady Windermere’s Fan is “one of the silent cinema’s most extraordinary achievements . . ., even larger and richer than the original in some ways.” Similar examples of successful cinemetamorphoses of great literature could be added.
Quoted from Herman G. Weinberg, The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study, rd ed., rev. (New York: Dover, ), . So McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? and –. McBride, , calls the film “perfect.” So James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), . Minority dissent has been voiced as well; see Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, ; rpt. ), –. For just one telling, although little-known, instance, see Bazin, “Stendhal’s Mina de Vanghel, Captured beyond Fidelity” and “Mina de Vanghel: More Stendhalian than Stendhal,” both in André Bazin on Adaptation, – and –. The film in question is a medium-length feature directed by Maurice Clavel. Bazin’s essays originally appeared in .
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Progymnasmata: Ways of Seeing
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Douris’ Jason: Reckless Interpretations and the Ongoing Moment
The Athenian vase painter Douris created one of the most striking images of Greek myth around – . It appears on the inside of a red-figure kylix (drinking cup) now in the Vatican’s Gregorian Etruscan Museum (Fig. .). Foreground left, we see the front part of a fierce bearded dragon, facing right. Its open maw reveals the torso of a man whose head, arms, and hair are hanging down. Foreground right, a young woman, armed and helmeted, is watching, her body partly turned to the viewer and partly toward the dragon immediately in front of her. Behind the dragon and above its jaws, two forking branches of a slender tree hold the skin and head of a ram.
CVA ; LIMC . The image is available online in color reproductions of various quality. Attractive black-and-white photos are in P. E. Arias, A History of a Years of Greek Vase Painting, tr. and rev. Brian Shefton (New York: Abrams, ), figs. (inside) and (outside), and in Erika Simon, Die griechischen Vasen, nd ed. (Munich: Hirmer, ), fig. (inside). Simon’s book first appeared in . Arias, , reports that Athena’s “chiton and himation below the knees have been badly repainted in modern times.” Arias’ and Simon’s photos reveal these repaintings, which appear also under the dragon’s lower jaw and in a smaller area on Athena’s dress; they are not all that bad. But most of Jason’s left hand is missing. The images published at the museum’s website, in color and in black and white, reveal all damaged areas in great clarity: https://bit.ly/slaXmN. I translate part of the accompanying text below. Details about the kylix, with bibliography, can be seen in the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum database at www.cvaonline.org/XDB/ASP/recordDetails.asp?recordCount=& start=. On Douris himself see J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), vol. , –; for this kylix: Beazley, no. (). The CVA page incorrectly credits Paul Hartwig, Die griechischen Meisterschalen der Blu¨thezeit des strengen rothfigurigen Stiles (Stuttgart: Spemann, ), –, with the attribution to Douris; Hartwig assigned it to the Meister mit der Ranke, a disciple of Douris. Hartwig’s conclusion was almost immediately questioned or rejected; cf. Philippe Rouet, Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases, tr. Liz Nash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. The proper credit belongs to Emil Reisch: Wolfgang Helbig and Emil Reisch, Fu¨hrer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Alterthu¨mer in Rom, vol. (Leipzig: Baedeker, ), –. The Master of the Tendril was eventually identified with Douris. Diana Buitron-Oliver, Douris: A Master-Painter of Athenian Red-Figure Vases (Mainz: von Zabern, ), (no. ), and notes –, describes and interprets the kylix and lists some references. The rejection of Douris by Max Wegner, Duris: Ein ku¨nstlermonographischer Versuch (Mu¨nster: University of Mu¨nster, ), (“unmöglich . . . ein eigenhändiges Werk des Duris”), has not prevailed. Edmond Pottier, Douris and the Painters of Greek Vases, tr. Bettina Kahnweiler (London: Murray,
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Douris’ Jason
Figure . Douris’ painting of Jason in the dragon’s maw. Wikimedia Commons.
What sort of scene is this? Let us imagine two kinds of viewers, one modern, one ancient, both attempting to make sense of the image. Most modern viewers, such as tourists visiting the museum, have no knowledge of ancient culture but will be struck by the dramatic nature of the painting and try to understand it. They are likely to conclude that the dragon is devouring the human body, something that is familiar from fairy tales and adventure stories. But who is the woman, armed and helmeted? And why is she simply standing there? Her facial expression is calm, so is she not ), is an older introduction but does not mention our kylix. The French original had appeared in .
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Douris’ Jason
concerned? Has she no pity? She is fearless enough not to run away, so why does she not attack the dragon? After a few moments of looking, modern viewers may shrug and turn away without having solved the riddle of the image. Still, they understand that a fight between the man and the dragon must have occurred. Thus, the image immediately implies two temporal aspects: a before and a now. But this is all that viewers ignorant of Greek culture will be able to deduce. By contrast, ancient viewers had no problem making sense of the scene. The animal skin hanging from the tree can only be the Golden Fleece because no other Greek myth connects a dragon with such a pelt. The dragon is its guardian in Colchis. The woman is the goddess Athena, recognizable by her dress with the Gorgon’s head on her chest, her helmet and spear, and her owl, which she is holding in her left hand. So far, all is clear. But who is the man? The answer can be found in the name , written vertically below his profile and in between his arms and hair. With this information all ancient viewers and modern ones with some knowledge of Greek myth can understand the image, but not completely. This is because they know that the dragon was defeated and that Jason got the Fleece and returned home. Douris, it appears, shows us something that never should have occurred. But, as noted, there is a before and a now and, implied, an after, to which we will turn below. All these imply a passage of time: a beginning, middle, and end to an action, hence a story. Douris’ is a narrative image. But: the narrative image in itself is unable to tell a story; as an image, it does not have the words to do so. Instead, it simply requires a story to be told. The task of telling the story will have to be fulfilled by the beholder, who, in turn, will not be able to extract the story he is supposed to tell from the image he is looking at: he must already know it. The maker of a narrative image is not allowed to invent a story: he must refer to a traditional tale that will also be known by the expected beholder.
The static image thus prompts a tale that the viewers tell themselves, verbally or silently. There is a duality at work: What is the image-maker to do with . . . plot? How can he refer to it in a medium that lacks verbs, tenses, and prepositions? How can he concentrate a wide-ranging sequence of actions into one single image? He will have to choose and to concentrate . . . [whenever he is] depicting something unusual that requires an explanation while, at the same time, offering its beholders a clue. Even more challenging is what the narrative image expects from the recipient . . . In order to find an answer, the educated beholder will have to
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Douris’ Jason rely on the canon of traditional tales, but will most likely be familiar with dozens, if not hundreds, of them. He or she will therefore have to search the image for a clue, trying to identify the story to which it refers . . . This accomplished, the beholder will finally of course also need to tell the story . . . while offering explications that the image is unable to give.
These words well describe the visual and narrative situation that Douris’ painting elicits. In this chapter I propose a new approach on the basis of its reception history, which I will question in some crucial instances. I intend a new appreciation of Douris’ artistry from a perspective that was impossible at his time.
The Literary Background of Douris’ Image The canonical version of the Golden Fleece myth is best known from the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes: Jason and Medea face the dragon together; Medea drugs it or otherwise overcomes its menace. In stark contrast to this, Douris serves up a shock. And Medea is nowhere in view; instead, there is Athena. Beginning with Book of Homer’s Iliad, Athena is a frequent helper of great heroes. But she has no part in this particular moment of Jason’s quest because she is not necessary: Medea is powerful enough to help Jason. Douris’ Athena is watching but doing nothing. Medea, not present, did not overcome the dragon; Athena, present, did not save Jason; the Fleece has remained untouched. End of story? End of myth? Such cannot be. Jason must get the Fleece and make it back to Greece. And the myth must continue. The Jason and Medea story culminates in its most famous part, at least since Euripides: Years later, Medea kills her and Jason’s children. So what is the point of Douris’ image? Either this turn of mythical events was his invention to show off his cleverness: You thought you knew the myth, but look at this! Such is unlikely, given that the surviving representations of Greek myth suggest that the weight of tradition precluded unbridled inventiveness. Or Douris wanted to provoke a viewer’s astonishment at first seeing his painting. After all, he took care to make any misidentification (This must be a different story!) impossible. In either case, Douris painted what Homer had called a thauma idesthai (“wonder to
Both quotations are from Luca Giuliani, “Images and Storytelling,” in Judith M. Barringer and François Lissarague (eds.), Images at the Crossroads: Media and Meaning in Greek Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –, at and –. Apollonius, Argonautica .–. I turn to this myth in Chapter
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behold”) and what Aristotle would later call an ekplêktikon (“something striking, shocking”). Nor did Douris act on a mere whim, as the time it must have taken to produce such an intricate picture demonstrates. But there is one final possibility: Douris painted a version of the myth in which Jason dies, or nearly dies, in Colchis. In the words of John Boardman, who may be quoted as a representative of the scholarly consensus today: His myth scenes appear throughout his career, with no perceptible pattern. There are some oddities, like the dragon regurgitating Jason . . . with the golden fleece hanging beyond and Athena watching with her owl. This is a unique variant on the Argonaut story.
And: “JASON disgorged by a serpent before Athena on the Douris cup is an uncanonical episode from the Argonaut story.” In this view, Jason is not dead. In the same vein, modern museum visitors get the following information about the painting after an outline of its mythical background: Jason, disgorged by the monster, is saved by Athena: the goddess turns her gaze toward the head of the large serpent which still holds the hero between its fangs, while the Fleece may be seen in the background, hanging from the branch of an oak. The kylix is attributed to Douris, one of the Attic ceramic painters of the severe style that dominated during the first three decades of the fifth century . In this case, the great master’s creative ability and imagination in rendering the features of the monster are remarkable.
Gerhard, Welcker, Robert: Clashes of Academic Titans
The reception history of Douris’ kylix is characterized by a combination of expert knowledge and imaginative speculation. The latter largely shaped the former from the very beginning. The kylix was discovered in an
The former expression appears several times in the Iliad and the Odyssey; its first occurrence is at Iliad .. Hans Joachim Mette, “‘Schauen’ und ‘Staunen,’” Glotta, (), –, traces its linguistic and literary development. The latter is from Aristotle, Poetics b– (ekplêktikôteron). On thauma see Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; rpt. ), – and – (notes); he lists references to major studies on the topic at note . Buitron-Oliver, Douris, , observed that “Douris obviously spent time and effort on this picture” and called it “extraordinary.” When she concluded that “the composition and narrative remain clear,” she was right about composition but not about narrative, as we will see. John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period (London: Thames & Hudson, ), and .
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Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri in . It was first published in by Eduard Gerhard, a German archeologist then living in Rome. Gerhard had been the principal founder of the Instituto di correspondenza archeologica, which later became the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome. His dissertation had been on textual questions in Apollonius’ Argonautica. His extensive publications on myth included studies of Greek vases and Etruscan mirrors. A large plate accompanied Gerhard’s description and interpretation (Fig. .). The title under which Gerhard presented Douris’ vase summarizes his understanding of the image: “Jason the Dragon’s Prey.” Gerhard began with a vivid description of “some unfortunate . . . who has fallen victim to the force of a terrible dragon” while “the animal’s wide-open maw imparts to our picture a . . . gruesomely alive impression” (). Gerhard stressed the victim’s helplessness despite the spear tip next to him, in which he saw a “hint at futile resistance” (). Gerhard then turned to “the grandiose figure of Athena,” whose posture means “idle presence more than . . . helpful participation.” Athena may leave the viewer wondering whether her “firm calmness” indicates someone who commanded the dragon to carry out “her revenge” or someone who “knows how to come to the rescue of her protégé at the last and, in human understanding, all too late moment” (). Only now did Gerhard reveal the identity of the man “who is about to be devoured or about to be released by the dragon” () and draw attention to the Golden Fleece and the importance of Athena as “the most august protector of all heroic valor” (), including Jason’s. Gerhard concluded that the image must not be understood as “a transformation of the myth caused by an artist’s arbitrariness” (–). Instead, the “wondrous but undeniable transformation of Jasonic myth on our bowl” () is to be explained by Athena’s closeness to Jason, proven by several parallels in literature and the visual arts, which exceed her function as helper (–). Further details about Athena as painted here rounded off Gerhard’s interpretation. He was evidently much taken with Douris’ image, especially his Athena. Douris himself painted an image of Athena as heroes’ helper around the same period as his dragon image. The tondo of this red-figure kylix shows
Eduardus Gerhardius, Lectiones Apollonianae (Leipzig: Fleischer, ). Eduard Gerhard, “Iason des Drachen Beute: Ein Vasenbild,” in Ein Programm des Archäologischen Instituts in Rom zur Feier des einundzwanzigsten Aprils (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, ), – and fig. His title page quotes Pindar, Pythian Odes. . and ; on this below. April is the traditional day of the founding of Rome. Below, page references to quotations and translations will appear in parentheses in my main text.
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Gerhard, Welcker, Robert
Figure .
Reconstruction of Douris’ painting in Gerhard’s publication.
Athena standing on the right; she is holding her spear and owl in her left hand. She is pouring Heracles, seated on the left, some wine from a kantharos, a larger kind of drinking cup. A tree is again in the back on the left. The scene is quiet and relaxed; Athena has taken off her helmet
This famous work (CVA , LIMC ), now in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich (Inv. = J), is ubiquitous in print and electronic media.
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Douris’ Jason
and put it on a stone or marble slab behind her. Heracles is apparently taking a break between labors, and Athena is providing him with refreshment. This moment does not contradict any aspect of Heracles’ myths, but it is unattested in literature. There is one crucial detail in Gerhard’s interpretation that, upon closer inspection, is untenable. It marks the first instance of scholarly speculation about the thauma idesthai of Douris’ image. The detail in question is the spear at the bottom of the painting, which appears to be embedded in the ground. Gerhard was aware that its tip might belong to Athena’s weapon, which is partly obscured by Jason’s neck and lower left arm but visible again just above his right hand. Gerhard maintained that the tip was “more likely” that of Jason’s spear and adduced the earliest narrative of the myth in support, Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode ( note ). At line Pindar tells of Jason disrobing before taking on the fire-breathing bulls; this Gerhard considered suitable to Jason’s nudity in Douris’ painting. More likely, however, it points to the heroic nudity that is conventional in classical visual arts and need not be taken realistically. For Gerhard, Athena’s spear deserves to have its tip shown. If the only one visible belongs to Jason’s, then Athena’s must be supplied. Accordingly, the copper plate that accompanied Gerhard’s text changed what Douris painted. The shaft of Athena’s spear and a newly added blade extend upward, well beyond the outer edge of the painting’s border decoration. This amounts to tampering with the evidence. Gerhard also pointed out that, if the tip at the bottom did belong to Athena’s spear, her weapon would have two. Why these should have looked as different as they do in his engraving is not explained. Gerhard granted that little or no evidence exists for such a weapon but thought of the dithyrson (double thyrsus) as an analogy. He added that a spear like this was “not inappropriate for a firmly stepping goddess.” Even so, Gerhard concluded that the artist, careful as he was in all other respects, decided “to omit the end of Minerva’s spear, which is sufficiently noticeable even beyond the image’s upper frame, at the bottom, where an almost parallel tool would only have interfered.” So Athena’s spear was left incomplete. We may, however, grant Douris sufficient artistry not to have left the number of weapons in his image open to doubt. In addition, if the lower tip belongs to Jason’s
Here is Gerhard’s syntactically rather convoluted original: “es liegt daher näher anzunehmen, der Ku¨nstler unseres Bildes habe es bei aller sonstigen Sorgfalt angemessener gefunden, das Ende der hinlänglich und selbst u¨ber den oberen Rahmen des Bildes hinaus bemerklichen Minervalanze unterwärts, wo ein fast parallel laufendes ähnliches Geräth gestört hätte, wegzulassen.” Both of the preceding quotations are from – note .
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Gerhard, Welcker, Robert
Figure .
Detail of Douris’ painting: Athena’s spear.
spear, its shaft as shown is too short and must have broken in two. But no broken-off piece is lying on the ground. Nor is there any reason why the short piece should be sticking in the ground by its point. Gerhard was silent about all of this. Most astonishing is Gerhard’s conclusion that the goddess’s weapon extends above the upper frame of the image. It does not. It extends only to the upper border of the framing decoration (Fig. .). The break line that goes through the frame diagonally to the right and touches the two vertical lines representing the spear shaft at the top and just below the outer black glaze is no reason to suspect that the spear lines would have risen further. No part of the painting goes outside the frame, nor does it need to. Anything we do not see within the frame we can mentally supply, chiefly that part of the dragon’s body that Douris did not paint – i.e. most of it, if we consider how long a tail an animal this size must have had. If Athena’s
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Douris’ Jason
weapon indeed had a blade at the top of the image, Douris would have given viewers a hint but would not have painted it as far outside the image as Gerhard illustrated. When he speculated that the lower end of the goddess’s weapon was omitted as interfering with the composition, he again fudged the evidence. The shaft of the spear at the top of the image, the small part visible between Jason’s face and arm, and the shaft (with tip) at the bottom are as close to lying on one line as a painter who did not use a ruler could achieve. (The curvature of the cup precluded the use of such a tool, anyway.) There is no meaningful deviation between and among the sections. The conclusion that Douris painted only one weapon is inevitable. If he had intended one for Jason and one for Athena, they would be immediately recognizable as such. The very year in which it appeared, Gerhard’s analysis was roundly rejected by another leading German. This was classical philologist and archeologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, at the time professor at Bonn University and co-editor of the Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie, one of the most prestigious classical journals and the oldest one still in existence. Welcker wrote a detailed review of Gerhard’s comparatively short text. Unlike Gerhard in Italy, Welcker in Germany could not look at the original work but only had Gerhard’s illustration to consult. Welcker offered an interpretation opposite to Gerhard’s: Jason as victor over the dragon. He saw an analogy in Heracles’ victory over Ketos. This sea monster was invulnerable on its outside, so Heracles “climbed into [its] belly and laid waste to its innards.” Athena had given him a “wondrous” suit of armor – teukhos, emended from teikhos in text sources – to make his feat possible. Welcker deduced from Jason’s nudity that Medea had “presumably” put the dragon to sleep, and its “jaws gaping wide in its sleep have remained unchanged in dying.” There is no mention of its wideopen eye. The dragon’s head and neck do not show “the expression of death” because “it was not compatible.” Consequently, Jason is now “adroitly” making his way out of the dragon’s inside by “carefully raising himself above the lower jaw’s teeth.” In doing so, “he increases the pressure to glide forth by means of his hanging arms and the movement of his hands.” Welcker would have been more accurate had he said that Jason intended to use his arms and hands in this way since they are still in the air. Athena’s presence is fully compatible with Welcker’s interpretation. She is said to watch out that Jason “not be wounded by the dead maw of
F. G. Welcker, Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie, (), –. I omit parenthetical references below since there are only two pages.
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Gerhard, Welcker, Robert
teeth.” Her owl, “perhaps a magic aid for the deed carried out in darkness” inside the dragon, “is looking on thoughtfully.” This detail is far-fetched, even if Welcker was probably not implying that the bird with its acute night vision accompanied Jason into the dragon’s belly. The thoughtfulness he imputed to the animal fits Athena much better. But Welcker said nothing about the expression on her face. Welcker also quoted the first of the two lines from Pindar that Gerhard had printed on his title page (“He [Jason] killed the grey-eyed serpent of multi-colored skin”) and commented: “Pindar may well have understood [by these words] the same clever feat with which the ancient painter now acquaints us.” One and the same text is made to support mutually exclusive interpretations. Immediately noticeable about Welcker’s understanding of Douris’ image is its implausibility. Welcker was justified in pointing to the myth of Heracles and Ketos, but the parallel falls away if we deny Welcker his argument’s premise: Jason’s victory. Had Douris intended to show it, he would never have painted an image that allows viewers to reach opposite conclusions. Why paint a menacing dragon that looks dead or a dead dragon that looks like a menacing live one? And did dragons in Greek myth go to sleep with their eyes open? Even more to the point: If Douris intended his dragon, its front part upright, to be dead, in what manner would he have depicted one meant to appear alive and lethal? On the other hand, Welcker was correct in drawing attention to the fact that Jason’s chest appears slightly above the dragon’s lower row of teeth. He might have added that the upper row is painted in such a way that, although there is no empty space between them and Jason’s back, these incisors seem not to have harmed the hero. The archeological-philological duel of Gerhard and Welcker continued in and . First, in another interpretive description of the kylix, this time in Italian, Gerhard largely accepted Welcker’s view. Gerhard also abandoned his belief in two spears: now Athena’s has two tips (
The best guides to dragons in classical culture are Daniel Ogden, Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds and Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook (both Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ). Both books feature illustrations of Douris’ dragon. Ogden, Drakōn, –, summarizes literary and artistic sources, with detailed primary and secondary references. Ogden, Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers, –, provides the source texts, with brief comments, on the Colchian dragon and includes the story of its survival and eventual death at the hands of Diomedes (source references at ). Od. [sic for Ed.] Gerhard, “Tazza dal Giasone,” Annali dell’Instituto di Correspondenza Archeologica / Annales de l’Institut de Correspondance Archéologique (Rome, ), –. Page references in parentheses again.
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Douris’ Jason
with note ). And Jason only looks “like a dead body” (). Gerhard drew attention to the Golden Fleece and ran through various possibilities about the identity of the man in the dragon’s maw (–). First, might this be an otherwise unknown Argonaut? No, he is identified as Jason. Second, might this be a Jason who is not the famous hero but an unknown bearer of the same name? No again, because it is better to “reconcile the singular contradiction” () of the image with the myth. Third, “heroic names from Greek myths” could often be used for “hidden allegories.” Finally, the image might express “the unbridled license with which the artists of ancient and modern eras” could have “trifled with received traditions” (). The last two possibilities Gerhard rejected as well; the image now can be reconciled with the myth because the dragon was “finally killed by Jason” (). So the painter did not change anything. Chief proof is Athena. After pointing out the “quiet pose” of “the august goddess . . . with the sweet inclination of her head and with her fearless gaze” (), Gerhard waxed rhapsodic about her facial expression. Being “tranquil, assured, meditative, and kind-hearted” (–), it can only point to “Jason’s victorious exit from the poisonous belly” (). Moreover, since in the common version Jason does not defeat the dragon by himself but only with someone else’s help, why could not Athena be such a helper rather than Medea? Welcker had made the same point. Jason, “as good as lost,” is saved by the aid of “a warrior and intervening goddess” (). Gerhard’s reflections made the image fully compatible with the Jason myth, implying “final success” and “the necessity of supernatural aid to human strength” (), and with other hero myths that, he said, one should remember. Gerhard then summarized Heracles’ defeat of the sea monster that Welcker had included (–) and proposed that one should not deny “that the expression given to him [Jason] by the artist in his whole person might not be intended to show his lucky exit from the horrible jaws and not his entrance” (). This is quite a volte face from his earlier interpretation. Welcker reprinted most of his review of Gerhard, slightly revised but with some additional literary references, at the beginning of a longer piece on the kylix fifteen years later. This he titled “Jason the Dragon Slayer.” Welcker included a version of Gerhard’s image as his illustration. Added
F. G. Welcker, Alte Denkmäler, vol. : Griechische Vasengemälde (Göttingen: Dieterich, ), – (“Iason der Drachentöder”). Page references in parentheses. Welcker, Griechische Vasengemälde, plate XXIV.. The image was frequently reproduced. It appeared, for instance, in the (epically titled) dissertation by Achille Gennarelli, La moneta
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into the text of his review and following another mention of Heracles’ feat is the observation that Athena not only was Jason’s helper here but also “inspired him to the deed and equipped him for it” (). In his new passages Welcker rejected Gerhard’s original description once again. Welcker was now more detailed and more imaginative about Jason: “Jason is working with caution, and his face does not express fear or terror but calm firmness” because the dragon no longer poses a threat except for its teeth (–). Welcker also reported on Gerhard’s second text, slightly grumbling about Gerhard’s not quite complete adoption of his original view. This only came in , when Gerhard briefly returned to the kylix image in another context. Gerhard’s change of heart gave Welcker a noticeable sense of vindication. But he passed in silence over the number of spears. Welcker’s argument in both its forms as well as Gerhard’s retraction of his original view are, on the whole, unconvincing. But they are of greater significance than Gerhard’s more credible original interpretation. They demonstrate that the moment Douris painted calls for a consideration of its temporal context: what has happened shortly before and what will happen shortly after what we see. The presence of Athena is crucial for this. In this regard Welcker pointed out the correct approach. And his incorporation of Heracles’ defeat of Ketos into the interpretation of Douris’ image was to become standard. Here one of Welcker’s observations is essential: “in the most ingenious manner the [very] moment has been found out simultaneously to present [Jason’s] victory and its accomplishment in the dragon’s innards” (). Having won over Gerhard, Welcker remained largely unchallenged until today. But both met with equal criticism from Carl Robert in an
primitiva e i monumenti dell’Italia antica messi in rapporto cronologico e ravicinnati alle opere d’arte delle altre nazioni civili dell’antichità per dedurre onde fosse l’origine ed il progresso delle arti e dell’incivilimento (Rome: Reverenda Camera Apostolica, ), plate VII, in connection with Gennarelli’s description and interpretation of the kylix (–). The caption of Gennarelli’s copper engraving agrees with Welcker: “Giasone campato dal dragone.” Eduard Gerhard, Etruskische Spiegel, vol. , pt. (Berlin: Reimer, ), and note . Gerhard here described an Etruscan mirror showing Jason’s victorious fight against the dragon. Welcker, Griechische Vasengemälde, –, then turned to another, later, vase painting of Jason and the dragon (shown on his plate XXIV.) and briefly mentioned a medieval parallel. Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Legend of Perseus: A Study of Tradition in Story, Custom and Belief, vol. : Andromeda, Medusa (London: Nutt, ), note , considered the tale of Cleostratus (from Pausanias, Description of Greece ..–) and Douris’ kylix (“Jason vomited forth from the dragon’s maw”) as a parallel to Heracles’ feat. Cleostratus killed his dragon from its inside by means of his ingenious body armor but did not make it out again.
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Douris’ Jason
article on Euripides’ Hypsipyle. Robert was yet another of the great German scholars and a pioneer of the study of myth in literature and images. Euripides’ tragedy, which survives only in fragments, is about the Lemnian queen who had been Jason’s lover and had become the mother of his first two children. In one of its major fragments Hypsipyle learns from her grown sons of their father’s death. Robert summarized Gerhard’s and Welcker’s arguments before offering an astonishing alternative: More recent [scholars] have followed now the one, now the other of these reckless interpretations [dieser verwegenen Interpretationen]. But the very evidence, whose irresistible power even Welcker could initially not escape, must convince every impartial viewer that the dragon is about to swallow Jason; and to judge by the presence of Athena that it will later vomit him out again alive is at the least rather hasty, since we cannot know if there was not a version of the myth according to which Athena was angry at Jason because he had insulted her or for some other reason.
Athena may have caused the dragon to swallow Jason, and, as Robert goes on to say, Jason remains dead. Robert deduced from his analysis of Hypsipyle that Medea did not save Jason, Jason perished in Colchis, and Douris followed this version of the myth. A different Argonaut was to be
His chief works in this regard: Carl Robert, Bild und Lied: Archäologische Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Heldensage (Berlin: Weidmann, ), and especially Archäologische Hermeneutik: Anleitung zur Deutung klassischer Bildwerke (Berlin: Weidmann, ). A. M. Snodgrass, Narration and Allusion in Archaic Greek Art (The Eleventh J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture; London: Leopard’s Head Press, ), , rightly observes that “all subsequent studies have built” on Bild und Lied. The latter receives a current tribute in François Lissarague, “Ways of Making Sense: Eagle and Snake in Archaic and Classical Greek Art,” in Barringer and Lissarague (eds.), Images at the Crossroads, –, at –. From Archäologische Hermeneutik, Snodgrass, with note , quotes a passage in a letter by Goethe (February , ) on implied time in ancient images. The text is in G. W. Bond, Euripides: Hypsipyle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), (Fragment .–), with commentary at –. Richard Kannicht (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. .: Euripides: Pars posterior (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, ), –, is the best recent edition of the text. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp (eds. and trs.), Euripides VIII: Fragments: Oedipus-Chrysippus, Other Fragments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –, present a text edition with different line numbering, a translation, and a basic bibliography. Jason’s son Euneos mentions his father’s death to his mother in line (Collard and Cropp, –). A summary of the play is in Collard and Cropp, –. Carl Robert, “Die Iasonsage in der Hypsipyle des Euripides,” Hermes, (), –; quotation at . Robert included a drawing based on Gerhard’s illustration and attested to its frequent use. He also reported ( note ) that he was not alone in his understanding of Athena’s role. In retrospect it is poignant to remember that, a few years earlier, Robert had contributed the entry on Douris to Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft without realizing (or accepting?) that this was the painter of the Jason-dragon image: Carl Robert, “Duris ,” PW . (), cols. –.
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Gerhard, Welcker, Robert
the main hero: Jason’s rival Heracles and the Argonauts’ leader, according to Dionysius Scytobrachion. Robert concluded that Athena’s presence in the painting was still fitting: “the protector goddess of Herakles is watching Jason’s demise with truly Olympian detachment.” Robert’s opinion of Douris’ image conforms to Gerhard’s original one. But to regard Athena as potentially so vindictive as to bring about Jason’s death is less convincing, even if there is sufficient literary evidence that she can be ruthless in persecuting her enemies. In this one regard Robert was as speculative as Welcker had been. Partly for this reason, Robert found few followers. But, unlike Gerhard, he remained undaunted by criticism and retracted nothing. He returned to Douris’ image in his magnum opus on Greek hero myths. The first of its three parts, each book length, began with the Argonautic material. In a section called “Winning the Fleece,” Robert considered visual art alongside texts. He ended with a reaffirmation of his argument about Jason’s death in Colchis and added a new conjecture:
For references see Albin Lesky, “Medeia,” PW . (), cols. –, at .–.. Robert, “Die Iasonsage in der Hypsipyle des Euripides,” . Among these are Bond, Euripides: Hypsipyle, (with note ) and, in part, –; W. E. H. Cockle, Euripides Hypsipyle: Text and Annotation Based on a Re-Examination of the Papyri (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, ), . This edition, with commentary, detailed bibliography, and reproductions of the papyri, complements Bond’s. J. P. Mahaffy, “On a Passage in Euripides’ Hypsipyle,” Hermathena, no. (), –, rejected Robert (“I can imagine no wilder speculation,” ) and reaffirmed Welcker’s understanding of Athena’s role without naming him. So did, again without naming him, Eugen Petersen, “Euripides Hypsipyle,” Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie, n.s., (), –, at note . In this note Petersen otherwise largely agreed with Robert’s argument in appropriately heroic terms (“Dies hat Robert siegreich verteidigt”). Cf. Paul Friedländer, “Kritische Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Heldensage,” Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie, n.s. (), –, at note : “That there ever was a version of the myth in which Jason was killed by the dragon – that I cannot grant Robert.” G. Italie, Euripidis Hypsipyla cum notis criticis et exegeticis (Berlin: Ebering, ), engaged with Robert’s article throughout and devoted almost all of his last three pages (–) to Douris’ image as interpreted by Robert. Robert had spoken of reckless interpretations; Italie, , turned the tables on him: “aedificium ingeniose a Roberto constructum. . . eius conclusiones fundamentis demptis sponte collabuntur.” Lesky, “Medeia,” .–, called Robert’s article “highly problematic” and dissented; so, he reported, had Reisch. Ludwig Radermacher, Mythos und Sage bei den Griechen, nd ed. (; rpt. Vienna: Rohrer / Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ), – (with fig. ), described Douris’ painting and decided for Welcker. Radermacher, note , summarized Robert’s argument and also dissented: “Jason’s early death looks like Euripides’ etiological invention.” Radermacher, –, placed Jason’s death in the context of a Finnish fairy tale. Radermacher’s first edition had appeared in . Carl Robert, Die griechische Heldensage, part : Die Argonauten – Der thebanische Kreis (Berlin: Weidmann, ). Parts and appeared posthumously in and . All were published as installments of L. Preller (ed.), Griechische Mythologie, vol. : Die Heroen (Die griechische Heldensage), th ed., vol. : Die großen Heldenepen. The epic-heroic titles are not inappropriate for this massive work of scholarship. Robert devoted almost pages to the Argonauts. The earliest edition of Ludwig Preller’s work on myth had appeared, in two vols., in .
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Douris’ Jason Also, an old version of the myth, which is known only from images of the sixth and fifth centuries, . . . has Jason . . . being devoured by the dragon. These images show him still sticking out from the dragon’s maw; on vases he is weaponless, on a gem he is armed. Earlier, the scene was understood in such a way that, on the one hand, Jason was being devoured by the dragon but, on the other, because Medea anointed him with that magic salve, was spat out again. In this, it is difficult to imagine how the story should continue. But now we have come to know, via Euripides’ Hypsipyle, a version of the myth according to which Jason perished in Colchis and the figure of Medea was completely removed. This is the version to which the images refer. Presumably, according to this version, it was Herakles who won the Fleece, and presumably it was thought of in Herakleia on the Pontus.
Heraclea Pontica, the Greek city on the southwestern coast of the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus), had been named after Heracles. He was believed to have descended to the Underworld in its vicinity. Although he mentioned Medea’s absence, Robert here was silent about Athena’s presence. Since he saw no way for the myth to continue, he did not understand her involvement the way Welcker had. To Robert, Douris’ image is the end of the myth, at least as far as Jason is concerned. Others, whose arguments need not be examined here, believed that Athena was forcing the dragon to disgorge a living Jason, whom she had made immune; that Jason was coming out of its jaws on his own; and that Athena saved or prevented a defeated Jason from being swallowed. Athena’s is always the decisive part. This accords with one other observation by Welcker: “The mere presence of Athena is sufficient to make a defeat of Jason unthinkable” ( note ). Robert, as we saw, demurred. Fifty-five years later, he acquired a new champion.
From Lycophron to Simon and Giangrande Even more than her presence, Athena’s dominance within the image has provided the basis for all interpretations that attempt to bring Douris’
Robert, Die griechische Heldensage, part , . Robert, note , gives the references to the Bildwerke in question: two black-figure potsherds (which may, he adds, not definitely refer to this episode), Douris’ kylix, and an Etruscan scarab. In the following note Robert provides the references to Hypsipyle and his article. My information is from the summary in Hugo Meyer, Medeia und die Peliaden: Eine attische Novelle und ihre Entstehung: Ein Versuch zur Sagenforschung auf archäologischer Grundlage (Rome: Bretschneider, ), . Meyer, –, provides additional references in his discussion of Douris’ vase. Margot Schmidt, Gnomon, (), –, judiciously reviewed Meyer’s book. One more reason for Jason’s dive into the dragon’s maw appears in Paul Dräger, “‘Abbruchsformel’ und Jona-Motiv in Pindars Vierter Pythischer Ode,” Wu¨rzburger Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r die Altertumswissenschaft, (–), –, at .
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From Lycophron to Simon and Giangrande
painting into line with the traditional myth. Athena thus points us to a third temporal dimension: not only a before and a now but also an after. Greek literature has preserved a version of Jason’s violent death in connection with the dragon that differs from how Robert had understood it. It can be explained more easily than what Douris painted because it is a variation on something that occurred considerably later in the canonical myth. When the Argonauts had returned to Greece, Medea rejuvenated Jason’s aged father Aeson in a cauldron after first dismembering him. The Hellenistic poet Lycophron moved this part of the myth back in time and told it about Jason: “his body was chopped up in a cauldron” just before Jason obtained the Fleece. Simon Hornblower comments: Lyk.’s apparent sequence of events is a puzzle . . . this item is a puzzle . . . Or we might suppose . . . that Jason needed rejuvenation after the encounter with the serpent . . . But Lyk.’s order of events is dislocated in several other ways.
And this is to say nothing of the dragon’s body: Lycophron’s monster is a “fournostrilled serpent,” presumably because it has two heads. Puzzlement about Lycophron’s dragon has led to speculation, too, although not to the extent that Douris’ dragon has provoked. The reason is that Douris’ image can be integrated into the myth only with far greater difficulty than Lycophron’s brief text. Here we may well agree with Welcker, who had categorically rejected any connection of the kylix image with Medea rejuvenating Jason. Even so, in Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, one of the greatest of all classical scholars not only among Germans, referred to the visual arts in his comments
Lycophron, Alexandra ; quoted from Simon Hornblower, Lykophron: Alexandra: Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, and Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Hornblower, ad loc., lists literary passages (Pherecydes, Siminides, Dosiadas) in which Medea rejuvenates Jason in this way but not under these circumstances. Hornblower, Lykophron: Alexandra, . On Lycophron’s dislocations see Hornblower, (on Alexandra –), and Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ; rpt., in two vols. [cont. pag.], ), and lxxxi notes –. Gantz, , also expresses “some puzzlement.” Lycophron, Alexandra ; quoted from Hornblower, Lykophron: Alexandra, . Welcker, Griechische Vasengemälde, note . Welcker here also rejected Gennarelli’s explanation that Jason was revived when Athena forced the dragon to spit a living Jason out again because this Jason was not Greek but “merely” Etruscan. (The vase, we remember, was found at Cerveteri.) Welcker equally rejected one German scholar’s similar explanation and two other Germans’ deductions that Athena did so by administering an emetic to the dragon. Welcker was indubitably correct about all this. He afforded his readers momentary merriment by reporting that one of these scholars had mistaken Athena’s owl for a dove.
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Douris’ Jason
on Lycophron’s line about Jason’s dismemberment. Here it is not Athena but Medea who saved Jason from the devouring dragon: It is important that Jason is boiled . . . before winning the Fleece. It may be placed thus in order to tease us, but I would rather connect it to the tale, transmitted only in the visual arts, that the dragon devoured Jason and brought him up again at a moment when Medea’s art could best prove itself. But we cannot reach any certainty here.
Wilamowitz’ interpretation could have been the source of a much more elaborate reconstruction – without Medea – by Erika Simon, a distinguished archeologist at the University of Wu¨rzburg, Germany. In an explanatory text accompanying an attractive plate of Douris’ painting in her large picture book about Greek vases, Simon described the horrific appearance of Douris’ dragon in vivid detail, then continued: The cold gaze of the serpent is terrifying . . . One of the most important features, however, is missing: its long, forked tongue. In its place Jason is protruding from the jaws of the monster, which is in the process of regurgitating the hero head first. The reason why it cannot devour him is the missing tongue. Jason has climbed into the dragon’s maw and cut it off. The goddess Athena, who has inspired him with this audacious decision, is standing near-by.
Simon then turned to Athena’s appearance, noting the goddess’s closeness to her protégé: Athena lowers her gaze full of sympathy onto the hero, who through this heroic feat will bring the Golden Fleece into his possession . . . The fearful dragon that guarded it is defeated.
Simon’s interpretation of Douris’ image has met with considerable and occasionally enthusiastic approval. It is a tour de force, but is it convincing? Not in every respect. First, Jason. What Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the fifteenth century about the depiction of dead bodies in art applies here. Alberti took his cue from a mythological scene frequently shown on ancient Roman
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos, vol. : Interpetationen (Berlin: Weidmann, ), . Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, , commented on the ancient scholiasts’ attempt to make sense of Lycophron’s term “four-nostrilled” by emendation. He wondered if it was linguistically possible (“sprachlich denkbar”) and asked, rhetorically, whether their attempt at attributing two or even four heads to the dragon was merely silly (“ein albernes Autoschediasma”). Wilamowitz considered the text to be corrupt. Cf. Hornblower, Lykophron: Alexandra, ad loc. The two quotations are from Simon, Die griechischen Vasen, –. Simon, , dealt with related art works but provided only minimal references to this one.
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From Lycophron to Simon and Giangrande
sarcophagi: the dead body of Meleager. It is obvious that Alberti saw such an image although we cannot know which sarcophagus or sarcophagi he had in mind. He commented on one in terms appropriate to our subject: In every one of his members he appears completely dead – everything hangs, hands, fingers and head; everything falls heavily. Anyone who tries to express a dead body – which is certainly most difficult – will be a good painter, if he knows how to make each member of a body flaccid . . . The members of the dead should be dead to the very nails . . . The body . . . is said to be dead when the members no longer are able to carry on the functions of life, that is, movement and feeling.
Virtually everything fits Douris’ Jason to the very nails. Why else would Douris have painted Jason’s hanging arms parallel to his streaming hair? His arms are not exactly in the same position that art historians call il braccio della morte (“the arm in death”), which frequently appears in ancient vase paintings and on sarcophagi, including the Meleager type. The position of Jason’s right hand reinforces such a view. His left hand, invisible because of damage, presumably was painted in the same way, as its wrist indicates. Jason’s fingers, but not his thumb, are curled inward rather than hanging straight down, which would be unnatural. For those who, with Welcker, believe that Athena will force the dragon to regurgitate Jason, the conclusion is unavoidable that she must also bring him back to life. Equally, Simon said nothing about Jason’s posture. Robert Fowler has written of “a droopy Jason being disgorged.” For Diana Buitron-Oliver, Jason is “emerging exhausted after he has gone down inside the dragon to kill it or, as Erika Simon proposes, to cut out its tongue.” But droopy and exhausted are too weak to describe this Jason. Nor does the dragon appear to be mortally wounded, as it must be in Simon’s reconstruction, let alone dead, as it must be in Buitron-Oliver’s. If a living Jason is emerging from
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, tr. John R. Spencer; rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. On this see Giorgio Pellegrini, Il braccio della morte: Migrazioni iconografiche (Cagliari: Janus, ), a short monograph. Nigel Spivey, The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase (London: Head of Zeus, / Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), examines various instances of the braccio della morte and traces them back to Euphronius, painter of the Sarpedon image. Robert L. Fowler, Early Greek Mythography, vol. : Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Fowler, – and , summarizes the early (fragmentary) testimonia on Jason’s deeds in Colchis, with or without Medea’s help, and on his rejuvenation by Medea in Greece. The sources are in Fowler, Early Greek Mythography, vol. : Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), where see ad locc. Buitron-Oliver, Douris, .
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Douris’ Jason
the dragon’s maw, why should Douris have given him the appearance of a corpse? Would he not have indicated, perhaps by a different position of Jason’s arms (or at least one arm), that the hero is alive and conscious? If he can be strong enough to cut off the animal’s tongue, then he ought to be strong enough to struggle free or, as Welcker had it, cautiously climb out. Either way, he would not passively have to wait until being fully disgorged. Second, the dragon. The process of regurgitating an adult human body is likely to result in violent convulsions even by a huge monster, but Douris’ dragon is gazing steadily ahead, his visible eye wide open. Simon was right on the mark when she called its gaze terrifying. But when she declared the dragon defeated, she was referring to a future event. Her words do not fit the moment painted. The sympathy that Simon read into Athena’s gaze is clearly there, but it would be there, too, if the dragon were still swallowing Jason. That moment might evoke even greater sympathy for her helpless protégé. And it would be more comforting for viewers if Athena evinced her knowledge that all would end well: an incipient smile of relief or triumph would fit Simon’s scenario much better. She noted the absence of the monster’s tongue but not that of Jason’s weapon. Is he supposed to have left it in the dragon’s body? Although the dragon’s tongue could fit the image only awkwardly, a sword lying on the ground would be unproblematic even though there is little empty space. More importantly, “Greek mythical dragons are often represented without visible tongue, even when they are in the process of attack or pursuit.” So are virtual all dragons and comparable monsters in tales and legends. This tradition is a strong argument against Simon. The preceding points do not entirely invalidate Simon’s hypothesis, but they do tell us that Douris’ moment is ambiguous. As Gerhard was the first to point out, it equally fits two actions by the dragon: swallowing Jason, regurgitating Jason. Daniel Ogden writes: The scene . . . offers two possibilities for reading. One is that the drakōn contrived to swallow or half-swallow Jason before he fought his way out of its mouth again, or was disgorged by it for some other reason. The other is
So Raquel López Melero, “Jason y la serpiente de la Colquide: A propósito del Kylix de Duris del Vaticano,” in Otar Lordkipanidze and Pierre Lévêque (eds.), Sur les traces des Argonautes: Actes du e symposium de Vani (Colchide), – septembre (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, ), –; quotation at . Ogden, Drakōn, note , asks: “where is the missing tongue?” He dissents from Simon but cites her article “Die Typen der Medeadarstellungen in der antiken Kunst,” Gymnasium, (), – (with plates V–VIII), in which Douris’ painting is not mentioned. Ogden, Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers, , repeats the error. Ogden, Drakōn, – , deals with Athena as “drakōn-mistress” and refers to Douris’ cup at (with note ). On the missing tongue see further Meyer, Medeia und die Peliaden, .
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From Lycophron to Simon and Giangrande
that Jason deliberately fed himself to the massive drakōn in order to kill it by hacking his way out of it from within . . . The former alternative should be preferred: Jason’s weaponless, unresisting, and possibly bedraggled state suggests that he has already been fully swallowed, and that he is now on his way back out of the drakōn’s mouth.
Not all of this is fully convincing, especially his vague expression “possibly bedraggled.” (Why possibly?) Simultaneously with Ogden but independently, Aurore Petrilli summarized this aspect: “This scene presents an unconscious Jason, half submerged in the maw of the giant serpent, as if it were trying either to swallow him or to vomit him out.” Both Ogden and Petrilli are right about temporal ambiguity. Douris’ narrative is, then, not quite as clear as Buitron-Oliver would have it. The two visual parallels – there are none in literature – that Simon brought up in support of her deduction that Jason cut off the dragon’s tongue from inside its body involve Heracles cutting off the tongue of Ketos and another hero, not clearly identifiable, killing a lion “by climbing into its maw.” In the former case, Simon referred to a black-figure vase now in Tarentum, on which Heracles did so from outside its body. But she seems to have overlooked the version in which Heracles had climbed inside, which could have strengthened her case. If Simon imagined Jason to have done the same, how could he now emerge head-first? He would have had to turn himself around in the monster’s belly in order to come out as Douris shows him. Simon’s reconstruction started from the absence of the dragon’s tongue, about which she wrote: Since the chief characteristic of demonic monsters consists in the act of devouring, which is possible only by means of their tongue, cutting out the tongue should have been sufficient to render the antagonist harmless.
Simon was correct about the nature of man- and animal-eating monsters, but her subjunctive implies tentativeness. That the dragon’s tongue is not visible at the moment Douris depicts is perfectly natural: the monster has its mouth full.
Ogden, Drakōn, . In view of this, the summary in Daniel Ogden, The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , is disappointing: “The interesting image suggests that the drakōn had initially succeeded in swallowing Jason, but had to regurgitate him, perhaps because Medea’s lotion of invincibility had rendered him indigestible.” Perhaps so, but why then is Athena, not Medea, in the picture? Jason’s indigestibility fits the kind of autoschediasma that Wilamowitz had had in mind. Aurore Petrilli, “Le trésor du dragon: Pomme ou mouton?” Gaia, (), –; quotation at . Simon, Die griechischen Vasen, . Simon, Die griechischen Vasen, .
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Douris’ Jason
Simon’s interpretation is so clever that Athena herself might have inspired it. But what Fowler has observed about Douris and the Corinthian and Etruscan art works mentioned by Wilamowitz and Simon is important to remember: “These . . . are a prime example of both our patchy knowledge and of the independence of the artistic tradition.” Patchy knowledge concerning Douris’ image sparks ingenuity but is doomed to leave all explanations speculative, if to varying degrees. The firmest among Simon’s dissenters was Hugo Meyer, another German and later a distinguished archeologist at an American Ivy League university. Meyer condemned Simon’s analysis as “freely invented.” But he was not above inventiveness himself, as when he freely deduced political contexts as Douris’ inspiration for, and intention with, his kylix. And he exaggerated Robert’s view of Athena as cause for Jason’s death by calling it her revenge. Is there then no solution to the enigma of Douris’ painting? One year after Simon, a versatile Italian philologist working in Britain was certain that he had found it. Giuseppe Giangrande advanced a new interpretation as part of his analysis of the fragment of Euripides’ Hypsipyle that Robert had examined in . Giangrande confirmed Robert’s conclusion that there had been a version of the myth in which the dragon killed Jason, but like all others he rejected Athena as instigator. Giangrande was more emphatic about Jason’s dead body than even Gerhard had been: every detail is so precise as to leave no uncertainty about the fact that Jason is deceased: the upper half of the hero’s corpse hangs totally lifeless from the dragon’s mouth, his arms are pendulous and inert, the nerves of his fingers
Fowler, Early Greek Mythography, vol. , . Meyer, Medeia und die Peliaden, . His rejection was in turn rejected by Schmidt, review in Gnomon, . Meyer, Medeia und die Peliaden, –. Mata Vojatzi, Fru¨he Argonautenbilder (Wu¨rzburg: Triltsch, ), may be consulted alongside Meyer’s book; she treats Douris’ vase and related art works at – and – (references). Vojatzi adheres largely to Welcker and Simon. Simon had been Vojatzi’s advisor for her dissertation, on which her book was based. Bettina von Freytag gennant Löringhoff, “Argonautika: Ein etruskischer Spiegel in der Tu¨binger Sammlung,” in von Freytag, Dietrich Mannsperger, and Friedhelm Prayon, Praestant Interna: Festschrift fu¨r Ulrich Hausmann (Tu¨bingen: Wasmuth, ), –, at –, also largely dissents from Meyer, especially his interpretation of Jason’s open eye. Meyer, Medeia und die Peliaden, and . As we saw, it was Gerhard rather than Robert who first speculated, in passing, about Athena’s revenge. Otherwise, Meyer does justice to Robert, his main inspiration and model; cf. Meyer, xviii. Giuseppe Giangrande, “Hypsipyle’s Children: Eur. Hyps. Fr. , Bond,” Museum Philologicum Londiniense, (), – and – (plates). Giangrande, note , dismissed Jason’s voluntary entry into the dragon’s belly as “devoid of any foundation.” Giangrande, – note , went into details about the manner of Jason’s death (the dragon’s teeth and coils).
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From Lycophron to Simon and Giangrande
have lost every bit of the tension which they had in life, so that his hands are hollowed, his neck is bent down, under the weight of the inanimate head.
Alberti had made comparable points about Meleager. Giangrande interpreted Jason’s open eyes as additional proof of his death (“closing the eyes of the dead is the first duty of the survivors”) and mentioned several ancient works of art that show dead bodies with their eyes open. The strongest argument supporting Giangrande is Athena’s posture, for which he marshaled both literary and visual sources. “The mourning stance of the goddess as depicted by Douris” and in particular “Athena’s bowed head,” together with the fact that gods in Greek myth and literature “cannot revive humans once these have died a violent death,” led him to conclude: “Athena . . . stepped in just in time to stop the dragon from chewing and devouring the upper half of Jason’s body, so that at least this half of the corpse could be given funeral honours and be properly buried.” This is a sensible reinterpretation even if, like all others, it, too, resorts to speculation. Giangrande’s chief aim, like Robert’s, was to elucidate Euripides’ Hypsipyle fragment; again like Robert’s, his interpretation of Douris’ painting was ancillary, although Giangrande went into greater detail. On his final page he voiced his confidence that “a literary discussion which has raged for years is now concluded” (); his numeral is best taken with a grain of salt. As far as Euripides’ drama is concerned, Giangrande may have been right, but was he right about Douris’ cup? German archeologist Margot Schmidt, a student of Max Wegner, remained skeptical. She judged Giangrande to have advanced “partly useful” textual arguments but also “partly archeologically untenable arguments” about Jason’s death by dragon. So the mystery may still be unsolved. Even if
Giangrande, “Hypsipyle’s Children,” –. Giangrande here dissented from Bond, Euripides: Hypsipyle, (“Jason is definitely [!] alive and awake, for his eye is open”) and explained Bond’s misunderstanding ( note ) of German schlaff (“languid”) in Petersen, “Euripides Hypsipyle,” note , as Schlaf (“sleep”). Giangrande, “Hypsipyle’s Children,” –. He credited Cockle with being the first to have observed the importance of Athena’s stance. Giangrande had been one of two supervisors of Cockle’s dissertation, which was the basis for his edition of Euripides’ play; see Cockle, Euripides Hypsipyle, and cf. . A painting showing Heracles carrying off the half-devoured body of Abderus for burial is described in Philostratus the Elder, Images .. Schmidt, Gnomon review of Meyer, . As may be seen from the following comment, which appeared a quarter century after Giangrande’s article: “Some iconographic evidence, much debated, suggests there may have been a preEuripidean tradition that he [Jason] was consumed by the fleece-guarding serpent at Colchis.” Quoted from Martin Cropp, “Hypsipyle and Athens,” in Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (eds.), Poetry, Theory, Praxis: The Social Life of Myth, Word and Image in Ancient Greece: Essays in Honour of
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Douris’ Jason
he did not completely succeed, Giangrande at least came closer than anyone else. Gerhard and especially Robert were the giants on whose shoulders he was standing. The reception history of Douris’ painting from to consists of interpretations that are variously contradictory and frequently reckless. These can also lead to a facile retreat into superficial esthetics, as the Vatican Museum’s Internet page reveals when it draws attention to Douris’ creative ability and imagination in painting his dragon. On the surface level, this statement is unobjectionable: Douris’ is one of the most magnificent dragons ever painted, and not only in antiquity. On a deeper level, however, the sentence is an admission of failure: We cannot really understand the scene or why it was painted, so let us appreciate how great some of it looks. Douris’ artistry is equally on display in Athena, about whom the text has nothing to add, and in the painting as a whole. This inconclusive reception history will now serve as a foil for the argument to follow. My criticisms demonstrate that it will be preferable to appreciate Douris’ painting on its own terms: as a particular moment in time. My approach might be placed under Pindar’s aegis. His Fourth Pythian Ode, which Gerhard had been the first to consider, includes a universal insight: “the right moment [kairos], for humans, has only a short measure.”
Douris’ Visual Narrative and the Aristotelian Now Aristotle began his Metaphysics with a general point: “All men by nature desire to know.” He provided the reason a little later: For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little . . . And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders).
William J. Slater (Oxford: Oxbow Books, ), –, at note . References to Neils (see below), Robert, Giangrande, and Meyer follow. Pindar, Pythian . Aristotle, Metaphysics a; quoted from Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt., with corrections, ), . The translator is W. D. Ross. A valuable introduction to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and beyond is Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ). Aristotle, Metaphysics b– and –; quoted from Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. , .
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Douris’ Visual Narrative and the Aristotelian Now
Philosophy is the desire to understand and derives from wonderment at what one sees: a thauma idesthai. What Aristotle wrote explains all the scholarly endeavors that have gone into making sense of Douris’ image. After an initial surprise any viewer, ancient or modern, knowledgeable or not, will try to find an explanation: How did this happen? All viewers will construct or reconstruct the action preceding the image. Viewers knowledgeable about the myth will also ask: What happened next? That virtually all scholars have asked themselves this question is evident from the nearly universal explanation that the dragon is regurgitating Jason, who either comes to life again or was only unconscious. In the words of Jenifer Neils: “His survival and eventual disgorgement are, in short, a resurrection.” Before her, Giangrande had eliminated a resurrection as impossible. Long before both, Welcker had made a simple observation: “Since a regurgitation is not really depicted, the myth adduced for it falls away by itself.” Most scholars seem to be unaware of this point. But what did happen next? As Welcker was the first to see, the image furnishes a clue: the presence of Athena. Presumably this is the only reason she is there. All interpretations except Gerhard’s first and Robert’s understand her in this way. Viewer response, a modern theoretical perspective, explains how viewers engage with images. This theory derives from a parallel one about narrative literature: reader response. Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell has described viewer response in terms applicable to Douris’ image: If the subject is familiar to the viewer . . . the viewer can resort to a shorthand identification that corresponds to his or her experience or knowledge of the visual language before moving on to look at the details of the picture. However, if the viewer has trouble recognizing the subject matter quickly, there is a more detailed examination of the significant elements to identify a potential subject. Such difficulty could be a result of the story being obscure and not commonly found in art, or because the action is unfamiliar, or because a key element of the picture seems to contradict the normal formula for what the viewer might have guessed from first glance.
So, as a matter of course that appears to need no further comment, twice in LIMC: “Le dragon vomit Jason” (., p. : “Athéna ”) and “I. [Jason] . . . disgorged by a large serpent” (., p. : “Iason ”). Jenifer Neils, “Reflections of Immortality: The Myth of Jason on Etruscan Mirrors,” in Richard Daniel De Puma and Jocelyn Penny Small (eds.), Murlo and the Etruscans: Art and Society in Ancient Etruria (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –; quotation at . (Similarly, Buitron-Oliver, Douris, note .) Neils brought up, as parallels, some earlier Corinthian vases (alabastra) as well as Etruscan gems and bronzes produced around Douris’ time. Welcker, Griechische Vasengemälde, note .
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Douris’ Jason
He goes on to observe: “What seems to attract additional attention from the viewer, in particular, are scenes that depart from standard representations.” The stark contrast between a viewer’s ingrained familiarity with the Jason myth and the surprise at seeing an unfamiliar moment leads to deeper intellectual involvement: “It is possible for a viewer to construct a plausible and consistent interpretation of a work that contradicts the intended subject matter, but this interpretation may still be valid.” In our case, we might adjust “intended subject matter” to traditional subject matter for a better fit. It is primarily its temporal indeterminacy that makes Douris’ image irresistible and urges viewers to construct a whole scenario surrounding this moment – or rather, the painting demands such a construction. The image depends on viewers’ engagement. The eye sees a static image; the mind provides its backstory and continuation and turns it into a mental picture story of before, during, and after. Max Wegner once put the case about our painting very well: “here everything is in process.” Such a conclusion is supported by Aristotle’s understanding of “the now” (to nyn; henceforth, except in quotations: the Now). In Chapter of Book of his Physics he wrote: The ‘now’ is the link of time, as has been said (for it connects past and future time), and it is a limit of time (for it is the beginning of the one and the end of the other) . . . in so far as it is dividing[,] the ‘now’ is always different, but[,] in so far as it connects[,] it is always the same . . . So the ‘now’. . . is in one way a potential dividing of time, in another the termination of both parts, and their unity. And the dividing and the uniting are the same thing and in the same reference, but in essence they are not the same.
The quotations are from Mark D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, Looking at Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (in chapter section titled “Viewer Response”). See further Stansbury-O’Donnell, –, on narrative in visual art (section of chapter titled “Meaning”). Stansbury-O’Donnell, Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (chapter section titled “The Viewing Process”), goes into greater detail. See further, and partly in connection with his arguments, Adrian Stähli, “Erzählte Zeit, Erzählzeit und Wahrnehmungszeit: Zum Verhältnis von Temporalität und Narration, speziell in der hellenistischen Plastik,” in Peter C. Bol (ed.), Zum Verhältnis von Raum und Zeit in der griechischen Kunst (Möhnesee: Bibliopolis, ), – and plates LII–LXII, with extensive references; Klaus Junker, Interpreting the Images of Greek Myths: An Introduction, tr. Annemarie Ku¨nzl-Snodgrass and Anthony Snodgrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Luca Giuliani, Image and Myth: A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art, tr. Joseph O’Donnell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). G. O. Hutchinson, Motion in Classical Literature: Homer, Parmenides, Sophocles, Ovid, Seneca, Tacitus, Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), approaches the topic from the other direction. Wegner, Duris, : “hier ist alles Vorgang.”
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Douris’ Visual Narrative and the Aristotelian Now
Aristotle next referred to a time near the Now. Shortly after, he noted that “the ‘now’ is an end and a beginning of time, not of the same time however, but the end of that which is past and the beginning of that which is to come.” All this is connected to motions and movements. Here is one telling passage from among many in Aristotle that deal with time, motion, and the Now: When . . . we perceive the ‘now’ as one, and neither as before and after in a motion nor as the same element but in relation to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, no time is thought to have elapsed, because there has been no motion either. On the other hand, when we do perceive a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, then we say that there is time. For time is just this – number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after’.
It follows that “the ‘now’ is the boundary of the past and the future.” Concerning Greek art, Caterina Maderna, turning to Aristotle, has pointed to Myron’s Diskobolos (“Discus Thrower”) as one example among several. What she concluded about the Roman wall painting of Medea contemplating the murder of her children, in which several moments of the myth are being combined into one whole, fits Douris’ kylix image to a striking degree: The momentary nature of the image . . . rather serves to accentuate a dramatic high point of the tale, which, as such, becomes comprehensible only through knowledge of a temporally past, earlier, occurrence . . . The situation depicted in the image is only a starting point; the chronological “axis” of its present action is broadened by a retrospect into the past and a prospect into future events. [In such images] the possible understanding of pictorial narrative is subject to the viewer’s intellectual-abstract comprehension and imagination that knowledgeably combines all elements with one another.
Aristotle, Physics a– and a–b; quoted from Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; sixth, corrected, printing, ), –. The translation is by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Grant. I have added a few commas for greater clarity. Aristotle, Physics a–b and a–; Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. , and . For details about the Aristotelian Now and its various specific meanings and implications, which need not be pursued here, see Hartmut Kuhlmann, “‘Jetzt’? Zur Konzeption des νῦν in der Zeitabhandlung des Aristoteles (Physik IV –),” in Enno Rudolph (ed.), Zeit, Bewegung, Handlung: Studien zur Zeitabhandlung des Aristoteles (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, ), –, with references. Caterina Maderna, “Augenblick und Dauer in griechischen Mythenbildern,” in Bol (ed.), Zum Verhältnis von Raum und Zeit in der griechischen Kunst, – and plates LXV–LVIX, at . Snodgrass, Narration and Allusion in Archaic Greek Art, –, describes Annibale Caracci’s latesixteenth-century fresco of Odysseus and Circe (Camerino, Farnese Palace) in comparable terms, if without mention of Aristotle. Maderna, “Augenblick und Dauer in griechischen Mythenbildern,” and . Immediately after the first ellipsis in the text here quoted, she refers to Lessing’s fruitful moment, on which below.
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Douris’ Jason
Douris lived long before Aristotle, but his painting perfectly illustrates Aristotle’s thought. “The descriptive capacity of [static] images,” writes StansburyO’Donnell, “has its own narrative power.” For Greek art, especially painting, he lists and defines the following ways in which time and temporal development can be shown: monoscenic narrative: “narrative picture in which the action occurs at a single time and place” (“the snapshot approach”) synoptic narrative: “narrative picture that includes figures, actions, or objects that belong to different moments of a narrative” progressive narrative: “narrative image in which time progresses as one moves from one part of the image to another, but without repetition of any characters” panoramic narrative: “narrative image in which different actions take place at the same time but in different places” continuous narrative: “narrative image in which multiple scenes are set in a continuous frieze or picture, repeating some of the participants from one scene to the next” cyclical narrative: “narrative image in which multiple scenes are set in separate panels or pictures, repeating some of the participants from one scene to the next” In terms of these categories, Douris’ image is no more than monoscenic. But any viewer who recognizes its characters is likely to be left unsatisfied by its “snapshot” appearance. Is the image then synoptic or progressive?
Mark D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, A History of Greek Art (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, ), (at beginning of chapter titled “Narrative”). On the origins of narrative arts in antiquity, see, e.g., John Carter, “The Beginning of Narrative Art in the Greek Geometric Period,” The Annual of the British School at Athens, (), –; Heide Froning, “Anfänge der kontinuierlichen Bilderzählung in der griechischen Kunst,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, (), –. Stansbury-O’Donnell, A History of Greek Art, and – (in section “Narrative Time and Space”). More detailed analyses are in his Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art, – (introductory) and – (chapter section titled “Syntagmatic Extension”). For an example of earlier and simpler summaries, and with references to the beginnings of such analyses, see H. A. Shapiro, Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece (London: Routledge, ), –. He follows Snodgrass, Narration and Allusion in Archaic Greek Art and An Archaeology of Greece: The Present State and Future Scope of a Discipline (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), – (chapter titled “The First Figure-Scenes in Greek Art”). Glenn Markoe, Phoenician Bronze and Silver Bowls from Cyprus and the Mediterranean (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), – (in chapter called “Narrative and Adaptation in Cyprio-Phoenician Art”), offers a more nuanced list than Shapiro’s. Geralda Jurriaans-Helle, Composition in Athenian Black-Figure VasePainting: The “Chariot in Profile” Type Scene (Leuven: Peeters, ), –, is a useful summary and restatement, with references.
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Douris’ Visual Narrative and the Aristotelian Now
Not really, because what Douris created does not fully fit any one category. It is sui generis across time and action, as the various attempts at explanation or interpretation reviewed above have shown. Douris provided the present; modern experts have constructed the past (Jason’s defeat) and emphasized the future (his disgorgement). Douris’ work practically necessitates all this. Nearly vases signed by Douris survive; nearly have been attributed to him. (Some scholars speculate that he may have painted nearly , vases.) Douris fully understood motion and action sequences expressed in static images. Stansbury-O’Donnell’s final category, for example, may be observed in one of Douris’ most famous vases, a red-figure kylix also discovered at Cerveteri. It shows, in three separate scenes, the contest between Odysseus and Ajax over Achilles’ suit of armor. The first two scenes appear on the outside: Ajax and Odysseus are about to come to blows but are being restrained; Athena, again magnificent, presides over the voters who are about to award the armor to Odysseus. The inside shows the conclusion: Odysseus presents the armor to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. As we saw, in his Jason cup Douris painted a now that implies a before and an after; i.e. a three-part progressive action. Here Douris divided an action into a series of images in three parts. Crucially from our point of view, the first two additionally express a temporal progression within their scenes that is vividly implied in the postures of various characters. Time matters. In their different ways these famous works, considered alongside each other, demonstrate Douris’ sophistication in expressing temporal aspects of motion in unmoving images. There is no clue in Douris’ painting that Jason is being disgorged at this moment. Scholars assume so because they have their own solution in mind. Only a few have pointed out that Jason could still be in the process of being swallowed. The image itself is indeterminate because of its unmoving characters: divine, human, animal. The scene could equally show the last moment of what has been happening and the first moment of what will happen. Viewers’ reasoning depends on their outside knowledge: the complete myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. In stark contrast, Douris chose the most gripping Now.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; inv. no. ANSA IV ; Beazley Archive Pottery Database ; LIMC . Images are available in print and online. Dyfri Williams, “Ajax, Odysseus and the Arms of Achilles,” Antike Kunst, no. (), –, well describes the vivid and dramatic development in the individual scenes at – and concludes that “the story is thus brought full circle and the cup becomes a kind of triptych” (). He deals with other vase images, including by Douris, of this subject as well.
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Douris’ Jason
The Now as kairos: Lessing’s “Fruitful Moment” In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a leading figure of the Enlightenment, published one of the most influential studies of painting and poetry: Laocoon. One specific aspect is important for our topic: der fruchtbare Augenblick – in English, “the fruitful [or “pregnant,” “fertile”] moment” vel sim. Serendipitously for our context, the German Augenblick (“moment”) literally means “eye’s gaze.” The idea is crucial for a painter or sculptor to render this moment in order to achieve the highest degree of beauty, to Lessing the ultimate goal of literature and the arts. The development of the idea has frequently been traced back to medieval painting and its increasing emphasis on naturalism: The impression steadily grew that a painting represented a frozen moment in an event that had really taken place . . . The question arose, then, of the relation between the moment and the event . . . painting found itself . . . caught between two contradictory claims: showing the entire event to enhance its understanding versus showing only one moment, trying to be true to what could . . . have been seen by a witness . . . It was not until the th century that this dilemma received an adequate theoretical solution, which was that there was no contradiction between those two claims . . .
Its full title in original spelling: Laokoon: oder u¨ber die Grenzen der Mahlerei und Poesie. Mit beyläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte. Erster Theil. Later parts never appeared. Beate I. Allert, G. E. Lessing: Poetic Constellations between the Visual and the Verbal (Heidelberg: Synchron, ), –, gives a general introduction. The two most important modern editions of the text, including Lessing’s Paralipomena, are Hugo Blu¨mner (ed.), Lessings Laokoon, nd ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, ), and Wilfried Barner (ed.), Werke –: Laokoon/Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, ; rpt. ). The latter, vol. . in the multi-volume edition Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Werke und Briefe, co-edited by Barner, has the now authoritative text (in modernized spelling). Below, I provide page and line references. On the continuing applicability of Laocoon to classical art, literature, and archeology, see Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), –, and Avi Lifschitz and Squire (eds.), Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the “Limits” of Painting and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). I return to Lessing in Chapter . A good, if older, introduction to it is in Blu¨mner (ed.), Lessings Laokoon, –. The concept has elicited large amounts of comment. Useful introductions are Inka Mu¨lder-Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der “Darstellung” im . Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, ), –, and Norbert Christian Wolf, “‘Fruchtbarer Augenblick’ – “prägnanter Moment’: Zur medienspezifischen Funktion einer ästhetischen Kategorie in Aufklärung und Klassik (Lessing, Goethe),” in Peter-André Alt et al. (eds.), Prägnanter Moment: Studien zur deutschen Literatur der Aufklärung und Klassik (Wu¨rzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, ), –. The brief overview by Frank Brommer, Die Wahl des Augenblicks in der griechischen Kunst (Munich: Heimeran, ), incorporates Lessing. On Lessing and classical enargeia (“vividness,” explained in Chapter ), see further Gyburg Radke-Uhlmann, “Über eine vergessene Form der Anschaulichkeit in der griechischen Dichtung,” Antike & Abendland, (), –.
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The Now as kairos: Lessing’s “Fruitful Moment”
Both aspects could be expressed if the moment chosen was one which expressed the essence of the event . . . Lessing . . . called this the ‘pregnant moment’. The concept was highly useful in painting, especially since it had been practiced well before it had been theoretically defined.
Lessing analyzed the fruitful moment extensively. He also explained the temporal context that a static image impresses on the viewer: all bodies exist not only in space but also in time. They continue and, at any moment of their duration, can appear differently and in different connection [or: combination]. Each of these momentary manifestations is the effect of a preceding one and can be the cause of a following and, hence, the center of an action, as it were. It follows that painting can imitate actions, too, but only by way of suggestion through bodies.
This fits the moment Douris chose. It is the center of an action – or, rather, of a series of dramatic actions involving three bodies. The passage quoted appears in Chapter XVI, the most famous and crucial one of Laocoon. In Chapter III Lessing had already observed something that explains and vindicates scholars’ approach to Douris’ scene: If the artist can never use more than a single moment of an always changeable nature, and the painter especially can use this single moment only from one single aspect; but if their works have been produced not simply to be seen but to be contemplated, to be contemplated for long and repeatedly; then it is certain that that single moment and single aspect of that single moment cannot be chosen fruitfully enough. But only that is fruitful that allows free play to the power of imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to add in our mind. The more we add in our mind, the more we must believe we are seeing.
Douris’ fruitful moment allows free play to the imagination – not of amateurs but of experts, who apply knowledge that is related to what they see but remains extraneous. To expand on Lessing: The more we understand by contemplation, the more outside knowledge we adduce.
Quoted from Jacques Aumont, The Image, tr. Claire Pajackowska (London: British Film Institute, ), . The French original had appeared in . Aumont’s criticism of the fruitful moment, which follows immediately on the words quoted, is justified but does not affect my topic. The German adjective prägnant is derived from the same Latin word as its English cognate but has lost its physiological aura. Rather, it means poignant or expressive: pointing to something absent that yet can be readily inferred. For this reason I will use the English translation of Lessing’s other, synonymous, term fruchtbar. Barner (ed.), Werke –, .–.. Barner (ed.), Werke –, .–.
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Douris’ Jason
The more we adduce, the more we convince ourselves of seeing. Simon’s is the example par excellence. Lessing was not the first to identify the fruitful moment, but he eclipsed all others. In Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, following Newtonian physics, wrote about “the Single Instant” in An Essay on Painting: Being a Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules. In James Harris, his nephew, continued the argument in A Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry, the second of Three Treatises, in which he championed the “punctum temporis” for painting: “All Actions and Events, whose Integrity or Wholeness depends upon a short and self-evident Succession of Incidents” or on an extended succession. In a footnote he added: “ of necessity every is a Punctum Temporis or .” In his main text he continued: “All Actions . . . open themselves into a large Variety of Circumstances, concurring all in the same Point of Time.” This prompts another note, which begins: “ is not bounded in Extension, as it is in Duration.” In the main text Harris distinguished between “Actions which are known, and known universally,” and those which are “newly invented, or known but to few.” This last observation leads to another note: “ Reason is, that a Picture being (as has been said) but a Point or Instant, in a Story well known the Spectator’s Memory will supply the previous and the subsequent. But this cannot be done, where such Knowledge is wanting.” That ancient artists frequently counted on just such knowledge becomes evident from the scene most often shown on Greek vases: Heracles’ first labor. His defeat of the Nemean Lion appears on more than vases in the archaic period alone. In Frank Brommer’s summary: All these images show the hero wrestling with the lion at the climax of the fight, which is not yet decided. Final victory cannot yet be recognized, even though everyone at this archaic period knew the result of the fight from
For Lessing’s precursors see the summary in Władysław Folkierski, Entre le classicisme et le romantisme: Étude sur l’esthêtique et les esthêticiens du XVIIIe siècle (; rpt. Paris: Champion, ), –, and, more briefly, Barner (ed.), Werke –, – (where correct “John Harris” to James Harris; see next note). Major examples are Jonathan Richardson (the Elder), An Essay on the Theory of Painting (); Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets (), Essais sur la peinture (), and the entry “Composition” in his Encyclopédie (). In Germany, Herder, Goethe, and Hegel followed Lessing, variously assenting and dissenting. The quotations are from J. H. [James Harris], Three Treatises: Treatise the Second: A Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry (London: Woodfall, ), – and notes (e), (g), and (h). The first discourse is on art, the third on happiness. Revised editions followed during and after his lifetime. On this Brommer, Die Wahl des Augenblicks in der griechischen Kunst, –.
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The Now as kairos: Lessing’s “Fruitful Moment”
myth, and no doubt could arise about this point and no instruction was necessary. The result, however, cannot be seen in the images themselves. The moment chosen is that of highest suspense for the viewer and highest exertion for the fighters.
Parallels to Douris’ kylix image are self-evident. The concept of the fruitful moment, we realize, extends much further back than the Middle Ages. Brommer then turned to depictions in later art that show Heracles’ victory: Imagination is here stimulated much more strongly – in Lessing’s sense – by the new style of composition [Stilmittel]; that is, the choice of a different moment, because violent action has been abandoned. We feel with the hero. Our thoughts return to the immediate past and bring the fight back before our eyes.
We can apply the points Brommer made about both ways of showing Heracles’ encounter with the lion to Douris’ portrayal of Jason’s with the dragon. The beast’s victory stimulates our imagination in the highest degree; we mentally return to their fight. In our case, of course, we feel with the vanquished, not with the winner. At least some ancient viewers were familiar with this version of the myth, as Robert deduced from Euripides’ Hypsipyle. The moment chosen by Douris is also that of highest suspense because we see Athena and wonder what will happen next. The final outcome of what Douris painted cannot yet be recognized. But it can be deduced. Virtually all interpretations, beginning with Welcker’s and culminating in Giangrande’s, have done so. One additional consideration is appropriate here. German philosopher Georg Simmel began the first chapter of his book on Rembrandt with a section titled “The Continuity of Life and the Movement of Expression.” To my knowledge, nobody has ever considered Douris and Rembrandt in tandem, but this chapter’s topic suggests just that, with Simmel providing the rationale. I therefore quote him at some length and without further comment, leaving the matter to my readers to decide for themselves whether what Simmel wrote about Rembrandt’s drawings in does not also fit Douris’ painting: While in classical [and some other later] art the representation of a movement happens through a kind of abstraction, by the fact that the sight of a certain moment is snatched from the life that flows up to it and continues to flow under it and is crystallized to a self-sufficient form – with Rembrandt the represented moment seems to contain the whole impulse
Brommer, Die Wahl des Augenblicks in der griechischen Kunst, –.
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Douris’ Jason that lives up to it . . . It is not a temporally fixed part of a physical-psychic movement . . . but it makes evident how the single represented moment of movement is really the whole movement, or rather is movement itself and not a solidified Such-and-Such. It is the inversion of the “fruitful moment.” While this latter leads the movement from its Now into the future in our imagination, Rembrandt’s moment gathers its past into this Now: not only a fertile but also a harvesting moment [ein erntender Moment]. Just as it is the essence of life to be wholly present in every moment because its wholeness is not the mechanical summation of singular moments but a continuous and continuously form-changing flow, so it is the essence of Rembrandt’s expressive movement to let the whole succession of its moments be felt in the uniqueness of a single moment, to overcome its fragmentation into any succession of separate moments . . . With Rembrandt . . . the impulse of movement . . . seems to lie at the basis, and from this germ, this collected potentiality of the whole and its meaning, his drawings develop part by part, just as movement unfolds accordingly in reality. With him, the starting point or foundation of representation is not the picture of the moment seen, as it were, from the outside, in which the movement has arrived at the climax which is to be represented . . . but it is, from the outset, the dynamic of the entire action within that moment, brought together as if into one unity.
Enter Photography: Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” Some fifty years ago Roland Barthes took Lessing’s idea of the fruitful moment into the twentieth century: the age of photography (actions in snapshots) and cinematography (actions in progress). As Jacques Aumont writes: “[The] split between wanting to freeze a real moment and the requirements of meaning (which the pregnant moment doctrine sought to resolve) reappeared with a vengeance at the time of the invention of photography.” Barthes spoke of “this perfect instant” and the “crucial instant” in Diderot, which he linked to Lessing’s “pregnant moment” in his essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.” He also referred to “the pregnant moment.” In a long essay from , Barthes had turned to what he called, somewhat tentatively, the cardinal function or nucleus of a
Georg Simmel, Rembrandt: Ein kunstphilosophischer Versuch (Leipzig: Wolff, ), –. This first edition was followed by numerous later ones. Aumont, The Image, . Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image – Music – Text, ed. and tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, ; several rpts.), –; quotations at and . The matter can be taken much farther. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema : The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, and Cinema : The Time-Image, tr. Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (both London: Athlone Press, ; French originals: and ), and the work of Georges
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Enter Photography
narrative. He defined it in terms that remind us of Aristotle’s Now and fit the preceding analyses of Douris’ painting: For a function to be cardinal, it is enough that the action to which it refers open (or continue, or close) an alternative that is of direct consequence for the subsequent development of the story, in short that it inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty . . . cardinal functions are both consecutive and consequential. Everything suggests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by . . . cardinal functions are the risky moments of a narrative.
The last sentence quoted applies to Douris’ dragon image, as the variety of contradictory scholarly responses has made clear. It is not surprising that Barthes’ concept of the cardinal function or nucleus has been applied to Greek vase paintings. We may compare what Anthony Snodgrass stated around the same time about Greek vases: “there are some early works of Greek art which . . . embody the . . . modern-seeming notion of ‘photographic’ representation.” Representations of actions in the traditional – i.e. static – arts are by no means entirely separate from those in moving images: “the cinema deals, in its own way, with the fixed image, and painting, for its part, deals with movement.” As a result of such an affinity between and among artistic media even across long time spans, we are today able to see in Douris’ scene both a motion picture in the term’s literal sense and an example, avant la lettre, of what Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most artistic of photographers, called the decisive moment. Lessing’s fruitful moment is exactly the same: It triggers contemplation
Didi-Huberman, to which Chari Larsson, Didi-Huberman and the Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), provides a recent introduction. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image – Music – Text, –; quotations at –. So, extensively, by Stansbury-O’Donnell, Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art, – (summary of Barthes’ terminology) and – (application to ancient images in various media), and Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (with comments on Athena as spectator on vase images that remind us of how Douris presents her) and – (definitions). Snodgrass, Narration and Allusion in Archaic Greek Art, . So Pascal Bonitzer, Décadrages: Peinture et cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma / Éditions de l’Etoile, ), (in opening paragraph). Bonitzer, at the time a highly regarded film critic and essayist, later became a screenwriter and director. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon & Schuster, ; facsimile rpt. Göttingen: Steidl, ). My quotations below are from his foreword (on fourteen unnumbered pages; references will be added in square brackets). The book’s supplement – Clément Chéroux, “A Bible for Photographers” – explains the English title, which differs from the original French (–).
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Douris’ Jason
of, and reaction to, an image and prompts an attempt at understanding the before and the after of its now. The split noticed by Aumont can thus be overcome. As Cartier-Bresson explained: “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself.” He elaborated as follows: In photography there is a new kind of plasticity, product of the instantaneous lines made by movements of the subject. We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.
The third sentence quoted reminds us of what Aristotle had said about the Now as the link and limit of time connecting past and future and as the beginning of the one and the end of the other. A decisive moment can qualify as a kind of Aristotelian Now as described above to CartierBresson – and to Douris and all visual artists. What Cartier-Bresson, who had studied painting before becoming a photographer, said about his goal as a photographer fully describes the monoscenic nature of painting as outlined above: “Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.” How much closer could we get to Douris’ image’s whole essence that is unrolling itself – not before our eyes but in our minds (or mind’s eye)? Time is essential for any artist capturing an action or movement. Clément Chéroux has provided an eloquent explanation of CartierBresson’s decisive moment. It directly fits Douris’ image, and not only because of Chéroux’s use of an ancient Greek term: at a precise given moment, things organize themselves in the viewfinder in an aesthetic and significant arrangement, and that is when one has to trigger the shutter. A sort of photographic kairos, the decisive moment is a formal equilibrium that reveals the essence of a situation.
Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, []. On the subject see John Berger, “A Man Begging in the Métro: Henri Cartier-Bresson” (), now in Berger, Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Aperture, ), –. Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, []. For just one, if quite different, example, see Markus Stauff, “The Pregnant-Moment Photograph: The London Marathon and the Cross-Media Evaluation of Sport Performances,” Historical Social Research, (), –. Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, []. Chéroux, “A Bible for Photographers,” .
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Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment
These words apply to all visual arts of any era. It is revealing that CartierBresson drew attention to the influence of the cinema. About the very beginning of his photographic career, he wrote: “From some of the great films, I learned to look, and to see.”
Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment As noted, Douris’ painting is fundamentally a monoscenic narrative. But the extreme complexity that he managed to conjure up and convey to viewers belies any simplicity that the term might connote. An image that belongs to the most basic of Stansbury-O’Donnell’s categories is nevertheless so profound as to imply three moments in time and to require elaborate explanations to make complete sense. If we consider the everincreasing complexities inherent in the other categories, we can point to a modern medium as their continuation. This is the cinema, followed in turn by its later “relatives”: television, digital media, and computer graphics. Aumont once wrote about the film image: The cinematic image was originally seen as radically new because it moved, not only because it represented motion . . . [The film camera and projector present us with] not only the passage of time but also a complex, stratified time in which we move through different levels simultaneously, present, past(s), future(s).
Exponentially more so than the still camera could do, the film camera and later digital media have revolutionized how we look at and understand images. Greek vase paintings, for instance, can even be made to move. Mini-films show us what went before and what came after the scene
Monique Trédé-Boulmer, Kairos: L’àpropos et l’occasion: Le mot et la notion, d’Homère à la fin du IVe siècle avant J.-C., nd ed. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, ), is the most detailed study and offers an extensive bibliography (–). On kairos as concept and aspect of ancient art, see further Dietrich Boschung, Kairos as a Figuration of Time: A Case Study, tr. Janine Fries-Knoblach (Munich: Fink, ). Boschung primarily examines Lysippus’ lost statue of Kairos personified as god, including its description in a dialogic poem by Poseidippus (Greek Anthology .), and its visual and literary contexts; he refers to Aristotle’s Now at –. See further Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (eds.), Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), with general introduction and bibliography. The idea of kairos meaning “just the right moment” led, as early as in antiquity, to the related meaning of “opportunity,” which applies to all artists. Ulrich Schädler, “Kairos – der unfruchtbare Moment,” in Bol (ed.), Zum Verhältnis von Raum und Zeit in der griechischen Kunst, – and plates XXV– XXVI.–, is a dissenting voice. Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, []. Cartier-Bresson’s brother-in-law, film historian Georges Sadoul, had suggested several possibilities from among “titles related to the notion of time” before Cartier-Bresson made his final decision (Chéroux, “A Bible for Photographers,” ). Aumont, The Image, and , following Deleuze.
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Douris’ Jason
painted. The British Panoply Vase Animation Project has demonstrated what moving images of such static art can be like. In one of them Heracles again defeats the Erymanthian Boar. One of the Panoply team has said about monoscenic images: Artists took such care in how they rendered . . . aspects of the physical form . . . that you know they are expressing movement. Sometimes this creates the impression of a snapshot of an ongoing event with clear indications of what happened before or after – those scenes really invite storytelling, storyboarding, and animation.
Accordingly, I approached the team concerning Douris’ painting, posing the following questions: If you were to animate this image in, say, a minute’s time or so, what exactly would you decide to show? In other words, what would have happened just before and just after the moment painted? How would you decide on what to include in your animation? Would the moment before or the moment after be more important to you (and receive more time in an animation)?
The reply I received was enlightening: We would most likely focus on Before, ending at or around the moment on the vase, with a little time given to After. We would try not to impose too much narrative on a scene like this, not knowing whether Jason is on his way in or out. From this perspective it might be preferable simply to try and help viewers understand what the scenario is. I would think that many nonspecialists might struggle to see that Jason is half in the dragon, so it would be helpful to show the dragon without Jason being visible but then becoming visible. I’m inclined to think that the image suggests the hero’s return; I wouldn’t expect Athena to look on so placidly while Jason was being gulped down, and he must come back up at some point, so presumably this is that point. So: perhaps the serpent with its maw closed and no sign of Jason; then some flexing of the scales to indicate Jason’s movement within, then Jason emerging just as far as he does in the image, but with signs of life. The movement of the dragon would reveal the fleece quite nicely, too. Athena would react, perhaps sharing a look with Jason, and perhaps she would look over to the fleece to draw the viewer’s eye to it, with the implication that Jason will be seizing it next. We thereby get to see that Jason is alive, but he might relax back into his hanging pose of the original
Their work appears at www.panoply.org.uk/. Quoted from “Animating Antiquity: An Interview with Classical Scholar Sonya Nevin and Animator Steve K. Simons” (unsigned), thersites, (), –, at .
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Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment
scene. Or there might be a fade back to the original after some signs of life, rather than the return movement being part of the animation itself. Athena’s owl could flap its wings a little so it can be seen more clearly. I might also be tempted to consider showing the serpent as drowsy, with the implication that this is how Jason has come to escape. Sometimes it seems clear rather quickly what the animation of a vase image should show. This one is tricky and would take a lot of thought.
These words show that Douris’ image readily lends itself to the animation team’s approach. The detail about Athena’s owl, for instance, would further enhance the image’s appeal, perhaps adding a humorous touch to an essentially gruesome scene. The animators’ understanding is a modern – and modern media-based – approach that reaffirms the views of Welcker, Simon, and others by linking it to the myth as preserved in our sources. What Douris painted existed, and exists, as a unique moment in a kind of counter-narrative to epic and mythographic literature, but, as we saw, it can nevertheless be linked to Euripides and Lycophron. Isolated as the image is in what it shows, it is still part of the wider myth, a myth that Douris knew as well as anyone else. By presenting this counter-mythical painting to Athenian viewers, he counted on, perhaps even cleverly played with, their familiarity with the canonical story. Douris’ image is indeed tricky in its complexity and because of its creator’s bravado. That is the basis of the fascination it continues to exert. The digital animation practiced today has a classic precursor, also British. In Emily Diana Watts published a book on calisthenics and dance in which she reconstructed the movement sequences expressed and implied in classical Greek visual arts, including vase paintings. She presented many of her insights visually: Several series of photographic snapshots that resemble the chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge preserve her reconstructions, including those
Email message from Sonya Nevin of August , (slightly condensed). Diana Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal (London: Heinemann / New York: Stokes, ). My source is the American edition. A comparable perspective appears in Maurice Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance after Sculptured and Painted Figures, tr. Harriet Jean Beauley (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head / New York: Lane, ), where see, e.g., –. More on Emmanuel in Chapter . Some of the essays collected in Fiona Macintosh (ed.), The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), refer to Watts, Emmanuel, and related historical figures. See further Rémy Poignault (ed.), Présence de la danse dans l’Antiquité, présence de l’Antiquité dans la danse (La Flèche: Centre de Recherche André Piganiol, ), and Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar and Karin Schlapbach (eds.), Choreonarratives: Dancing Stories in Greek and Roman Antiquity and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, ).
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Douris’ Jason
concerning famous art works like the Heracles as crouching archer on the pediment of the temple at Aegina and Myron’s Diskobolos. Watts was even inducted into the prestigious Institut Marey in Paris as a result of her book. She included no fewer than sixteen individual “Cinema Series,” as she called them, whose images variously range from ten to fifty. The Diskobolos receives thirty-four. All were taken at the Institut. The photos published, she reports, “were selected from [!] actual film representations.” About the Heracles, the first statue she turned to, Watts reported: the whole sequence of movement came as a revelation . . . it is not enough to give a careful imitation of the one position chosen by the sculptor. To prove its naturalness and its truth, it is necessary to show what led up to that momentary poise, and what followed it, and if all three positions produce an uninterrupted sequence it is safe to conclude that the central poise is correct.
Evidently, all this is equally applicable to images of motion on vases. And to photographs: Watts’s Cinema Series can easily be digitized as a film. Canadian Norman McLaren animated photos in Neighbours (). Film scholar Tom Gunning accordingly concludes: “Probing animation in relation to the processes of photography actually allows us to more fully [sic] grasp the adventure in time and movement that all cinema invites us . . . to join: the technical manipulation of time through the discovery of the instant as the seed of motion.” He adds later: “I believe it is nearly impossible to see an instantaneous photograph of motion without continuing the frozen motion in our imagination. These instant images practically demand [being animated].” The same is true for earlier static art forms showing bodies in motion. Might it be taking Gunning’s point
Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, note . Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, –. For the Diskobolos see Watts, plate V, Cinema Series –, and –, including this: “The revelation of what Myron’s Discobolus meant in movement was . . . a great joy.” For more on Watts, Marey, and Emmanuel, see Laura Horak, “Animating Antiquity,” in Scott Curtis et al. (eds.), The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –. Other contributions to this essay collection touch on my topic, too. An example (Watts) is at https://vimeo.com/. McLaren’s film is adduced by Tom Gunning, “Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography,” in Karen Redrobe Beckman (ed.), Animating Film Theory (Durham, : Duke University Press, ), –, at . Gunning, “Animating the Instant,” . In this article Gunning also turns to Plato, Aristotle (and the Now), Parmenides, and Zeno. More on the instant (and on Marey and Muybridge) in Chapter . Gunning, “Animating the Instant,” . My emendation simplifies Gunning’s distinction between two kinds of animation, which does not concern my argument.
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Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment
too far to say that, in the case of Douris’ dragon, his word choice (“continuing”) points us to a possible solution of the Gerhard–Welcker– Robert dilemma? After all, as Gunning will observe soon after, the instantaneous photograph finds “its succession in the chronophotographic series.” Such a series in turn may be considered alongside a particular modern Greek work. The Runner () by Costas Varotsos, a glass-and-iron sculpture about twelve meters high in downtown Athens, represents what we might call a chronoglyptographic series (to coin a term). Being static, it expresses a particular moment, but it also catches, by means of a blurring effect created with the arrangement of the glass shards extending horizontally behind the runner, the passage of time. Although unique and thoroughly modern, The Runner is firmly rooted in ways of seeing made familiar to us, and presumably to Varotsos, by photography and cinematography. If a painter’s punctum temporis was a fruitful moment, that moment’s “backstory” and “sequel,” to use terms familiar to us, can now be presented as well. What Geoff Dyer has called “the ongoing moment” in photography supplements Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. And these moments can readily be extended beyond photography into cinematography. Several works by French photographer and filmmaker Agnès Varda attest to this. In the first episode of her five-part essay film Agnes Here and There Varda (), she muses about a photograph of people in a picture she took decades earlier: “I often asked myself who these people were and what had happened before and after this instant.” Earlier, in The People on the Terrace (), she created “a brief sketch . . . to supplement and animate it [i.e. the same photograph], stretching it out within a fictional chain of causality to imagine both the moments before the shutter closed and something of the post-snap story.” Laura Mulvey’s words about filmic viewing may be applied here, with some adjustment from her cinematic to our painterly context:
Gunning, “Animating the Instant,” . Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (; rpt. New York: Viking, ). On her see Rebecca J. DeRoo, Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art (Oakland: University of California Press, ). The quotations are from Shirley Jordan, “Still Varda: Photographs and Photography in Agnès Varda’s Late Works,” in Marie-Claire Barnet (ed.), Agnès Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media (Cambridge: Legenda, ), –, at note and (in section titled “The Ongoing Moment”). For more on photography, cinema, and myth in Varda, see now Caroline Eades, Cinéma et mythologie: Varda, Resnais, Honoré, Annaud (Paris: L’Harmattan, ), – (chapter titled “Ulysse d’Agnès Varda []: Une idée d’image”). This film, too, began with, and is about, a photograph.
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Douris’ Jason The process of repetition and return involves stretching out the cinematic image to allow space and time for associative thought, reflection on resonance and connotation, the identification of visual clues, the interpretation of cinematic form and style, and, ultimately, personal reverie . . . Privileged moments or tableaux are constructed around an integrated aesthetic unity that is detachable from the whole, although ultimately part of it.
Pre-photographic images like paintings and statues are not excluded from such ways of seeing. Since Welcker, even personal reverie has become a part of modern ways of looking at Douris’ dragon image, an independent esthetic unity that is nevertheless part of a much larger whole: the myth. Decades ago, Erwin Panofsky pointed to the affinities of the cinema with the traditional arts, especially painting, in a classic essay on the medium and its style: The craving for a narrative element [in early cinema] could be satisfied only by borrowing from older arts, and one should expect that the natural thing would have been to borrow from the theater, a theater play being apparently the genus proximum to a narrative film in that it consists of a narrative enacted by persons that move. But in reality the imitation of stage performances was a comparatively late and thoroughly frustrated development. What happened at the start was a very different thing. Instead of imitating a theatrical performance already endowed with a certain amount of motion, the earliest films added movement to works of art originally stationary . . . The living language, which is always right, has endorsed this sensible choice when it still speaks of a “moving picture” or, simply, a “picture,” instead of . . . “screenplay.”
He goes on to observe what we have come across in regard to Douris’ painting since its discovery: The “unique and specific possibilities [of film] can be defined as dynamization of space and, accordingly, spatialization of time. This statement is self-evident to the point of triviality but it belongs to that kind of truth which, just because of its triviality, is easily forgotten or neglected.” This is particularly noteworthy in the mystery genre: In these films, “space [is] doubly charged with time as the beholder asks himself not only ‘What is going to happen?’ but also ‘What has happened before?’” We have examined just these aspects of Douris’ dragon image.
Laura Mulvey, Death x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, ), – and . Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), – and (notes); quotation at –. This essay was first published in Critique, no. (), –, as an expansion of “On Movies” (). Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” and .
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Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment
“How long is the moment, the ongoing moment?” Dyer has asked, not just rhetorically, about photography. In the digital age, that moment can be extended backward and forward. Austrian screenwriter-director Gustav Deutsch demonstrated this with his feature-length Shirley: Visions of Reality (). Here not one but thirteen paintings, all by Edward Hopper, have become the basis of a complex live-action narrative about the titular woman which faithfully recreates Hopper’s style and spans three decades. (At one point she reads Plato.) Classic films in which an ongoing moment derives from an enigmatic photograph are Chris Marker’s La Jetée () and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (); both inspired other films. Comparable cases involving sound rather than image are Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation () and Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (). As in Douris’ case, so with Blow-Up: “interpretation rests with the spectator.” Robin Le Poidevin, a British scholar of metaphysics, concluded a chapter on representations of time in motionless images with words that remind us of Douris’ painting and evoke Aristotle’s Now: the answer to the question of what time span a static image represents depends on the level of cognitive sophistication involved in responding to the features of that image. At the most basic level, static images may depict a part of an event, whatever could be taken in at a single glance. At a much higher level, involving an appreciation of dramatic context, they suggest a much longer time span. Somewhere between these levels, certain spatial features of the image may convey the impression (though not literally the sensation) of change or motion. There is no incompatibility between these answers.
This view of our topic derives from Henri Bergson’s insight that human perception is innately cinematic. In Le Poidevin’s words: the cinematic view of perception is quite consistent with the perception of succession as present. The cinematic picture also suggests a view of what static images depict: if the perception of motion consists of a series of
Dyer, The Ongoing Moment, . Quoted from Gordon Gow, Suspense in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer / New York: Barnes, ), . I turn to La Jetée in Chapter . Robin Le Poidevin, The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), (in the section “Depiction, Change, and the Cinematic View” of a chapter titled “Image and Instant: The Pictorial Representation of Time”). See in particular Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, ), –, and Histoire de l’idée de temps: Cours au Collège de France – (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). More in Chapter .
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Douris’ Jason perceptual ‘stills’, then static images depict the part of motion that we register in one of those ‘stills.’
In the case of Douris’ dragon image, knowledgeable viewers such as ancient Greeks and, perhaps even more so, modern scholars of great cognitive sophistication supply the longer time span that Douris prompted them to recollect – not necessarily in a series of “stills” but in a series of motion images that could be divided into momentary stills. The dramatic moment between past and future that Douris has chosen could, and presumably did, evoke a complete motion picture in a viewer’s imagination, with the painting itself as its temporal turning point. Italian archeologist Paolo Enrico Arias was not thinking of any of this when he wrote a short summation of Douris’ art, but some of it applies here: “Many of Douris’ works give an animated . . . picture . . . Beyond this . . . he can also devise most striking pictures from life . . . and from mythology . . . often bringing an original and new rendering to well known scenes.” Indeed the fruitful and decisive moment, then as now. But it is even more: an ongoing moment. The different ways of seeing Douris’ dragon painting began with himself, its first viewer, and his contemporaries. This period came to an end sometime in antiquity, when the kylix was deposited in an Etruscan tomb. A new period started with Gerhard. Perhaps now that artistic and technological advances have made radically new ways of seeing possible and advisable, the academic discussion about Douris that started in can come to a conclusion. What the preceding pages have attempted to demonstrate is a modern photographic and cinematic approach to viewing and understanding ancient paintings and sculptures that show bodies in action and express motion. Our technology can aid us in ways that the artists themselves could never have conceived. The very enigma of a work that shows a decisive but also ongoing turning point in a story now barely recoverable and that, to at least some extent, defies any conclusive interpretation of its narrative is particularly suitable to a kind of viewing that concentrates on the inherent dynamic of what it displays. In this regard it matters less whether Jason or the dragon win; the crucial thing is das Bild an sich. If, on the other hand, discussions should continue, no problem. Douris’ shade might even prefer it that way. After all, he provided an irresistible opportunity, a kairos, for
Le Poidevin, The Images of Time, . Arias, A History of a Years of Greek Vase Painting, . Arias, , restates Welcker (“the dragon disgorges Jason”) and concludes: “The version in which Jason was first swallowed by the guardian dragon is not otherwise known.”
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Ways of Seeing the Ongoing Moment
ongoing debates. As Jean-Pierre Vernant once wrote about the ancient image: “If it is what it ought to be, a thauma idesthai, it becomes animated and takes on life.” In the words of Italian director Riccardo Freda, who made an epic film about Jason and the Golden Fleece: “The image must be a continual surprise to the eye.” Freda, unwittingly restating the Homeric idea of the thauma idesthai, emphasized its temporal dimension. What Cartier-Bresson wrote about the impulse of taking photographs may be applied, at least in part, to our viewing, even if we know nothing about Douris’ impulse: “perpetually looking . . . seizes the instant and its eternity.” This way of looking in turn conforms to what Varda was to say years later in her final film, Varda by Agnes (): “Make what is fixed come alive by the active gaze.”
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Passé et present: Contributions à une psychologie historique, ed. Riccardo Di Donato, vol. : Textes et entretiens (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, ), . So it is fitting that a recent study of vase paintings should focus on the idea of the kairos – and do so in connection with the cinema: SeungJung Kim, “Toward a Phenomenology of Time in Ancient Greek Art,” in Jonathan Ben-Dov and Lutz Doering (eds.), The Construction of Time in Antiquity: Ritual, Art, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Jacques Lourcelles and Simon Mizrahi, “Entretien avec Riccardo Freda,” Présence du cinéma, (), –; quotation at . On the more than reckless deviations from the myth in Freda’s The Giants of Thessaly (), see Chapter below. So reported by Berger, “A Man Begging in the Métro,” .
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Classical Cinematism
Classical antiquity has played a major part throughout the history of cinema practically since its invention. As Sergei Eisenstein once put it: “Cinema is the heir of all artistic cultures.” Elsewhere he observed: “It seems that all the arts, across the centuries, have tended toward the cinema. Conversely, the cinema aids us in understanding their methods.” This statement is uncontroversial to all but Gradgrinds and Beckmessers. But it prompts a kind of reverse-angle question: Was there a cinematic method in antiquity?
Aristotle and the camera obscura In his collection of problems in mathematical theory, Aristotle describes the following phenomenon: Why does the sun penetrating through quadrilaterals form not rectilinear shapes but circles, as for instance when it passes through wicker-work? Is it because the projection of the vision is in the form of a cone, and the base of a cone is a circle, so that the rays of the sun always appear circular on whatever object they fall? For the figure also formed by the sun must be contained by straight lines, if the rays are straight; for when they fall in a straight line on to a straight line, they form a figure contained by straight lines. And this is what happens with the rays; for they fall on the straight line of the wicker-work, at the point where they shine through, and are themselves straight, so that their projection is a straight line. But because the parts of the vision which are cut off towards the extremities of the straight lines are weak, the parts of the figure about the angles are not seen;
Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), . The quotation is the opening sentence. Translated from François Albera, “Introduction,” in S. M. Eisenstein, Cinématisme: Peinture et cinéma: Textes inédits, tr. Anne Zouboff (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, ; new ed.: Dijon: Les Presses du Réel / Paris: Kargo, ), –; quotation at .
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Aristotle and the camera obscura
but what there is of straight line in the cone describes a straight line, while the rest does not, but the sight falls on part of the figure without perceiving it. For there are many things to which the sight penetrates without our seeing them, objects, for instance, which are in darkness. A similar phenomenon is the fact that a quadrilateral figure appears polygonal, and at a greater distance circular. Now since the projection of sight is in the form of a cone, when the figure is removed to a distance the parts of the vision which are cut off towards the angles, because they are weak and few, do not see anything when the distance is increased; but the parts of the vision which fall upon the centre of the figure, being numerous and strong, are more persistent. When, therefore, the figure is near at hand, they can see the parts in the angles; but, when the distance is greater, they cannot do so. For this reason too a curved line removed to a distance appears straight, and the moon on the eighth day seems to be contained by straight lines, if the vision falls upon the line which encloses it and not on its breadth. For when the circumference is near, the sight can discern how much nearer one part of the circumference is than another; but when it is distant, the sight does not perceive it clearly, and it seems to be equally distant; and so it appears to be straight.
Scholars have questioned the authenticity of the work, but historians of the origins of photography and cinematography refer to this passage as a matter of course – even as fact or dogma – in connection with the camera obscura, the earliest and best-known projection apparatus. Wolfgang Baier, a historian of photography, comments:
Aristotle, Problems . (b–), quoted from Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt., with corrections, ), , –. The translator is E. S. Forster. Publications on ancient roots of the cinema frequently refer to this passage but often do so with only vague or erroneous text reference. The phenomenon had been observed and commented upon in China, possibly even earlier; see, e.g., Joseph Needham (ed.), Science and Civilisation in China, vol. : Physics and Physical Technology, pt. I: Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), – (chapter section titled “Camera Obscura”). Equally, Aristotle’s problem concerning sun rays observed during an eclipse through a leaf, sieve, or fingers interlaced, with different appearances at different apertures (Problems .; b–), is routinely mentioned regarding apertures in modern cameras. His observation of an image lingering in the eye after one looks into the sun and then turns to darkness (On Dreams b–) is a standard ancient passage on the principle of persistence of vision. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), – and – (notes; chapter titled “The Background: Ancient Theories of Vision”), is on Greeks from atomists to Euclid, Heron of Alexandria, and Ptolemy. See also, e.g., William C. Wees, “The Cinematic Image as a Visualization of Sight,” Wide Angle, no. (), –. On ancient vision and related aspects, see especially Michael Squire (ed.), Sight and the Ancient Senses (London and New York: Routledge, ). In general: Nicholas J. Wade, A Natural History of Vision (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), with numerous references to and quotations from classical sources. So, to cite just one instance, does Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, ed. and tr. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, ), –; cf. Mannoni, – (in chapter section called “First Principles, After Aristotle”). On the camera
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In connection with the development of color photography, Baier will later observe that bleaching colors in sunlight was known to Aristotle, Vitruvius, and others. He then adds: Here we see, as with the development of the Camera obscura, a continuing process of observation and research that extended across millennia, one that was to lead, in the nineteenth century, to the unfolding of new areas of knowledge . . . and eventually . . . to the invention of photography.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Arab Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), Roger Bacon, Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Giambattista della Porta were credited with the invention of fully functioning camerae obscurae, as were others. Among these latter, the idiosyncratic Baroque polymath Athanasius Kircher, SJ, has received more credit for it than he has earned. Kircher authored a huge and sumptuously illustrated tome that appeared in several expanded editions beginning in . Its main title still sounds impressive: (“The Great Art of Light and Shadow”). Untenable conclusions about the actual use of optical devices, specifically the camera obscura, are still circulating. Here is a recent example, written by a
obscura, its technology, and is use by painters (Vermeer, Velásquez, Hockney) see in particular Wolfgang Lefèvre (ed.), Inside the Camera Obscura: Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut fu¨r Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ; Preprint ). There the photograph of a mid-eighteenth-century camera obscura in book form (Lefèvre, fig. ) is likely to charm every reader. On Vermeer see especially Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ). Wolfgang Baier, A Source Book of Photographic History / Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie (Halle [East Germany]: VEB Fotokinoverlag / London and New York: The Focal Press, ), and . Regarding the color aspect see, in English, Josef Maria Eder, History of Photography, th ed., tr. Edward Epstean (; rpt. New York: Dover, ; German original, ), – (chapters titled “From Aristotle (Fourth Century before Christ) to the Alchemists” and “Influence of Light on Purple Dyeing by the Ancients”). Cf. note below. So by Martin Quigley, Jr., Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures (Washington, : Georgetown University Press, ; several rpts.), who called Kircher “the first person to project pictures. His magic lantern originated the screen art-science in Rome ca. ” (caption to portrait of Kircher opposite p. ). Contra: H. Mark Gosser, “Kircher and the Lanterna Magica: A Reexamination,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, (), –.
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Francastel and the Birth of Pre-Cinema
prominent scientist and published in a prestigious journal: “in the rd century BC . . . the mathematician Euclid . . . reported the first systematic investigation on light in Optics, studying direct vision and using a camera obscura to demonstrate that light travels in straight lines . . . Aristotle . . . used a camera obscura in sun-eclipse observations.” Although he did not, his influence on film theory and practice is pronounced.
Francastel and the Birth of Pre-Cinema In , French art historian Pierre Francastel participated in the Deuxième Congrès International de Filmologie as member of a research group charged with studying aspects that the cinema and other forms of expression have in common (“Problèmes comparés du cinéma et d’autres formes d’expression”). Francastel’s published report on their findings introduced a new term that was destined to achieve a remarkable degree of attention. He coined the terms “pre-cinema” (“le pré-cinéma”) and “pre-filmic” (“pré-filmique”). The research group had been wondering about an “extremely important” question: Among people who utilized material modes of expression that were completely different and did not allow people of times past to express themselves the way the cinema now gives us the means to do, was there not, in spite of this, a certain mode of comprehending phenomena, a certain desire to associate, one after the other, the natural images that pass before our eyes in a manner which makes it possible to predict the appearance of film and cinema?
Francastel mentioned that some contributions presented by his working group had addressed “classical poetry” in particular. He concluded with a
Massimo Guarnieri, “The Rise of Light – Discovering Its Secrets,” Proceedings of the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers], no. (), –; quotation at . Guarnieri mentions various others from Empedocles and Plato via Lucretius to Heron of Alexandria and Claudius Ptolemy. For a solid survey see A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). For example, J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ), –, bases his approach on Aristotelian categories (after Physics .). Some screenwriting manuals that turn to Aristotle’s Poetics are listed in Chapter , note . P. Francastel, “Études comparées: Compte rendu,” Revue internationale de filmologie, nos. – (), –. Some of his writings on cinema, all connected to the arts, were published posthumously: Pierre Francastel, L’image, la vision et l’imagination: L’objet filmique et l’objet plastique, ed. Galienne Francastel (Paris: Denoël / Gonthier, ). Francastel’s term pre-cinema is synonymous with Eisenstein’s cinematism. The preceding quotations are from Francastel, “Études comparées,” . An example is a presentation to the congress on Book of Virgil’s Aeneid, which was later published as a monograph: Paul Léglise [in some sources, Leglise], Une oeuvre de pré-cinéma: L’Eneide; Essai
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ringing call to arms, addressing all those interested in cinema, literature, languages, the arts, and, by implication, translation: The problem of the film is a problem of interpretation and creation – the same as the problem of languages. It is not because you know Chinese or English that you understand Shakespeare. The same in regard to the camera; there exists a pre-filmic mentality which the camera then came to realize . . .: this is the creation of a veritable common language for all nations and all people, a new form of expression added to all the others. However, only . . . a historical and comparative method enables us better to understand this new language.
Francastel had been influenced by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, a prominent Italian art historian and philosopher; Francastel named him in his report. Ragghianti had recently published a book on the cinema as figurative art. Years later, Ragghianti would direct short documentary films about Pompeii and Michelangelo. Following on earlier appreciations by art historians, most prominently Erwin Panofsky and Rudolf Arnheim, the cinema became established in intellectual and academic circles. The idea of pre-cinema became prominent as well. In , for instance, the French journal L’Age nouveau devoted a special issue to the topic: “Préhistoire du cinéma.” Its editor was Paul Léglise. Others, not least
d’analyse filmique du premier chant (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Debresse, ). Léglise, , regarded the Aeneid as demonstrating “a filmic rhythm of extraordinary and striking purity” (“un rythme filmique d’une extraordinaire et éclatante pureté”). Francastel, “Études comparées,” . On Francastel himself see Benoît Turquety, Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures, and Media History, tr. Timothy Barnard (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), passim but especially – and –, and the concise overview by François Albera, “Pierre Francastel, le cinéma et la filmologie,” Cinémas, nos. – (), –. Albera, –, summarizes Francastel’s concept of pre-cinema and quotes a passage from Léglise, Une oeuvre de pré-cinéma. An edited transcript of a Group discussion, presided by Francastel and including Léglise, is in the same journal issue: “Congrès de : Groupe VI,” Cinémas, nos. – (), –. See further Laurent Mannoni, “Archaeology of Cinema / Pre-Cinema,” in Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, ), –. On Shakespeare see, e.g., Henri Lemaitre, “Shakespeare, the Imaginary Cinema and the Pre-cinema,” tr. Charles W. Eckert; in Eckert (ed.), Focus on Shakespearean Films (Englewood Cliffs, : Prentice-Hall, ), – (French original, ); Henri Suhamy, “Shakespeare, cinéaste par anticipation,” Études anglaises, (), –. Carlo L. Ragghianti, Cinema arte figurativa (Turin: Einaudi, ). On him see in particular Marco Scotini (ed.), Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and the Cinematic Nature of Vision (Milan: Charta / Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti, ). Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; new ed., , several rpts.). For Panofsky see Chapter , note . L’Age nouveau, , no. (). It includes an introductory piece by the editor: “Le pré-cinéma: Un mythe ou une réalité?” (–). He mentions, for instance, the Lascaux cave paintings (cf. below), Lucretius (see Chapter ), the Panathenaic procession on the Parthenon, and Trajan’s Column (on which below) as examples, among some others. In view of my argument in Chapter , it is worth mentioning that
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classical scholars, followed in their footsteps. French classicist Simone Viarre turned to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in . One of the chapters in her book is titled “The Spectacle of Movement” (“Le spectacle de mouvement”) and contains a section called “A Fundamental Relationship with the Cinema” (“Une parenté avec le cinéma”). Viarre also considered Book of the Metamorphoses as inherently cinematic and added a section called “Screenplay and Editing” (Découpage et montage), in which she applied film techniques to various passages in Ovid’s epic. She concluded: “We can, in this way, image a [complete] film of the Metamorphoses.” In Alain Malissard wrote on Homer, Virgil, and filmic language and, the following year, on Léglise’s Virgil. But the concept of pre-cinema had existed in scholars’ minds long before Francastel was to call it so, thereby supplying a concise and catchy “handle” to something left previously undefined. A telling example appeared in in an issue of The International Review of Educational Cinematography, published in Rome by The International Educational Cinematographic Institute of the League of Nations. Giuseppe Fanciulli, a well-known educator and author of children’s literature, among other works, published an abbreviated screenplay of Virgil’s Aeneid: summary descriptions of seventy-three individual scenes, accompanied by arthistorical illustrations. A backlash, less against Francastel than against the idea of pre-cinema, was almost inevitable, both in regard to film studies and concerning classical literature. In a book published in , Jacques Aumont dismissed
he pays homage to Eisenstein, who “opened, magisterially, a first route by practising himself a filmic analysis of Pushkin, Milton, and Dickens. His labor, his punctilious exercises in this direction influenced, without any possible dispute, his art and technique” (). Simone Viarre, L’image et la pensée dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), –; quotation at . A comparable approach was taken up, on a large scale but without knowledge of Viarre, by Philip Fondermann, Kino im Kopf: Zur Visualisierung des Mythos in den “Metamorphosen” Ovids (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ). I have continued these perspectives in my Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). More recently on ancient texts and images: Claude Pouzadoux and Airton Pollini (eds.), Synopsis: Images antiques, images cinématographiques (Paris: Maison Archéologie & Ethnologie / Association de Boccard, ). A. Malissard, “Homère, Virgile et le language cinématographique,” Caesarodunum, (), –; “Une œuvre de pré-cinéma: L’Énéide, à propos du livre de Paul Léglise,” Caesarodunum, (), –. A pioneering article on Virgil and cinema from Eisenstein’s perspective had appeared in ; it is best consulted in its revised version: Fred Mench, “Film Sense in the Aeneid,” in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Giuseppe Fanciulli, “The Aeneid: Scenario for a Film Based on Virgil’s Poem,” International Review of Educational Cinematography, no. (), –.
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Eisenstein’s approach to cinematic aspects in pre-cinematic arts alongside Francastel’s; I quote from its later English-language edition: Frequently, images which can be perceived as ‘single’ depict many episodes of a particular story. [Examples follow.] Such works correspond to an image sequence, as Rudolf Arnheim () pointed out, adding that one should not confuse sequentiality with movement: there are still images which represent sequentiality, just as there are moving images which do not. This observation has led some authors to consider narrative techniques that are particular to the cinema (articulation of the two narrative levels, the concepts of the shot and of the sequence of shots) as merely a reprise of timeless techniques already widely used in the other arts. This observation is not false, but, unfortunately, it has often been expressed in a negative sense: that all other arts merely prefigure the cinema. The term ‘pre-cinematic’ was so fashionable around that a whole edition of the periodical L’Age nouveau was devoted to it, encompassing everything from the Odyssey to the Bayeux tapestry. In this teleological form which makes cinema the capstone of the other arts, the proposition is unacceptable, even if it has tempted such distinguished authors as Eisenstein and Francastel.
Aumont, as we already know, is himself an Eisenstein specialist. In a later book on several filmmakers’ theories of film, he provided a summary of Eisenstein’s pre-cinematic views. In a chapter titled “Art and Poetics” (“L’art et la poétique”) Aumont turned to Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Cocteau, Raul Ruiz, and, briefly, Eric Rohmer under the heading “Cinema as Synthesis of the Arts: From Eisenstein to Godard (Plus Ruiz).” Here, in its essence, is his outline of such a synthesis and his critique of Eisenstein: The cinema would be, in this version, less the competitor of the other arts . . . than their heir, and their heir in everything . . . Since it applies to all the senses and all the emotions, the cinema is a multiple, plural art: art of space and time, art of narrative and description, art of dialogue and art of music, art of dance and of sculptural pose, of design and of color. It absorbs into itself, without even “resolving” them, the principal esthetic questions of the traditional arts before it. Cinema is a total art, which contains all the others, exceeds them, and transforms them . . .
Jacques Aumont, The Image, tr. Claire Pjackowska (London: British Film Institute, ), . Aumont here refers to Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; expanded ed. ; rpt. ), without specifying where Arnheim had dealt with sequentiality. Arnheim did so in a chapter titled “Movement” (section titled “Simultaneity and Sequence”). The same chapter contains a section on film editing. Francastel appears on several other pages of The Image. On Francastel see also Aumont, À quois pensent les filmes (Paris: Séguier, ), –.
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In this maximalist and euphoric version, one recognized first of all positions that recur in Eisenstein. For him, the cinema has no problem completing the other arts, giving them their definitive version, because these arts contain, in embryo, the essential features of “cinematographicity” [cinémagraphicité]. What he calls “cinematism” . . . is a cinematic character avant la lettre, which he identifies in certain works of the past: pictorial (El Greco, Degas, Daumier, Piranesi), poetic (Rilke, Pushkin), literary (Balzac, Zola, Dostoevsky), musical (Scriabin, Debussy, Prokoviev) . . . The roster is odd and resembles more an inventory of personal tastes than an application of the theory of correspondences among or a synthesis of the arts. Eisenstein paints an idiosyncratic portrait of the art of cinema instead of pursuing a really coherent theory. As a result, he gives changing definitions as the analogies he proposes demand . . . The cinema surpasses and includes all the arts because it is an art of development in time rather than an art of time or movement.
Aumont is a distinguished scholar of film and culture (and Eisenstein). But he seems unfamiliar with what early-cinema historian Charles Musser, encountered in my Prolegomena, had written about the subject at hand. Musser, too, was skeptical about pre-cinema since he is dealing with the history of screen practice, not screen thought, but he had this to say about it: A history of the screen also helps to define the subject of “pre-cinema.” In the past, the boundaries of pre-cinema were limited by preoccupations with technology and invention [since the s], and an obvious teleology. Once this framework is demolished pre-cinema loses its specificity; anything that the historian might subsequently consider relevant to our understanding of cinema as a cultural, economic, or social practice becomes a fitting subject of inquiry.
An example of a traditional classicist’s disdain of the cinema occurs in a review of Viarre’s book by British classicist E. J. Kenney. By now, times have changed, but not completely. Here is a quaint restatement of a
Jacques Aumont, Les théories des cinéastes (Paris: Nathan, ; rpt. ), –. His mention of Zola is revealing: Eisenstein had pertinent remarks about the novelist in an essay published in English as “Lessons from Literature” and originally intended as foreword to a book on Pushkin and cinema. I adduce Eisenstein’s essay in Ovid on Screen, –. The text of the essay is in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Essays and a Lecture, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (New York: Praeger, ), –, with source information at – (in no. ). On Zola see, e.g., Susan Blood, “The Precinematic Novel: Zola’s La Bête humaine,” Representations, no. (), –. Charles Musser, History of the American Cinema, vol. : The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to (New York: Scribner’s, ), . E. J. Kenney, “Discordia semina rerum,” The Classical Review, (), –. The title quotes part of Ovid, Metamorphoses ..
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quasi-Aumontian view by a classical scholar and a French scholar with a strong interest in antiquity, writing together: the studies of Classical representations could be considered as the precursors of film criticism, not in the sense that Classical texts are to be analyzed as pre-filmic texts, but in the sense that films constitute a modern tradition which many regard as having inherited rhetorical, narrative, and stylistic devices and structures at work in ancient texts.
Most of this is unobjectionable. A note accompanying their term pre-filmic texts, however, states: “We consider that, when analyzing texts produced before the invention of cinema, the reference to filmic codes is anachronistic.” But is this logical? If films have inherited features of classical texts, presumably without their makers being conscious of that fact, why should it be anachronistic (or worse) to consider such features from a filmic point of view? Is enlightenment in both directions impossible? A few decades ago, classicist John Herington answered this question in the context of the origins of tragedy in the sixth century : In view of what is to come later [i.e. “after nondramatic Greek poetry”], it may be worth drawing attention to the extraordinary story of the rise of a comparatively modern art, that of film. We shall not, of course, claim that the analogy proves anything scientifically; we shall only suggest that it provides an acceptable model for our understanding of tragedy’s development during the early decades.
Herington goes into brief details about the earliest cinema in analogy to early tragedy, which can be omitted here. But his conclusion about the cinema is telling: “by the s . . . it had produced cinematic masters in their own right, peers and rivals to the novelists and dramatists: a Griffith, an Eisenstein.” Further comment seems superfluous. One other perspective on antiquity and film is instructive, not least because it does not come from an academic. In Italo Calvino wrote an essay about Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which he made its affinities to the
Both quotations are from Caroline Eades and Françoise Létoublon, “From Film Analysis to OralFormulaic Theory: The Case of the Yellow Oilskins,” in Thomas M. Falkner, Nancy Felson, and David Konstan (eds.), Contextualizing Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, ), –, at . The chapter is on the cinema of Theodoros Angelopoulos. John Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), and . He adds about tragedy and cinema: “And once they had reached maturity, both . . . tended to devour the traditional artforms [sic] that had begotten them and had continued to nourish them” (). On the visual aspects of nondramatic verse, see the essays collected in Vanessa Cazzato and André Lardinois (eds.), The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual (Leiden: Brill, ).
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cinema explicit. Its title is as revealing as it is elegant: “Ovid and Universal Contiguity.” Calvino observed: The Metamorphoses is the poem of rapidity: each episode has to follow another in a relentless rhythm, to strike our imagination, each image must overlay another one, and thus acquire density before disappearing. It is the same principle as cinematography: each line like each photogram must be full of visual stimuli in continuous movement.
Words like overlay and disappearing remind us of cinematic dissolves and fade-outs. Later in the essay, when Calvino states that “new events quickly follow on,” we may think of rapid editing. Ovid’s “need to change rhythm,” which leads him to “change the person of the verb,” is comparable to changes from one screen character to another. The “parallel actions” in Ovid’s tales are the literary equivalent of the cutting back and forth made famous by D. W. Griffith in his scenes of last-moment rescue. There is even an equivalent of slow motion in Ovid: “when the pace of narrative has to slow down, switch to a calmer rhythm, give the feeling of time being suspended.” On screen, the last instance mentioned could lead to a freeze-frame. When Ovid “stops to dwell on the smallest details,” he gives readers the textual equivalents of a close-up. Calvino goes so far as to make Ovid a precursor of one of the most famous modernists in both literature and the cinema: “Ovid’s writing . . . appears to contain within itself the model, or at least the programme, for [Alain] Robbe-Grillet at his most cold and rigorous.” But is Ovid, even when he is rigorous, ever cold? Calvino immediately adds: “Of course such a description does not exhaust everything we can find in Ovid.” Still, his point about contiguity is worth taking into account. A different version of contiguity, one that goes much further back, deserves at least a brief mention. The discovery, in , of prehistoric paintings in the Lascaux caves brought to light the dawn of art. The images discovered in in the Chauvet Cave, named after its principal discoverer, are significantly older than those in the Lascaux and Altamira caves. The Chauvet paintings became the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, made in D. Commenting on
It is now best accessible in Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? tr. Martin McLaughlin (; rpt. Boston: Mariner Books, ), –. The preceding quotations are from Calvino, Why Read the Classics? . Both quotations are from Calvino, Why Read the Classics? . Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings (London: Thames & Hudson, ) = Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave: The Oldest Known Paintings in the World (New York: Abrams, ). Michel
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the depiction of moving animals, especially horses and lions, Herzog termed the paintings “proto-cinema” and spoke of the discovery of the human soul. In terms just as enthusiastic as Eisenstein had been about his cinematism, Herzog once said in a radio interview: Arguably, or for me, the greatest single sequence in all of film history [is] Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadows, and all of a sudden he stops, and the shadows become independent and dance without him and he has to catch up with them. It’s so quintessentially “movie.” It can’t get more beautiful. It’s actually from Swing Time []. And when you look at the cave and certain panels, there’s evidence of some fires on the ground. They’re not for cooking. They were used for illumination. You have to step in front of these fires to look at the images, and when you move, you must see your own shadow. And immediately, Fred Astaire comes to mind – who did something , years later which is essentially what we can imagine for early Paleolithic people.
American writer and broadcaster Lowell Thomas introduced viewers to their most amazing cinema experience at the beginning of This Is Cinerama (), made in a new widescreen process that he had been closely involved with producing and promoting. It employed three cameras for three-panel projections onto a gigantic screen that was feet wide, feet high, and curved in an arc of degrees. To put Cinerama into an appropriately impressive perspective, Thomas, seen in black and white on a small rectangular screen, summarized the history of moving images. He began in prehistoric times: Since the earliest times, artists have been trying to get action into their pictures. Some , years ago, an artist in caveman days drew a picture of
Lorblanchet and Paul Bahn, The First Artists: In Search of the World’s Oldest Art (London: Thames & Hudson, ), is a recent summary. See, e.g., Simon McBurney, “Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams: The Real Art Underground,” The Guardian (March , ); www.theguardian.com/world//mar//werner-herzog-cave-offorgotten-dreams. Quoted from “Herzog Enters ‘The Cave of Forgotten Dreams’,” National Public Radio (April , ); www.npr.org/////herzog-enters-the-cave-of-forgotten-dreams. Footage from Swing Time appears in Herzog’s film. Rudolph Herzog, the director’s grandfather, had been a classicist and archeologist; he discovered and excavated the Asklepieion on Kos. See further Edward Wachtel, “The First Picture Show: Cinematic Aspects of Cave Art,” Leonardo, (), –, and Ira Konigsberg, “Cave Paintings and the Cinema,” Wide Angle, no. (), –. Both cave paintings and comic strips, a modern form of sequential narrative in static images, have long been considered as “relatives” of the cinema. The subject is too large to be addressed in any detail here; starting points are Lancelot Thomas Hogben, From Cave Painting to Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope of Human Communication (London: Parrish, ); Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (New York: Norton, ). There is, of course, more.
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Francastel and the Birth of Pre-Cinema
a boar on the wall of a cave in Spain, and he wanted the animal to be in motion. So he added eight legs – eight legs! [A reproduction appears on screen.] There was a bold pioneer, a man of ideas!
Thomas’s forced humor and superior attitude have not worn well, but no matter. Next comes ancient Egypt, whose images “gave no illusion of movement.” But in the Renaissance “we seem to see living forms caught in an instant of arrested motion.” Michelangelo’s Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel makes Thomas’s point. About a century later, “there was a mathematician and scientist named Kircher, who invented the magic lantern.” Thomas demonstrates how this worked (“Here are the first animated cartoons!”) but gives the learned Father too much credit. Next in his sequence are daguerreotypes, the thaumatrope (unnamed), and the zoetrope. They are followed by photography – with Matthew Brady “introducing action to photography” in Civil War photos – and Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographs. In high rhetoric, the birth of cinema is imminent when “[Thomas] Edison took a blazing torch and put it in Kircher’s magic lantern, and with [George] Eastman’s film the shadow pictures on the wall came to life.” The progress of history culminates, naturally, in Thomas’s emphatic announcement: “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Cinerama!” The small area visible so far expands to reveal the huge screen, with color and dramatic music in stereophonic sound. And it all started in prehistoric caves! In , French film scholar Armand-Jean Cauliez contributed the opening article to L’Art nouveau, the journal already mentioned. His hymn to the medium as a complete means of expression, whose roots lie in classical antiquity, scales several peaks of rhetoric. His opening two sentences are these: “Spirit [“L’esprit”]: cinema has always existed. Human perception is a ‘camera shot’ [“prise de vue”].” Universal contiguity indeed! Eisenstein, Francastel, Calvino, and others all urge us to broaden our perspective – better: widen our intellectual lens – so as to view antiquity and the cinema side by side. In corroboration, I now survey various examples from classical literature and the visual arts. This survey is in the nature of a tour d’horizon: necessarily incomplete and greatly expandable. Chapters – will then go into considerably greater detail about more complex topics.
On the thaumatrope (“wonder turner”) see my Ovid on Screen, – (chapter section titled “Flashback to Pre-cinema; or, Ovid, Virgil, and the Thaumatrope”). A.-J. Cauliez, “Le cinéma moyen intégral d’expression,” L’Age nouveau, no. (), –; quotation at . I return to Cauliez and this article in Chapters and .
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey Since the arrival of photography and cinematography, which really is cinematophotography, ways of seeing and reading have changed fundamentally. The analysis of moving-picture narratives has considerably influenced and advanced the interpretation of modern literature and other arts. Critic James Bridle even speaks of a New Aesthetic, according to which literary and artistic creations reflect the visual media that are now preeminent. Visually oriented analysis has also begun to influence Classical Studies, an area of scholarship concerned primarily with texts, not images. But a coherent perspective on the visual qualities of ancient narrative that goes beyond then-existing art forms like painting, sculpture, and theater has largely been neglected. The same is true for those narrative qualities inherent in ancient static visual media that go beyond Greek and Roman forms. Greeks and Romans were aware of the close affinities between the verbal and the visual. As reported by Plutarch, Simonides of Keos held that painting is silent poetry while poetry is painting that speaks. Today we would speak about literature rather than poetry. Simonides, however, was not the first to voice this view. C. O. Brink comments: The comparison of poetry and the fine arts, especially painting, is as old as literary theory . . . As early as the comparison was familiar . . . Hellenistic literary discussion seems to have made these notions so familiar that they could be carried into neighbouring fields . . . In Rome these notions were common literary property.
An influential if today sometimes misunderstood restatement of Simonides’ point is in Horace’s dictum in his Ars poetica, one of the most influential ancient (and later) treatises of literary criticism: ut pictura, poesis (usually quoted without punctuation, which is modern, anyway): “as painting, so poetry.” About it, Brink adds: “The exaggerated generality is a deliberate puzzle” and explains why it became famous:
David M. Berry et al., New Aesthetics, New Anxieties (), –, provides an initial bibliography. This short e-book, now outdated, is available electronically at http://v.nl/files//publishing/ new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-pdf/view. In our electronic age, the Wikipedia article “The New Aesthetics,” although short, may be the best starting point for orientation on the topic. Full references to Plutarch on Simonides and a partial quotation are in Chapter , note . C. O. Brink, Horace, on Poetry, vol. : The ‘Ars Poetica’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), . He adds several examples. Horace, The Art of Poetry . On this phrase and its meaning and context see Brink, Horace on Poetry, vol. –. I discussed the matter and included the basic scholarship in Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), .
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
‘ut pictura poesis’ was sufficiently memorable to serve as a base for farreaching assertions on the relations of the arts. Of these it is innocent, if it is not actually opposed to them. In the Italian Renaissance H.’s saying was used as if it were ‘ut poesis pictura’, to inculcate the superiority of painting to poetry, music, and the rest. In Lessing’s Laokoon it was made to point the inherent difference rather than likeness between poetry and painting. The debates thus provoked tended to gain in scope and interest as the distance from the original Horatian context increased.
Ancient rhetorical terms like the Greek enargeia (“clarity, vividness”) and the Latin evidentia, illustratio, demonstratio, and repraesentatio and Cicero’s phrase sub oculos subiectio (in Greek: hypotypôsis: “putting something before a listener’s or reader’s eyes”) all refer to the visual; they express and anticipate what narratives in moving images do as a matter of course. Listeners perceive what a speaker places before their eyes not literally but mentally. The process presupposes the concept of the mind’s eye. Just as listeners perceive what they hear, so, by analogy, readers imagine what is
Brink, Horace on Poetry, vol. , and –. Cf. Cicero, Orator . and On the Orator .. (to be quoted in Chapter ); Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric .. and elsewhere. Cf. Bernhard F. Scholz, “‘Sub Oculos Subiectio’: Quintilian on Ekphrasis and Enargeia,” in Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: VU University Press, ), –. The ancient loci are collected and discussed in Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft, th ed. (Stuttgart: Steiner, ); see § (s.vv. demonstratio, evidentia, illustratio, imaginatio, imago, oculus, repraesentare, repraesentatio) and § (s.vv. enargeia, phantasia, hypotypôsis) for indices. José M. González, “The Meaning and Function of Phantasia in Aristotle’s Rhetoric III.,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, (), –, is a good introduction, with numerous references. In general see Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press, ). Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, (), –, deals with one specific aspect. On a larger scale: Andrew Feldherr, Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), especially –. The essays in Thomas Dewender and Thomas Welt (eds.), Imagination – Fiktion – Kreation: Das kulturschaffende Vermögen der Phantasie (Munich: Saur, ), deal with antiquity and its influence. In the present context see also Luigi Spina, “L’enárgheia prima del cinema: Parole per vedere,” Dionysus, (), –. Rutger J. Allan, Irene J. F. de Jonge, and Casper C. de Jonge, “From Enargeia to Immersion: The Ancient Roots of a Modern Concept,” Style, (), –, link Homeric enargeia to current literary theory and media practice (D cinema). On Greek scientific theories of viewing and seeing, see, e.g., Willem van Hoorn, As Images Unwind: Ancient and Modern Theories of Visual Perception (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), – (pre-Aristotelians), – (Aristotle and related authors), and – (Democritus, Aristotle, and early moderns). See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The Birth of Images,” tr. Froma I. Zeitlin, in Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt. ), –. For Latin references (oculus mentis [“the mind’s eye”] and related others), see, e.g., Frederick Van Fleteren, “Acies mentis (gaze of the mind),” in Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ; rpt. ), –. Cf. further, e.g., Vivien Law, “Learning to Read with the oculi mentis: Virgilius Maro Grammaticus,” Journal of Literature and Theology, (), –. In general see
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on the page. A speaker’s or writer’s detailed verbal descriptions incite the listener or reader toward mental visualization: vivid descriptions are produced not so much by describing as by noting the particulars of scenes. Though auditory details as well as details that appeal to senses other than sight are sometimes used, most details appeal to sight. Rhetoricians promote visualization by noting forceful actions, particularizing actions with objects, and contrasting features of the scene – particularly light and darkness. Details are selected for their ability not only to promote visualization but also to heighten an emotional response and suggest plausibility.
A case in point is Virgil in his Aeneid. Well over a century ago, Richard Heinze concluded about Virgil’s narrative aim: “the more successfully he produces the illusion in us that we are actually present at the events, the more perfectly Virgil believes that he has reached his goal.” Quintilian explains how all this works. Citing a particular example from Cicero, he asks – rhetorically, of course: “is anybody so far removed from mentally creating images of things being described that he does not . . . seem to be looking at the people and their surroundings and their clothing and, moreover, himself fills in further details what is not even being expressed in words?” The answer is self-evident. As Quintilian also wrote: “It is a great achievement [for a speaker; we might add: and for a writer] to present the things about which we are speaking [and writing] clearly and in such a way that they appear to be seen.” Detailed textual descriptions, as of remarkable objects or art works, illustrate Quintilian’s perspective:
Christopher Collins, The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). For the cinema see, e.g., Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, “Movies in the Mind’s Eye,” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds.), PostTheory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –, with illustrations and further references. Quoted from Beth Innocenti, “Towards a Theory of Vivid Description as Practiced in Cicero’s Verrine Orations,” Rhetorica, (), –, at . Cf. Richard Hunter, The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , on Iliad .–: enargeia, “by enabling the Greeks [here listening to Odysseus] to visualise what is being described, also supports the idea that ‘this really happened.’” You are there, ergo This is true. Richard Heinze, Virgil’s Epic Technique, tr. Hazel, David Harvey and Fred Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Prominent examples are Virgil’s uses of the historical present and the interjection ecce (“look!”), on which Heinze, –. The first German edition of Heinze’s book had appeared in . Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric ... His quotation from Cicero, Against Verres .., is here omitted. Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric ...
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In an ecphrasis the poet converts his listeners into spectators by various means . . . [including] the poetic conceit of animating the depicted figures. They are not static . . . but move about magically. . . Another way . . . is by referring to their sounds and movements . . . A less direct but no less effective way. . . is by calling attention to the inner emotions and motives of the figures depicted . . . Both ecphrases and certain types of simile . . . allow the audience to grasp in the mind’s eye what otherwise may be literally unimaginable in the narrative.
Today, what the mind’s eye sees can be extended, more specifically, by what the filmmakers who adapt narrative texts put on the screen. Usually, they have to decide on specific set-ups or settings. The poet tells, the scholar explains, the filmmaker shows. The verbal and the visual are inseparable. The prologue to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe elegantly demonstrates Simonides’ point. Long before Longus, Apollonius of Rhodes did the same in his portrayal of Medea’s initial infatuation with Jason. Medea sees, in her mind’s eye, Jason’s handsome figure and mentally hears his words: “Everything appeared again before her eyes.” Apollonius’ description of Phrixus and the ram with the Golden Fleece depicted on Jason’s cloak is another case in point. Phrixus appears to be listening to what the ram is telling him, and so any viewer might wish to preserve silence in order to be able to hear what is being said. To adduce a phrase of Ovid’s, albeit in a somewhat different sense: “the voice was seen.” The combination of the visual – including motion – and the verbal was crucial for the type of uncanny verisimilitude so much admired in painting and sculpture of the Late Classical and Early Hellenistic periods. To fool the viewer into believing the figures were alive was a sought-after effect . . . most of them [the scenes on the cloak] were chosen . . . because they illustrated especially well one or another of these principles: the realistic rendering of human (and animal) figures which seem to be alive . . .; a fascination with bright and reflected light . . .; the capturing of violent movement arrested
Quoted from Steven H. Lonsdale, “Simile and Ecphrasis in Homer and Virgil: The Poet as Craftsman and Choreographer,” Vergilius, (), –, at –. Cf., as just another example, Christopher M. Chinn, “Before Your Very Eyes: Pliny Epistulae . and the Ancient Theory of Ekphrasis,” Classical Philology, (), –. On this see my Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), –. Much earlier: Michael C. Mittelstadt, “Longus: Daphnis and Chloe and Roman Narrative Painting,” Latomus, (), –. Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica .–. The line quoted is . Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica .–. Ovid, Metamorphoses .: visa est vox. The sense of Ovid’s verb is seemed or appeared to be and does not express literal sight. But to mention it here was an irresistible temptation.
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Classical Cinematism on a static two-dimensional surface . . .; and the illusionistic rendering of non-visual sense perceptions and supernatural phenomena in a conventional artistic medium . . .
Most of these effects, especially those of light and motion, are still highly sought after on our screens, another two-dimensional surface. Well over two millennia after Apollonius, Patricia Highsmith, author of highly complex psychological suspense novels, unconsciously agreed with Simonides: “painting is the art most closely related to writing.” Hence, virtually any kind of narrative literature can be adapted to the screen. Narrative films are visual texts. Both modes of storytelling are highly suitable for, and capable of, interpretive analyses. Gérard Genette’s concept of hypoand hypertexts provides a bridge from antiquity to today in connection with the more recent critical concept of intermediality, which can readily be related to the New Aesthetic. And the visual pleasure of narrative – I am alluding to Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – is equally characteristic for classical literature and for film, although not only in Mulvey’s sense. At the same time, the concept of visual pleasure is nothing new. In the first century , for instance, the Roman poet Statius employed the exact same phrase: spectandi . . . voluptas. Paintings and statues depict all activities in static images. As do photographs, they usually imply a sequence of motions that, together, constitute a full action. Such static images encourage their viewers mentally to incorporate the sequence of motions or actions which the body they are observing is carrying out. The cinema depicts such actions as they are in their entirety. For instance, a homage to Myron’s Diskobolos (“Discus Thrower”), a statue that survives only in copies (Fig. .), is in the prologue to Part One of Leni Riefenstahl’s epic film Olympia (), when Myron’s statue appears to
Quoted from H. A. Shapiro, “Jason’s Cloak,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, (), –, at – (individual examples omitted). The immediately following sentence reads: “Painters are accustomed to using their eyes, and it is good for a writer to do the same.” Both quotations are from Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Boston: The Writer, ), . There are several reprint editions. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ). The original appeared in . Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Mulvey (ed.), Visual and Other Pleasures, nd ed. (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. This article was first published in . Statius, Silvae ... The context are the games given by Emperor Domitian during the festival of the Saturnalia in December. Additional details are in Suetonius, Domitian . For the history of painting from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, leading up to twentiethcentury graphics and the cinema, see, e.g., Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures (; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ).
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
Figure .
Myron’s Diskobolos. National Museum, Rome. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA .).
come to life. Riefenstahl first shows us the statue in a close-up that fills the entire screen and thus makes this athlete look life-size. Her camera partially circles the statue, thereby imparting to it a semblance of motion, as if the athlete were turning realistically during his throw. A dissolve then reveals a modern discus thrower in a pose identical to Myron’s (Fig. .). This fleshand-blood figure now goes through all the motions of an actual throw. We see on the screen what we imagine when looking at the statue: an action carried from beginning to end. Myron showed us only one particular
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Figure .
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Triumph of the Will. The dissolve from Myron’s Diskobolos to a modern athlete. Screen capture.
moment of that action, the one that is crucial and central. Henri CartierBresson might well have considered it the decisive moment. That is why Myron chose it. It makes it easiest for us to see, as it were, the entire throw with our mind’s eye. Jean Cocteau, the great poet, playwright, painter, and filmmaker, expressed what we are examining extremely well. He quoted a prophetic statement made on his deathbed by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky about the future of art: “One day, he says, art will express itself by statues that move.”
Jean Cocteau, Du cinématographe, rd ed.; ed. André Bernard and Claude Gauteur (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, ), . The original, from : “Un jour, dit-il, l’art s’exprimera par des statues qui bougent.” A different wording, from , occurs at Cocteau, : “L’art futur ce sera des statues qui bougent.” A remarkable, if complementary, variant (statues that speak), again from , is at Cocteau, : “L’art sera un jour fait de statues qui parlent.” (What did Mussorgsky really say?) The version appears in a long essay by Cocteau about his film The Blood of a Poet (), in which a statue, played by American fashion model and photographer Lee Miller, comes to life. The first version here quoted serves as the epigraph to Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Cinéma et sculpture: Un aspect de la modernité des années soixante (Paris: L’Harmattan, ), .
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Even before statues could be made to move, many already appeared to move. The baroque enargeia with which Apuleius has the narrator of The Golden Ass describe the effect that a statue of Diana, the goddess of the hunt, has once had on him is a telling example. The description begins with a visual exhortation and emphasizes the motions that this unmoving image implies: Look – Diana, sculpted from Parian marble, takes up the exact middle of the whole room, a perfectly splendid statue; with her dress puffed out, with a lively forward movement toward those entering and demanding veneration through the deity’s sheer majesty. Dogs surround and protect the goddess on all sides. These are marble as well, but their eyes are menacing; they prick up their ears, flare their nostrils, and bare their fangs. If sounds of barking were to reach a viewer from somewhere outside, he would assume that they are coming from the jaws of these dogs. And not just that, but the master sculptor achieved the absolute apex of his art in this: The dogs’ chests are rising steeply; their hind legs press against the ground, their front legs are running away!
The text continues with an elaborate description of the rocky grotto behind the statue, the water basin at Diana’s feet in which she is about to bathe, and Actaeon, the Peeping Tom whom she changes into a stag. Actaeon is, in fact, in the middle of his metamorphosis; the ferocious dogs will pounce on him any moment: “The statuary. . . tells the story of Actaeon, freezing it at a moment that implies all that precedes or follows. The entire story of Acteaon can be read from that single moment.” And, we can add: it can be seen or watched. The astonishing enargeia both in the verbal account of this sculpture group and in the work itself is there for a reason: Text and
Apuleius, The Golden Ass ..–. It practically goes without saying that figures in paintings, too, appear to move. Here is just one random example from late antiquity, a painting of Athamas and Ino as described in Callistratus : “For though the figure [of Athamas] was in reality without motion, yet it seemed not to retain a fixed position; instead it astonished those who saw it by a semblance of motion.” Quoted from Arthur Fairbanks (ed. and tr.), Philostratus the Elder: Imagines / Philostratus the Younger: Imagines / Callistratus: Descriptions (London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ; several rpts.), . On paintings expressing motion see Chapter . Apuleius, The Golden Ass ..–. Quoted from John J. Winkler, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), . His detailed analysis (–) is worth reading, especially his description of a viewer’s eyes wandering along details. A comparable example of a text passage directing the reader’s inner eye will be part of my topic in Chapter . Helen Elsom, “Apuleius and the Movies,” in Heinz Hofmann (ed.), Groningen Colloquia on the Novel, vol. (Amsterdam: Benjamins, ), –, makes a case for the pre-cinematic nature of The Golden Ass and for its ready availability to be filmed. She twice refers to Lucius, the first-person narrator, as “a camera” (, ).
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sculpture both tell their story in the most gripping way possible. Readers of Apuleius may regret that the sculpture of Diana, Actaeon (half human, half stag), the dogs, and all the peaceful and pleasant natural surroundings never existed. The colossal statue group of the Farnese Bull, showing the punishment of Dirce, may be an actual comparison piece. A comparable reaction to the emotional power of statuary was recorded in . British composer and music historian Charles Burney noted, in his travel journal, about the equestrian bronze statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio in Rome: “The horse moves and the emperor speaks.” The horse has one hoof off the ground; the emperor has his right arm stretched out to an absent crowd. Sound and movement are thus implied – or better: clearly expressed even if neither is in evidence. Burney’s words will evoke at least two famous anecdotes about medieval and Renaissance Italian sculptures: Lo Zuccone, Donatello’s greatest masterpiece, and Michelangelo’s Moses. Giorgio Vasari reports about the former: “while he was working on it, he would stare at it, and kept saying to it: ‘Speak, speak or be damned!’” Similarly Michelangelo to his Moses: “Why don’t you speak?” David Bordwell has made a direct connection from sculpture to the cinema: Cinematographers valued roundness as much as depth, using highlights to accentuate curves of face and body or to pick out folds in drapery. As early as , the cinematographer [better: director; cf. below] was compared to the sculptor.
Bordwell then quoted from an article published that year; here is a slightly longer extract:
A shorter example of what this may have looked like is at Homer, Odyssey .–, the ecphrasis of Odysseus’ brooch: A hound kills a fawn which resists with all its might. Charles Burney, Music, Men and Manners in France and Italy , ed. H. Edmund Poole (; rpt. London: Eulenburg, ), (date of September ). Quoted from Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (trs.), Giorgio Vasari: The Lives of the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ), . This translation of Donatello’s words is rather loose. The story about Michelangelo, said to have struck Moses with his chisel while addressing him, belongs to the nineteenth century. On its background, with related anecdotes, see the fascinating study by Giorgio Masi, “‘Perché non parli?’ Michelangelo e il silenzio,” in Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Officine del nuovo: Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, ), –. David Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style, -,” in Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (eds.), The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to (New York: Columbia University Press, ), – and – (notes); quotation at .
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Figure .
Dancing Maenad by the Brygos Painter. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA .).
It is chiefly by the use of such [i.e. high-power] lighting equipment that the sculptor-director seeks his worshipped “plasticity.” Failing a true stereoscopic effect in film, he models his figures to a roundness with lights behind and above and on either side, softening here and sharpening up for accent elsewhere with a patience and skill inevitably lost on the layman, but contributing nevertheless to his . . . sense of pleasure.
Back to the Greeks. The ecstatic but static Maenad by the Brygos Painter with her swirling dress easily evokes dancers moving on the screen (Fig. .). Certain still images of actresses posing or moving in loose
Carlyle Ellis, “Art and the Motion Picture,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (November, ), –, at . This issue dealt with “The Motion Picture in Its Economic and Social Aspects.” Ellis was identified as “Producer of Social Service Pictures.” Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich: J (previously ); Beazley Archive .. (no. ). The painting dates to ca. . On dance and vase images, cf. also Chapter . Cinematic parallels are in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge () when several dancers made famous by Toulouse-Lautrec come to life. An especially charming instance, although not involving dancers, is in Marcel L’Herbier’s little-known short La mode rêvée (roughly, “Dreaming Fashion,” ). A young woman visiting the Louvre falls asleep in front of Watteau’s painting The Embarkation for Cythera (or Voyage to Cythera) and imagines its beautiful women come to life, leave the painting, acquire haute couture outfits in modern Paris, and then step back into the painting, only to embark in their modern clothes! Their gallants are dressed in coats and tails as well.
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Figure . Publicity photograph of Tamara Desni. Jerry Murbach Collection.
and swirling skirts parallel the ancient dancer, as does Tamara Desni (Fig. .). The skirt of the Brygos Painter’s Maenad parallels that of actress Anne Francis in a striking publicity shot for Forbidden Planet (; Fig. .). The photograph is the result of an especially carefully arranged
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
Figure .
Publicity photograph of Anne Francis. Author’s collection.
pose. The Maenad is represented as moving; her modern avatar is standing still but giving an impression of movement by means of the elaborate arrangement of the pleats on her skirt. What such a dance can look like may be seen in the musical comedy Thank Your Lucky Stars (), when Alexis Smith is dancing in a pleated and diaphanous swirling skirt. A whole sequence of dance stills, here of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Top Hat
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Figure . Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in dance sequence from Top Hat. Author’s collection.
(; Fig. .), can demonstrate the point made above in connection with Myron’s Diskobolos. In their classic Shall We Dance (), still images of a dance in a flip book come to life twice; the second time they
Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, nd ed. (Columbus: The Educational Publisher, ), provides the best appreciation. The book has still images that can be flipped to create the illusion of movement. For the concept of dance onscreen cf., among recent studies, Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and Douglas Rosenberg, Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image (New York: Oxford University Press, ), both with extensive references. For classical analogies to Astaire dancing, see Kathleen Riley, “A Pylades for the Twentieth Century: Fred Astaire and the Aesthetics of Bodily Eloquence,” in Fiona Macintosh (ed.), The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
dissolve to actual film footage of her dancing with someone. Particularly noteworthy are the diaphanous skirts worn by female figures in Greek vase paintings and sculptures and by women dancing on film or by actresses posing in publicity shots. Also noteworthy are the standing poses and the diaphanous or transparent gowns of goddesses and actresses, as in a juxtaposition of the Nike relief from the Acropolis (Fig. .) with a photograph of Carole Lombard (Fig. .). A possibly deliberate imitation of the Venus de Milo, at least as far as the position of her legs is concerned, occurs frequently in glamor shots, as here of Ginger Rogers (Fig. .). Promotional material for Marlene Dietrich, the eponymous character in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (), made the connection explicit, as in a Spanish-language poster (Fig. .). Matters can be much more complex. A black-figure amphora by the Amasis Painter of satyrs engaged in harvesting grapes and making wine presents a sequence of individual but related activities as one static image (Fig. .). If read in sequence from right to left, the image becomes a motion picture in Bazin’s sense of the cinema as idealistic phenomenon. It expresses movements in four different stages of one action, with individual satyrs representing one stage each. Like high-class early cinema, this image now looks sepia-toned. But unlike early films, this picture is not silent: A fifth satyr is playing an aulos. In cinematic terms, he represents the musical accompaniment either of a silent film by an orchestra or a single instrument, usually an organ, or of a sound film by an invisible orchestra
Such references to one of the earliest ways of portraying movements in still images occur elsewhere, too. Notable American examples are in Footlight Parade (; a steamship on the back of playing cards), Ragtime (; in connection with a future film director), and Blow Out (; a major clue to a murder). A variation appears in the animation-plus-live-action comic fantasy Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (). In the clever Popeye-and-Bluto cartoon short Customers Wanted (), a man watches four different flipbooks that turn into Popeye-and-Bluto cartoons. See, in this context, Laurent Guido, “Dancing Dolls and Mechanical Eyes: Tracking an Obsessive Motive from Ballet to Cinema,” in François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.), Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –, especially – and (images). He mentions the pioneering work by French composer and musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, who used films to verify the dancers’ movements on ancient vases and elsewhere; in English: Maurice Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance after Sculptured and Painted Figures; tr. Harriet Jean Beauley (London: Lane, ). The original appeared in . The Brygos Painter’s Maenad is not illustrated, but see Emmanuel, (Fig. A), (Figs. –), and (Fig. B), for somewhat comparable vase images. More on the Venus de Milo in cinematic contexts, with illustrations, is in my “Aphroditê kinêmatographikê: Venus’ Varieties and Vicissitudes,” in Katherine Harloe, Nicoletta Momigliano, and Alexandre Farnoux (eds.), Hellenomania (London: Routledge, ), –. Martin von Wagner-Museum, Wu¨rzburg (L ).
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Classical Cinematism
Figure .
Marble relief of Nike. Acropolis Museum, Athens. Wikimedia Commons (CCO .).
on its soundtrack. There is also a “Preview of Coming Attractions” in the frieze above the main image – satyrs dancing, drinking, and making merry once the grape juice stored in the large image has fermented – and a fulllength “sequel” on the other side of the vase: Dionysus, the god of wine, is sampling what the satyrs now have to offer (Fig. .). Here, too, we have a music track or musical accompaniment, provided again by a musiciansatyr. A cinematically trained viewer can appreciate the full measure of the painter’s cleverness. The same point applies to one of the earliest images of
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
Figure .
Publicity photograph of Carole Lombard. Author’s Collection.
a dramatic action from the Bronze Age, the Minoan fresco of bull jumpers from Knossos (Fig. .). Here an analysis that applies Eisenstein’s
On Minoan bull-vaulting (or bull-leaping), see T. [Thomas] F. Scanlon, “Women, Bull Sports, Cults, and Initiation in Minoan Crete,” in Scanlon (ed.), Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds, vol. : Early Greece, the Olympics, and Contests (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, with extensive additional references and an addendum (–) to this article originally published in . Scanlon, note and –, provides references to and discusses the Cretan image, often
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Classical Cinematism
Figure .
Publicity photograph of Ginger Rogers in Venus de Milo pose. Author’s collection.
called the “Toreador” or “Taureador” fresco. Whether the different skin colors (white, ochre) differentiate between male and female figures, as they do in later vase painting, is a matter of debate. On this see Anne P. Chapin, “Aegean Painting in the Bronze Age,” in J. J. Pollitt (ed.), The Cambridge History of Painting in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
Figure .
Spanish-language poster for Blonde Venus. Author’s collection.
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Classical Cinematism
concept of cinematism can uncover even greater complexity. We see the initial, central, and concluding phases of one action, but how complex is this scene really? Are we looking at three jumpers, two females (painted white) and one male (painted ochre), or are there only two, one male and one female (painted twice)? And is only one jump across the bull’s back depicted in three stages, or do the postures of the vaulters’ bodies hint at different ways in which Minoans could accomplish such an amazing feat? There may be no conclusive answers, but a careful look by someone with a cinema eye might discover much more than a casual viewer. The Roman Alexander mosaic, based on a Hellenistic painting of the fourth century , is a whole action spectacle in nuce, almost six meters wide and three meters high (Fig. .). We can imagine the drama of a heroic Alexander facing his doomed enemy, King Darius, on the battlefield, even if we have not recently watched Robert Rossen’s Alexander the Great () or Oliver Stone’s Alexander (), epic films that contain whole battle sequences between Greeks and Persians. The mosaic is “an astonishing tour de force which conveys the full chaos and confusion of battle with a mass of struggling and falling soldiers and of plunging and rearing horses.” The Roman Nile mosaic, about six by four meters in size, is comparable in its presentation of several scenes: from a panoramic view (“long shot”) over its landscape to numerous individual small scenes (“close-ups”) of simultaneous actions going on in a series of
), –, at – and notes – (“The Taureador Fresco”). Chapin, –, examines another such fresco from Mycenae. John G. Younger, “Bronze Age Representations of Aegean Bull-Leaping,” American Journal of Archaeology, no. (Spring ), – and plates –; “A New Look at Aegean BullLeaping,” Muse, (), –; and “Bronze Age Representations of Aegean Bull-Games, III,” in Robert Laffineur and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier (eds.), Politeia: Society and State in the Aegean Bronze Age, vol. (Liège: University of Liège / Austin: University of Texas Press, ), – and plates LX–LXII. Younger sees three different styles of leap in this single image. S. D. Indelicato, “Were Cretan Girls Playing at Bull-Leaping?” Cretan Studies, (), –, argues that the Toreador fresco shows a time sequence for a single leaper. On this: Ada Cohen, The Alexander Mosaic: Stories of Victory and Defeat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), and now Mauro Menichetti, “The Alexander Mosaic: Stories of Victory,” in Judith M. Barringer and François Lissarague (eds.), Images at the Crossroads: Media and Meaning in Greek Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –, with up-to-date references. Note the plural in both titles. See, in this context, Luigi Spina, “Beschreibung einer Belagerung: Wenn Worte den Krieg ‘sehen’ lassen,” in Marco Formisano and Hartmut Böhme (eds.), War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –. Quoted from Roger Ling, Roman Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; several rpts.), .
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Figure .
Side A of the Amasis Painter’s satyr amphora. Martin von Wagner-Museum, Wu¨rzburg Wikimedia Commons (CCO .).
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Figure .
Classical Cinematism
Side B of the Amasis Painter’s satyr amphora. Martin von Wagner-Museum, Wu¨rzburg Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA .).
mini-narratives. A Pompeian wall painting showing a riot in the city’s arena and various Roman mosaics with gladiatorial and animal-hunt scenes are comparable. Two Roman monuments, the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, display detailed sequences of campaigns from beginning to end; they are visual battle epics replete with long shots, medium shots, and close-ups.
On Roman mosaics see, in general, the fundamental work by Bernard Andreae, Antike Bildmosaiken, nd ed. (Darmstadt: von Zabern, ). The classic study of Trajan’s Column, regrettably unpublished, is Alain Malissard, Étude filmique de la colonne Trajane: L’écriture de l’histoire et de l’épopée latines dans ses rapports avec le langage filmique (dissertation, Université de Tours, ). Part of this material is accessible in Malissard, “Une nouvelle approche de la Colonne Trajane,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, .. (), –. Malissard’s perspective on this kind of sequential visual narrative is largely unknown among art historians. Martin Beckmann, The Column of Marcus Aurelius: The Genesis and Meaning of a Roman Imperial Monument (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ; rpt. ), for instance, mentions neither Malissard nor any filmic terminology. Philip
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
Figure .
Figure .
Fresco of Minoan bull leapers from Knossos. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Wikimedia Commons.
The Roman Alexander mosaic. National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Wikimedia Commons.
Waddell, “Eloquent Collisions: The Annales of Tacitus, the Column of Trajan, and the Cinematic Quick-Cut,” Arethusa, (), –, presents a narratological perspective on Tacitus’ text and the image sequences on the column.
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Classical Cinematism
Sound is implied as well. On a smaller scale but no less fascinatingly, the series of Roman frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries near Pompeii shows the different stages of a religious initiation rite in sequential order. Viewing it is comparable to examining the unmoving images on a filmstrip. Progressive scenes on Roman sarcophagi may be viewed similarly. An attractive example is the myth of Protesilaus as shown in six scenes on a sarcophagus now in the Vatican: his landing at Troy; his death; his return from the Underworld, guided by Mercury; his reunion with Laodamia, his wife; his new departure, or rather the moment just before; and his return to the Underworld, where Mercury hands over Protesilaus’ shade to Charon the ferryman. In addition to these examples, numerous Roman wall paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum tell different phases of one and the same story in a single image, with the protagonist appearing twice or even three times. And the mythical Gigantomachy depicted on the Pergamon Altar, now in Berlin, may well be the most monumental ancient story ever told. In spite of all this (and much else), neither classical antiquity nor any other ancient culture in East or West deserves credit for first depicting motion in unmoving images. This ability can be found as early as in prehistoric cave paintings. Detailed histories of photography and cinematography often begin there. The primary artistic challenge appears to
Reinhard Herbig, Neue Beobachtungen am Fries der Mysterienvilla in Pompeji: Ein Beitrag zur römischen Wandmalerei in Campanien (Baden-Baden: Grimm, ), is still fundamental. On these see, e.g., Richard Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ; rpt. ), – and –. In general: Paul Zanker and Björn C. Ewald, Living with Myths: The Imagery of Roman Sarcophagi, tr. Julia Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Galleria dei Candelabri, Vatican Museums, inv. no. . The myth is best known today from Ovid, Heroides . See, e.g., Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, tr. Laura Gibbs (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), – and passim. On a Greek image series comparable to the one on the sarcophagus, see Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, “Polygnotos’ Iliupersis: A New Reconstruction,” American Journal of Archaeology, (), –. Scholarship on such image cycles is now extensive. One of its pioneering works was Otto Jahn’s Griechische Bilderchroniken, ed. Adolf Michaelis (Bonn: Marcus, ). A modern pioneer is Michael Squire; see especially Squire, The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ). Earlier on the Tabulae Iliacae: Nicholas Horsfall, “Stesichorus at Bovillae?” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, (), – and plates II–IIIc. Ling, Roman Painting, reproduces and examines a large number of examples. Ancient landscape painting expresses movement and storytelling as well; see, e.g., Guy Hedreen, Capturing Troy: The Narrative Function of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). The visual narrative of one particular part of the Altar has elicited special attention; see Kristen Seaman, Rhetoric and Innovation in Hellenistic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (chapter titled “Narrative in the Telephos Frieze”). Older but good examples, with illustrations, are in Joseph Gregor, Das Zeitalter des Films (Vienna: Reinhold, ), – (chapter titled “Geschichtliche Grundlagen”), and Friedrich von Zglinicki,
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Word and Image: A Pre-Cinema Survey
have been how to capture the motions of animals being hunted and humans hunting them. In the words of Joseph Gregor: “The cinema is as old as mankind.” Lowell Thomas might well agree. In his survey of pre-cinema, Gregor calls a scene on the Egyptian tomb of Menne (ca. ) showing workers with scythes at a harvest and bending successively to indicate the progression of their swinging movements: “the first filmic representation.” Some years later, distinguished French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches Noblecourt of the Louvre Museum saw an even earlier work, Tomb at Beni Hasan, dating to the Middle Kingdom (–ca. ), as the first to display pre-cinematic art: scenes with dancers and launderers or bleachers, and, most spectacularly, a detailed frieze showing either pairs of wrestlers in action or one pair repeated numerous times in the course of action from beginning to end. And the hour-long American documentary The Film Parade () begins the “astounding story” of film with the different poses of a goddess on a temple built by Ramses around as charioteers are driving past her. German-American puppeteer Tony Sarg presented ancient Chinese shadow plays performed with two-dimensional puppets (“shadowgraphs”) as precursors of the cinema well over a century ago.
Der Weg des Films: Die Geschichte der Kinematographie und ihrer Vorläufer (Berlin: RembrandtVerlag, n.d. []), – (chapter titled “Alles Urdenken geschieht in Bildern”). Gregor, Das Zeitalter des Films, : “Der Film ist so alt wie die Menschheit.” This is the opening sentence of his first chapter. Gregor, Das Zeitalter des Films, – (italics his). Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, “Le film et l’écran au temps des Pharaons,” L’amour de l’art, nos. – (), –. For the sake of easy visual comparison, her article is accompanied by three bands of still images from praxinoscopes showing a young girl playing ball, charming birds, and riding on horseback. The issue’s cover image shows Myron’s Diskobolos accompanied by three differently colored abstract silhouettes in later phases of his throw. The film was released under various other titles as well. Its director, British-American J. Stuart Blackton, began his career in and made several silent shorts set in antiquity – Antony and Cleopatra, Virginius (both ), The Way of the Cross (about Nero’s Rome, ), and Elektra () – besides various other biblical and historical films. See further Gerald Noxon, Pictorial Origins of Cinema Narrative: The Birth and Development of the Scene in Pre-Historic and Ancient Art (Cinema Studies, ; Bridgewater, Mass.: Experiment Press, ), a short monograph with chapters on Lascaux and on Egypt and Mesopotamia. Several articles about Sarg’s Chinese shadowgraph performances appeared at that time. See, e.g., Hamilton Williamson, “Old China Comes to Broadway,” Motion Picture Magazine, no. (November, ), – and –, and Sarg’s own “Movies on Strings,” Photoplay Magazine, no. (December, ), and . Here Sarg summarized the history of the Chinese plays and traced their influence to the “Ombres chinoises” performed during the French Revolution and to the Parisian Chat Noir theater of around . A brief notice titled “Resurrecting Chinese Movies a Thousand Years Old,” Current Opinion, no. (July, ), , announces that Sarg intended to make a “motion picture play” based on a Chinese scenario of , using original puppets. This unsigned article is based on Karl K. Kitchen, “Chinese Movies,” The World Magazine, (June , ), .
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Sarg used slow-motion cinematography to film his puppets and animated – or co-animated – and directed several other short films. One of them was titled The Original Movie (). Here a director employed by The Stonehenge Film Company uses a dinosaur for a camera crane. In , a traveling exhibition, “Art in Animation,” had been organized by the Disney studios to “cultivate the appreciation and foster the production of art in America” and, not coincidentally, to promote Disney’s new animated color-and-widescreen feature Sleeping Beauty. The film’s pressbook juxtaposed a photograph of a Greek vase showing two wrestlers and one of a mural painting with Egyptians wrestling. Their captions read “Grecian urn shows early attempts to put motion into art” and “Egyptians used wrestlers to illustrate motion in art.” An accompanying text explained: The exhibits trace the history of animation from the very earliest attempts of man in the Stone Age to make his pictures move on down through the Egyptian and Grecian civilizations when man tried to achieve a feeling of motion in his ancient murals and pottery.
This article’s subheading proudly proclaims: “Journalists, Art Critics, Civic Leaders, Educators Have Acclaimed This Unique ‘Art in Animation’ Exhibit for Its Tremendous Cultural and Entertaining Values.” Decades earlier, Gregor had singled out Greek art as “the most perfect summation” to corroborate his view: vase paintings and, in particular, the Parthenon Frieze. He briefly referred to Roman sarcophagi and sequential images on columns as well. In view of my argument in Chapter , it is pleasing to see that Gregor specifically mentioned a vase painted by Douris.
Heron, the camera obscura, and Damascius Hellenistic scientists after Aristotle dealt with pre-cinematic phenomena or were later considered to have done so. A case in point is a particular comment on a passage in the treatise on architecture by the Augustan Roman architect and writer Vitruvius. Milanese painter and architect Cesare Cesariano published an Italian translation, with extensive commentary and numerous
My quotations are from “A Walt Disney Retrospective Exhibit . . . Selling ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Magic in Museums Throughout the World” (ellipsis in original), Sleeping Beauty pressbook, . Gregor, Das Zeitalter des Films, – and fig. (the Frieze); quotation at . On Douris: Gregor, note . The work in question is a psykter (wine cooler) with satyrs, now in the British Museum (inv. no. ,.). It was found in Cerveteri. The museum’s website (www.britishmuseum .org/collection/object/G_--) displays several images, including a “roll-out” of the action depicted on the band of images that circle the vase.
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Heron, the camera obscura, and Damascius
engravings, in . This was the first translation of Vitruvius’ treatise into a modern language. Vitruvius’ mention of aeolipiles seduced Cesariano into a long digression on this invention by third-century Greek scientists. The term combines the name of Aeolus, god of the winds, and the Latin word for ball (pila). An aeliopile is thus a “wind ball” or “Aeolus’ ball.” Vitruvius explained how aeliopiles work when he was dealing with the layout of city streets in connection with wind directions: Wind is a flowing wave of air with an excess of irregular movements. It is produced when heat collides with moisture and the shock of the crash expels its force in a gust of air. We can observe that this is true from bronze statues of Aeolus, and by means of such clever inventions we may wring divine truth from the hidden principles of heaven. Make hollow bronze Aeolus spheres; these have a pinhole opening through. They are filled with water and placed over a fire, and before they heat up they have no breath at all, but as soon as they reach the boiling point they emit a powerful gust at the fire. Thus, on the basis of a small, very brief spectacle, it is possible to understand and evaluate the great and extensive principles underlying the nature of the heavens and the winds.
These aeolipiles prompted Cesariano’s exposition, in which he credits a now obscure Don Papnutio with the following optical device: A beautiful law of optics may well be mentioned which was found out and verified by the Benedictine Monk and Architect Don Papnutio (or Panuce). If a circular concavity, about two inches in diameter, is cut with a lathe in a piece of wood, about four to six inches in size, and in the centre of the concavity a small and very short tube (spectaculum) or aperture, which is also called a sight (scopos), is placed; and if it be properly fixed in a leaf of a door, or in front of a window, shut, so that no light may enter, and if you have a piece of white paper or other material upon which everything passing through the aperture may be represented, you will see everything contained in the earth or the sky according to the pyramid formed through the aperture, and with their colours and forms.
Vitruvius, On Architecture ..; quoted from Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, ed. and tr. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe; rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), (with fig. at ). The best-known aeolipile was designed in the first century by Heron in the shape of a globe: Heron, Pneumatica ., on which see Guilelmus/Wilhelm Schmidt (ed.), Heronis Alexandrini quae supersunt opera omnia, vol. : Pneumatica et Automata / Herons von Alexandria Druckwerke und Automatentheater (Stuttgart: Teubner, ; rpt. ), –, with figs. and a; cf. Schmidt, XLIII–XLV. This Greek edition with German translation is still the standard text. Various reconstructions of aeliopiles are available in internet videos. Quoted from J. Waterhouse, “Notes on the Early History of the Camera Obscura,” The Photographic Journal, no. (May , ), –, at . Waterhouse, (Appendix ), prints the original: Cesare Cesariano (tr. and comm.), DI Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de architectura libri decem . . . (Como, ), fol. XXIII (v). Cesariano, fol. XXIII (r–v), describes aeliopilae in
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Several later commentators on optical devices pounced on the term spectaculum as an indication, or even proof, of the invention of the camera obscura or at least its precursors in antiquity. Here I limit myself to one irresistible passage: a prediction of virtually all cinema as offered by the camera obscura, especially of films on an epic scale with their eye-popping battles, special effects, action, and much else. This text appeared in Giambattista della Porta’s book (“Natural Magic”); I quote from the English edition of : How in a Chamber you may see Hunting, Battles of Enemies, and other delusions. Now for a conclusion I will add that, then [sic] which nothing can be more pleasant for great men, and Scholars, and ingenious persons to behold; That in a dark Chamber by white sheets objected, one may see as clearly and perspicuously, as if they were before his eyes, Huntings, Banquets, Armies of Enemies, Plays, and all things else that one desireth. Let there be over against that Chamber, where you desire to represent these things, some spacious Plain, where the Sun can freely shine: Upon that you shall set Trees in Order, also Woods, Mountains, Rivers, and Animals, that are really so, or made by Art, of Wood, or some other matter. You must frame little children in them, as we use to bring them in when Comedies are Acted: and you must counterfeit Stags, Bores [sic], Rhinocerets [sic], Elephants, Lions, and what other creatures you please: Then by degrees they must appear, as coming out of their dens, upon the Plain: The Hunter he must come with his hunting Pole, Nets, Arrows, and other necessaries, that may represent hunting: Let there be Horns, Cornets, Trumpets sounded: those that are in Chamber shall see Trees, Animals, Hunters Faces [sic], and all the rest so plainly, that they cannot tell whether they be true or delusions: Swords drawn will glister [sic] in at the hole, that they will make people almost afraid.
Here we have an early equivalent of our own virtual reality with its immersive audiovisual digital media. The line from antiquity to Renaissance and Baroque and on to the early modern age and beyond
detail, with an attractive illustration of five different aeliopiles. Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films, –, is just one of modern scholars who report skeptically on this. Natural Magick by John Baptista Porta, a Neapolitane: in Twenty Books; Wherein are set forth All the Riches and Delights of the Natural Sciences (London, ); quotation at –. The passage appears in chapter (“Of the mixt operations of the plain Concave-Glasses”) of Book (“Of Strange Glasses”: “Wherein are propounded Burning-glasses, and the wonderful sights to be seen by them”). The Latin original: Ioh. Baptistae Portae Neapolitani Libri Viginti (Leiden, ); text passage at (in Book , chapter ).
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Heron, the camera obscura, and Damascius
has never been broken. A telling example is Horace’s summary description of what could be seen on the stage: large contingents of soldiers on foot and horseback; defeated kings and fallen grandees being dragged along; chariots at full speed and other wagons, coaches, even ships; and the loot taken from entire cities. Epic spectacle galore! Horace reports even for how long one of these entertainments could go on: four hours! Small wonder that Roman shows on the stage and in the arena, for example, especially reenactments of scenes from famous myths, were considered precursors of cinema even in the silent era. Early film historians could feel particularly certain about the connections between antiquity and the cinema. Georges-Michel Coissac began his Histoire du cinématographe with a chapter titled “Les prophètes,” which covered ancient projections that used light and concave mirrors. Intellectually, we may dissent from Coissac’s statement that Pygmalion, when he animated his statue with Venus’ help, made a film (“faisait du cinématographe”), but we can be charmed by it as well. Coissac mentioned, to name only Greeks and Romans, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, and one Damasius. This last one is the fifth- to sixth-century Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius. He wrote, among other works now lost, four volumes on supernatural marvels: On Incredible Events, On Incredible Stories of Demons, On Incredible Stories of Souls That Have Appeared after Death, and On Incredible Natures.
The case has been made, convincingly but on a smaller chronological scale, by A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). This fascinating book may usefully be updated, and slightly corrected, with Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). The essays in André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (eds.), A Companion to Early Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, ), add greater details, especially those on “Early Cinema Culture.” Horace, Epistles ..–. The hyperbole in these lines – if any – only reinforces their enargeia. So by Henry S. Gehman, “Moving Pictures among the Romans,” The Classical Weekly, no. (), –. Gehman’s academic affiliation: “South Philadelphia / High School for Boys.” On the arena spectacles see primarily K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” Journal of Roman Studies, (), – and plates I–II. G.-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe: De ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Éditions de “Cinéopse” / Gauthiers-Villars, ), –. On his first page he refers to his earlier work on this topic: Coissac, De l’évolution de la projection à travers les âges (Paris: Lahure, ). Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe, . Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe, -; his accompanying source references ( note ) explain the error. It was repeated by no less an authority than Rudolf Arnheim in a article; a later version (“The Thoughts That Made the Picture Move”) appeared in Arnheim, Film as Art, wherein see for the error. The attestation is in the Byzantine Patriarch Photius, Library . A parallel phenomenon – that of divine appearances at the Eleusinian Mysteries – has recently been explained as having been achieved with a kind of pre-cinematic apparatus: Matt Gatton, “The Eleusinian Projector: The
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Coissac translated a passage from one of Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster’s letters to Sir Walter Scott. Brewster’s analysis in turn was frequently summarized or referred to by later aficionados of cinema history: It can scarcely be doubted, that a concave mirror was the principal instrument by which the heathen gods were made to appear in the ancient temples. In the imperfect accounts which have reached us of these apparitions, we can trace all the elements of an optical illusion. In the ancient temple of Hercules at Tyre, Pliny mentions that there was a seat made of a consecrated stone, “from which the gods easily rose.” Esculapius [sic] often exhibited himself to his worshippers at Tarsus; and the temple of Enguinum in Sicily was celebrated as the place where the goddesses exhibited themselves to mortals. Iamblichus actually informs us, that the ancient magicians caused the gods to appear among the vapours disengaged from fire; and when the conjuror Maximus terrified his audience by making the statue of Hecate laugh, while in the middle of the smoke of burning incense, he was obviously dealing with the image of a living object dressed in the costumes of a sorceress. The character of these exhibitions in the ancient temples is so admirably depicted in the following passage of Damascius, quoted by M. Salverte, that we recognise all the optical effects which have been already described. “In a manifestation,” says he, “which ought not to be revealed . . . there appeared on the wall of the temple a mass of light, which at first seemed to be very remote; it transformed itself, in coming nearer, into a face evidently divine and supernatural, of a severe aspect, but mixed with gentleness, and extremely beautiful. According to the institutions of a mysterious religion, the Alexandrians honoured it as Osiris and Adonis.”
Appealing and, to cinephiles, seductive as the classical passages quoted above may be, they are too slight individually or collectively to serve as proof of the origins of cinema in antiquity. For example, the stone mentioned by Pliny is not what Brewster and others believe it to have been. It was not gods but “the pious” (pii) visiting the temple who could
Hierophant’s Optical Method of Conjuring the Goddess,” in Costas Papadopoulos and Holley Moyes (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Light in Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic: Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart., th ed. (London: Murray, ), – (in Letter IV). The first edition had appeared in . Brewster’s quotation from Salverte may be found, in slightly different English, in Eusèbe Salverte, The Occult Sciences: The Philosophy of Magic, Prodigies, and Apparent Miracles, tr. Anthony Todd Thompson, vol. (London: Bentley, ), , with more on Damascius at . The first French edition of Salverte’s book appeared in . Salverte’s source on Damascius was Photius, Library . Enguinum (Engyon) has not been located.
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Heron, the camera obscura, and Damascius
rise from the stone seat easily (facile). Both for this reason and because the technical prehistory of the cinema has received extensive attention from scholars before and around the time of the introduction of the cinematographic apparatus in and again in recent decades, there is no need to go over all this material here, fascinating as it is.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History . (). Pliny called it eusebes (“reverent”). Introductory information on Iamblichus and Maximus of Ephesus, the Neoplatonist philosopher and tutor of Emperor Julian the Apostate, as theurgists and a more detailed description, with source reference, of this miracle worked by Maximus is in Valerie Flint et al., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome (London: Athlone Press, ), –. See further Sarah Iles Johnston, “Animating Statues: A Case Study in Ritual,” Arethusa, (), –. Scholarly (and other) publications on the history of pre-cinema since the sixteenth century and on the camera obscura are too numerous to be listed systematically. The following sources provide excellent overviews (and more); some of the older ones, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, serve intellectual banquets to aficionados: Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe, among other works; Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. : L’invention du cinéma: –, rd ed. (Paris: Denoël, ), a classic; Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through (; rpt. New York: Simon & Schuster, ), another classic and an affectionate survey of epic proportion; Daniel Gethmann and Christoph Schulz (eds.), Daumenkino: The Flip Book Show (Du¨sseldorf: Snoeck / Kunsthalle Du¨sseldorf, ), fascinating and lavishly illustrated; Eder, History of Photography; Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography from the camera obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, ); Hermann Hecht, Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image before , ed. Ann Hecht (London: Bowker-Saur / British Film Institute, ), an indispensable reference work. Baier, A Source Book of Photographic History / Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie, is a survey with extensive quotations from primary sources. Despite the bilingual title, almost everything in this valuable book is in German. Stephen Herbert, A History of Pre-Cinema, vols. (London: Routledge, ; rpt. ), contains many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications. Vol. reprints Olive Cook, Movement in Two Dimensions: A Study of the Animated and Projected Pictures Which Preceded the Invention of Cinematography (London: Hutchinson, ). Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, is a solid recent overview of the subject and the best starting point in English for newcomers. Similarly in French: Jacques Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma, vol. : De la cinématique au cinématographe – (Paris: Casterman, ); Jean Vivié, Prélude au cinéma: De la préhistoire à l’invention, ed. Maurice Gianati and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: L’Harmattan, ). Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films, is a bona fide epic: well over large and illustrated pages in small print, followed by over pages of illustrations on plates. C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, tr. Richard Winston (London: Thames & Hudson / New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, ), is a brief but attractive popularization by a bestselling writer; the illustrations are more valuable than the text. Gerhard Kemner and Gelia Eisert, Lebende Bilder: Eine Technikgeschichte des Films (Berlin: Nicolai, ), is a short but attractively illustrated historical survey. On theatrical uses of pre-cinematic devices, see in particular Vardac, Stage to Screen, with Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. See additionally Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Verso il cinema: Macchine, spettacoli e mirabili visioni (Turin: UTET Università, ) and Quando il cinema non c’era: Storie di mirabili visioni, illusioni ottiche e fotografie animate (Turin: UTET Università, ). An indispensable and invaluable list of references to all aspects of early cinema and its antecedents is now in a four-part bibliography: Deac Rossell, “Early Cinema and Optical Media: An Index to Print Anthologies and Exhibition Catalogues,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, (), – and – (to be followed by additional
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Classical Cinematism
The various pre-cinematic apparatuses had all artificial names, usually in pseudo-Greek: thaumatrope, zoetrope, zoopraxinoscope, phenakistiscope, and yet others. All these were able to show a sequential series of static images in apparent motion before the arrival of the film camera and projector, which originally were combined in one machine: the cinematograph. But none of them goes back to antiquity; instead, all date to the nineteenth century. But there was someone in the first century who has frequently merited an honorable mention in prehistories of film. This was Heron of Alexandria. His Latinized name may strike modern readers as even more appropriate: Hero. Heron invented various mechanisms that produced movement. He based his inventions on the works, all now lost, of Philon (or Philo) of Byzantium, also called Philo Mechanicus, from the third century . Some passages of his book Pneumatica were preserved in a Latin version of an Arabic translation and in turn influenced Vitruvius. Perhaps the most famous as well as the most intricate of all Heron’s machines is the one that shows the death of Locrian Ajax after the fall of Troy. It does so on an artificial stage in no fewer than five scenes. Ajax had outraged the goddess Athena, who in revenge contrived his destruction in a huge sea storm. Here is Heron’s own description in its entirety, from his book On Automatons (in Latin: De automatis): At the beginning, the stage opened. Then twelve figures appeared, which were distributed into three rows. They were representing Danaans, who were repairing ships and preparing to pull them into the sea. These figures moved, in that some were sawing, others carpentering with axes, others hammering, yet others working with large and small drills. They caused loud sounds that fully corresponded with reality. But after considerable time the doors were closed and opened again, and there was a different scene. For one could see how the ships were being pulled into the sea by the
installments). See additionally Rossell, Chronology of the Birth of Cinema – (New Barnet: Libbey, ). German experimental filmmaker and collector Werner Nekes made several documentaries on the topic; the best-known are Film before Film () and Media Magica I–V (–). There are also various internet sites, with attractive illustrations but often with too much enthusiasm, among them The History of the Discovery of Cinematography (precinemahistory. net) and Ancient Cinema (ancient-cinema.org, on the Romans). The latter describes and illustrates a Roman “projector” made of bronze, on which see Ulrich Meurer, “The Shards of Zadar: A (Meta-)Archaeology of Cinema,” in Pantelis Michelakis (ed.), Classics and Media Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, at –. Literature on these devices is extensive. See, for one, Tom Gunning, “The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century ‘Philosophical Toys’ and Their Discourse,” in Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –.
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Homo cinematographicus
Achaeans. After the doors were closed and opened again, nothing was visible on stage but painted air and sea. Soon after, the ships were sailing past in single file. As some were vanishing, others appeared. Often dolphins were swimming alongside who now dived into the sea, now became visible again, just as in reality. Gradually the sea became stormy, and the ships sailed along in close proximity. After closing and opening again, nothing was to be seen of those sailing earlier, but you could see Nauplius with raised torch and Athena standing beside him. Then a fire was kindled above the stage, as if the torch were shining with its flame. After another closing and opening you could see the shipwreck and notice Ajax swimming. Athena was being lifted upward by a crane, that is, above the stage, thunder was crashing, a flash of lightning suddenly struck Ajax on the stage, and his figure vanished. And thus the play, after closing, came to an end. Such, then, was the performance.
Heron, before beginning his description of this play, called it one of his “better performances.” It is more than that. Evidently, the clever inventor was a hero of his as well as of our time. Still, Philon deserves at least some of the credit.
Homo cinematographicus: The Cinema as Aristotelian Thought Machine We saw above that Aristotle was probably not suitable as a precursor of the cinema. But Aristotle did make a comment that fits in our age of ubiquitous visual stimuli. “The mind never thinks without an image,” he declared in On the Soul. Modern neurological studies bear Aristotle
Schmidt, Heronis Alexandrini quae supersunt opera omnia, vol. , –. The passage quoted is Automata .–. “Danaans” and “Achaeans” are ancient Greek names for Greeks. Nauplius is a son of the sea god Poseidon, who in revenge for his son’s death lured the Greek ships returning from Troy to their doom by false fire signals. Schmidt, LXII fig. c, shows the kind of drill Heron mentions; Schmidt, LXIII-LXIX with figs. a–e, provides a mechanical explanation, with an impressive image of Athena on stage. Various reconstructions of Heron’s play and related automatic scenes are on internet videos. See now also Philip Steadman, Renaissance Fun: The Machines Behind the Scenes (London: UCL Press, ), passim but especially – (chapter on Heron), including several pages, with illustrations, on the play here quoted and with useful references. Steadman, –, briefly adduces Aristotle, On the Movement of Animals (d), concerning automata. As he was of “the great ‘Heronian machine’ that was the Baroque theater.” So Steadman, Renaissance Fun, , in the context of the Teatro Farnese in Venice. He continues: “Hero [is] the improbable hero of the story told in this book.” Aristotle, On the Soul .. (a–); similarly, .. (b). See Gerard Watson, “ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑ in Aristotle, De anima .,” The Classical Quarterly, (), –. The matter, not least Aristotle’s terminology (eidolon, phantasia, phantasma) is more complex than I address here; see, most recently, Filip Radovic, “Eidôla and Phantasmata in Aristotle: Three
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Classical Cinematism
out. Or, in the words of film historian Friedrich von Zglinicki: “All Primeval Thinking Occurs in Images.” So also Danish director CarlTheodor Dreyer: “People think in images.” And German-andAmerican director Douglas Sirk: “The [camera’s] angles are the director’s thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy.” Neither von Zglinicki nor Dreyer nor Sirk was probably aware of how closely they echoed, even restated, Aristotle. I close this chapter with two other illustrations of Aristotle’s statement about the mind’s innate visual thinking. One is ancient, i.e. pre-cinematic; the other is modern, i.e. cinematic. The Greek novelist Heliodorus, probably writing around , includes a revealing moment in An Ethiopian Story, the subject of Chapter . At one point Calasiris, an old man who is among the book’s chief characters, tells Cnemon, a curious youngster, about the ritual procession which he had witnessed during a festival at Delphi. Calasiris omits details of the festival since they are unimportant and will have been familiar to Cnemon as to all ancient readers of the novel. Surprisingly, however, Cnemon insists on learning more: [Calasiris:] “When the procession and the rest of the ceremony of propitiation had come to an end–”
Senses of ‘Image’ in Aristotelian Psychology,” and Victor Caston, “Aristotle and the Cartesian Theatre,” both in Pavel Gregoric and Jakob Leth Fink (eds.), Encounters with Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, ), – and –. See further Anne Merker, La vision chez Platon et Aristote (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, ), and, for Plato, Michail Maiatsky, Platon, penseur du visuel (Paris: L’Harmattan, ). In The Art of Memory (), Frances Yates pointed out the importance of this Aristotelian concept for memory and reminiscence, not least for its visual side; see Frances Yates, Selected Works, vol. : The Art of Memory (London and New York: Routledge, ), –. There are several earlier and later reprints. Cf. Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), – (chapter section titled “The Brain Sees Pictures First”), and Peter Wyeth, The Matter of Vision: Affective Neurobiology and Cinema (New Barnet: Libbey, ). Hugo Mu¨nsterberg’s book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study () was the first to make the case for film and psychology. It is now best consulted in Alan Langdale (ed.), Hugo Mu¨nsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York: Routledge, ). Robert Sinnerbrink, “Hugo Mu¨nsterberg,” in Felicity Colman (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (; rpt. London: Routledge, ), –, introduces Mu¨nsterberg and his film-mind analogy (–). A concise recent overview is Jeremy Blatter, “Hugo Mu¨nsterberg: Psychologizing Spectatorship between Laboratory and Theater,” in Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.), Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, ), –. Cf. note . Quoted from Carl-Theodor Dreyer, “Thoughts on My Craft,” in Richard Dyer MacCann (ed.), Film: A Montage of Theories (New York: Dutton, ), –, at . Dreyer’s text, originally from , has been reprinted several times. Quoted from Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, ), .
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Homo cinematographicus
“Excuse me, Father,” interrupted Knemon, “but they have not come to an end at all. You have not yet described them so that I can see them for myself. Your story has me in its power, body and soul, and I cannot wait to have the pageant pass before my very eyes. Yet you hurry past without a second thought.”
So Calasiris describes the festivities and mentions a hymn that he heard being sung. Cnemon again interrupts him: For a second time, Father, you are trying to cheat me of the best part of the story by not giving me all the details of the hymn. It is as if you had only given me a view of the procession, without my being able to hear anything.
Calasiris yields, quotes part of the hymn, and describes the musical performance. As a result of both interruptions, Cnemon gets first to see and then to hear in his mind a story he is receiving only verbally, as expressions like “see for myself,” “before my very eyes,” and “a view of the procession” indicate. This is how all readers imagine what they read. What Cnemon sees with his mind’s eye while listening to Calasiris are moving images – after all, Calasiris is describing to him something in motion, a procession. Additionally, Calasiris provides a sound sequence to complement the images he conjures up, a “soundtrack” for the mental film Cnemon is watching: “Knemon . . . is eager to be treated to the full spectacle of what we would nowadays call a widescreen, technicolor romance.” But this sort of thing has been the case ever since Homer. An example is the racy tale of Demodocus about the illicit love affair of Ares and Aphrodite, whom her husband Hephaestus catches in bed. Its climactic moment might easily have been the subject of a painting. Had there been one, the text could be its exact ecphrasis. In the absence of such a painting, we see what happened on Olympus in our mind’s eye and hear that famous Homeric laughter.
Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, tr. J. R. Morgan; in B. P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –; quotations at and . Quoted from John J. Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” in Winkler and Gordon Williams (eds.), Yale Classical Studies, vol. : Later Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, at . The influential article by Winkler (no relation to the Winkler elsewhere in this book) was reprinted in Simon Swain (ed.), Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; quotation there at . Homer, Odyssey .–. Lonsdale, “Simile and Ecphrasis in Homer and Virgil,” –, examines the passage, considering a dance performance as an analogy.
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Classical Cinematism
An astonishing corroboration of Aristotle concerning modern homo technologicus came in . German physician Fritz Kahn was the author of various books of popular science. Between and he published five volumes of a book series entitled Das Leben des Menschen (“The Life of Man”). All were lavishly illustrated in such a way that Kahn has come to be known as “father of infographics” and data visualization. The fourth volume in his series contained a plate that shows a mechanical illustration of human sight inside a man-machine, as it has often been called (Fig. .). We look inside a head, shown in profile, of a man looking at a key, then processing what he sees, and uttering the name of the object (in German, Schlu¨ssel). Numbers written into the image lead the reader-viewer along the path of thought, which is shown as a filmstrip. Inside the eye, lines of sight reach a spool and are guided into the recesses of the brain (nos. –). At number , a tiny projector, worked by a tiny projectionist as if in a cinema theater, throws a lighted image of a key onto a comparatively large screen (no. ). Sound is mentally added (nos. –). The audiovisual thought then travels to the vocal cords (nos. –), reaches the mouth (no. ), and is finally uttered aloud. The image as a whole is fully Aristotelian. One scholar recently concluded about Aristotle’s On the Soul: Aristotle’s account of perception is first and foremost an account of the perception of external objects. Perceivers come to be aware of external things by receiving their perceptual qualities without their matter.
Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen: Eine volkstu¨mliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, vol. (Stuttgart: Franckh, ), plate VIII. Uta and Thilo von Debschitz, Fritz Kahn: Infographics Pioneer (Cologne: Taschen, ; rpt. ), is the best introduction (coffee-table size, with lavish illustrations) to Kahn. Its cover shows part of a poster (“Der Mensch als Industriepalast” [ or ]; “Man as Industrial Palace”) that Kahn commissioned for the third volume of Das Leben des Menschen; here, the human eye is represented as a still camera. Other, related, images are on pages (“Man as Industrial Palace”), (“The House of the Skull Has Four Floors” [], with human vision as third floor, a camera behind a lens), – (variations on “Man as Industrial Palace” from and , with explanatory supplement), – (two-page spread with a car instead of a key []), and (small reproduction of the key version). Kahn’s illustrations have recently found a new life in film studies. Walead Beshty (ed.), Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image – (Arles: LUMA, ), has part of “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” on its cover. My illustration is on the cover of Santiago Hidalgo (ed.), Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ). “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” was the basis of an animated video by graphic designer Henning M. Lederer in . It is available at https://vimeo.com/, with documentation at www .industriepalast.com/IP_Documentation.pdf. And somewhat Ciceronian, too, if we remember his observation, made in passing, that “certain paths, as it were, have been drilled from the mind’s seat to the eyes, ears, and nostrils.” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations ..: viae quasi quaedam sunt ad oculos, ad auris, ad naris a sede animi perforatae.
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Homo cinematographicus
Figure .
The human thought process according to Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen, vol. , Plate .
Perception is the basic form of cognition. It gives perceivers cognitive access to the objects of the outside world, which is a world of objects.
Motion is important as well, even though the mental image may be present only momentarily: the incorporeal presence of perceptual qualities in perceivers is drastically ephemeral. It lasts only for as long as the external objects act on the
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Classical Cinematism perceiver. As soon as they cease to do this, there will either be another object acting on the senses or there will be no sense perception, while the causal effect the external objects had on the sense organs will be stored as a motion (kinêsis) in the perceiver’s blood and sense organs . . . these stored motions (phantasmata) are . . . remnants of the perceptual stimuli, that is, remnants of the causal effect the medium exerted on the sense organs.
These explanations do not involve anything cinematic, but the residual phantasmata here mentioned may, in our context, be considered analogous to the lingering after-images caused by the persistence of vision that moving images on screens evoke in our eyes. The mental image that Aristotle referred to has become a cinematic image in the age of moving-image technology. Such an understanding is far from idiosyncratic. Henri Bergson made a comparable case, extensively and profoundly, as we will see in Chapter . So the following summary appreciation of Aristotle by Josef Maria Eder, one of the preeminent nineteenth-century historians of photography, provides me with an appropriate conclusion to this chapter: “There is no doubt that Aristotle thought more deeply than any other philosopher of antiquity about the inner nature of light.” What Eder wrote specifically about Aristotle’s understanding of colors can be expanded to include what we have examined above: “how far . . . he advanced before his time in the most difficult area of optics, the theory of colors, becomes evident from the very fact that even this day, with its highly perfected technology, his teachings could find their admirers [Verehrer].” To cite only two of his American admirers: film historian Terry Ramsaye titled the first chapter of his popular A Million and One Nights “From Aristotle to Philadelphia, Pa.” Decades later, classics scholar J. K. Newman dealt with Aristotle and cinema on two notable occasions. Will you, dear reader, become a Verehrer, too – of cinematic imagination in classical antiquity?
The quotations are from Klaus Corcilius, “The Gate to Reality: Aristotle’s Basic Account of Perception,” in Caleb M. Cohoe (ed.), Aristotle’s On the Soul: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, at and –, with parenthetical references to other works by Aristotle concerning the storing of phantasmata here omitted. Josef Maria Eder, Ausfu¨hrliches Handbuch der Photographie, part .: Geschichte der Photochemie und Photographie vom Alterthume bis in die Gegenwart; nd ed. (Halle: Knapp, ), (in chapter on the history of photochemistry from antiquity to Daguerre). Cf., in English, Eder, History of Photography, – (mentioned in note ). Eder names several Greeks and Romans from Presocratics to Pliny the Elder and quotes Sophocles and Statius. J. K. Newman, “Ancient Poetics and Eisenstein’s Films,” in Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, –. Cf. John Kevin Newman, The Classical Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ; rpt. ), – and – (in chapter titled “The Modern Epic I – Eisenstein and Pudovkin”).
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Complex Cinematism
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
As we saw in Chapter , Simonides of Keos called painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks. Plutarch, the Greek biographer and essayist, reports on Simonides’ view as follows, adding a telling example: Simonides . . . calls painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting: for the actions which painters portray as taking place at the moment literature narrates and records after they have taken place. Even though artists with colour and design, and writers with words and phrases, represent the same subjects, they differ in the material and the manner of their imitation; and yet the underlying end and aim of both is one and the same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides is always striving for this vividness [enargeia] in his writing, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them.
Authors resemble painters, readers resemble viewers of paintings. The decisive factor is enargeia: vividness. If the mind never thinks without an image, then the reading mind does not, either, unless it encounters a boring or incompetently told story.
Plutarch on Simonides: Moralia f–a and f–c. My quotation (Moralia f–a) is from Frank Cole Babbitt (ed. and tr.), Plutarch’s Moralia in Fourteen Volumes, vol. : A–A (London: Heinemann / New York: Putnam’s, ; several rpts.), . Cf. further, e.g., Graham Zanker, “Aristotle’s Poetics and the Painters,” The American Journal of Philology, (), –. In Rome, a certain Gaius Fabius painted images on the walls in the temple of the goddess Salus (Health) in (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations .) and so acquired the cognomen “the Painter” (Pictor), which became part of the name of the clan of the Fabii Pictores (so Pliny, Natural History ..). Among them was Quintus Fabius Pictor, the earliest Roman historiographer. In the second century , the playwright Pacuvius painted frescoes in the temple of Hercules (Pliny, Natural History ..).
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
Homer the Painter, Homer the Filmmaker In the second century , the Sophist Lucian observed that Homer was “the best of painters.” In the century before Lucian, Greek orator Dio Chrysostom had none other than Phidias, one of the greatest sculptors of antiquity, state that Homer showed his listeners or readers beautiful images of all the gods. As a result of his art, Dio’s Phidias had said a little earlier, Homer could put any emotion he wished into his listeners’ or readers’ hearts. On the Life and Poetry of Homer is an apocryphal appreciation of Homer that has come down to us under Plutarch’s name. It concludes with a eulogy of Homer’s enargeia. The author even cites Simonides’ saying about poetry and painting: If one were to say that Homer was a teacher of painting as well [as an epic poet], this would be no exaggeration, for as one of the sages said, “Poetry is painting which speaks and painting is silent poetry.” Who before, or who better than Homer displayed for the mind’s eye gods, men, places, and various deeds, or ornamented them with the euphony of verse? He sculpted in the medium of language . . . Hephaestus, making the shield of Achilles and sculpting in gold the earth, the heavens, the sea, even the mass of the sun and the beauty of the moon, the swarm of stars that crowns the universe, cities of various sorts and fortunes, and moving, speaking creatures – what practitioner of arts of this sort can you find to excel him?
The author of this essay next quotes from a passage in the Odyssey, the moment in which Odysseus’ nurse Eurycleia discovers his scar and realizes his true identity. Our essayist introduces the passage in the following manner: “Let us examine another of the many examples that show that his creations are such that we seem to see them rather than hear them.” He comments on the lines he quotes: “Here, while everything that can be displayed to the eye is presented as if in a painting, there is still more – things that the eye cannot grasp, but only the mind.” He concludes about
Lucian, Images . Dio Chrysostom, Discourse (Olympic), and . Pseudo-Plutarch, On the Life and Poetry of Homer ; quoted from J. J. Keaney and Robert Lamberton (eds. and trs.), [Plutarch] Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer (Atlanta: Scholars Press, ), and . A different perspective on Homeric enargeia and the concept of the mind’s eye is in Jonas Grethlein and Luuk Huitink, “Homer’s Vividness: An Enactive Approach,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, (), –, and in Luuk Huitink, “Enargeia, Enactivism and the Ancient Readerly Imagination,” in Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns, and Mark Sprevack (eds.), Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –. Homer, Odyssey .–.
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Homer the Painter, Homer the Filmmaker
Homeric epic in general: “Many other things are described in the same graphic manner by the poet, as one can see simply from reading him.” Dio Chrysostom and our unknown essayist were by no means the only ancient writers to consider Homeric epic in visual terms. Cicero, for example, wrote in the century before Dio that with Homer “we see painting, not poetry” and asked, rhetorically, which places, battles, or movements of humans and animals “were not painted in such a way that he made us see what he himself did not see?” In the second century , Maximus of Tyre titled one of his Orations “Homer the Philosopher.” It contains this appreciation: Homer’s poetry can be envisaged in the following manner. Think of a philosophically educated painter, a Polygnotus or a Zeuxis, who paints with deliberation . . . His artistic skill allows him to preserve an accurate image of reality in the shapes and contours he portrays; his virtue ensures that it is true beauty he imitates as he arranges his lines into a satisfying pattern.
Phidias, Polygnotus, Zeuxis: Homer the visual artist could not be in better company. After all, as Simonides also said: “The word is the image of things.” As one can see simply from reading: When we listen to a story or read one, we see it in our minds. Since the time of Homer, stories have inevitably been turned into their readers’ mental motion pictures. As shown in Chapter , the verbal and the visual are inseparable, and not only where static situations (in a text) or images (paintings, statues) are concerned. Painting, the most fundamental representation of things in images, has a revealing analogy in tapestry: woven images. This is so because our term text is derived from Latin textus or textum, two nouns which both derive from a participle of the verb texere, which means “to weave.” A text is literally “something that has been woven.” Texts are stories woven in words. Parallel to this in Greek is the verb graphein, which means both “to write” and “to draw.” Woven images tell stories, as they famously do in several myths. Philomela, whose tongue has been cut out by her rapist,
Pseudo-Plutarch, On the Life and Poetry of Homer ; quoted from Keaney and Lamberton, [Plutarch] Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer, . The translators’ examine misses the impact of the original’s idômen (“let us look at”). Cicero, Tusculan Disputations ... Maximus of Tyre, Orations .; quoted from M. B. Trapp, Maximus of Tyre: The Philosophical Orations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . Trapp, xcvii–xcviii, lists alternative numbering systems. So reported by Michael Psellus, On the Workings of Demons (P.G. cxxii ): kata ton Simônidên ho logos tôn pragmatôn eikôn estin. On this see Claude Calame, “Quand dire c’est faire voir: L’évidence dans la rhétorique antique,” Études de lettres, no. (), –; François Lissarrague, “Graphein: écrire et dessiner,” in
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
the evil King Tereus, to prevent her from revealing the truth, thwarts his purpose by weaving figures in a robe. Particularly sophisticated examples of woven stories are on the tapestries of Athena and Arachne as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Homer’s Helen wove the fighting of Trojans and Greeks into a large robe; later, Apollonius’ Jason wears a robe displaying an elaborate series of mythical tales woven into it. This robe was a gift from Athena, goddess of weaving. Helen’s weaving in particular has often been taken as a symbol of the Homeric poet’s own weaving: his composition of the Iliad. Consequently, the visual nature of storytelling (enargeia), primarily in Homer, has often been seen in analogy to ancient visual arts, especially the stage. But, if Homer can be seen as resembling a stage director, can he also be regarded as a film writer or director? British poet Christopher Logue apparently thought so in his poetic retelling of the Iliad. In his version of Book , the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon contains these lines, indicating a change of speakers from the former to the latter: “Reverse the shot. / Go close.” Since the time of
Christiane Bron and Effy Kassapoglou (eds.), L’image en jeu: De l’antiquité à Paul Klee (Yens-surMorges: Cabédita: Institut d’Archéologie et d’Histoire Ancienne, de l’Université de Lausanne, ), –. Plato, Philebus b–e, has Socrates describe the soul as a book composed by a writer (grammateus), with images added by a painter (zôgraphos). Analogies to Aristotle (cf. Chapter ) are obvious. On Plato’s book-soul see now Karel Thein, L’âme comme livre: Étude sur une image platonicienne (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, ). Plato, Sophist c, contains the expression “spoken images” (eidôla legomena). On this dialogue see Abraham Jacob Greenstine, “Accounting for Images in the Sophist,” in Shai Biderman and Michael Weinman (eds.), Plato and the Moving Image (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, ), –. Apollodorus, Library of Mythology .. (with noun grammata); Ovid, Metamorphoses .– (with verb intexuit). Ovid, Metamorphoses .–; detailed comments, including a filmic analysis, are in my Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Textile decorations practically demand an ecphrasis. On one other example see Anna Lefteratou, “The Bed Canopy in Xenophon of Ephesus and the Iconography of Mars and Venus under the Empire,” Ramus, (), –. Homer, Iliad .–; Apollonius, Argonautica .–. So by Ann Bergren, Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought (Washington, : Center for Hellenic Studies / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), – (chapter titled “Helen’s Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad”). An earlier version had been published in Helios, n.s. (), –. A well-known example is Jenny Strauss Clay, Homer’s Trojan Theater: Space, Vision, and Memory in the Iliad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). More recently: Tobias Myers, Homer’s Divine Audience: The Iliad’s Reception on Mount Olympus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). See additionally Soteroula Constantinidou, The Gaze of Homer: Light and Vision in the Iliad (Athens: Institut du Livre / Kardamitsa, ). Quoted from Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, / New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), – (in “Kings: An Account of Books –”). This edition collects Logue’s complete text, which had been published in separate parts since . British film director Lindsay Anderson is mentioned in the book’s acknowledgments (vii).
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Homer the Painter, Homer the Filmmaker
Homer, plot-driven narratives have become their readers’ mental motion pictures, even long before the invention of the cinematograph. Director Douglas Sirk once put the matter of verbal and visual storytelling most succinctly. About stage plays and novels in connection to film, he said: “it’s language that counts [more than plot]. Now, the place of language in pictures has to be taken by the camera – and by cutting. You have to write with the camera.” Hence such filmic terms as Alexandre Astruc’s coinage le caméra-stylo (“the camera-pen”) and Agnès Varda’s cinécriture (“filmwriting”). Robert Bresson, who began as a painter and who probably left the theater further behind than any other filmmaker, defined his kind of filmmaking, which he called cinematography or the cinematograph, “that new writing.” American classicist Ann Bergren considered the entire Iliad as an extended tapestry: “The art of the Iliad is the art of the tableau.” She emphasized that both the Iliad and tableau images reveal a “transcendence of linear time.” Still, she and most other scholars have not made the connection, obvious today, from verbal images and static visual narratives to moving images. But time, whether linear or implied in unmoving images, is so pronounced in literature and the arts as to demand a more sophisticated approach and a greater appreciation of its complexity. Cinematic analyses of classical texts, especially epic, are almost ideal for that purpose. The great ecphrasis of the shield of Achilles provides the best justification. Its complexity of image and narrative is astonishing.
Quoted from Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, ), . Sirk had been a theater director before he turned to the cinema. He staged Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex during one season and, decades later, repeatedly referred to the Greek tragic playwrights in interviews. He was particularly taken with Euripides, as we will see in Chapter . I adduced these and related concepts in Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), –. The entire context (cinematic authorship) applies here as well. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, tr. Jonathan Griffin (; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, ), . Bresson referred to cinematography and writing on numerous occasions. He called all, or almost all, commercially produced films “the cinema” in contrast to his own cinematography. His usage of these terms therefore differed from that of most critics, historians, and others (including my own). Bergren, Weaving Truth, , after quoting a corresponding view of an ancient commentator on the Iliad. Bergren, Weaving Truth, . Homer, Iliad .–. Literature on this passage is extensive. A good recent introduction to enargeia (Homer’s and others’), ecphrasis, and various related concepts is in Michael Squire, “A Picture of Ecphrasis: The Younger Philostratus and the Homeric Shield of Achilles,” in Alexandros Kampakoglou and Anna Novokhatko (eds.), Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –. Squire discusses Philostratus the Younger, Images (“Pyrrhus or The Mysians”). He also provides both texts in original and translation and a
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
No actual shield could possibly accommodate everything and remain small and light enough to be carried into battle. Apart from cosmic representations of earth and sea, sky and sun and moon and stars, and the ocean circling everything, there are seven chief scenes: . . . . . . .
Two cities (–) A field being plowed (–) A royal precinct at harvest time (–) A vineyard at harvest, with music and dance (–) A herd of cattle driven to pasture and attacked by lions (–) A meadow (–) A dance floor, with dancing in progress (–)
With the exception of , the shortest, which is a static panoramic image, all scenes contain activities. As Andrew Becker concluded: “The Shield appropriates visual images by translating them into stories. The translation includes motion, thought, motive, cause and effect, prior and subsequent action, and sound.” Although Becker does not consider the cinema, his book fits the present context. After all, as he pointed out: the Shield encourages us to respect the particular and peculiar virtues of the image . . . The Shield . . . makes the image its own, translating the image into its own particular and peculiar virtues.
The other short scenes on Achilles’ shield (–, ) contain several actions going on simultaneously and being observed over a short period of time. But the two long scenes are something quite different. Scene emphasizes pure motion. It follows the cattle from farmyard to
detailed bibliography. He begins with Simonides and Horace. In her chapter on the shield, Maureen Alden, Homer Beside Himself: Para-Narratives in the Iliad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, uses a six-scene division and examines the scenes in detail. On ancient understandings of the shield’s complexity, see Eric Cullhed, “Movement and Sound on the Shield of Achilles in Ancient Exegesis,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, (), –. On the significance of the shield ecphrasis for Homer and the Iliad as a whole, see especially Walter Marg, Homer u¨ber die Dichtung: Der Schild des Achilles, nd ed. (Mu¨nster: Aschendorff, ), and Keith Stanley, The Shield of Homer: Narrative Structure in the Iliad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt. ). Quoted from Andrew Sprague Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, ), . Cf., among numerous other studies, Alex C. Purves, Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (chapter titled “The Eusynoptic Iliad: Visualizing Space and Movement in the Poem”). A detailed recent contribution, with exhaustive references, is Ahuvia Kahane, “Homer and Ancient Narrative Time,” Classical Antiquity, (), –.
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Homer the Painter, Homer the Filmmaker
pasture and the lions’ attack from killing an ox to breaking open its carcass to feasting on it while being themselves attacked by the herdsmen’s dogs, who run back and forth barking. No more than fourteen lines, but an entire motion picture in sequential procession. Scene , the first narrative, is even more complex. The first of its two cities appears twice: in multiple wedding festivities and in a court of law. As with the cattle and lions, the court case is recounted in detail from its cause (homicide) to its climax (prosecution and defence speeches), and its ending (a just verdict) is foreshadowed. The image of the second city, one under siege, is subdivided, too: defenders, attackers. The latter lay an ambush of the formers’ sheep and cattle before the animals are driven to pasture, and then kill the shepherds. This in turn precipitates a counterattack from the city; pursuit leads to fighting. A transcendence of linear time is evident in each of the seven scenes except , but linear time is fully preserved as well. No tableau could visually represent what the individual episodes recount. No stage adaptation could preserve the nature of ecphrasis that listeners or readers are given although it could show progressive actions, if probably not with actual animals. The ecphrasis scenes transcend the static nature of their pictures by telling stories that could not be painted or sculpted in all their aspects but that can be imagined in their entirety. That imaginative creation involves progressive, i.e. moving, images. The cinema can do more than tableaux or the stage. I have elsewhere examined Scene cinematically and need not repeat such an exercise here. Nevertheless, a few comments on Scene , the shortest other scene showing actions, may be useful. Here is the text: He [Hephaestus] made upon it a soft field, the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-ploughed, with many ploughmen upon it who wheeled their teams at the turn and drove them in either direction. And as these making their turn would reach the end-strip of the field, a man would come up to them at this point and hand them a flagon of honey-sweet wine, and they would turn again to the furrows in their haste to come again to the end-strip of the deep field. The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has been ploughed though it was gold.
I did so in my “The Iliad and the Cinema,” in Winkler (ed.), Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, ), –, where see especially –. Quoted from Richmond Lattimore (tr.), The Iliad of Homer, new ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . This translation first appeared in . Gold is the metal with which Hephaestus represents the earth.
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
The topic is unremarkable. But even this short passage teems with activities whose temporal complexities are astonishing both in their individual sequences and in their repetitions. The Greek verb tense most in evidence is the imperfect, indicating an action in the past that was either in progress – hence the name: “unperfected,” i.e. not completed – or one that occurred repeatedly, as indicated by the recurrence of would. Here both senses are crucial. Even singulars (“a man,” “at this point”) imply plural: several men (cf. “many ploughmen”) and various points at either end of the field. Moreover, when the earth behind the plows is said to have “darkened,” then it must have looked somewhat lighter before. This minute detail may be the best proof of the careful intricacy with which the narrator tells what we hear or read and are subtly being induced to visualize. The field has been plowed earlier because it is now being “tripleploughed.” We may remember in this context the temporal complexity in the Minoan bull-leapers’ fresco described in Chapter . In Homer, temporal complexity is already as sophisticated as it will ever become, if with the exception of the modern and postmodern wilfulness that is intended to throw narratives into disarray. It is therefore more than serendipitous that over a century ago a classical scholar should have pointed to the cinema as analogy to the complex
The linguistic implications of tense and aspect are crucial for any understanding of movement or action in progress implied or expressed in Greek verbs, but an analysis here would be too technical for most readers. Those interested may turn to, e.g., Robert E. Binnick, Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect (New York: Oxford University Press, ), chapter (“Ancient Theories of the Simple Tenses”) and chapter sections d (aspect in Greek) and a (“Aristotelian Aspect”). More specifically: Andrew L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (New York: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ), especially pars. , , and –. Concerning Latin, cf., for just one illustrative example, this comment by the ancient commentator Servius on Virgil, Aeneid .: “he [Virgil] uses verbs with enormous skill; for here he expressed something that could be painted with the present tense; above, he described [in past perfect tense] what could not be painted but only told because the time for it had passed.” The context is the scenes from the Trojan War that Aeneas looks at on Juno’s temple at Carthage (Aeneid .–), to which I turn below. Don Fowler, “Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis,” in Fowler (ed.), Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, examines the Virgilian ecphrasis in detail (–) and quotes Servius ( note ). The original publication of this chapter had been as an article in The Journal of Roman Studies, (), –. Useful overviews of Homer’s complex narrative strategy are Harald Patzer, “Gleichzeitige Ereignisse im homerischen Epos,” in Herbert Eisenberger (ed.), : Festschrift fu¨r Hadwig Hörner zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Heidelberg: Winter, ), –, and Die Formgesetze des homerischen Epos (Stuttgart: Steiner, ), especially – (chapter titled “Bereich der Darstellung durch Sprache”). The latter explains continuous progression, linear stylization of that progression, continuous and simultaneous actions appearing as parallel doubles presented sequentially, and scene divisions. See also, e.g., Cedric H. Whitman and Ruth Scodel, “Sequence and Simultaneity in Iliad N, Ξ, and O,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, (), –, and especially Antonios Rengakos, “Zeit und Gleichzeitigkeit in den homerischen Epen,” Antike und Abendland, (), –.
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Lessing on Text and Image
narration found in Homeric simile and ecphrasis. In his fundamental and still valuable study of Homeric similes, Hermann Fränkel concluded in : A course of action . . . cannot be condensed into a “point.” The impulse to do so anyway, to speak of a “situation,” is based on an essential difference of modern ways of representation from the Homeric one. We are inclined to dissolve steadily continuing actions into an intermittent chain of situations that are almost or completely at rest. Thus we also think that if a simile is inserted into the narrative, it can at most reflect a situation, a momentary image, a particular fruitful single moment of the main action. And yet, Homeric man is hardly able to depict an image that does not move . . .; even the depictions on Achilles’ shield unexpectedly take on cinematographic life [erhalten unversehens kinematographisches Leben]. We, on the other hand, find it difficult to appreciate the progress of events, which proceeds with firm tread, as such; and so the changeful movement of a simile has often been overlooked . . . and thus it was deprived of its best effect.
Fränkel’s obiter dictum about the cinema did not receive much if any attention from Homer scholars. But his comparison is worth remembering in the age of the moving image with its ever-increasing fusion of technological media.
Lessing on Text and Image The title of Lessing’s Laocoon, which we encountered in Chapter , refers to a famous classical statue: the deaths of Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons in the coils of a monstrous sea serpent. The scene is best known from the account in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lessing’s book remains the most
Hermann Fränkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ; rpt. ), . In the immediately following footnote, Fränkel specifically included sound effects (“Geräuschbilder”) alongside images of action (“Handlungs- und Vogangsbilder”). As before, I cite Lessing by page and line numbers according to Wilfried Barner (ed.), Werke –: Laokoon/Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, ; rpt. ). Virgil, Aeneid .–. Literature on the sculpture is immense; the following are among fundamental works (besides numerous others) or provide good first orientations and detailed bibliographies; most have extensive references: Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –, an initial orientation about the work and its restorations and influence; Margarete Bieber, Laocoon: The Influence of the Group since Its Rediscovery, rev. and enlarged ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), a brief essay, first published in , with valuable illustrations; Salvatore Settis, Laocoonte: Fama e stile (Rome: Donzelli, ), including an anthology of sixteenth-century texts (but beginning with Virgil), a report on the restorations, and numerous historic and contemporary images; Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), on ancient and all later contexts,
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
famous examination of the differences between poetry – i.e. all narrative literature – and the visual arts of painting and sculpture. Lessing stated in the final paragraph of his Preface (“Vorrede”) that painting is a kind of abbreviated term for all visual arts, just as “poetry” includes the other verbal arts whose imitation of reality is progressive (“fortschreitend”). Lessing argued that narrative literature can express, or verbally imitate, temporal progressions of actions with the greatest of ease and that this very quality makes the imitation of actions the proper domain of literature. By contrast, he regarded the non-progressive, i.e. static, depiction of states of being or even of actions arrested in certain moments as the proper domain of the visual arts; for him, such works cannot and do not contain movement even when they show something or someone in mid-activity. It follows from this that the two kinds of imitation ought not to be mixed up and that detailed verbal descriptions of static objects are not proper for literature and must remain inferior to the painter’s art. Lessing was not greatly concerned with Simonides, whom he mentioned only briefly in the preface to Laocoon, although he appreciated his wit. Lessing’s idea of the fruitful moment, described in Chapter , is important in this context. Lessing addressed it at various lengths. Early in the third chapter of Laocoon, Lessing wrote that artists, even when they are granted greater permissiveness, will themselves observe moderation in order “that what is most ugly in reality may be turned into something that is beautiful in art.” The artist accordingly is called upon to practice restraint in what he expresses and ought “never to choose an expression from the climactic moment of an action.” Lessing added a little later: “to show the eye anything extreme is to clip the wings of imagination.”
including various types and reconstructions (list at ), and on the Laocoon in German Enlightenment (Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe; in his chapter ); Dorothee Gall and Anja Wolkenhauer (eds.), Laokoon in Literatur und Kunst: Schriften des Symposiums “Laokoon in Literatur und Kunst” vom . . , Universität Bonn (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), including contributions on Laocoon in Greek literature down to Virgil, Laocoon in Latin literature after Virgil, and on Winckelmann and Laocoon. Barner (ed.), Werke –, .–. Lessing includes, here and on his title page, a quotation, in Greek, from Plutarch’s essay On the Glory of the Athenians (Moralia a): poetry and painting differ “in the substance and kinds of their imitations” (hylêi kai tropois mimêseôs). Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), – (in chapter titled “The Theory of Imitation”), traced the influence of Simonides (and Horace) and the resulting approaches to literature and the arts back to the Renaissance. Barner (ed.), Werke –, .–, –, and ; .–. An authorial excursus in Susan Sontag’s historical novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), –, adduces the Laocoon sculpture and, without mentioning Lessing, restates his point about the moment preceding that of the greatest intensity and contrasts it with contemporary artists’ depictions of pain. Sontag’s title character is Sir William Hamilton. The excursus appears in
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Lessing on Text and Image
In the fifth of his Paralipomena, Lessing “corrects” (his term) his division of the “poetical painting” in language and of poetry. I summarize only the parts that concern our topic: Painting describes bodies and, by suggestion through bodies, motions. Poetry describes motions and, by suggestion through motions, bodies. A series of motions aiming toward a final purpose is called a story (Handlung). Such a series of motions is assigned either to one body or to several. If it is in one, it is to be called a simple action; if in several, a collective action. Painting cannot make any claims for simple actions, which remain solely the purview of poetry. By necessity, collective actions belong exclusively to painting. But can collective actions, which occur in space, be excluded from the subjects of poetic poetry? No, they cannot, because their effect on the viewer occurs through some extent of time: the time needed to view and gradually to become aware of the variety shown in a painting. It follows that a poet can, in equal measure, sequentially describe what a viewer can sequentially see in a painting; in turn, collective actions are the true common areas of painting and poetry. Still, they cannot cultivate their common ground in the same way.
This is something quite different from any absolute separation of the two ways of expression: visual vs. verbal. Regardless of any remaining differences in the cultivation of their common ground, to which Lessing then turns with a few other conclusions and observations and with one example each from painting and literature, here he grants painting, and by extension sculpture, the power to express motion after all. As a result, all the arguments before and after Lessing about the inherent temporal immobility inherent in visual arts and the temporal motions and actions told in narrative texts break down – and do so by logical necessity. Earlier, in section VIII of his third Paralipomenon, Lessing had granted poets the right, on a small scale, to describe bodies rather than actions, something that results in their being called “painterly poets” (“was man . . . einen Malerischen Dichter nennet”). Conversely, and on a larger scale, a painter, especially of a historical event depicted on a large canvas, may take the liberty of broadening his momentary subject by including immediately preceding and following moments. This leads to such a painting being
connection with the reality of violent deaths as suffered by Neapolitan revolutionaries, which is anything but esthetically pleasing. Sontag will become important in Chapter . Barner (ed.), Werke –, –, especially .–.. See in this regard also Lessing’s long third Paralipomenon (Barner, –), especially its section III (Barner, –).
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
called “speaking” or “poetic.” This, to Lessing, goes against good taste and can even be repulsive, but the painter takes recourse in a clever trick. This trick is crucial for our topic. It consists, for instance, in his turning away from the main action those figures who make a later movement than the moment of the main action requires or in placing them in such a way that they cannot see the main action in its moment; consequently he leaves them with the [facial or bodily] expression that the preceding moment, which they have witnessed, has caused . . . The painter, with his trick, as much as assumes several areas, several spatial planes; although we see all of his figures in one level space [the canvas], they do not all stand on one level; in one word, his trick is based on perspective.
The equivalent trick of the poet is a change of temporal sequence into the past of his main tale, followed by a return to the main storyline. Today one word, derived from cinema, will immediately suggest itself to any reader for such a narrative strategy: It is a flashback. Both in his published text and in his third and fifth Paralipomena, Lessing ceded one crucial part of his main argument. We might even go so far as to say that, in principle, he vindicated Simonides. We may summarize the matter as a kind of logical sequence in four propositions: . Paintings and sculptures of moving bodies cannot depict any motion in progress. . Paintings and sculptures can illustrate motion by prompting viewers to supply preceding, and often also subsequent, moments of the movement shown by an unmoving body. More specifically, paintings and sculptures of moving bodies are designed for, and depend on, viewers supplying the parts of the action not shown by the work itself; hence the concept of the decisive or fruitful moment. . Consequently, proposition above can be regarded as accurate only on the most elementary level. It imposes such a limited, indeed unsophisticated, perspective on viewing a work of art that it does not even begin to do justice to its creator’s ingenuity and artistry. . Propositions and lead to a specific kind of viewer response before a painting or sculpture that does not show a still life: viewers themselves imagine – i.e. supply, in their mind’s eye – a chronologically coherent
Barner (ed.), Werke –, .–; .–, , and . Barner (ed.), Werke –, .– and .–. As shown by Lessing’s word ehedem (“previously”); Barner (ed.), Werke –, ..
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Lessing on Text and Image
sequence of visual moments that surround and thereby complete the point in time [punctum temporis] the artist chose. After , viewers may be said to construct a mental motion picture from one still image. If we accept this logical deduction, we realize that Lessing is best understood from the perspective of propositions – above (excluding the analogy with motion-picture technology). On the whole, Lessing’s observations are borne out by the series of verbal descriptions of sixty-four paintings on display in an art gallery that appear in the Images of the Greek sophist Philostratus the Elder, written around the early third century . A learned viewer explains to a young boy the content, form, and sophistication of the pictures one after the other. Almost all of them show such complex actions that scholars tended to believe that the images were fictions since no one could actually paint exactly what is being described – until German painter Moritz von Schwind proved this view wrong. What Otto Schönberger wrote about Philostratus’ rhetorical artistry pertains here: Philostratus does not describe the images as much as he interprets them . . . But in this regard Philostratus stands in the ancient tradition of invigorating description, which always tended to a blurring of the “limits of painting and poetry.”. . . He intends to convey to the spectator the illusion that what has been painted is really happening. Thus the rhetorician dissolves spatial juxtaposition into temporal succession, into continuous movement and narration [and more].
These words and Philostratus’ text bear out Lessing’s emphasis on the fruitful moment. They refute Lessing’s larger point about the painter’s
A later series, also called Images, came in a work by Philostratus the Younger, the Elder’s grandson, as he called himself. This series is much shorter because it survives only incomplete. All these ecphrases are collected, in Greek and English, in Arthur Fairbanks (ed. and tr.), Philostratus the Elder: Imagines / Philostratus the Younger: Imagines / Callistratus: Descriptions (London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ; several rpts.). Still fundamental on Philostratus the Elder is Otto Schönberger (ed., tr., comm.), Philostratos: Die Bilder (; rpt. Berlin: De Gruyter, ), with illustrations and a detailed introduction. More recently: Cordula Bachmann, Wenn man die Welt als Gemälde betrachtet: Studien zu den Eikones Philostrats des Älteren (Heidelberg: Verlag Antike, ). The Younger Philostratus has long had a bad reputation among scholars; Squire, “A Picture of Ecphrasis,” attempts a rehabilitation. See Richard Förster (ed.), Moritz von Schwinds philostratische Gemälde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, ). The painter followed Goethe’s text on the paintings, not Philostratus’ own. On this see Förster, “Goethes Abhandlung u¨ber die philostratischen Gemälde,” Goethe-Jahrbuch, (), –. Karl Lehmann-Hartleben, “The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus,” The Art Bulletin, no. (), –, proved that Philostratus described actual paintings. Schönberger (ed.), Philostratos: Die Bilder, and . The entire context (–) is important. My translation “invigorating” does not do complete justice to Schönberger’s term belebend, which literally means “life-giving.”
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
inability to depict rather than merely hint at more than one moment. Schönberger’s specific allusion to the title of Lessing’s book in his affirmation of the “blurring” of the limits which Lessing upheld shows this. On this topic, classical art historian Margarete Bieber wrote decades ago: Lessing’s thesis is that figurative art postulates unity in time and must therefore confine itself within the boundaries of beauty. This theory would make the rendering of movement, action, truth, and character forever inaccessible to figurative art in contrast to poetry. This thesis, by the way, is refuted by the entire art of the Greeks.
This is as sharp as if cut with Ockham’s Razor. Later, Susan Woodford made a comparable statement, adducing photography in support of the ancient painters transcending their limits: A photographic snapshot records a single moment in time. The Greeks and Romans did not have cameras and probably did not have a very rigid concept of what could be seen at any one moment. It is unlikely, therefore, that they found it particularly odd if a single image suggested a number of different things, all of which could not be happening at the same time.
As a reminder that this applies to virtually the entire history of painting, here is a recent ecphrasis by Julian Bell, himself a painter, of Nicholas Poussin’s painting Bacchanalian Revel before a Herm (): Silken flounces flying up, his golden, hers blue, up he kicks, out she twists, his right hand takes her left and the naked man slips through: onward, to pursue the girl in rose who wants to hold back her wilder friend – the one who, helping that drunk girl the goat-man is reaching to grab, hoists up a wine vase she would smash down on his head. Above the goat horns, the old stone god by whose grove they’ve all gathered stands rigid, blindly grinning. Out beyond the leaves hover faraway mountains, and before them a tag-along party of toddlers appears – one already slumped sozzled, and two soon to follow, felled by the grape juice the girl in blue is squeezing.
With all this, we are back to topics addressed in Chapters and . Concerning Homer, classical philologist Oliver Primavesi some time ago reaffirmed, to a large degree, Lessing’s position in connection with the
Bieber, Laocoon, . Susan Woodford, Images of Myths in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), (at beginning of a chapter section entitled “A Synoptic View”). Conversely, Woodford also wrote: “Words can sometimes conjure up images that defy visual representation” (; opening sentence of a chapter entitled “Showing What Cannot Be Seen”). Julian Bell, “A Kinetic Endlessness,” The New York Review of Books (February , ), and , at . This is a review essay on “Poussin and the Dance,” a – exhibition and catalogue. The essay’s title is serendipitous for our context.
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Lessing on Text and Image
ecphrasis of Achilles’ shield. Primavesi offers a careful analysis of both Lessing’s passages on the shield and of Homer’s own lines; his article is highly recommended. Still, it seems to represent an unfruitful moment in classical scholarship as conducted in the time of moving images, not least because it appeared in an essay collection on current topics among interdisciplinary approaches to the study of antiquity. Moreover, some classical scholars now acknowledge the existence of cinema and of its applicability to a greater appreciation of ancient art and literature. Before Primavesi, Anthony Snodgrass had written about part of the archery contest in Book of the Iliad: Here there is a foreshadowing of a future event, of a kind that has become familiar from any number of lesser works of fiction since Homer, especially in the cinema: part of the intention is to give the reader or viewer an inkling of what is going to happen, and this is not far different from the way in which early Greek artists use the synoptic method to advise or remind the viewer of what will happen presently.
Some pages later, Snodgrass addressed ancient visual artists’ “‘homage’ or ‘credit’ to be shown towards Homer’s version (rather after the manner of the modern film director’s passing gesture of tribute to his own or others’ earlier work) through references to minor features of his account which are unlikely to have been present in any other form of the story.” That same year Alexander McKay, one of the great Virgil scholars of the late twentieth century, began an essay on the shield of Aeneas in Book of the Aeneid in this manner: This paper will argue that Vergil’s great shield of Aeneas, divinely crafted by the Lord of Fire for the fated champion, follows patterns and conventions favoured by Roman artists and that the shield’s panels provide a veritable “filmic” documentary of Italic history and Roman triumphs.
Oliver Primavesi, “Bild und Zeit: Lessings Poetik des natu¨rlichen Zeichens und die Homerische Ekphrasis,” in Ju¨rgen Paul Schwindt (ed.), Klassische Philologie inter disciplinas: Aktuelle Konzepte zu Gegenstand und Methode eines Grundlagenfaches (Heidelberg: Winter, ), –. Primavesi rightly emphasized the verb tenses in the ecphrasis of Achilles’ shield. So did, years later, Irene J. F. de Jong, “Pluperfects and the Artist in Ekphrases: From the Shield of Achilles to the Shield of Aeneas (and Beyond),” Mnemosyne, th ser., (), –. She twice uses the filmic term “zoom in” as a matter of course (–). Anthony Snodgrass, Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), and . The contest of the bow will be my topic in Chapter . Alexander G. McKay, “Non enarrabile textum? The Shield of Aeneas and the Triple Triumph of : Aeneid .–,” in Hans-Peter Stahl (ed.), Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context (London: Duckworth, ), –; quotation at .
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
It is instructive to compare McKay’s perspective, made as a matter of course, with one by Richard Heinze, one of the greatest Virgil scholars from the early twentieth century. In his book on Virgil’s epic technique, which appeared in three editions in , , and , Heinze observed about Virgilian ecphrasis: “The common factor of all kinds of description is that it delays the progress of the action; the reader stands still and examines the details of a picture.” Clearly, Heinze’s words fit the times in which they were written: The era in which a cinematic view of literature was still beyond the horizon. Today, awareness of the pre-cinematic nature of classical epic and other textual and visual arts seems to be gaining ground. There is no reason to dissent from the following assessment by Andrew Horton, an American film scholar, screenwriter, and teacher of screenwriting: “Homer was the best screenwriter ever,” I like to say whenever I teach screenwriting. True, Homer was blind and never saw a film in his life. But what I then point out is that Homer gave us all we need to know in creative cinematic narrative in terms of life as a journey towards our own Ithacas after our own Trojan Wars and adventures and misadventures.
German director Alexander Kluge once put the matter in comparable terms: film, to my understanding, has to do with something you can see and with something that is invisible. The best moments in film, connected with montage, show something that is not directly visible. It is between the
Quoted from Richard Heinze, Virgil’s Epic Technique, tr. Hazel Harvey, David Harvey, and Fred Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . The translation is of the third edition. Heinze’s chapter (“Presentation”) in which this passage occurs is worth reading from our point of view. He deals with various aspects of Virgilian narrative, including vividness; continuity, simultaneous and secondary actions; synchronous, past, and future actions. See, more recently, Riggs Alden Smith, The Primacy of Vision in Virgil’s Aeneid (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). As may be seen in, e.g., Karel Thein, Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge (London and New York: Routledge, ). Thein refers to the cinema throughout and adduces, with greater or smaller approval, several instances of classical scholarship (including McKay) that make similar connections. Nevertheless, he seems to remain conservative: “There is a real difference between the cinematic and the ecphrastic detail, the latter being closer to a photographic punctum that puts our mind in motion without itself moving” (). Even more conservative is Myers, Homer’s Divine Audience. He is aware of cinematic approaches to Homer but mentions them only in passing: “Many scholars have shown the usefulness [!] of describing these shifts [in battle narratives] in cinematic terms” (). Myers repeatedly calls Homer’s Zeus a “director” who stages actions, but only in theatrical terms. Andrew Horton, review of L. A. Alexander, Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age of Visual Culture (Brooklyn, ), Film & History, no. (), –, at . Homer frequently appears in this book.
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Lessing on Text and Image
pictures, and your imagination makes it jump to a second reality, which is the reality of filmmaking. Homer was blind, and therefore he was a very good poet. He had invisible pictures in his mind, and he was able to write about them.
Kluge’s logic about a blind man writing may be questionable, but his enthusiasm for his chosen medium and for literature is not in doubt. Kluge is a notable public intellectual in Germany: not only a major screenwriter and director but also a philosopher, cultural and social critic, and author of essays and fiction. We can, of course, never know if Homer, whoever he was, had invisible pictures in his head. But attentive readers of tales do have such pictures in their heads, even if they are not always consciously aware of them. To restate what is by now obvious: While reading, we create our own mental films. At least some classical scholars might find themselves in agreement with Kluge if they were to come across his words. Here are two telling examples, both dealing with action scenes in Homer’s Iliad. Mark Edwards commented on Achilles’ encounter with Tros as follows: “Like a good movie director, Homer has given us a close-up of Tros, then a wide shot (the narrator’s comment on the folly of his hopes), then another close-up (Achilles’ furious face), then a return to focus on the on-going action.” A few years before, Hans van Wees had gone into greater detail about Homeric battle descriptions: Homer constructs his battle scenes much as a film director might do. He opens with a panoramic image of the forces drawing up and advancing, then zooms in on the action, and thereafter cuts back and forth between clos-ups of the heroes . . . and wide-angle views of the army at large. During close-ups the general action recedes into the background or falls outside the frame.
Candace Wirt, “‘I Am a Patriot of the s’: An Interview with Alexander Kluge,” Notebook (online journal; February , ); https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/i-am-a-patriot-of-the-s-aninterview-with-alexander-kluge; unpaginated. Mark W. Edwards, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt. ), (with note ). The passage is Iliad .–. Cf. Edwards, , on Iliad .. Similarly, George Alexander Gazis, “Homer and the Art of Cinematic Warfare,” in Andrea Capra and Lucia Floridi (eds.), Intervisuality: New Approaches to Greek Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –, at : “these scenes [of heroic duels in the Iliad] represent the equivalent of the cinematic technique of slow-motion zooming . . . It is precisely this zooming-in technique that brings the narrative into life.” Gazis says very little else about the cinematic in Homer. Hans van Wees, “Homeric Warfare,” in Ian Morris and Barry B. Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden: Brill, ; rpt. ), –; the quotation is at –. Joachim Latacz, Kampfparänese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampfwirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
Concerning the Odyssey, Antonios Rengakos has stated: The gradual convergence of the two strands of the story, the adventures of Odysseus and the Telemachy, is effected with astonishing dexterity and the background material is artfully distributed throughout various parts of the first half of the epic. The most remarkable examples are the great flashback of the so-called Apologoi, Odysseus’ long narration at the court of Alcinous, and the complex embedding of various temporal levels in the digressions.
So we can agree with the conclusion by Jenny Strauss Clay: “Many scholars have called attention to the cinematic character of Homer’s narrative.” In this context one particular point that Philostratus’ art expert makes to the youngster he is leading through the gallery is important to remember. Before an image of the bloody deaths of Cassandra and Agamemnon, he draws attention to the limitation of the theater vis-à-vis painting: “And if we understand this as a play [drâma], my son, then a great tragedy has been represented in something small; but if we consider it as a painting [graphê], you will see in all this even more.” Today, the conclusion is unavoidable that it is not the stage but the cinema that enables us to see even more in classical art and literature than the ancients did. Or could.
After Lessing: Eisenstein’s Homer Homer is a touchstone for both Lessing and Eisenstein. Homeric epic provided Eisenstein with the, to him, conclusive proof of the unity of text and image that is now possible. Homer’s compositional method is its best illustration. Eisenstein devoted a long essay, titled “Laocoön” in English, to Lessing’s book. It provided Eisenstein with the impulse to examine Homeric epic for its cinematism:
(Munich: Beck, ), , considered a still camera with zoom lens as modern analogy of Homeric narrative but misses the obvious (zoom!) and better analogy of the film camera. His chapter, on the epic bards’ narrative techniques in battle scenes (Latacz, –) is still a fundamental analysis of simultaneous and sequential descriptions of Homeric fighters and armies in action. Antonios Rengakos, “Homer and the Historians: The Influence of Epic Narrative Technique on Herodotus and Thucydides,” in Franco Montanari and Rengakos (eds.), La poésie épique grecque: Métamorphoses d’un genre littéraire (Vandoeuvres-Genève: Fondation Hardt, ), –, at . Clay, Homer’s Trojan Theater, . Jan Telg genannt Kortmann, “Mass Combat in Ancient Epic,” in Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann (eds.), Structures of Epic Poetry, vol. : Configurations; pt. I: “Battle Scenes” (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –, lists examples at note . Philostratus the Elder, Images ... The subject appeared often in ancient literature and painting and on the stage. Schönberger (ed.), Philostratos: Die Bilder, –, lists references (in his commentary on this picture). “Laocoön” is in Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. : Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor; tr. Michael Glenny (; rpt. London: Tauris, ), –. For information about the text see Taylor, “Note on Sources,” and Naum Kleiman, “On the Story of
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After Lessing: Eisenstein’s Homer
The final and conclusive proof that Laocoön deals with the same problems as those that concern us here is, of course, the subtlety with which the essay examines Homer’s methods from entirely the same standpoint that we have adopted in our enquiries. No doubt we would not have dwelt on Lessing’s work in such detail, had not one of our aims been to demonstrate the similarity between the methods of montage and this ancient, seminal epic [i.e. the Iliad].
Eisenstein briefly turns to the madness of Ajax in Timomachus’ (or Timanthes’) painting and to the sufferings of Philoctetes, which Lessing dealt with in Chapters III and IV. Eisenstein then quotes a passage from Chapter VI on the Laocoon sculpture. He approves of Lessing’s conclusion that “Virgil’s description of Laocoön preceded the sculptural composition and that the sculptors followed the poet in creating the group, not the other way round.” This is not necessarily the case, but the verbal – i.e. the oral tales about the Trojan War – did precede the visual. Eisenstein’s understanding of Lessing thus remains valid. So Eisenstein repeats his main point, “an exact congruence with the concept of montage as we have demonstrated it, in the contrast of the overall depiction of the fight with the alternating consecutive images of the fighters” in the sculpture group. Eisenstein’s cunning juxtaposition of alternating and consecutive says it all. In classical rhetorical terms, it amounts to a callida iunctura: a clever clash of unexpected or even contradictory terms that leads to a deeper understanding. Eisenstein becomes almost rhapsodic about Lessing (and Homer) immediately afterwards. In his crucial Chapter XVI, Lessing went through several of Homer’s descriptions, beginning with the Greek ships. These are either black or fast or many-oared and black, but Homer does not show them sailing along. A painter, Lessing added, would need several paintings
‘Montage ,’” both in Towards a Theory of Montage, xi–xii and xvii–xx. Antonio Somaini, “Cinema as ‘Dynamic Mummification,’ History as Montage: Eisenstein’s Media Archaeology,” in Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. Kleiman and Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), – and – (notes), variously identifies the text as a chapter or chapter section in Eisenstein’s intended book on film history (–, ). The “Laocoön” text is titled Osnovnoy fenomen kino (“The Basic Phenomenon of Cinema”) in its Russian edition; information from Ada Ackerman, “What Renders Daumier’s Art so Cinematic for Eisenstein?” in Eisenstein (ed.), Notes for a General History of Cinema, – and – (notes), at ; source reference at note (but with questionable page reference; contrast Somaini, note ). Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” . Montage, Eisenstein’s (and others’) term for film editing, has been applied to classical literature on some occasions. The article by Fred Mench (reference in Chapter , note ) does so for Virgil. Elizabeth Jones, “Horace: Early Master of Montage,” Arion, n.s. no. (Winter, ), –, is on Odes .. Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” . Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” .
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
to show a ship’s motion. Eisenstein translates this circumstance into cinematism: In other words, the ship is not depicted in detail but we are presented with an image of the ship through its various actions (sailing, departure, landfall [sic: in this order]). This portrayal . . . is not conveyed as a datum but as a generalising image . . . That is to say, literally five or six montage sequences for the image of the ship sailing on the waves, five or six for its departure, five or six for its landfall. In the end, we have the image of the ship, though nowhere is it portrayed as such. Now try to deny the identity of this method with the film techniques described above!
Eisenstein’s challenge to his reader proves his enthusiasm for Homer, Lessing, and cinema all at once. But Eisenstein’s understanding of montage in Homer is, in principle, nothing new today, even if the terminology he uses in this context is new to practically all scholars of classical literature and art. In , for example, eminent British archeologist Sir John L. Myres wrote about Homer’s “frieze-composition” in analogy to ancient visual arts. Lessing went into greater detail about the chariot of the goddess Hera. (Lessing and, following him, Eisenstein, call her Juno.) The goddess Hebe readies it. I juxtapose Homer’s lines and Eisenstein’s interpretation. Homer: Then Hebe in speed set about the chariot the curved wheels eight-spoked and brazen, with an axle of iron both ways. Golden is the wheel’s felly imperishable, and outside it is joined, a wonder to look upon, the brazen running-rim, and the silver naves revolve on either side of the chariot, whereas the car itself is lashed fast with plaiting of gold and silver, with double chariot rails that circle about it, and the pole of the chariot is of silver, to whose extremity Hebe made fast the golden and splendid yoke, and fastened the harness, golden and splendid . . . Eisenstein: Homer . . . makes Hebe put the chariot together before our eyes. We see the wheels, the axles, the bodywork, the shafts and the harness, not in their
Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” . J. L. Myres, “Homeric Art,” The Annual of the British School at Athens, (), –, at (on Odyssey .–), (“frieze decoration of the Shield” of Achilles), and (“battlefriezes, in the Iliad, composed of many single combats”). Homer, Iliad .–; quoted from Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, –. The felly (or felloe) is the exterior rim.
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After Lessing: Eisenstein’s Homer
assembled state [i.e. as a painting would show the chariot] but as Hebe is putting them together. The poet even describes the wheels in several stages; he draws our attention consecutively to the eight copper spokes, the golden rims, the brass tyres, the silver hubs, and to each part separately.
The last italicized words prompt a comment from Eisenstein in a footnote: “That is to say there are literally four consecutive shots of the wheels, shots in which each one emphasises compositionally some aspect that is decisive for the particular shot, i.e. the characteristics, in turn, of the spokes, the rim, the tyres or the hubs.” That these are in the nature of close-ups is such an elementary fact that Eisenstein does not even point it out. His analysis of Homer’s chariot passage continues: It could be said that since there is more than one wheel, as much extra time is spent on describing them as would be needed in reality to assemble all the wheels, compared to the time needed to assemble one wheel.
This sentence receives a detailed footnote. Eisenstein begins it by admitting that he is overstating the case: “This last thought is more of a frivolous thought than a profound reflection.” But what comes next deserves our attention: I do think, though, that the important point here is not the length of ‘footage’ that would be needed for ‘all four wheels’. It is something different: the reason why so many montage sequences [in Homer’s text] are used to draw our attention to is that in the image of a chariot that is being formed in our mind’s eye, it is precisely the wheels which play the most essential part! Therefore it is both in the amount of ‘footage’ and, more importantly, by virtue of the method by which they are not ‘depicted’ but the image of them is ‘built up’ that they merit this ‘special treatment’.
It is not only the chariot that is being formed but also our mental image of its being formed. The two become inseparable. Any formation is by its nature a process: something in motion. And for this reason, as Eisenstein more than implies, it is the wheels of a chariot or wagon that express its movement, its speed. The chariot’s car may not be moving all that much from moment to moment, much less be rocking wildly about. But its whirring wheels, whose spokes have become indistinguishable to an observer, powerfully demonstrate its action – and they do so more immediately and vividly than any other aspect of a racing chariot could do, not
Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” . Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” note . Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” . Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” note ; transliterations of the Russian words for “chariot” and “wheels,” provided by the translator, are here omitted.
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
even the horses’ fluttering manes or flying tails. Anyone who has ever noticed the side view of a stagecoach racing across the plains in a Western will agree with Eisenstein. The spokes of the wheels move faster and faster and then appear to slow down and stand still for just one moment before reversing direction. They move faster and faster again until another reversal of direction, and another. This phenomenon is commonly known as wagon-wheel effect. What scientists have concluded about it fits Eisenstein’s view more closely than might be thought at first: The illusion of wheels or other radial patterns rotating backward in continuous light . . . suggests that the human visual system processes sequential episodes of information rather than a continuous temporal flow. In addition to accounting for this remarkable illusion, a strategy of vision that parses the world in this way can explain why movies are so realistic . . . and how we detect motion (by comparing the position of the same objects in sequential episodes).
The wheels are the best proof of motion because they make the motion’s essence visible. Eisenstein’s frivolous thought leads to a serious and even profound observation. That a point about an ancient case of inherent cinematism was prompted by a passage in the earliest work in the Western tradition is in itself ample justification for Eisenstein’s cinematism and for any interpretation of classical texts from his perspective, unusual as it may at first appear to traditionalists. A charge of anachronism is beside the point; the point is the greater appreciation of a work that artistic and technical developments have now made possible. Concerning Homer, Eisenstein’s appreciation may even exceed Lessing’s.
Catullus and Virgil A practical demonstration of the cinematic nature of a long text passage is appropriate at this point. The one I have chosen is the centerpiece of Catullus’ Poem , whose main topic is the marriage of Peleus, one of the Argonauts, and the sea goddess Thetis. They are the future parents of Achilles. Their marriage bed is decorated with a coverlet. Since Peleus’ palace is supernaturally splendid, it is appropriate that this coverlet should fit its semi-divine surroundings. Accordingly, it receives a detailed
Quoted from Dale Purves, Joseph A. Paydarfar, and Timothy J. Andrews, “The Wagon Wheel Illusion in Movies and Reality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, (April ), –, at (in “Conclusion”). Several online sites have explanations and demonstrations.
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Catullus and Virgil
ecphrasis. We are not told who designed or wove the images decorating it, but this imaginary artist cannot have been far behind Homer’s Hephaestus. The coverlet contains eleven scenes of a progressive narrative. The Athenian hero Theseus leaves Athens, sails to Crete to kill the Minotaur in its labyrinth, and succeeds with the help of the Cretan princess Ariadne, who has fallen in love with him. They sail back to the mainland, but Theseus abandons Ariadne on Naxos and returns home only with his fellow Athenians. The god Bacchus then finds Ariadne and later marries her. Catullus’ narrative interweaving of this myth in his text exceeds Homer’s artistry with the shield of Achilles in the Iliad and Virgil’s with the shield of Aeneas in the Aeneid, to say nothing of Jason’s cloak in Apollonius’ Argonautica. Catullus’ text extends over almost two hundred lines. The narrations of individual scenes are interrupted twice by speeches which belong to specific images: Ariadne’s lament and the instructions of Aegeus, Theseus’ father, to his son concerning the latter’s return. The complexity of the images being described may best be shown in a detailed outline. Readers may wish to have the text or at least a translation at hand. Here is a possible screenplay of the ecphrasis; line references are in brackets: Scene (–) This consists of two parts. An first reveals Ariadne on the beach and Theseus’ ship on the far horizon (a). Without a cut, we
Catullus .– (the ecphrasis proper, without introductory or concluding lines), with speakers’ insets at – (Ariadne) and – (Aegeus). The visuals comprise lines of the poem’s . Below, I refer to the text parenthetically by line numbers. Scholarship on this intriguing poem is extensive. Detailed appreciations, with numerous references, are in Hans Peter Syndikus, Catull: Eine Interpretation, vol. : Die großen Gedichte (–) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ; several rpts.), – (– on the ecphrasis); Julia Haig Gaisser, “Threads in the Labyrinth: Competing Views and Voices in Catullus ,” The American Journal of Philology, (), –; rpt. in Gaisser (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Catullus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Below, my references will be to its original publication. Clifford Weber, “Two Chronological Contradictions in Catullus ,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, (), –, is an indispensable earlier study of the poem’s most intriguing aspect. More recently: Katherine Wasdin, “Weaving Time: Ariadne and the Argo in Catullus, C. ,” Helios, (), –. On the poem see further James J. O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Michaela Schmale, Bilderreigen und Erzähllabyrinth: Catulls Carmen (Munich: Saur, ), is an entire monograph on the poem. The ecphrasis of the basket in Moschus, Europa (Idyll ) –, is a Greek example on a smaller scale; on this see Fowler, “Narrate and Describe,” . A longer demonstration comparable to what follows here, although not involving an ecphrasis, will be applied to the topic of Chapter .
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Motion Images in Ecphrases close in on her (b: ) and return to a. There is a hint at what preceded this scene: Ariadne’s awakening (). Scene (–) Ariadne in , looking toward the far-away ship; then, without any cuts, camera movements into - or - on various parts of her figure: head, chest, belt, feet. Ariadne’s inner turmoil can easily be shown by a nervous – i.e. hand-held – camera, resulting in unstable views of her. to Scene (–a) Explanatory in nebulous images, indicating her emotional state: Ariadne is practically in love with Theseus at the time he leaves the Piraeus, Athens’ harbor; i.e. before she even sets eyes on him. Her disquiet (–) appears again via an unstable camera. This scene’s flashback in turn leads via another to Scene (b–) An equally brief takes Theseus from his departure to his landing on Crete. His heroic determination is rendered in a stable image. Line is a masterstroke, connecting, in time, Ariadne and Theseus while they are still geographically apart: illa tempestate (a, belonging with Ariadne) and quo tempore (b, with Theseus). The heroic adjective ferox in between primarily belongs with Theseus, but Ariadne, too, is savage with grief (as we know from Scenes –) and emotional anticipation (as we know from Scene ). There was no punctuation between clauses in antiquity, so ferox is the very pivot on which the references to time, one for each character, turn. to Scene (–) This scene is another but much longer . It reveals the backstory that is crucial for what preceded and for what will follow and, for that reason, is extremely complex. Its parts are the following: . (–): exposition: Androgeus’ death in Athens leads to the slaughter of Athenian youths in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. This is best rendered by a brief indicating time passing, a device familiar from such a cliché as leaves falling from a calendar. . (–): first part of action: Theseus’ arrival before King Minos in his palace, where Ariadne catches her first glimpse of him. This is shown in a
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Catullus and Virgil
of Theseus from an objective (or observer’s) angle, e.g. from the sidelines, which then turns via a into a - on Ariadne’s face as she looks at him. to . (–): flashback within flashback: First, the emotional effect of Theseus’ appearance on the innocent and virginal girl. The content of these lines is best rendered with a lingering (but not too long!) - on Ariadne’s face because it cannot be shown. Second, the physical effect: Ariadne’s sighs, fears, pallor. The apostrophe in these lines to the God of Love who has caused it all is best omitted. There is no grammatical closure (full stop) at the end of line , indicating that things are in flux and inexorably move to their next phase. Hence a back to .. ctd. (–): second part of action, with inset of epic simile and extremely brief new flashback (for this narrative level only): Theseus enters the labyrinth, kills the Minotaur, and returns by means of Ariadne’s thread. The heroic rapidity with which this occurs is expressed in the epic simile of a storm (–), which stands in for the act of killing. This can be an : a - on a tree or trees before wind-drivenclouds. Such nature imagery is by now a screen cliché and therefore best omitted. (If it must be included, show the usual, but as briefly as possible.) There is another extremely brief at : a hint at Ariadne giving Theseus her ball of string. The danger of the labyrinth (tecti . . . inobservabilis error, ) is mentioned after Theseus has escaped from the labyrinth (pedem sospes . . . reflexit, ). to . (–): third part of action: The narrator’s apostrophe to himself is in the nature of a reminder to get back on the main narrative track (Scenes –) and sets the stage for a rapid summary of what happens after Theseus’ escape from the labyrinth: Ariadne’s farewell from her sister and mother and avoidance of her father, their arrival on Naxos, Theseus’ abandonment of her. All this might be rendered in a quick to indicate the couple’s hasty departure from Crete. At the end of . we are back where we left off: Ariadne looking across the sea. The montage of . then leads via either a , , or (e.g. a ) to Scene (–) A , with appropriate camera movements, on Ariadne from observer’s point of view as she runs along the beach, climbs up hills, and looks out to sea. The main part of this scene is taken up by her lament,
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Motion Images in Ecphrases which, if a visual equivalent were to be included, ought to be in the nature of a hectic montage, with tilted angles, rapid editing, images going out of or coming into focus, zooms in and out on some of the things or creatures she mentions: stormy seas including equivalents for Scylla and Charybdis, savage animals, the Minotaur, gods, etc. The end should be a on Ariadne, perhaps now exhaustedly lying on the ground, that turns into an as the camera begins an into Scene (–) This brief scene serves as a transition from earth to sky: Jupiter nods his assent to Ariadne’s prayer for Theseus’ doom. Since no god has appeared here before, Cupid having been omitted from Scene ., Jupiter is best omitted as well. This is not a problem in that Catullus describes the god’s will by its physical manifestations (–), which may be shown in another brief . or across the sea to Scene (–) Theseus arrives home but without having exchanged his ship’s black sails for white ones. The meaning of this occurs in a , which contains Aegeus’ speech to Theseus before he sets off on his dangerous voyage. The speech culminates and ends in Aegeus’ exhortation about the sails. to Scene (–) Aegeus’ death: he throws himself from a cliff, believing Theseus dead. The cut into this scene should be abrupt, perhaps shocking, to do justice to Catullus’ own sudden at (a strong contrast, more than a mere “but”), which opens this scene. The brevity of the scene reinforces the shock. or - into Scene (–) Theseus arrives in his father’s palace and discovers his death. This fulfills Ariadne’s wish for his own suffering in retaliation for hers. An objective could into a - on Theseus as he realizes what has happened; the close-up could be extended for a few moments as awareness sinks in, thus paralleling an earlier close-up on Ariadne’s anguish. (Theseus does not, of course, know or find out that Jupiter has agreed to Ariadne’s plea.) Since this is the final appearance of Theseus on the coverlet, a on Theseus could turn into a as the camera retreats from him and finally leaves him as a tiny figure in .
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Catullus and Virgil
to Scene (–) Back to Ariadne on Naxos (as in Scenes –): she is still looking out over the sea as Theseus’ ship recedes toward the horizon – a remarkable moment of time actually either standing still or being rewound, as it were, after all that has been told in the flashback scenes and in Theseus’ arrival in Athens. Scenes –, or at least –, now look like an extended - . Then an abrupt – again Catullus’ at () – into a frontal of the arrival of Bacchus and his entourage before Ariadne, which leads to a happy ending (of sorts): the god is in love with her and will marry her. The ruckus made by his followers, Satyrs, Sileni, Maenads, and their various activities can be rendered in a variety of , - on animal parts, writhing snakes, singing and dancing, and the like. All this will make for a suitably dramatic climax.
No ancient painting or mosaic could ever show such complexity, let alone encompass all the temporal and geographic changes, not even in a large picture. Achilles’ shield was not meant to be realistic, either. The Alexander mosaic mentioned in Chapter is larger than any coverlet would be, even one that is spread, as here, across a double bed, but the mosaic contains only one overall moment. Ancient painters had no problem expressing different moments in time and different settings in one image as indicated in Chapter , but Catullus outdoes them all. Chronologically, he even preceded the most advanced stages of Roman painting, which flourished from the age of Augustus to the destruction of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the surrounding countryside. As Hans Peter Syndikus observed: “none of the descriptions of images in the epics and epyllia [short epics] known to us even approximately reaches the extent of its surrounding plot,” as this one does. But Catullus’ ecphrasis hardly remains just that. He “soon accompanies the description . . . with interpreting words and then completely drops the form of description in favor of a wide-ranging narrative immersion into the new topic.” This immersion encompasses both past and future – hence the complex flashback structure and the extraordinary flash-forward emphasized above. This is revealed only when we return to Ariadne on the beach. The result: “While Catullus was unfolding a great variety of incidents, time
Syndikus, Catull, note . Syndikus, Catull, . Cf. Syndikus, Catull, (“extensive looks backwards and forwards reveal a conscious turning away from linear telling”) and (“Catullus freely roams into past and future” when describing the consequences of Ariadne’s curse).
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
on the beach of Naxos had stood still, as it were.” It is therefore wholly appropriate that Julia Haig Gaisser should use the cinema term flashback as a matter of course throughout her analysis of the structure of Catullus’ lines on the coverlet. What she concludes about its appearance and the effect of the ecphrasis on us is revealing: The coverlet . . . is really two tapestries in one. The wedding guests have seen the two scenes embroidered on it; we have seen those, as well as three narrative episodes amplifying and embellishing them . . . One scene shows Ariadne on the shore and Theseus sailing away; the other the arrival of Bacchus . . . The coverlet for us is more complicated . . . On our coverlet, too, are conflicting and unresolved voices and points of view hardly visible (or not visible at all) to the wedding guests . . . It is only we, the external audience, who see the narrative episodes . . . In the strange world of the ecphrasis the laws of time and space . . . are compressed and contravened.
This is an excellent assessment, not least because it emphasizes how disappointing this coverlet, were it real, would be: only two scenes! That is hardly impressive to anyone remembering how complex Homeric ecphrases had already been. So the imaginative visuals that Catullus’ sophisticated composition evokes in our mind’s eye via the mental vision in Ariadne’s recapitulation (flashbacks) and the poet’s or narrator’s look ahead (flash-forward) are far more attractive. Gaisser was right in repeatedly using the film term flashback for her explanations. But would her sensitive interpretation not have been even more revealing had she concentrated on a visual approach to her text that modern media now make easy? Gaisser’s theoretical point of view is mainly narratological, with
Syndikus, Catull, . Specifically: Gaisser, “Threads in the Labyrinth,” (with “flashforwards”), , , , note , and . So did, on a smaller scale in a shorter article, Andrew Laird, “Sounding Out Ecphrasis: Art and Text in Catullus ,” The Journal of Roman Studies, (), –, at and especially . Schmale, Bilderreigen und Erzähllabyrinth, uses film terminology only intermittently (and rather half-heartedly): “ein zeitlicher und räumlicher Schnitt” (), “filmschnittartig” (), “Ru¨ckblende” (). That prolepses, as ancient rhetoricians termed literary flash-forwards, were a familiar phenomenon is evident from, e.g., Stephen [J.] Harrison, “Picturing the Future: The Proleptic Ekphrasis from Homer to Vergil,” in Harrison (ed.), Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, and “Picturing the Future Again: Proleptic Ekphrasis in Silius’ Pvnica,” in Anthony Augoustakis (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Silius Italicus (Leiden: Brill, ), –. Earlier, Ann L. T. Bergren, “Odyssean Temporality: Many (Re)Turns,” in Carl Rubino and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine (eds.), Approaches to Homer (Austin: University of Texas Press, ; rpt. ), –, had examined analepses and prolepses in the Odyssey from a narratological point. Her essay is also in Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought (Washington, : Center for Hellenic Studies / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –. Gaisser, “Threads in the Labyrinth,” –.
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Catullus and Virgil
emphasis on focalization. There is nothing wrong with this, except perhaps the narratologists’ dependence on an array of turgid terminology that tends to obfuscate more than it reveals to all but dedicated initiates. (Gaisser, to her credit, avoids it.) The concept of a point-of-view shot, for instance, is as telling as any kind of focalization. Andrew Laird has observed, quite correctly, that scholars are wrong when they “claim that Catullus poorly describes a picture, forgets he is describing a picture, or. . . is not describing a picture at all.” His strategy to clear Catullus of such charges is to distinguish between what he calls “obedient” and “disobedient” ecphrasis and to postulate Catullus’ use of the latter: “Disobedient ecphrasis . . . breaks free from the discipline of the imagined object and offers less opportunity for it to be consistently visualized or translated adequately into an actual work of art.” This is a clever perspective, but is it necessary? For one thing, it skirts the notion that Catullus, and by implication other authors, was not or only insufficiently in control of what he was composing. Here the following view of ancient epic poets is much more to the point: their “insistent attacks on fixed boundaries and definitions . . . subjecting characters and actions to constantly changing perspectives and frames of reference. That is why the shift of narrative voice must be noted with care.” For another thing, Laird himself states that a supposedly disobedient echprasis offers less opportunity. If we approach the matter from a filmic perspective, we can easily see that it offers more opportunity, at least for our understanding of it today. Laird also states: “Sound, movement and temporality are characteristically open to verbal narrative, but closed to visual media.” In a note immediately following this sentence, he refers readers to Lessing’s Laocoon. Concerning antiquity, the statement is
Laird, “Sounding Out Ecphrasis,” , with examples of such scholarship in note . Quotations from Laird, “Sounding Out Ecphrasis,” . Cf., for a somewhat different but related approach, Barbara Weiden Boyd, “Non enarrabile textum: Ecphrastic Trespass and Narrative Ambiguity in the Aeneid,” Vergilius, (), –. As she states (): “the intrusion of one plot into another [i.e. in the relations between main plot and ecphrastic tale] creates a complex narrative fabric, in which meanings can be and are often interwoven, inextricable, and confused.” Boyd, note , cites her source for the term trespass. Quoted from Frederick Ahl, “Homer, Vergil, and Complex Narrative Structures: An Essay,” Illinois Classical Studies, (), –, at . Soon after, he speaks of the poets’ “verbal and metrical talents and massive learning.” Disobedience seems out of place. Most recently, Sophia Papaioannou, “Temporality and Ecphrastic Narrative in the Aeneid,” in Richard Faure, SimonPierre Valli, and Arnaud Zucker (eds.), Conceptions of Time in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –, examines “chronological regressions and violations of linearity” () in three ecphrases, including that of Aeneas’ shield. Laird, “Sounding Out Ecphrasis,” and note .
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
correct in a strict or literal sense only; in a broader sense, it becomes questionable. And it is false for the visual arts after the end of the s, when sound arrived for the cinema. Laird writes as a philologist, but his insights into Catullus could only have been enriched had he been more in sympathy with the art of the moving image (and its sounds). He is right to emphasize, in the title and in the body of his article, the importance of sound, as when he writes: “Direct speech is not to be found in the narration of any other ancient ecphrasis.” Does this insight not beg for an understanding from a filmic perspective, in which sound and image coexist and, more to the point, often even depend on each other, not least since flashback has become virtually unavoidable in describing a complex narrative? As early as , for example, Michael Putnam used it prominently in his long study of Catullus . But its use for literature is only a later analogy of its use for the cinema, which began in . The word’s earliest occurrence had come in . Literary scholars now routinely employ the term even when they are barely thinking of the cinema. In addition to all this, almost all but the briefest flashbacks in film are of a “disobedient” nature in that they easily abandon any strict, and strictly limited, perspective – usually that of the character who verbally introduces it – and take on a narrative independence. Often, they contain images of sights or facts that their narrator could not have seen or known. Such “disobedience,” if this kind of narrative within a larger narrative really is such a thing, indeed enhances the quality and complexity of the entire work’s story structure. The ultimate example of this in film history may well be Max Ophu¨ls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (), based on the story by Stefan Zweig and superior by far to its source. Earlier and later instances of the complex ecphrasis of Catullus may be found in Greek and Roman visual arts as well. Here, too, a cinematic perspective may be useful. I mention only two examples, along with
Laird, “Sounding Out Ecphrasis,” . Michael C. J. Putnam, “The Art of Catullus ,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, (), –. See Putnam, (in section heading) and (on .–: “a long flashback”). Cf. A. M. Snodgrass, Narration and Allusion in Archaic Greek Art (The Eleventh J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture; London: Leopard’s Head Press, ), : “when a writer adopts (as Homer does) the technique of the ‘flashback.’” Cf. Antonios Rengakos’ comment on the Odyssey quoted in note . On this see the Oxford English Dictionary s.v. “flashback, n.” (: a burning car) and (cinema). Its filmic use was preceded by the synonym cut-back, first attested in (OED s.v. “cutback, n.” ). So, in the case of Catullus , does Peter Green (tr. and comm.), The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), . Green, , characterizes Ariadne’s dealings with Theseus as “a series of vivid snapshots.” I deal with this film in detail in Ovid on Screen, –, with extensive references.
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Catullus and Virgil
scholarly comments. A Greek krater (mixing bowl) depicting the departure of the seer Amphiaraus has been characterized thus: “allusions to past and future episodes . . . are piled onto a central episode which itself turns out to be split into temporally incompatible phases . . . The painter . . . has defied time.” On the Great Trajanic Frieze, part of the Arch of Constantine, “the main stream of the story. . . ebbs and flows alternatively to left and right. And the scenes are grouped together with a total disregard of spatial and temporal logic.” Jocelyn Penny Small, who quotes both passages and considers several other art works, concludes: “it is clear that neither classical art nor classical culture privileged strict sequential time.” Neither, as we saw, did Catullus. But it is regrettable that she rejected out of hand a cinematic analogy to the latter work advanced by another scholar: “comparison to cinematic sequencing does not work, for the whole point of cinematic sequencing is the sequence, not discontinuity.” This is simplistic. Nonlinear and discontinuous narratives have been a staple of cinematic narrative at least since the early modernism of the s or since the New Wave in France, to say nothing of jump cuts. Indeed, discontinuous editing goes back much farther. For example, “in the Odessa Steps sequence in [Eisenstein’s Battleship] Potemkin [], the temporal sequence of, and spatial relationships between, successive shots are quite secondary to the overall impression.” Back now to ecphrasis. A few observations on Putnam’s detailed interpretation of a particular ecphrastic passage in Virgil’s Aeneid – that is, in Roman literature sometime after Catullus – may be useful here. Several of Putnam’s points about the scenes from the Trojan War on Juno’s temple in Carthage that Aeneas is looking at suggest filmic parallels. Any cinematic view was, appropriately, not within Putnam’s purview when he
Quoted from Snodgrass, Narration and Allusion in Archaic Greek Art, and . So J. M. C. Toynbee, The Art of the Romans (London: Thames & Hudson / New York: Praeger, ), . Jocelyn Penny Small, “Time in Space: Narrative in Classical Art,” The Art Bulletin, (), –, at . Small, “Time in Space,” note . Small rejects Anne-Marie Leander Touati, The Great Trajanic Frieze: The Study of a Monument and of the Mechanisms of Message Transmission (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Rom, ), and notes , , and . Touati adduces Malissard on Trajan’s Column; cf. above, Chapter , note . Quoted from Matthew Solomon, “Sergei Eisenstein: Attractions/Montage/Animation,” in Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.), Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, ), –, at . Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), – and – (chapter titled “Dido’s Murals”); originally published as “Dido’s Murals and Virgilian Ekphrasis,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, (), –.
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Motion Images in Ecphrases
was dealing with Virgil’s scenes. One of them shows the young Trojan hero Troilus fleeing from Achilles. As Putnam writes: There is a growing particularity as we move from horses, chariot, body drawn on its back . . ., and reins to neck, hair, earth, dust, and spear. From one vantage point, our seeing-reading eye follows the line of motion forward . . . From another, we look in the opposite direction as our vision works backward . . . We behold the action of writing as a culmination of a series of verses describing both forward impetus and backward inversion, a combination emanating from the tension which Virgil . . . builds between the seeing and the reading eye, between the multidimensionality of notional ekphrasis and the unforgiving drive of narrative.
All this is admirably put, but expressions like particularity, forward impetus, backward inversion, and combination, to mention only the most obvious ones, strongly suggest close-ups, back-and-forth camera movements, and editing. The drive of Virgilian narrative, as here, is inherently cinematic. And Virgil does all this in only five lines! About the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the subject of Virgil’s final scene, Putnam points out that “the unspoken boundary between ekphrasis and narrative . . . tends to break down . . . Ekphrasis and narrative finally begin to merge.” Such a merger in a text corresponds to a dissolve on the screen. Putnam further observes that these four lines demonstrate a general aspect of Virgil’s epic technique: “acts of anticipation, of repetition, and, in turn, of retrospection.” Perfectly true. And perfectly cinematic: These acts are flashforwards and flashbacks. What classicist Peter Green once observed about a passage in Satire of the satirist Juvenal (mid-first to mid-second century ) is comparable (and nearly Eisensteinian): at times Juvenal seems to anticipate the techniques of cinematic montage, and if he had been alive today it is a fair bet he would be making his living as a scriptwriter at Cinecittà. This is especially apparent in Satire III, with its fast-moving, well-edited shots . . . of street scenes in the City [of Rome]. We can almost hear the cutting-room shears at work as we move from the fatal accident (pedestrian crushed under waggonload of marble) to the victim’s home, and from there to Hades’ bank, for a glimpse of the brand-new ghost awaiting Charon the ferryman; or from the bedroom of
Virgil, Aeneid .–. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs, . Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs, , on Virgil, Aeneid .–. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs, . The comments on Virgil’s use of verb tenses in Aeneid .– (Putnam, ) are equally telling. Putnam’s entire chapter is revealing about the inherently filmic character of ecphrasis (and beyond).
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Catullus and Virgil
an insomniac bully to the dark street where he picks his quarrel with an innocent passer-by.
Roman satire was a literary genre with especially close ties to epic. The hyperbole of the audible cutting-room shears is a pleasing instance of Green’s own enargeia. My filmic approach to Catullan (and Virgilian) ecphrasis is only one of several that are possible and shows that modern media make a new understanding of ancient texts possible, beginning with Homer’s. Eisenstein had advanced just such an argument.
Quoted from Peter Green (tr.), Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), xlviii (in his introduction). The passages referred to are Juvenal .– and – (summarized). Cf. Green, lii, on Juvenal : “From this point [after line ] the montage technique comes increasingly into play, and the pace quickens.” Or consider Michael von Albrecht, Ovid: Eine Einfu¨hrung (Stuttgart: Reclam, ), , on the Metamorphoses: “With motoric imagination [“Mit motorischer Phantasie”] and the power of visual suggestion Ovid traces exterior and interior motion . . . Often he appears to anticipate possibilities that only the cinema is able to realize visually.” For example, Laird, “Sounding Out Ecphrasis,” , referring to Achilles’ shield: “perhaps we might conceive of it as a kind of mosaic of little video scenes.” His comment, worth considering as it is, drew dissent from a major narratologist in her own narratological analysis: Irene J. F. de Jong, “The Shield of Achilles: From Metalepsis to Mise en Abyme,” Ramus, no. (), –, at and note . O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic, and note , in passing refers to a few random examples of “continuity errors” in the cinema as analogy to the structure of Catullus .
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Shadows and Caves: The Cinema as Platonic Idea and Reality
This chapter juxtaposes Plato’s Cave Allegory in Book of the Republic, in which Socrates describes the projection of shadows onto a wall by means of firelight, and our visual media. Various film theorists, directors, and cinematographers have pointed to this analogy between past and present. Plato’s Cave is an image of an entire world and its mental condition and not an anticipation of a technological invention, but, in retrospect, his detailed description of that world readily lends itself to a cinematic view. Among modern philosophers, Henri Bergson was the first and most influential to incorporate the Cave Allegory into his philosophy of the cinematographic mind. Recent theoretical scholarship has turned to the topic as well. The following pages will trace its development from the birth of cinema through today. In all this, two different approaches stand out. Filmmakers look back to Plato’s allegory and so claim a prestigious precursor for their medium. Philosophers and other academics point to it in order to address or explain philosophical problems raised by Plato, and not only in the Republic. Some of the latter turn to the cinema as well: philosophical engagement with film as such and with individual films and genres would benefit from a reconsideration of Plato’s aesthetics and epistemology on the basis of Plato’s own practice as an artist . . . the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues, and especially his extraordinarily selfconscious reliance on images that are often presented within a mythopoetic frame in exposing central philosophical themes, has much to gain by learning from recent developments in film-philosophy and the careful discussion of recent films such developments entail.
The Cave Allegory can illuminate both Platonic philosophy and the nature of cinema. Here, too, there are two sides:
Quoted from Shai Biderman and Michael Weinman, “Introduction,” in Biderman and Weinman (eds.), Plato and the Moving Image (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, ), –, at .
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Shadows and Caves
Plato’s philosophy has influenced the way many twentieth-century film scholars understand and interpret the moving image. While Plato’s Cave Allegory has been used to indict cinema as the most illusionist, and therefore deceptive[,] of art forms, it also supports film theory’s more celebratory claim that cinema is the fulfillment of the age-old artistic dream of transcending space and time.
The editor of a recent collection of scholarly essays, which also reprints crucial primary sources, accordingly writes: Understanding what the screen is rests in part on knowing what it has been as both an idea and an object . . . Plato’s allegory of the cave . . . is one of the oldest and most widely disseminated descriptions of a screen world. It would be hard to ascribe to Plato any direct influence on the rise of the screen or screen culture. However, this ancient conceptualization of being and knowledge where “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” may help explain the enduring uneasiness that often accompanies our reliance on screens. The common and paradoxical belief that all screens offer both more and less in their influence on our perception finds its seed in the paradigm of Plato’s imaginary cave.
While it is true that Plato did not influence the rise of our screen culture, we will see below that certain thoughtful filmmakers became aware of him once such a culture had been established. At a time when simulacra and simulations, as Jean Baudrillard calls them, predominate, an ability to distinguish, on more than one level, between images and reality in our arts, letters, and popular media is crucial. More even than the still camera, the film camera – together with television, video, and digital media – has revolutionized how we look at and understand the three-dimensional world and two- and threedimensional images of that world. Images taken with a still camera were introduced in the s. The brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière publicly exhibited their moving images for the first time in Paris on December , . Although the brothers had given a few private screenings earlier, this is generally considered the cinema’s birthday. About six months later, on or shortly after June , , Russian journalist Maxim Gorky, then twenty-eight years old, had his first
Quoted from Jorge Tomas Garcia, “The Cinematic Image as Platonic Simulacrum,” in Biderman and Weinman (eds.), Plato and the Moving Image, –, at . Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), , begins a chapter titled “Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema” with Plato. Quoted from Stephen Monteiro (ed.), The Screen Media Reader (New York and London: Bloomsbury, ), .
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Shadows and Caves
experience with the cinema. He attended a program of Lumière films at the All-Russian Exhibition fair in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, later renamed Gorky in his honor. He described the program and added his own moralistic musings in a newspaper article that began like this: Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour . . . It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
The secluded realm of darkness into which Gorky entered prompts intellectual speculation by its very nature. Taking our cue from Gorky, let us descend to a world of shadow images as described by Plato and then attempt to find a way from darkness to enlightenment about the nature of these shadows.
In Plato’s Cave Classical pre-cinema found its earliest and greatest expression in the Allegory of the Cave. Here is the relevant passage. The first speaker is Socrates; his interlocutor is Plato’s brother Glaucon. Socrates introduces the allegory as “a situation which you can use as an analogy for the human condition” and says: ‘Imagine [ide; literally, “see”] people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads. There’s
Quoted from Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – (with source reference), at . The translation is by Leda Swan. On the dating see also Deac Rossell, “A Chronology of Cinema, –,” Film History, (), –, at . A few corrections to this useful article (but not concerning Gorky) are in Rossell, “Chronology of Early Cinema: Corrections,” Film History, (), . See further Rossell, Chronology of the Birth of Cinema – (New Barnet: Libbey, ), and . On the fair see Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, ed. Richard Taylor; tr. Alan Bodger (; rpt. New York: Routledge, ), . Gorky’s text has been published, sometimes in extracts and slightly different translations, several times. Colin Harding and Simon Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London: Cygnus Arts / Madison, : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ), chiefly an anthology of early texts on the cinema, takes its title from Gorky, whose article it reprints (–). Gorky wrote another article for a different newspaper. The translation by Leonard Mins in Herbert Kline (ed.), New Theatre and Film – : An Anthology (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), – (“Gorky on the Films, ”), appears to be of that article. Gorky is sometimes said to have attended his first film show in Paris or Moscow.
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In Plato’s Cave
firelight burning a long way further up the cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built . . . Imagine also [hora toinyn; literally, “see now”] that there are people on the other side of this wall who are carrying all sorts of artefacts. These artefacts . . . stick out over the wall; and . . . some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent.’ ‘This is a strange picture [eikôn] you’re painting,’ he said . . . ‘. . . do you think they [the prisoners] see anything of themselves and one another except the shadows cast by the fire on to the cave wall directly opposite them?. . . And what about the objects which were being carried along? Won’t they only see their shadows as well?’ ‘Naturally.’ ‘. . . And what if sound echoed off the prison wall opposite them? When any of the passers-by spoke, don’t you think they’d be bound to assume that the sound came from a passing shadow?’ ‘I’m absolutely certain of it,’ he said. ‘All in all, then,’ I said, ‘the shadows of artefacts would constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize.’ ‘That’s absolutely inevitable,’ he agreed.
From a modern point of view, the description is striking. So is the entire passage with its repeated terms of seeing, as when Glaucon tells Socrates “I see” and Socrates continues “See now” and, later, “Now look.” Plato’s cavernous cell corresponds to the darkened cinema theater, although the latter is not literally underground. The fire corresponds to the film projector, its light to the beam from projector to screen. The cave wall is the equivalent of our screen; the shadows moving across it correspond to the scenes enacted in a film. Just as the shadows of the humans in the cave are not real, so the images of the actors on screen are insubstantial. This is most obvious when they appear in black and white. And, as in our
Republic a–b; quoted from Robin Waterfield (tr.), Plato: Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ), –. A nonspecialist introduction is Gerasimos Santos, Understanding Plato’s Republic (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ), especially – (chapter titled “Knowledge and Governing Well: Opinions and Knowledge, Forms and the Good”). John Henry Wright, “The Origin of Plato’s Cave,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, (), –, connects, with due circumspection, the Cave Allegory with the cave on Mount Hymettus near the village of Vari close to Athens and with ancient sources (mythicized) about Plato’s life. Wright, note , gives the source reference about the cave’s exploration. The following develops brief comments in my “Introduction” to Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –, at –. Jacques Deslandes, Histoire Comparée du cinéma, vol. : De la cinématique au cinématographe – (Paris: Casterman, ), – (“le Choreutoscope”) links pre-cinematic tableaux to Plato’s Cave. Plato, Republic b– (horô, hora toinyn) and c (skopei dê).
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cinemas, there is sound in the cave: The words spoken by the carriers of the artifacts are like the dialogue spoken by actors. Such words appear, as Socrates clearly states, to be coming from the mouths of the human shadows, just as they do from the actors’ mouths rather than from the soundtrack channeled into and out of loudspeakers. The projection in the cave is not like a silent film. Nor was the cinema ever really silent after the time Gorky experienced it. Even if the spectators in cinemas are not prisoners in any way like those in the cave and are not as immobilized, dedicated cinephiles will confess to having been addicted, usually since childhood. They often find themselves “riveted to their seats,” as enthusiasts like to put it. Glaucon was right to call Socrates’ description a picture painted in words. A prisoner’s ascent from the cave after being freed into the real world and the light of the sun signals the beginning of knowledge and understanding: of the true and the good. Socrates introduced the Allegory of the Cave as a symbol of human life. So it still is, if somewhat differently: as an aspect of the near-tyranny of the ubiquitous images to which we submit ourselves. The restraints necessary in the cave to force everybody to look at the shadow images are no longer needed. We let ourselves be captivated voluntarily. The analogy between Plato’s allegory and the cinema has long been recognized. F. M. Cornford pointed to cinema as a modern parallel in his translation of the Republic: A modern Plato would compare his Cave to an underground cinema, where the audience watch the play of shadows thrown by the film passing before a light at their backs. The film itself is only an image of ‘real’ things and events in the world outside the cinema. For the film Plato has to substitute the clumsier apparatus of a procession of artificial objects carried on their heads by persons who are merely part of the machinery, providing for the movements of the objects and the sounds whose echoes the prisoners hear.
Cornford was not the first to make such an observation. Three years before, Jean Przyluski had advanced a detailed argument about ancient and later puppet theater, for which he took a cue from French Hellenist and Plato scholar Auguste Diès, whose influence he acknowledged on his first page. Diès had been, at various times, a student of Hermann Diels
Francis MacDonald Cornford, The Republic of Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), note . Jean Przyluski, “Le théâtre d’ombres et la caverne de Platon,” Byzantion, no. (), –. He also turned to Plato, Laws d–c (–).
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In Plato’s Cave
and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. He had published, in , two articles on the Athenian puppet theater, the closest ancient analogy to the shadow plays in Plato’s Cave. In the earlier one Diès called the cave a salle, the French term for performance venues (concert halls, theaters, cinemas), and observed that the lower part of this space serves as a modern screen. Accordingly he concluded: “we might say, in sum, that the show imagined by Plato is a kind of cinema for projected shadows.” Four decades afterwards, one of Diès’s students strongly reaffirmed his late teacher’s thesis. Przyluski, too, referred to a screen onto which the shadows are projected. Accordingly, if without knowledge of either Przyluski or Diès, Plato’s “cinema” has been termed the “arche-screen” in a recent study. Earlier still, British classicist A. S. Ferguson had referred to “the whole machinery of the cave” and to “the power of an engine devised to corrupt the ingenuous mind.” (Cornford, too, referred to machinery.) But there is neither an engine nor any kind of machinery in Plato’s Cave! Such anachronistic terms are unintentionally illuminating. Soon after, Ferguson stated: “In a drama – and that is what the prisoners seem to see and hear – the play is the thing.” Quite so; hence Ferguson’s mention,
Auguste Diès, “Guignol à Athènes” and “Encore Guignol,” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, (), –, and (), –. The second article does not mention the cinema. On the puppet stage see, e.g., Asli Gocer, “The Puppet Theater in Plato’s Parable of the Cave,” The Classical Journal, no. (), –. Heron’s automaton theater (cf. Chapter ) has often been called a puppet theater as well, if not quite correctly. Diès, “Guignol à Athènes,” (“le fond de la salle, servant d’ècran”) and (“nous pourrions dire, en somme, que le spectacle imaginé par Platon est une espèce de cinéma par ombres projetées”). L. Chauvois, “Le ‘cinéma populaire’ en Grèce au temps de Platon et sa projection dans l’allégorie de la ‘caverne aux idées,’” Revue generale des sciences pures et appliquées, nos. – (), –. Przyluski, “Le théâtre d’ombres et la caverne de Platon,” : “les silhouettes projetées sur l’écran.” In his mammoth book on the history of cinema, Marcel Lapierre, Les cent visages du cinéma (Paris: Grasset, ), –, quotes Przyluski and connects the Cave Allegory with earlier work on shadow projections during the Eleusinian Mysteries and with Egyptian shadow plays. He asks, rhetorically: “C’est impressionant, n’est-ce pas?” and reports that “in the ruins of Herculaneum an apparatus was found that strangely resembles a projection lantern” (). Cf. on this Chapter . Lapierre, , compares cinema audiences with the listeners of ancient Greek rhapsodes and audiences at Atellan farces in Rome. So Mauro Carbone, Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution, tr. Marta Nijhuis (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), especially –. Plato, Platonism, and the Cave appear throughout. So do Bergson and more recent, primarily French, philosopher-theorists. Plato and the Cave are prominent as well in several of the contributions to Dominic Chateau and José Moure (eds.), Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship – A Historical and Theoretical Assessment (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ). Cf. in this Mauro Carbone, “Thematizing the Arche-Screen through Its Variations,” tr. Marta Nijhuis, – and – (notes, with several classical references). Jenna Ng, The Post-Screen through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), passim, follows Carbone, Philosophy-Screens.
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in the immediately following sentence, of “the mechanism which produces it.” In Ferguson’s and our time, this mechanism is the cinema. Ferguson used an even more anachronistic term when he concluded: “all the prisoners see and hear of themselves comes from the screen in front of them.” Again: no screen in Plato’s Cave! One further statement is appropriate here, even if its last word reminds us of films far more than it may have Ferguson’s first readers: “As in an exciting play, the prisoners are satisfied to anticipate the sequel.”
Shadow Play: Mistaking the False for the True That the shadowy existence of actors on the screen parallels that of the people whose shadows appear on the cave wall becomes clear in the following description by Luigi Pirandello, one of the first modern authors to address this aspect of cinema. In his novel Si Gira, written long before the advent of sound and the spread of realistic color, Pirandello put the case in terms strongly reminiscent of Platonic philosophy and its distinctions among images, reality, and the realm of ideas: The film actor feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses his corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence . . . The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.
The fact that the viewers imprisoned in the cave mistake the shadows they observe for the real thing has another parallel in the cinema. In its earliest days, audiences sometimes took screen images to be real – quite literally. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery () is usually credited with being the first film to tell a fully cinematic story. A well-known anecdote has it that the appearance of a Western outlaw firing his six-shooter point
A. S. Ferguson, “Plato’s Simile of Light. Part II. The Allegory of the Cave (Continued),” The Classical Quarterly, no. (), –; quotations at – and note (“screen”). I quote Pirandello from Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (; slightly different new ed. New York: Schocken, ; rpt. ), –, at . The standard English translation of Si Gira is Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, tr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). In our Platonic context it might be amusing to note that my quotation from Pirandello is several times removed from its original. It comes from an English translation of Benjamin’s German translation of a French version of Pirandello’s Italian.
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Shadow Play: Mistaking the False for the True
blank at the camera and, in this way, directly at the audience, created tumultuous excitement or even panic. The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (), a fifty-second film made by the Lumière brothers, has often been mentioned as bringing about a similar reaction. Gorky appears to have watched it in : Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you – watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building . . . But this, too, is but a train of shadows.
A modern report on The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is instructive well beyond this individual case: The cinema’s first audiences are interpreted as being unable to distinguish between the film image and reality. Arrival of the Train . . . stands as a striking example of the manipulative power allegedly inherent in cinema since its beginnings. It serves to illustrate cinema’s inherent suggestive forces, elevated to a basic principle . . . Paradoxical as it may appear today, the audience’s interest in the projected documentary images . . . was of a primarily fantastic nature. Spectators did not want to see reality on the screen, but rather images of reality, which were different from reality.
Thirty years later, a quasi-parallel to the arrival of the Lumières’ train was the intended arrival among viewers in a film theater of an entire battleship. But this effect was never realized. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin () ended with a famous shot of the cruiser’s bow rising and towering above viewers. The film’s premiere was to have been something different:
Martin Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth,” tr. Bernd Elzer; The Moving Image, no. (), –, has conclusively demolished this story and also shown that virtually everything on screen was carefully staged. Loiperdinger, , calls the film “a media event of immense historical consequence.” On the subject see primarily Stephen Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect,’” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, no. (), –, with numerous source quotations and illustrations. See further Klaus Kreimeier, “‘Dashing Down upon the Audience’: Notes on the Genesis of Filmic Perception,” in Annemone Ligensa and Kreimeier (eds.), Film : Technology, Perception, Culture (New Barnet: Libbey, ), –. Quoted from Leyda, Kino, . Gorky’s description of the film continues after this quotation. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text, no. (), –, examines Gorky’s article in the context of early viewers’ reported reactions and concludes that they may not have been as easily duped as has often been thought; neither, he argues, was Gorky. Gunning’s crucial article has been reprinted or anthologized a few times. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train,” and .
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Shadows and Caves It is amusing to recall that . . . its first actual showing was to end with its own particular “being beside oneself” of the film as a whole . . . According to the director’s idea, the last shot of the film – the oncoming nose of the battleship – had to cut . . . the surface of the screen: The screen had to be cut in two and reveal behind it an actual memorable solemn meeting of real people – the participants of the events of .
On another occasion Eisenstein put the case more succinctly: “Potemkin bursts through the screen into the auditorium.” A charming re-creation of an early audience’s scared reaction to the train’s arrival occurs in The Magic Box (), a fictional biography of William Friese-Greene, a British cinema pioneer. Moreover, the anecdote about the train’s effect has modern correlatives in any number of horror and slasher films. Viewers know that a monster or maniac is lurking in a dark attic or basement, but the characters do not. Whenever one of these announces an intention to go there (“I’ll be right back!”), audiences instinctively want to call out a warning. Such is the seductive and irrational power of moving images. They can even be terrifying. Distinguished film historian Kevin Brownlow vividly described the effect that a particular moment in D. W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance () had had on him decades earlier: I was thirteen years old when I first saw Intolerance, and a very mischievous friend told me that during the battle scenes one of the extras had had his head cut off by an over-enthusiastic warrior. Well, that shocked me. So, when I saw the epic and I actually saw a soldier decapitated in front of my eyes, I thought it was real. Now you can see it’s fake, but I reacted as audiences of the time must have reacted – with absolute horror, and I couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards, thinking about that terrible scene, that poor man [he laughs a little] – just papier-maché.
Doubtless, many cinemagoers can remember comparable experiences. Eisenstein, for one, referred to a moment during the climax of the
Quoted from Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, tr. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), and . The final ellipsis, indicating suspense, is Eisenstein’s. Battleship Potemkin was made in commemoration of a failed revolution. (More below.) Sergei Eisenstein, “The Prometheus of Mexican Painting,” in Eisenstein, Film Essays and a Lecture, ed. Jay Leyda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –, at . The text, written in in two unfinished versions, is about José Clemente Orozco in comparison with Diego Rivera. It did not appear in this book’s edition. Quoted from Three Hours That Shook the World: Observations on “Intolerance” (), a video interview short. Three hours is the film’s approximate running time. Brownlow adds that the film turned him into a pacifist, “as indeed it was intended” to do. Intolerance has two such decapitations in quick succession.
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Shadow Play: Mistaking the False for the True
historical epic Chapayev (or Chapaev, ), when schoolboys in the theater used their slingshots to help the titular hero against his enemies. A variation on this You are there perspective is The camera was there for you. One charming anecdote from the days of early cinema is telling. British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth recounts the following story from his days as presenter of film shows: I was giving my lecture once in a large hall built underneath a chapel. My apparatus was set up as usual in the heart of the audience, and while I was waiting beside it for the hour strike when I was to begin, the dear old parson came and sat down beside me. He said he was quite sure that my entertainment was everything that it ought to be, but he knew I would understand that, as shepherd of his little flock, it was his duty to make doubly certain and would I let him see my list of pictures. So I handed him the list and watched him mentally ticking off each item until he came to the pick of the whole bunch, a hand-coloured film of Loie Fuller in her famous serpentine dance. He said at once that he could not allow that –a vulgar music-hall actress. I said rather indignantly that there was nothing vulgar about it; that it was indeed a really beautiful and artistic production, but he was adamant and insisted that it must be omitted. Then I had to begin. Apart from my reluctance to leave out my best picture, I was faced with the practical difficulty of how to do it. For this was the last picture but one on the spool. There was no earthly means of getting rid of it except by running it through in darkness, and I didn’t think the little flock would stand for that. Then, just as I came to the danger-point, I had a sudden brainwave. I announced the film as ‘Salome Dancing before Herod’. Everyone was delighted. Especially the parson. He said in his nice little speech afterwards that he thought it was a particularly happy idea to introduce a little touch of Bible history into an otherwise wholly secular entertainment. And he added that he had no idea that the cheenimartograph had been invented so long!
An American example may be said to show the other side of the coin: “When [exhibitor] P. P. Craft went out to roadshow a foreign production, entitled Homer’s Odyssey, a considerable percentage of his patrons
In Sergey M. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniya v shesti tomakh, ed. Sergey I. Yutkevitch et al. (Moscow: Isskustvo, –), vol. , note. My source for this information is Sergei Eisenstein, On the Detective Story, ed. and tr. Alan Upchurch (new ed.; London: Seagull Books, ), note . Cecil Hepworth, “Those Were the Days: Reminiscences by a Pioneer of the Earliest Days of Cinematography,” The Penguin Film Review, (April, ); quoted from The Penguin Film Review, vols. (rpt. Totowa, : Rowman and Littlefield, –), vol. , –; quotation at –. Hepworth was a filmmaker and writer on cinema; as early as he published Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph; nd ed., (rpt. New York: Arno, ).
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demanded to know if Mr. Homer was travelling with the show to make personal appearances.” An even more telling case occurred in in connection with the Danish epic Atlantis, whose dramatic high point is the sinking of an ocean liner. Any parallel to the fate of the Titanic in is unintentional since the film was adapted from a novel by German author Gerhard Hauptmann, published earlier. The film is practically unknown today; so is a revealing Austrian newspaper’s article about its production. The writer first explains the change brought about by moving images: We are now living in the age of the cinematograph . . . When we read the description of some event in a book, we depend on our imagination and can often get only a weak idea of what is being told us, and often enough this idea is not even accurate. The cinematograph, however, not only tells us something; no, it also allows us to see the event. We see everything embodied [leibhaftig] and so real [wahr] that our imagination has nothing left to do . . .
He then turns to Atlantis: We are transported into the middle of this terrible reality, for nothing is missing to convince us of the truth of the living image. We believe that the cameraman was really present at such a disaster and succeeded in photographically preserving these scenes. We forget that, in the face of death, no one exists with such strong nerves calmly to record [such things].
Drawings of “the most gripping images that have been taken until now” have alerted readers to the article following them. Its writer was no longer as gullible as Hepworth’s clergyman. He reported that a wooden model was used for the sinking ship and that the actors were good swimmers and were being protected by lifebelts and lifeboats. But he is still in thrall to the might of the cinematograph. The illusion of reality that moving images on screens can evoke is even greater when these images are in color, widescreen, and three dimensions or a format approximating three-dimensionality. The Cinerama process used a gigantic curved screen to take in peripheral vision and had stereophonic sound, with speakers surrounding the audience on all sides. Its marketers claimed to take viewers into the picture and to show “the full
Quoted from Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through (; rpt. New York: Simon & Schuster, ), . The film in question will make an appearance in Chapter . “Die teuerste kinematographische Aufnahme: Der Untergang eines Ozeandampfers auf hoher See” (unsigned), Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt (Vienna), (September , ), –.
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Shadow Play: Mistaking the False for the True
wonder of reality,” as producer and narrator Lowell Thomas put it in This Is Cinerama (), the first release. An independent trade journal reviewing it made the following points: Cinerama . . . creates an illusion of three-dimensional effects . . . [with] breath-taking scenes projected in a way that seemingly made [audiences] feel like participants in what they saw on screen. The astonishing illusion of reality created by Cinerama is demonstrated fully by the depiction of a . . . roller-coaster ride. The feeling of realism is so intense that the viewer feels as if he is in the roller-coaster and experiences all the sensations that one gets in the pit of the stomach caused by the steep dips and hairpin turns of such a ride.
This ride, the film’s first spectacular attraction, became famous. Its effectiveness was increased by the unseen riders’ screams of excitement on the soundtrack. D, too, is an artificially created effect. Its films are notorious for flinging all manner of objects directly at the viewer in moments of action or suspense. Who has not instinctively ducked to avoid being hit even while knowing that nothing at all can come out of the screen? Such moments have been included for the effect’s sake only. The death by scissors in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder () is an honorable exception. The D eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii () is the more effective in that fiery and rocky parts of the mountain come flying at the audience on a diagonal and make viewers instinctively duck to the side. (I did.) Here the objection may be raised that all this is child’s play: that only inexperienced and overly impressionable cinemagoers could be so affected. But this objection is wrong. A telling case in which mature audiences were taken in, if only momentarily, involves the supernatural shocker Rosemary’s Baby (), directed by Roman Polanski. William Fraker, who would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in American cinematography, described, more than once, a camera set-up in which a pregnant Rosemary (Mia Farrow), standing in a hallway, is watching an older woman (Ruth Gordon) speaking on the telephone in a bedroom: The bedroom door was open. The bed was right there and Ruth was sitting on the bed and talking on the phone. Now I had her framed through the doorjamb from the hallway. It was terrific . . . But Roman thought it was
Quoted from “Cinerama,” Harrison’s Reports, no. (October , ), and , at . The review, unsigned, was probably by publisher P. S. Harrison, the journal’s founder and editor.
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Shadows and Caves wrong. And he began to move the camera to the left. Now, by doing this, he began to cut Ruth off by the bedroom doorjamb. He cut her in half. Then he said, “Stop the camera, this is it.” . . . I said, “You can’t see her.” Roman said, “Exactly, exactly.” So we shot it that way. Now, months later, we go see Rosemary’s Baby in a theater. We . . . come to the scene I’ve just described . . . Mia looks on from the hallway. Then you cut to see Ruth and . . . you can only see half of her and fifteen hundred heads in the theater lean to the right to see around the doorjamb. Now, that’s the power that Roman has.
Elsewhere, Fraker added: “I didn’t get it [during shooting] until we were in dailies and I saw everyone leaning in their seats, trying to look around the edge of the door frame to see what was happening.” (I did the same when I first watched Rosemary’s Baby on a big screen.) As Polanski explained, emphasis on “depth, not just a flat field” on a two-dimensional screen creates, in a viewer’s mind, an effect of viewing three-dimensional space: “If you use composition in such a way that things are hidden from your camera, you can discover something that was hidden when you move sideways, particularly if you use wider lenses, where you come close to the object in the foreground.” Remarkably, all this occurred when the cinema was already more than seven decades old and viewers were anything but new to the medium. Even experienced professionals were affected. So great is the fallacy inherent in the moving image. Previously, painters had played with comparable composition, as Pierre Bonnard did in or around with Nude in an Interior (National Gallery of Art; Washington, ). Here, however, there is an additional layer in his clever design in that the titular woman’s half body is seen only as a reflection in a mirror. A historically significant example that proves how deceptive screen images may be – one out of countless others that could be mentioned as well – involves Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein’s film deals with the mutiny of the crew against their officers. Some of the mutineers have been herded together for execution; they are covered by a large tarpaulin. Twelve years later Eisenstein commented on this set-up as follows:
Quoted from Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), (in chapter titled “Bill Fraker”). Both of the preceding quotations are from David E. Williams, “Beyond the Frame: Rosemary’s Baby,” American Cinematographer, no. (March, ); best accessible at https://ascmag.com/ articles/beyond-the-frame-rosemarys-baby.
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At naval executions by firing squad no one was ever, on any occasion, covered by anything – not on the Potemkin, or any other vessel of the tsarist navy. A tarpaulin actually was used at such executions, but unrolled and spread out – to prevent the blood of the victims from staining the deck . . . The image of this ‘shroud’, separating the condemned men from their comrades, from the sunlight and from life as a whole, proved to be so powerfully expressive that it completely convinced the audience, who never for a moment doubted the authenticity of this method of execution . . . I never heard any objections even from people well-informed in these matters – ex-sailors of the tsarist navy, now staunch crewmen of the Red Fleet; for them, too, the effect of this image was more significant and decisive than a documentarily accurate but artistically meaningless factual account of the procedure.
Seeing is believing: I watched it on a screen, so it must be true. Even today, with easy image manipulation available to all, images still deceive. Often we want them to do just that, even when we (should) know better. The tongue-in-cheek apostrophe to viewers in the theater by the titular hero of The Crimson Pirate (), a comedy-romance-adventure tale, is therefore worth remembering: “Ask no questions. Believe only what you see. No – believe half of what you see.” Better still: Ask lots of questions. Then believe only what you understand.
Bergson and the Philosophy of the Cinematographic Mind Seeing equals understanding, as in the common phrase I see what you mean, which applies chiefly to hearing. Aristotle, we saw in Chapter , believed that we never think without images. If mental images are fundamental to human thought, are moving images, too? According to twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson, they are. Among his other academic appointments, Bergson held a professorship in Greek and Roman philosophy at the Collège de France from to . In he published his most widely read major book, Creative Evolution. In its fourth and final chapter, he turned to “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic
Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage ,” in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. : Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor; tr. Michael Glenny (; rpt. London and New York: Tauris, ), –; quotation at . Below, I quote from and refer to its authorized English translation: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, ). There are several reprints, not all with the same pagination.
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Illusion.” Here he was expressly Platonic, discussing the cinematograph in a chapter section titled “Form and Becoming.” “Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, such as the marching past of a regiment,” Bergson begins. We could do so with cutout figures in various poses, but a more effective way is to use “a series of snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does.” But photographs do not create movement: “with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere.” Indeed it is: “it is in the apparatus.” From individual and momentary movement postures of bodies in still photographs we come to a stage in which “each actor of the scene recovers his mobility” through “the invisible movement of the film.” Herein lies the very nature of how humans acquire understanding, as Bergson makes evident immediately afterwards: The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge.
Bergson now explains in detail how exactly we reach a state of “becoming” – an awareness of ideation – from “the passing reality. . . at the back of the apparatus of knowledge” within us. Perhaps echoing Aristotle, Bergson concludes:
Bergson, Creative Evolution, (first part of chapter heading). For an introduction to his thought in connection with cinema, see Dorothea Olkowski, “Henri Bergson,” in Felicity Colman (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (; rpt. London: Routledge, ), –. See further Maria Tortajada, “Technique / Discourse: When Bergson Invented His Cinematograph,” Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry, nos. – (), –; Tom Gunning, “Animation and Alienation: Bergson’s Critique of the Cinématographe and the Paradox of Mechanical Motion,” The Moving Image, (), –; and Elie During, “Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph,” tr. Franck Le Gac, in François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.), CineDispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –. The entire argument (Bergson, Creative Evolution, –) is worth considering. On the regiment cf. Paul Douglass, “Bergson and Cinema: Friends or Foes?” in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –, at : “Oddly enough, Bergson’s example of cutting out ‘jointed figures’ perfectly describes the method of recreating movement used in digital computer modelling.”
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Bergson and the Cinematographic Mind
Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.
Today, Bergson’s perspective may be less astonishing than it must have been when he was writing; equally, it is wholly convincing to Platonic cinephiles (or film-loving Platonists). But Bergson goes further when he concludes a little later: “The cinematographical method is therefore the only practical method, since it consists in making the general character of knowledge form itself on that of action, while expecting that the detail of each act should depend in its turn on that of knowledge.” Later on, Bergson interprets the Platonic term eidos (“idea”). He concludes: “we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the real.” And: “if we treat becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms [i.e. Ideas] are no longer snapshots taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements.” In this way time becomes “‘a moving image of eternity.’” Bergson’s quotation is from Plato. Just as photography is the basis of cinematography, so Bergson’s perception of photography is the basis of his understanding of the cinematograph. He wrote in Mind and Matter of , a work that underlies Creative Evolution and appeared close to the time the cinema had its first public showing: we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception – a photograph which would then be developed in the brainmatter by some unknown chemical psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the heart of things and in all points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion.
The quotations are from Bergson, Creative Evolution, –; emphases in original. Bergson, Creative Evolution, –. Bergson, Creative Evolution, –. Bergson, Creative Evolution, . Bergson’s observations a little later on this page are pertinent, too. Bergson, Creative Evolution, –; Plato, Timaeus d. Henri Bergson, Mind and Matter, tr. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen / New York: Macmillan, ; numerous rpts.), . The translation is based on the revised edition of the French original.
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Philosopher Elie During, a Bergson expert, explains: Indeed, as Bergson evoked the operation of the cinematograph, he sought to bring to light a mechanism that was . . . to allow the identification of the workings of an “inner cinematograph” that spontaneously directed the thought of movement . . . This thought was already at work in natural perception: in that respect, equipped perception only effected a passage at the edge of natural perception. Its full expression was achieved in the representation of movement by physics. From this standpoint, it becomes clearer that Bergson did not content himself with an ingenious metaphor: it is barely an exaggeration to say that he literally invented the cinematograph as we know it today. The cinematograph he was dealing with was primarily a philosophical or, more precisely, a conceptual object – not a cultural object to which philosophical reflection would be applied from the outside.
Bergson exerted significant influence on modern French film theorists, notably Gilles Deleuze. But there is something even more astonishing about Bergson’s cinematic philosophy than what he outlined in Creative Evolution. He had become alert to the philosophical potential inherent in the cinematograph considerably earlier and at a time when the cinema was still in its infancy. In a footnote attached to the second of the three
During, “Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph,” –. (Well, not literally literally.) On the technical side see, e.g., Michel Frizot, “Comment ça marche: L’algorithme cinématographique,” Cinémathèque, (Spring ), –, with illustrations. See in particular Gilles Deleuze, Cinema : The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, and Cinema : The Time-Image, tr. Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, and ); Bergsonism, tr. Tomlinson and Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, ). On Deleuze and Bergson see, e.g., Paul Douglass, “Deleuze, Cinema, Bergson,” Social Semiotics, no. (), –; Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Bergson-Deleuze Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), especially – and – (notes; chapter titled “Cinematic Thought: The Deleuzian Image and the Crystals of Time”). John Mullarkey, “Gilles Deleuze,” in Colman (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy, –, provides an introduction. See further Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema (New York: Routledge, ); Felicity Colman, Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts (Oxford: Berg, ); David Deamer, Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). There is much more. On the earliest cinema see especially Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle, nos. – (Fall ), –; rev. as “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), – (square brackets in title). There is now extensive scholarship on this topic. It may be worth noting that, at the time Bergson was connecting the cinema with philosophy, teachers and researchers of Greek philosophy were unaware of the new medium’s applicability to Platonic studies. An example is the two-volume work by James Adam, The Republic of Plato: Edited with Critical Notes, Commentary and Appendices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Neither the detailed commentary
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Bergson and the Cinematographic Mind
headings for Chapter of Creative Evolution (“A Glance at the History of Systems”), Bergson revealed that he had developed this part in much greater detail “from to ” and referred to his lecture course “on the History of the Idea of Time (–),” delivered at the Collège de France: “We then compared the mechanism of conceptual thought to that of the cinematograph.” At that time Étienne-Jules Marey, one of the fathers of cinema, was his colleague. More importantly, Bergson’s visual analysis of the passing regiment evokes a particular moment in the Paris of . One of the small exhibitions by the brothers Lumière took place on November at the Sorbonne. The first public showing on December consisted of ten films. The fifth was Le Régiment. It is at least possible that Bergson attended the November or December presentation. Le Régiment may have provided him with some measure of inspiration, for why else should he have chosen this particular subject from among countless other and equally suitable ones? Bergson reported in an interview with Michel Georges-Michel in : “Several years ago, I went to the cinema. I saw it at its origins.” He continued: Obviously, this invention . . . can suggest new ideas to a philosopher. It could be an aid to the synthesis of memory, or even of thought. If the circumference [of a circle] is composed of a series of points, memory is, like cinema, a series of images. Immobile, it is in a neutral stage; in movement, it is life itself . . . Is not the living eye a cinematograph?
nor the appendix on the Allegory of the Cave in the second volume refer to the cinema. A second edition appeared in . Bergson, Creative Evolution, (note). The next sentence concludes his note: “We believe the comparison will be useful here.” On Bergson and Marey at the Collège de France, see Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Esthétique du mouvement cinématographique (Paris: Klincksieck, ), ; cf. –. On Bergson: LiandratGuigues, . Further details are in Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, ), – (in chapter on Marey). My information is from René Jeanne, “L’évolution artistique du cinématographe,” in Le cinéma des origines à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Cygne, ), –, at –, with listing of the program in order of presentation. Lewis A. Lawson, Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy’s Work (Troy, : Whitston, ), – (chapter titled “Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer: The Cinema as Cave”), argues for Bergson’s knowledge of this film (– note ) and connects it with Creative Evolution. Quoted from Louis-Georges Schwartz, “‘Henri Bergson Talks to Us about Cinema,’ by Michel Georges-Michel from Le Journal, February , ,” The Cinema Journal, no. (), –. The short interview (–) is preceded by the translator’s introduction; my quotations are from . Bergson observes a little later: “We must have utterly false ideas about ‘the ancients in movement.’ What a joy it would be for us to see . . . Cleopatra . . . passing on the screen” ().
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Similarly, Bergson said in another conversation with Georges-Michel: “Thought is the succession of film images [films] created gradually as they appear and are wound up in the magazine called memory.” Georges-Michel commented on this, quoting Bergson: “An idea is an immobile thought, a momentary mark [point] of thought: ‘it’s a cliché in the cinema.’” Modern scholars have on numerous occasions asserted Bergson’s negative attitude toward the cinema and his aloofness from it, while others, most prominently Deleuze, have argued the contrary. Tom Gunning comments: Bergson’s condemnation of the cinematographic illusion . . . did not target the cinema, but rhetorically used the mechanics of the cinematograph to illustrate a misconception of movement he did condemn . . . Bergson’s comparison of the limited understanding of movement to the cinematograph draws on, first, its accumulation of still images in a successive strip and secondly the exteriority of the motion given to the images, a mere mechanical impetus, not inherent in the images themselves. But the viewer of a projected film sees an image moving on the screen, not a strip of static images or a machine imparting motion . . . Thus it is the mechanics of the cinematograph that Bergson critiques, not necessarily the spectator’s experience of the moving image on the screen (which he does not really discuss, the Cinématographe serving basically as an illustration or metaphor for a way of understanding movement).
This is a convincing argument, even if I dissent from Gunning’s term rhetorically. Early French filmmakers, in particular Marcel L’Herbier and Jean Epstein, recognized Bergson’s affinities with their medium.
Quoted in my (somewhat free) translation from Michel Georges-Michel, “En jardinant avec Bergson,” in Georges-Michel, En jardinant avec Bergson . . . (Paris: Albin Michel, ), –, at . Bergson had something to say about painting, photography, and cinema on the preceding page as well. The full title of this book is too long, even epic, to be given here. It lists an unconnected series of Georges-Michel’s encounters with numerous artistic, intellectual, and political celebrities. See in particular Alain Ménil, “Deleuze et le ‘bergsonisme du cinéma,’” Philosophie, (September, ), –; Douglass, “Bergson and Cinema.” Douglass examines “Bergson’s contribution to film theory” (), with numerous references to Bergson’s writings, and observes: “Bergson’s critique of cinema did not dissuade its defenders from claiming him as their philosopher” (). Tom Gunning, “The ‘Arrested’ Instant: Between Stillness and Motion,” in Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon (eds.), Between Still and Moving Images (New Barnet: Libbey, ), –; quotation at . Cf. Gunning, : “Bergson does not attack mechanical movement, but rather a mechanical model for our understanding of movement.” See further Douglass, “Deleuze, Cinema, Bergson,” –, and Philippe Dubois, “The Flux-Image,” in Antonio Somaini (ed.), Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities (Milan: Skira, ), –, especially – on Bergson. Marcel L’Herbier, “Hermes and Silence,” in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology –, vol. : – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. For Epstein see the references in Abel, note . Of special importance in this regard are two essays of October, , by Emile Vuillermoz and Paul Souday, which “did most to raise
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Bergson and the Cinematographic Mind
The cinema is the decisive modern phenomenon by which Bergson illustrated his understanding of the mind, notwithstanding his philosophical stance toward it. He was the first major intellectual to have recognized the fundamental change in our engagement with the world that the cinema brought about. That he went so far as to name the cinematograph in the title of his fourth chapter in Creative Evolution is thus nothing short of astonishing, for in this way he helped pave the way for the acceptance of a generally despised medium of popular entertainment by cultural elites: intellectuals, academics, philosophers. But the greatest surprise is the fact that Bergson had grasped the importance of photography in motion only a few years after the very invention of the Lumière brothers’ camera-plusprojector. In the sixth lecture in his History of the Idea of Time, Bergson referred to Plato’s Cave and, in this immediate context, mentions a magic lantern and a screen. Shortly after in the same lecture, Bergson discussed Platonic ideas and especially the Idea of the Good. He spoke of a light source that passes through glass of different colors and projects its reflections through an immense empty darkness “as if seeking out a screen.” All this as early as January , ! Bergson must have been the first philosopher of cinema. Not all French philosophers believed that the cinema could aid memory and thought, as Bergson had put it in . In “God in Plato,” an essay originally published in but based on notebook entries written between late and late , Simone Weil included a passing comment on the cinema in her observations on the Cave Allegory: “The talking cinema is very much like this cave. Which shows how much we love our degradation.” Weil here expresses the traditional prejudice against the cinema that intellectuals, academics, and the haute bourgeoisie had commonly held from the beginning. In Maxim Gorky’s words from : “There is nothing in the world so great and beautiful but that man
the question of the possible relationship between the cinema and the philosophy of Henri Bergson” (Abel, note , with bibliographical information about them). Summary comments on these connections appear in Maria Tortajada, “The ‘Cinematographic Snapshot’: Rereading Etienne-Jules Marey,” in François Albera and Tortajada (eds.), Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, tr. Lance Hewson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –, at –. Henri Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps: Cours au Collège de France –, ed. Camille Riquier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), : “une lanterne magique, un écran.” The surrounding argument (–) is worth reading. This book derives from an almost verbatim transcript of a course of nineteen lectures. I return to it in Chapter . Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps, : “comment cherchant un écran.” Simone Weil, “God in Plato,” in Weil, On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, ed. and tr. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, ), –, at .
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can vulgarize and dishonor it.” Weil’s comment elicited a footnote from Richard Rees, her English translator, which is worth quoting in full: This observation is so strangely true that it seems worth emphasizing. In an age without photography it would be impossible to conceive anything more like the cinema than Plato’s description of moving shadows projected on to a wall by passing a series of images across a light placed behind the spectators (the captive audience . . .).
Sir Richard, a baronet, was himself a writer and painter, among other notable achievements. The astonishment he betrays in his note indicates that he subscribed to the contemptuous attitude toward cinema. Bergson’s is a far better approach to its nature and potential. By now, however, much has changed. A case in point is French philosopher Alain Badiou, a modern Platonist and cinephile. In the early s Badiou translated The Republic and was reported to be writing a screenplay for a film about Plato’s life to be produced, of all places, in Hollywood. Bergson’s mind-cinema thesis received a remarkable posthumous confirmation from French filmmaker, cultural critic, and philosopher Edgar Morin: It is not pure chance if the language of psychology and that of the cinema often coincide in terms of projection, representation, field, and images. Film is constructed in the likeness of our total psyche . . . The inventors of the cinema have empirically and unconsciously projected into the open air the structures of the imaginary, the tremendous mobility of psychological assimilation, the processes of our intelligence. Everything that can be said of the cinema goes for the human mind itself, its power at once conserving, animating, and creative of animated images. The cinema makes us understand not only theater, poetry, and music, but also the internal theater of the mind: dreams, imaginings, representations: this little cinema that we have in our head.
If seeing is believing, then mental seeing is understanding. So, at times, is seeing a film. Morin made this point at some length.
Quoted from Kline (ed.), New Theatre and Film –, . Quoted from Weil, “God in Plato,” (note). The ellipsis is Rees’s. Cf. Alain Badiou, Cinema, ed. Antoine de Becque; tr. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, ). Stephen Zepke, “Alain Badiou,” in Colman (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy, –, is a concise introduction. On Badiou and Plato’s Cave see Alex Ling, Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), – and passim. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, tr. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Morin’s book first appeared in . Morin, The Cinema, – (chapter section titled “Participation and Logos”) and – (fig. , a diagram titled “Film Language,” whose categories move from to and from to ).
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Plato’s Cave on Screen
Manifestations of mental cinema appear on our screens in various guises and genres. I next turn to several examples of Platonic films that take up aspects of the Cave Allegory. My first one may well be the most profound example of Platonic cinema ever made.
Plato’s Cave on Screen: La Jetée, The Conformist, and Related Films In Stoic philosophy as elsewhere in classical thought, the end of the world occurs in a conflagration (ekpyrôsis) at the conclusion of a Great Year; the kosmos is then regenerated in a palingenesis for another cycle, which will come to the same end. These eternal returns are natural. Since , however, man has been able to bring about a different kind of ekpyrôsis, without any possibility of palingenesis. The nuclear annihilation of the Earth has been imagined on screen most chillingly in Stanley Kubrick’s Aristophanic-satirical Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (). Kubrick’s epic : A Space Odyssey (), to be discussed in Chapter , imagines a cosmic regeneration for humans at its conclusion. In contrast to either of these well-known works is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (), an intricate science-fiction film more philosophical than . It is just under half an hour long and consists almost entirely of still images. The titular location is a pier or jetty at Orly Airport, where the story begins and ends. The survivors of the devastation brought about by World War III live in one or more subterranean caves, an analogy to something Dr. Strangelove also proposes. Those in power ruthlessly enslave the weak. To ensure mankind’s future, scientists experiment on prisoners, searching for what the omniscient narrator calls “a loophole in time” to obtain “food, medicine, energy.” In his words: “past and future to the rescue of the present.” The most suitable subject for the experimenters is a young man who has a recurrent visual memory of a specific moment at the jetty. As a little boy he had observed a violent death. The experimenters in their cave forcibly induce his mental or dreamlike time travels, first back to a prewar past and eventually to the future. “His childhood image had been used as bait to condition him,” the narrator later observes. In a clear reference to Nazi atrocities, the experimenters speak in German and inflict treatments that anticipate those in Kubrick’s dystopian A Clockwork Orange (). The narrator once refers to the head scientist as “camp leader” – two loaded words. In the peaceful past the man meets a young woman, who was among the people on the Orly pier, and they fall in love. The images of them together
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in the streets of Paris, in museums, and in nature are in stark contrast to those showing us what happens down in the cave. Images of the past are intercut with those of the present. The young man in the laboratory is both in the present and in the past, as one of the experimenters puts it, and arrives in the future with a message: “since humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its own survival,” as the narrator explains. “That sophism was taken for Fate in disguise.” The man is made to initiate the process by which the humans of the present will be able to ascend to the upper world. Eventually the future humans accept him “as one of their own.” But he requests instead to return to “the world of his childhood” and to the woman, even though he realizes that the experimenters will not brook any disobedience. “Now he only waited to be executed, with somewhere inside him the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time,” the narrator ominously reveals. On the pier the man sees the woman and runs toward her, only to notice people from the experimenters’ cave. “He knew there was no way out of time.” And so it turns out to be: They kill him. Over the final image we hear the narrator’s last words: “He knows this haunted moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death.” My brief summary of logical and temporal complexities of La Jetée cannot substitute for the actual experience, both intellectual and emotional, of this haunting and disturbing film. Its classical overtones are especially noteworthy. The strongest of these is Plato’s Cave Allegory. To Plato, ascent from the cave is an ascent toward light and enlightenment; comparably in La Jetée, the young man’s departure is for the sake of knowledge. He, too, has long been imprisoned. But he has a memory from a different time and place, something Plato’s Cave dwellers cannot possess. This is what makes him capable of travel in three time periods. These may be regarded to correspond, if not wholly, to Platonic levels: reality – the present in the cave, an
The first to see this was Sander Lee, “Platonic Themes in Chris Marker’s La Jetée,” in Kevin L. Stoehr (ed.), Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and Ideas (Jefferson, : McFarland, ), –. An earlier version had appeared in Senses of Cinema, (March, ), http://sensesofcinema.com//feature-articles/jetee/. I am indebted to his article but take a partly different view. See further Greg Watkins, “Time the Redeemer: Time as an Object of Cinema in a Post-Metaphysical Age,” Journal of Religion and Film, no. (), art. ; at https:// digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol/iss/. Chris Marker, La Jetée: Ciné-roman (New York: Zone Books, ; rpt. ), is a book version of the film, with the text of its voice-over in French and English. Chris Darke, La Jetée (London: Palgrave / British Film Institute, ), is a recent introduction, especially noteworthy for describing a different version. On the possibly Platonic ending of another dystopian science-fiction film, George Lucas’s THX- (), see Raymond Cormier, “The Closed Society and Its Friends: Plato’s Republic and Lucas’s THX-,” Literature/ Film Quarterly, (), –.
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Plato’s Cave on Screen
Figure . La Jetée. In the Cave. Screen capture.
awful existence; above it, ideas or forms – the future and its advanced humans; on the lowest level, images of reality – those of memory and repeated experiences. If we relate sight to insight, we may regard the strange and menacing optical instruments on the faces of the scientists both as practical means to aid them in their experiments on the man’s eyes, which often appear bandaged during his tortures, and as symbols of their limited knowledge (Fig. .). And just as the dwellers in Plato’s Cave are at first blinded upon seeing the light in the upper world and are unable to recognize the objects whose shades they are familiar with, so the man has to wear sunglasses on his first trip to the future. This is a particularly arresting image (Fig. .). The future humans display an eye-shaped symbol on their foreheads. This has been interpreted as a reference to Hinduism, in which such a decoration symbolizes a third eye of inward sight and self-awareness. Everything in the film is expressed chiefly in images, Plato’s lowest level, but Marker elegantly and unobtrusively points to different layers of knowledge and representation. The narrator tells us what the man sees on a particular “peacetime morning”: “Real birds. Real cats.” Later he and the woman go to a museum and look at stuffed animals. These, too, had been real while they were alive; now they represent the essence of each species or family: the animalness that all have in common and that can be abstracted and become intelligible from any number of physical exemplars. The narrator calls them “timeless animals” and observes: “Now the aim is perfectly adjusted.” The stuffed animals remain unchanging and become
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Shadows and Caves
Figure .
La Jetée. The symbolic sunglasses. Screen capture.
quasi-eternal. We see all animals only as two-dimensional screen images, so there is no strict separation between layers; rather, the man experiences, as does everybody, a gradual progress toward knowledge. Understanding begins with images and ideally leads to ultimate knowledge. The man’s achievement of knowledge, however, causes something good for society and something bad for himself. On the one hand, the members of the post-apocalyptic society will have a considerably more advanced comprehension of life than men did in the present and in the past; presumably they will possess a superior sense of right and wrong as well. On the other hand, this comes at the price of the man’s own death. The people in Plato’s allegory represent all mankind; equally, the man in La Jetée is a representative of us all. As an Everyman, he has no name. He also evokes Sophocles’ Oedipus, who searches for knowledge of who he is, both in terms of his myth and as an allegory of humanity’s search for the self-knowledge that is the ultimate goal of Platonic and all classical philosophy. As Aristotle, Plato’s most famous disciple, put it at the beginning of his Metaphysics, our desire to understand is fundamental. (On this cf. a few comments of mine in Chapter .) For Oedipus, the attainment of selfknowledge brings about a complete reversal. In La Jetée, the moment in which the man acquires the meaning of a specific memory is the moment in which he, too, reaches self-knowledge and undergoes a reversal. Earlier, having achieved an incomplete level of knowledge, the man rejected it for love; he abandoned intellection for emotion. This is the nature of his
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Plato’s Cave on Screen
Figure . La Jetée. The Sibyl’s Cave. Screen capture.
tragedy, his self-imposed Fate. The childhood image of that moment on the jetty is now clear. In his beginning was, is, and will be his end. Marker called La Jetée a “photo novel” (photo-roman) in its credits. A camera that pans, tilts, and zooms over the unmoving images creates an illusion of movement. Marker was a pioneer of this technique, which has become popular in documentary filmmaking with Ken Burns’s The Civil War (). But there is a remarkable exception in La Jetée. At one point we watch the woman asleep in a series of dissolves from close-up to closeup; she looks peaceful, even angelic. In a startling moment we see her opening her eyes. Here we observe an image move. But the static images surrounding it move, too: through the projector. Independent support for classical analogies to La Jetée may be found onscreen. Numerous instances of classical or classicizing works of art include a type of Venus and a version of the Hellenistic statuette of a young boy with a goose. Most importantly, one of the images showing the long dark corridor from the upper world to the caves is a photograph of the entrance to the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, from an inside view toward the entrance and its light (Fig. .). No film scholar seems to have
This has prompted French art and cultural critic Jean Louis Scherer, “On La Jetée,” in Paul Smith (ed.), The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts by Jean Louis Scherer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, to inquire into the identity of the narrator and the source of his knowledge of the story (–).
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Shadows and Caves
recognized it. The museum, as the narrator tells us about the young man, “is, perhaps, his memory.” The word museum goes back to the Greek Muses, representatives of arts and sciences, whose mother is Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Marker observed in Immemory (; expanded version, ), an interactive multimedia memoir: “I claim for the image the humility and the powers of a madeleine.” This homage to Proust also bears on themes in La Jetée, which includes Marker’s homage to the mysterious Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (). Marker’s six-hour documentary essay The Owl’s Legacy () again demonstrates his profound engagement with antiquity. Various artists and intellectuals, among them philosophers, classical scholars, and film directors Theodoros Angelopoulos and Elia Kazan, discuss key aspects and terms of classical Greek culture and their continuing presence and importance in the modern world. The titular bird is, of course, the owl of Athena, goddess of wisdom. La Jetée returned to the screen in Terry Gilliam’s feature-length updating Monkeys (), which acknowledges Marker’s film as its inspiration. Gilliam’s classical references are not as pronounced or important as those in La Jetée. A Cassandra Complex denoting futile prophecies of doom is the most notable one. At more than four times the length of Marker’s film, Monkeys is far less intense than La Jetée and well below the level of Brazil (), Gilliam’s dystopian retro-futuristic masterpiece. Only at its climax, when Gilliam incorporates more explicit references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and, very briefly, Psycho (), does his film generate genuine emotional involvement in viewers. Monkeys in turn led to a television series in no fewer than forty-seven episodes (–). The Matrix trilogy (–), to which I will turn in Chapter , made complex futuristic narratives of travel through time and place highly popular. The films included numerous classical references. Even a minor work like Jacob Gentry’s Synchronicity () may be regarded as a free, andprobably wholly unconscious, variation on La Jetée. So is, although on a more profound level, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (), adapted from Stanisław Lem’s novel. Novel and film are poetic
On Proust (and Bergson) and cinema, see Liandrat-Guigues, Esthétique du mouvement cinématographique, – and –. On Gilliam and Marker see, e.g., Carolina Ferrer, “L’évolution de la fin: De La Jetée à Monkeys,” Cinémas, no. (), –; Amresh Sinha, “La Jetée and Monkeys: Memory and History at Odds,” in Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty (eds.), The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, ), –.
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Plato’s Cave on Screen
philosophical disquisitions about human existence, consciousness, and memory in the guise of science fiction. Platonic parallels in the film are strong; those to La Jetée are more subdued. At one telling moment the following dialogue occurs between two of the main characters; the second one quoted is the film’s protagonist: : I see you are interested in profound questions. Soon you’ll be asking me the meaning of life, I suspect. : Stop being ironic. : It’s a banal question. When a man is happy. . . the meaning of life and other eternal themes seldom engage him. Their place is at the end of life. : But when this end will come, we have no way of knowing . . . A question is always the desire to know, and to preserve simple human truths, we need secrets. The secrets of happiness, death, love. : Maybe you’re right. But try not to think about all that. : To think about it is to know the day of your death. Not knowing it practically makes us immortal.
The eternal return in , with which Solaris is routinely compared, is also Tarkovsky’s theme, among others. But unlike the world of Kubrick’s space-age future with all its visual glories, the world in Solaris looks more realistic – an indication that Tarkovsky, like Marker, was primarily focused on philosophy and not, as Kubrick had been, on mythology. Tarkovsky provided an apt summation of Solaris in : Inner, hidden, human problems, moral problems, always engage me far more than any questions of technology . . . My prime sources are always the real state of the human soul, and the conflicts that are expressed in spiritual problems.
Asked about the central idea of Solaris, Tarkovsky responded: What is central is the inner problem . . .: namely the fact that in the course of its development humanity is constantly struggling between spiritual, moral entropy, the dissipation of ethical principles, on the one hand, and on the other – the aspiration towards a moral ideal . . . And it seems to me that the conflict, and the fraught, urgent search for a spiritual ideal, will
Quoted from Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected Screenplays, tr. William Powell and Natasha Synesios (London: Faber & Faber, ), ; staging direction at first ellipsis omitted. The translation of the Solaris script (–) is by Powell. Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris of is an American remake of Tarkovsky’s film. On it see Douglas McFarland, “The Philosophy of Space and Memory in Solaris,” in R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders (eds.), The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, ), –, with several references to Plato and, at –, to the Cave Allegory.
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Shadows and Caves continue until humanity has freed itself sufficiently to concern itself only with the spiritual. As soon as that happens a new stage will begin in the development of the human soul . . . Lem’s novel, in my own specific understanding of it . . . points to the conflict between man’s spiritual life and the objective acquisition of knowledge.
Tarkovsky’s cinema is here more Platonic than he may have realized at the time. It is therefore poignant in our context to remember that Marker directed a poetic documentary as posthumous tribute to Tarkovsky: One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (). But more important overall is the question such cinema poses in our digital age: “Could I Be in a ‘Matrix’ or Computer Simulation?” The centennial of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) in prompted Kees van Oostrum, its president, to a few musings on light, darkness, and shadows: “The phenomenon of light and dark long ago inspired Plato, as he expressed in his allegory of the cave.” Van Oostrum briefly summarized the allegory and concluded: “It could be argued that[,] with this story, Plato envisioned the ‘movieplex’ long before it came to be, but what’s truly important for us to recognize is the power of light in Plato’s allegory.” Van Oostrum then quoted master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and ended by mentioning “the fire-lit world of shadows flickering across the ‘screen’ in Plato’s cave.” Storaro himself has described how he used light thematically when he photographed Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (), in which a short version of the Cave Allegory is retold. Such a moment does not occur in Alberto Moravia’s novel, on which the film was based. The retelling of a novel in images calls for a different approach. That is why “Plato’s myth of the cave serves as the film’s central image.” Storaro said about The Conformist:
Quoted from Andrei Tarkovsky, Time within Time: The Diaries –, tr. Kitty Hunter-Blair (London: Verso, ), –. The quotation is the title of Part I of Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, nd ed. (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ). The book appropriately contains a translation of Plato’s Cave Allegory early on (–, followed by an excerpt from Descartes). Scholarship on digital media is extensive; good starting points are Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (a telling title) and Digital Cinema (both New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, and ). The latter is an introductory overview. See also David Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of the Movies (Madison, Wisc.: Irving Way Institute Press, ). Quoted from Kees van Oostrum, “Plato’s Cave,” American Cinematographer, no. (), . The electronic version (https://ascmag.com/blog/presidents-desk/presidents-desk-platos-cave) is preceded by Jan Pieterszoon Saenredam’s engraving of Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem’s “Antrum Platonicum” (“Plato’s Cave”; ca. ), which does not correspond to Plato’s text. Quoted from Raymond D. Boisvert, “Philosophical Themes in Bertolucci’s The Conformist,” Teaching Philosophy, no. (), –, at ; cf. : “The focal scene of the movie.” This
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Plato’s Cave on Screen
I used the idea that the light could never reach the shadows. So that there was a distinct separation between the shadows and the light. That’s why I was using the kind of technique to give very sharp shadows and very sharp light in the first half of the picture . . . The Conformist is almost a black-andwhite picture in the beginning. [In the second half] I expressed [a] sense of freedom by letting the light go into the shadows.
Light overcoming shadow is the culmination of the scene in which Marcello Clerici, the eager would-be conformist in Fascist Italy, meets his former philosophy teacher, Professor Quadri, a dedicated anti-Fascist now living in exile abroad. They remember their days at the university. The shutters in Quadri’s study are closed, and the screen is indeed almost black and white. Clerici summarizes the Cave Allegory that Quadri had taught his students. Clerici, surrounded by shadows, is at first barely visible. Then he moves into the half-light. At the allegory’s climax he is fully in the light, facing it and casting a shadow on the wall behind him. He turns toward his shadow. During the continuation of their conversation, Bertolucci and Storaro cleverly vary the play of light and shadow on the men’s faces. Eventually Quadri opens the shutters, and, with an unexpected cut, Clerici watches his shadow disappear. The wall is now blank and white. Storaro explains: I turned off all the other lights and used the only one that was outside the window [of Quadri’s study], in order to have these perfect shadows of the character [Clerici] projecting into the room. And I used another window, when it was open, with natural light, to fill these shadows and let the shadows disappear. When the second window was closed, only one light was in this perfect relationship with him, reality, and its representation, his
short but valuable article points to several other Platonic passages and to other scenes that reinforce the importance of the Cave Allegory for the film’s theme of light, shadow, blindness, and knowledge. Cf. Robert Phillip Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci (London: British Film Institute / New York: Oxford University Press, ), (“The myth of the cave . . . is the controlling metaphor of The Conformist”) and (“the film’s central set piece”). Quoted from Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, – (chapter titled “Vittorio Storaro”), at . The very first quotation in Storaro, Scrivere con la luce / Writing with Light (Milan: Electa / Aquila: Accademia dell’Immagine, ), vol. : La luce / The Light, and , is from Plato’s Cave Allegory (with a still image from The Conformist). Storaro, –, is about this film, with mention of Plato’s Cave at . Storaro’s second and third volumes are on colors and elements. See Pau [Pablo] Gilabert Barberà, “The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci: Alberto Moravia + Plato Against Fascism,” Annali Online di Ferrara–Lettere, no. (), –. See also Adrian Switzer, “Fascism Re-performed: Benjaminian Mimesis, Platonic Methexis and Bertolucci’s The Conformist,” in Biderman and Weinman (eds.), Plato and the Moving Image, –.
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Shadows and Caves own shadow . . . The point was to use only one specific light for that specific shadow.
The shadow images in the cave are analogous to the myopia of prevalent contemporary ideology: “The Conformist primarily associates Fascism with the ‘shadowy images’ which people mistake for reality.” But the film also “explicitly references Plato’s Cave as a theoretical model for the spectator’s experience of mistaking the shadows of images for reality” when watching a film. So it is entirely correct for Storaro to define photography, and by extension cinematography, as the “literature of light.” Storaro has been emphatic on this subject on numerous occasions. It is rather serendipitous for the present context that the philosopher’s last name in The Conformist is identical with quadri, Italian for “paintings” or “pictures.” Speaking about The Conformist, Bertolucci once concisely summarized our topic in the following terms: when you read the Cave of Plato’s, the cave is exactly like the theater and the background is the screen and Plato says there is a fire and people walking in front of the fire and the fire projects the shadows in the background of the cave. It’s the invention of cinema.
Storaro saw the Cave Allegory in the same light: “If you think, for a moment, this is a kind of metaphor for the cinema. The prisoners of Plato are the audience. High above them is the projector. The people passing in front are the film. The back wall of the cave is the screen.” The Conformist can take its place beside La Jetée as another profoundly Platonic film. As Storaro once noted: “The protagonist was trying to hide
Quoted from Ray Zone, “The Literature of Light: An Interview with Vittorio Storaro ASC, AIC,” in Zone (ed.), Writer of Light: The Cinematography of Vittorio Storaro ASC, AIC (Hollywood: ASC Press, ), –, at . Storaro used comparable ways of lighting in other films, most notably to suggest the development from ignorance and helplessness to knowledge and responsibility in his visual portrayal of the title character in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (). Quoted from Frances Flanagan, “Time, History, and Fascism in Bertolucci’s Films,” The European Legacy, (), –, at and . Detailed discussions of the scene appear in, e.g., Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci, –; Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –; and Christopher Wagstaff, Il conformista (The Conformist) (London: Palgrave Macmillan / British Film Institute, ), –. Claretta Micheletti Tonetti, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity (New York: Twayne / London: Prentice Hall, ), –, examines it in relation with Plato’s Symposium. Cf. Zone, “The Literature of Light,” and Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, . Quoted from “Bernardo Bertolucci Seminar,” in Rochelle Reed (ed.), The American Film Institute: Dialogue on Film, no. : Fritz Lang / Bernardo Bertolucci (April, ), –, at , with “Cave” printed in boldface. Quoted from Zone, “The Literature of Light,” . Disarmingly, Storaro continued: “Audiences today, watching film, are into these emotional abilities of the art.”
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Plato’s Cave on Screen
something in himself, and project onto outside, as reality, something conscious . . . I said, let us make a cage around Marcello, where there is an opposition between light and shadow.” According to Bertolucci, “the protagonist journeys into his memory” as well as traveling by train and car. It has rightly been said about The Conformist: “Light going on and off is a leitmotiv throughout the film, and is part of the articulation of the opposition between appearances and reality, an opposition that will include the cinema itself, and this very film.” Plato scholar Julia Annas characterized the importance of the Cave in The Conformist in these terms: All three images [i.e. Sun, Light, and Cave] stress vision and sight . . . The Cave is especially rich in visual detail. However, it and the Sun resist visual representation . . . attempts to picture Sun and Cave, for all their pictorial suggestiveness, render them merely bizarre. The only successful visual translation of the Cave’s terms of metaphor that I am aware of is Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie The Conformist. (. . . the use of the Cave imagery to interpret the story is entirely Bertolucci’s idea, and indeed is something that can only be done in cinematic terms.) It has often been pointed out that the Cave is a ‘dynamic’ image whereas the other two are ‘static’, and no doubt this is why we have had to wait for the availability of movie techniques for Plato’s image to be successfully interpreted in other than philosophical terms.
Annas next examines the Platonic side of The Conformist in some detail, linking it to the ideology of Italian Fascism that forms the background of the story. Hers is a compelling argument for my approach in this book. The more regrettable, therefore, that Annas did not include La Jetée. Doubtless she would have had illuminating thoughts about it, too. A charming contrast to all the seriousness of a work like The Conformist can be found in Beauty of the Devil (), French writer-director René Clair’s tragicomic retelling of the Faust legend. Mephistopheles has just rejuvenated an old and grumpy Henri Faust by exchanging his own body with him. (Actors Michel Simon and Gérard Philipe switched parts accordingly.) An exuberant Faust reveals the true cause of human happiness to a crowd of people:
The two quotations are from Wagstaff, Il conformista (The Conformist), and ; source references at , notes and . Wagstaff, Il conformista (The Conformist), . Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; rpt. ), –; quotation at –.
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Shadows and Caves Are you happy? I am. I’ll tell you my secret. Long before you were born, in a country you’ll never see, a philosopher you don’t know, Plato, shut men in a cave to explain the earth’s secrets to them. Later, another man you don’t know, in a country you’ll never see, the astronomer Newton, flew off among the stars to explain to men the secrets of the heavens. But the philosopher and the astronomer were wrong. So says a third scientist: I, Henri, because you need to know only one secret, the secret of youth. That’s the secret of happiness; that’s the secret of joy; that’s the secret of pleasure.
That Plato’s Cave is one of the best analogies for the cinema is supported by an insightful comment on Alfred Hitckcock’s thriller Rear Window (), which is routinely considered an allegory of the essence of watching and being watched. A photographer, wheelchair-bound after an accident, keeps looking through his camera into various apartment windows across the courtyard from his own place. In a loose variation on the Kuleshov Effect, to be discussed in Chapter , he becomes a Peeping Tom and eventually convinces himself that one of his neighbors has committed a murder. French film critics and soon-to-be feature directors Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol wrote about the film in revealing terms. At the same time they anticipate and thus disarm any possible charge of hyperbole for turning to Plato: It is in Rear Window that the deductive aspect . . . is presented in its purest form . . . Everything happens as though they [the little worlds being observed] were the projections of the voyeur’s thoughts – or desires . . . On the facing wall . . .the strange silhouettes are like so many shadows in a new version of Plato’s cave. Turning his back to the true sun, the photographer loses the ability to look Being in the face. We risk this interpretation because it is supported by the ever-present Platonism in Hitchcock’s work . . . this work is constructed on the implicit base of a philosophy of Ideas. Here, the idea – even if it be only the pure idea of Space, Time, or Desire – precedes existence and substance.
Space, time, desire: These may be three fundamental sides in all storytelling in word or image and for all reading or watching such stories. Concerning the cinema, a famous saying, heard in voice-over at the opening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt () and there attributed to
The quotations are from Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, tr. Stanley Hochman (New York: Ungar, ), and –. The French original appeared in , when the authors were writing for Cahiers du cinéma, one of the two most significant French film journals at the time. Rohmer had already directed several short films. Chabrol would become a director the following year. Hitchcock was a particularly strong influence on him.
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The Cinema Returns to and from Plato’s Cave
André Bazin, concisely explains why: “The cinema, said André Bazin, substitutes to our gaze an alternate world, which conforms to our desires.” This insight equally fits the ancient (and all other) cultures if we replace cinema with the general term visual narrative.
The Cinema Returns to and from Plato’s Cave Bazin had been strongly influenced by Bergson in his formative years: “Bergson was present to Bazin in the air he breathed every day, for Bazin . . . received a Bergsonian education . . . Bergson gave Bazin a deep feeling for the integral unity of a universe in flux.” At the beginning of this book we already came across Bazin’s article “The Myth of Total Cinema,” with his characterization of cinema as an “idealistic phenomenon,” his point about the Icarus myth as “descending from the platonic heavens,” and the idea of human flight dwelling “in the soul of every man since he first thought about birds.” In our Platonic context it is amusing to know that Bazin has been considered a kind of modern Socrates. The technology to show sophisticated moving images had to wait for the film camera and projector, not to descend from any kind of Platonic heaven but to ascend from the Platonic cave. This technology had dwelt in the soul of man ever since he first thought about anything, for the mind never thinks without an image. Plato’s Cave Allegory has frequently been mentioned or retold, usually in abbreviated form, in various films. Several short animated versions, usually made for educational purposes, also exist; one, from , is narrated by Orson Welles. Parallels to the Cave Allegory in film plots
In French: “Le cinéma, disait André Bazin, substitue à notre regard un monde qui s’accorde à nos désirs.” Bazin, however, did not say such a thing. Compare Michel Mourlet, “Sur un art ignoré,” Cahiers du cinéma, (August ), –, at : “le cinéma est un regard qui se substitue au nôtre pour nous donner un monde accordé à nos désirs.” Mourlet’s article has been republished several times. On Mourlet, Bazin, and Godard’s misattribution, see in particular Antoine de Baecque, La cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, historie d’une culture, – (Paris: Fayard, ; rpt. ), –. Quoted from Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and . Especially telling is Bazin’s article on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Mystery of Picasso (): “A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery,” in André Bazin, Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo; tr. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (London: Routledge, ; rpt. ), –. So by Roger Leenhardt, “Du côté de Socrate,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. (January, ), –. Bazin is the starting point for David N. McNeill, “Phaedo: A Ghost Story,” in Biderman and Weinman (eds.), Plato and the Moving Image, –. It is available online, e.g. at https://vimeo.com/, with filmographic information.
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are numerous. By now, the allegory has also firmly established itself as a nearly obligatory point of reference in film studies, especially where film and philosophy (and religion) are concerned. The cinema, it has been said, has many fathers. It also has many ancient forefathers, Plato among
A case in point is the Matrix trilogy, on which see, e.g., Thomas Bénatouïl, “La Matrice ou la caverne?” in Elie During (intro.), Matrix: Machine philosophique, nd ed. (Paris: Ellipses, ), –; William Irwin, “Computers, Caves, and Oracles: Neo and Socrates,” in Irwin (ed.), The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago: Open Court, ), –; Lou Marinoff, “The Matrix and Plato’s Cave: Why the Sequels Failed,” in Irwin (ed.), More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago: Open Court, ), –; Badiou, Cinema, – (chapter titled “Dialectics of the Fable: The Matrix, a Philosophical Machine”), especially , , and . This text originally appeared in During, Matrix: Machine philosophique, –. See further, e.g., John Partridge, “Plato’s Cave and The Matrix,” in Christopher Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore The Matrix (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. On a related case – the Cave Allegory and Christopher Nolan’s Inception () – see Sylvia Wenmackers, “How to Keep Track of Reality,” in Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (ed.), Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For (Chicago: Open Court, ), –. Recent examples, offering various perspectives, are Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” tr. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura, no. (), – (as “The Apparatus”), rpt. in, e.g., Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press ), – – just one example of his writings on cinema with mention of Plato; André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, tr. Timothy Barnard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ); Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden: Blackwell, ), – (chapter sections titled “Plato’s Cinema” and “Socrates’ Magic,” both within chapter “Seeing in the Dark” in book section “Cavities”); Maureen Eckert, “Cinematic Spelunking Inside Plato’s Cave,” Glimpse, (), –; Nathan Andersen, Shadow Philosophy: Plato’s Cave and Cinema (New York: Routledge, ). But E. Ann Kaplan, “Introduction: From Plato’s Cave to Freud’s Screen,” in Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cinema (New York: Routledge, ), – and – (notes), only has something to say about Plato in a brief comment on Baudry (). Mary Anne Doane, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” in Kaplan, – and – (notes), offers a little more on Baudry and his Plato (– and ) and concludes: “In psychoanalytic film theory, the cinema seems inevitably to become the perfect machine for the incarnation or institutionalization of the wrong idea – here it is Platonic idealism” (). More on Baudry and Plato is now in Vinzenz Hediger, “Can We Have the Cave and Leave It Too? On the Meaning of Cinema as Technology,” in Santiago Hidalgo (ed.), Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, tr. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), touches on Plato and the Cave several times. The essays collected in Barbara Gabriella Renzi and Stephen Rainey (eds.), From Plato’s Cave to the Multiplex: Contemporary Philosophy and Film (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, ), do not chiefly deal with Plato except for a perfunctory final one: Stephen Rainey, “Plato’s Cave and the Big Screen” (–). Rather better is Andrea Capra, “Plato’s Cinematic Vision: War as Spectacle in Four Dialogues (Laches, Republic, Timaeus and Critias),” in Anastasia Bakogiannis and Valerie M. Hope (eds.), War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, ), – and – (notes); see especially –. Then there is this: David L. Smith, “Plato’s Watermelon: Art and Illusion in The Brothers Bloom,” Journal of Religion and Film, no. (), article ; at https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol/ iss/. On Neoplatonism and film see Thorsten Botz-Bornstein and Giannis Stamatellos (eds.), Plotinus and the Moving Image (Leiden: Brill / Rodopi, ).
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The Cinema Returns to and from Plato’s Cave
them. This case was made, charmingly, in , when French film historian Charles Burguet replied in the negative to the question whether spectators who attended the first public show by the Lumière brothers realized that they were witnessing the birth of a new art. Burguet mentioned the common prejudice against the cinema at his time (“Art populaire!”), then turned to antiquity: “But the Muses themselves did not disdain earthly love affairs and, leaving Olympus, sometimes perfumed with a kiss the lips of a handsome artisan.” He continued: “The arts they protected procured, it is said, the forgetting of ills and the ending of pain.” For support Burguet quoted Plato: “At the birth of the Muses, when music was created, some people of that time were seized by such great pleasure that, always singing, they forgot to eat and drink and died a sweet death.” Burguet then closed the gap between past and present: In the twentieth century, enthusiasts of the art of cinema do not push their abstinence that far, but many are those who economize on food stuffs to enter dark halls where they hope to find, thanks to magical rays of light, forgetfulness of daily torments or momentary relief from deeper kinds of grief.
A case complementary to Burguet’s was made in , although more briefly. In a short article on cinema and thought, Georges Damas surveyed and rejected various theories of what the cinema is or is like and settled on language as its essential nature: “Un nouveau langage.” He explained it as follows: This definition that explains all of cinema has existed for millennia: it is language . . . To express thought securely, language uses writing: this, in the course of time, progressively passed from ideograms to phonograms and, in the same manner, the cinema, from silence, came to sound and speech. The passage from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the Phoenician phonetic alphabet explains the cinema.
Not everybody will agree with such an enthusiastic and breathless condensation of cultural and technological history, but what Damas wrote
The quotations are from Charles Burguet, “L’auteur de films,” in Le cinéma des origines à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Cygne, ), –, at . The passage quoted is part of Plato, Phaedrus b–c, considerably condensed. Georges Damas, “Le cinéma et la pensée,” L’Age nouveau, no. (), –; quotations at . The entire issue (“Devenir du cinéma”) is devoted to the growth of cinema and includes contributions on its relation to the other arts and on its roots in antiquity. The phrase “Un logos idéal” appears immediately below the author’s name in large letters, indicating a kind of secondary title.
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Shadows and Caves
later in his article pertains to our topic. Immediately after affirming that the cinema is “a language that is, first of all, synthetic,” he continued: After two thousand years of then-scientific Aristotelian dictatorship and of the worship of the principle of non-contradiction, the cinema, through its character of writing strictly in images [caractère strictement imagé], brings about a salutary return to analogic thought and finally brings us back to Plato. This is not the least of its merits; and if the Idea, etymologically, derives from eidos, then eidos is also the Forms. The light of art restores them to us by letting themselves be modeled by the film strip.
In the Muses’ own language: ho kinêmatographos Platônikos esti. After all: “The shackled prisoners fascinated by the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave are the first ‘cinema’ spectators; the only historical changes in the apparatus since then have been little more than technological modifications.” Moreover, in Jean-Louis Baudry’s words, “the allegory of the cave . . . haunts the invention of cinema and the history of its invention.” Or, in a playful aperçu by Alain Badiou: “‘The cinema, as a preparation of Plato,’ as Pascal would have said.” But the cinema is also Bergsonian: “he [Deleuze] sanctioned [a] commonplace conveyed by critics and philosophers – namely, that cinema was, in essence, a Bergsonian art.” Bergson himself concluded in : “the cinematograph . . . seriously helps and will help the scholar, the artist, the historian, and even the philosopher.” Chris Marker demonstrated that this is the case in La Jetée and again, more explicitly, about twenty-five years later. The ninth episode of The Owl’s Legacy, titled “Cosmogony or The Way of the World,” culminates in a brief demonstration of the Cave Allegory as cinema. The essential part of Plato’s passage is heard in voice-over. A man quotes Socrates’ words, a woman responds. The camera travels left to right along rows of viewers in a dark auditorium. The small window of a projection booth appears in the
Quotations from Damas, “Le cinéma et la pensée,” . He mentions Aristarchus on the next page. I have capitalized his “les formes” to point out the term’s affinity with the Platonic word idea and italicized the second appearance of eidos. My translation “film strip” does not capture Damas’s “pellicule argentique,” which hints at silver nitrate as the base of film stock. Quoted from Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ; rpt. ), . Her term fascinated, however, is not quite appropriate for the people in the cave and owes more to our modern contexts. Baudry, “The Apparatus,” (= [rpt.]). Badiou, “Dialectics of the Fable,” (in concluding paragraph). Quoted from During, “Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph,” . He adds various examples of such thinkers from the s and later, including Jean Paul Sartre in : “Cinema provides the formula for a Bergsonian art. It inaugurates mobility in aesthetics” (, with source reference in note ). Quoted from Schwartz, “‘Henri Bergson Talks to Us about Cinema . . .,’” .
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The Cinema Returns to and from Plato’s Cave
Figure .
The Owl’s Legacy. Plato’s modern Cave. Screen capture.
background, with flickering lights from the projector’s lens. The film being shown to the audience is Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (). Like La Jetée, it deals with a nuclear catastrophe and memory. When the male narrator mentions the wall in the Cave Allegory, Marker cuts to the brick wall at the back of the hall. Above it, the projector’s beam is visible. Shortly after, projector and screen appear together (Fig. .). Then, in medium close-up, the projector’s beam briefly dominates the screen image. Extreme close-ups on some of the audience members reveal their intense emotional response to Resnais’s film. The scene closes after the man in Hiroshima mon amour tells his lover: “You saw nothing at Hiroshima, nothing.” Just before this, Marker’s male narrator, now speaking on his own behalf, which clearly is also Marker’s, mentions what Simone Weil had written about the cinema in . Then he adds: “How could she accept that this inferior art form should find within the cave the power to negate the cave, to disarm the Gorgon, to tie itself to the thread of human creation, and finally to create its own myths?” This is as elegant a summation of the art of cinema as is likely ever to be rendered in such few words. In , Canadian novelist and filmmaker Michael Ondaatje engaged in several videotaped conversations with John Berger. In one of them
On this scene in The Owl’s Legacy, with discussion of Weil and the context of Greek myth (the Gorgon, mentioned prominently in this episode), see Rick Warner, Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, ), –.
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Shadows and Caves
Berger said that, when writing fiction, the cinema influenced him more than literature and the other arts. He gave three reasons: I see things, first of all . . . Cinematographic editing . . . well, it is a form of narrative . . . also . . . the fact that one can have long vistas and close-ups one after the other; and lastly . . . the relationship of cinema to its public. That is to say, there are two things very special about that: first of all, that it’s in the dark; secondly, that . . . frequently [there are] quite a lot of people together and they are together, and yet each is listening and looking alone; and somehow that image of . . . collaboration, the collaboration of the spectator who is no longer a spectator but who is part of the telling of the story – that image which comes from the cinema is to me more encouraging than the other two.
Berger was himself a screenwriter and had collaborated with Swiss director Alain Tanner on the latter’s feature films The Salamander (), The Middle of the World (), and Jonah Who Will Be in the Year (). Presumably without intending to, Berger was echoing Plato, Bergson, and Marker, if only en passant: People who are watching images together in the dark become participants in the stories they see. This has been the case ever since the arrival of the Lumière brothers’ train. And it points to a process that is emotional and intellectual at the same time. By means of “strong mental images,” as the narrator of La Jetée puts it at one time, ways of seeing lead to ways of thinking. Thought is knowledge.
Light and Shadows The light and shadows in Plato’s Cave, deceptive as they may be, symbolize the earliest stage in the process of human understanding: first comes the visual, then the intellectual. Gorky’s skepticism toward the kingdom of the shadows contrasts, however, with what Athanasius Kircher called “the great art of light and shadow.” His book Ars magna lucis et umbrae contained detailed instructions for the projection of light by means of the camera obscura, as we saw in Chapter . But the art of light and shadow had been invented considerably earlier. As Pliny the Elder reported in his Natural History, written during the first century , the discovery
Quoted from “John Berger with Michael Ondaatje, Conversation , Episode ” (at beginning). The conversation is available online at vimeo.com/. (So are others.) On the wider context see, e.g., Joshua Sperling, “John Berger and the Cinema,” in Ralf Hertel and David Malcolm (eds.), On John Berger: Telling Stories (Leiden: Brill / Rodopi, ), –. Cf. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), – and – (notes; chapter titled “Machines and Marvels”), especially – on the camera obscura, in his “Part II: Machines and Mind.”
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Light and Shadows
was associated with the Greek cities of Sicyon and Corinth: “the shadow of a human figure was outlined,” a first stage that eventually gave rise to polychrome painting. Pliny reports a charming anecdote, one that also includes the invention of relief sculpture: The potter Butades from Sicyon was the first to discover, in Corinth, how to sculpt [human] likenesses from clay. This came about through a work of his daughter’s, who, smitten with love for a young man about to go abroad, drew lines around the shadow of his face, cast by an oil lamp on a wall. Her father pressed clay along these lines and thus made an image in bas-relief, which he hardened in fire together with other earthenware. It was kept in the Nymphaeum, they say, until Mummius destroyed Corinth.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History .–. Pliny the Elder, Natural History .. The story is most likely folkloristic. Butades, occasionally called Butes or Dibutades, is said to have lived around . (The Greek names are also transliterated with ou spellings.) The Romans destroyed Corinth in . Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, tr. Laura Gibbs (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –, is an appreciative introduction; he returns to the tale throughout his book. A long-standing tradition has come to call the daughter Dibutade, especially in French texts and paintings, or Dibutadis. Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building,” AA [Architectural Association] Files, (Summer ), –, calls her “Diboutades” (–, note ) although this is masculine in Greek. Habent sua fata puellae (et patres). The daughter is frequently called “the Maid of Corinth” as well. Cf., recently, Philippe Walter, “Au sujet de l’histoire du potier Butadès de Sicyone: Commentaires sur les origines préhistoriques de l’art,” and Valérie Naas, “La jeune fille de Corinthe: De l’anecdote à l’invention de l’art,” both in Sandrine Alexandre, Nora Philippe, and Charlotte Ribeyrol (eds.), Inventer la peinture grecque antique (Lyon: ENS, ), – and –. The following are fundamental introductions to the history and influence of Pliny’s story, with extensive references and illustrated by fascinating examples: Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” The Art Bulletin, (), –; George Levitine, “Addenda to Robert Rosenblum’s ‘The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism’,” The Art Bulletin, (), –, adding further examples and references and listing ( note ) older scholarship on the ancient texts about the origin of painting; Frances Muecke, “‘Taught by Love’: The Origin of Painting Again,” The Art Bulletin, (), –, in particular on the figure of Cupid added into the scene and updating Rosenblum and Levitine ( note ); Shelley King, “Amelia Opie’s ‘Maid of Corinth’ and the Origins of Art,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, (), –, on visual instances in connection with Opie’s poem “Epistle supposed to be Addressed by Eudora, The Maid of Corinth, to Her Lover Philemon, Informing him of her having traced his Shadow on the Wall while he was sleeping, the Night before his Departure: Together with the joyful Consequences of this Action” (quoted from King, ). Eudora is Mrs. Opie’s invention. The poetess here imitates the model set by Ovid’s Heroides, a series of fictional letters written by chiefly mythical women to their absent lovers or husbands. After antiquity there also appeared a popular role reversal, in which a male lover traces the profile of his beloved. Levitine, col. and note , reports on another variant: the daughter of mythical King Belus draws his profile out of love for him. Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric .., reports on the variant in which sunlight, not candle- or firelight, throws a shadow to be traced. This gave rise to the modern concept of the daguerrotype (and then photography) as “the pencil of the sun” or “the pencil of nature,” on which briefly below. Early practitioners were appropriately called heliographers. For a British example see “The Pencil of the Sun” (unsigned), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, (), –. For just one American example, both solid for its time and perhaps amusing now, see M. A. Root, The Camera and the Pencil; or the Heliographic Art,
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Shadows and Caves
Ever since, painters have frequently reconstructed Pliny’s anecdote, often freely, in their own works. Particularly telling is a color photograph by Karen Knorr titled “The Pencil of Nature” from her series Academies (–.) A woman, standing, traces the silhouette of a seated woman’s profile on a wall. The setting and their clothing are modern, but they are placed next to a large classical or neoclassical marble sculpture of a male nude. The title quotes that of the – book by Henry Fox Talbot on the calotype (or talbotype), an early form of photography. The history of what Butades’ clever daughter initiated led to at least three developments that are noteworthy in our context. First, it has been connected with the shadow images in Plato’s Cave. Secondly, Swiss physiognomist (among other things) Johann Kaspar (or Caspar) Lavater in the eighteenth century had popularized silhouette profiles and had himself related the origin of drawing and painting to Butades’ daughter: In Lavater’s book, the analogy between the legend of the origin of painting and the art of the silhouette is concretized in a machine – the famous machine à tirer des silhouettes – which is essentially based on the principle discovered by Dibutade.
Its Theory and Practice in All Its Various Branches; e.g. – Daguerrotypy, Photography, &c. (Philadelphia: Lippincott / New York: Appleton, ). The full title of this hefty volume is about twice as long as what I quote here; the title page identifies Root as a “ .” On the other ancient tradition concerning the origin of painting as invention of Narcissus and its connections to cinema, see the details in my Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Leon Battista Alberti is usually credited with considering Narcissus as a painter in his On Painting of . The series is included in Karen Knorr (Madrid: La Fábrica / Córdoba: University of Cordoba, ), with “The Pencil of Nature” at . So, for example, by Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, La fabulation platonicienne, new ed. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, ), – (chapter titled “Autour de la caverne”), at ; or by Adriana Cavarero, “Regarding the Cave,” tr. Paul Kottman, Qui Parle, no. (), –. Cavarero begins with Giorgio Vasari’s fresco The Invention of Drawing, a wall painting in the Casa Vasari in Florence that shows a variant in which a male figure, seated between a brazier and a wall, pencils in the outline of his profile projected onto that wall. She observes that “in the story of the cave Plato represents above all himself: the philosopher” () and considers Plato as a creative artist: “Plato the artist knows how to arrange the light of the scene” (). So, today, do photographers, stage directors, cinematographers, and film directors. Cavarero’s translator takes up the topic in Paul A. Kottman, “Learning to Notice: Light and Shadow, from Chauvet Cave to Plato’s Cave and Beyond,” in Biderman and Weinman (eds.), Plato and the Moving Image, –, with – on Vasari (with illustration). Long ago, Edmond Pottier, “Le dessin par ombre portée chez les grecs,” Revue des études grecques, no. (), –; rpt. in Pierre Wuilleumier (ed.), Recueil Edmond Pottier: Études d’art et d’archéologie (Paris: de Boccart, ), –, connected it to Athenian black-figure vase painting. Quoted from Levitine, “Addenda to Robert Rosenblum’s ‘The Origin of Painting . . .,’” col. ; Levitine, notes –, gives the page references to Lavater (in English). Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting,” , had likewise mentioned Lavater.
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Light and Shadows
Lavater’s machine was replaced when Gilles-Louis Chrétiens invented a more advanced instrument to trace profiles for decorative engravings, the physionotrace (or physiognotrace) of –. This development leads us to the third major aspect: the silhouette-animation films by German artist Lotte Reiniger. She perfected the art of narrative films which were told entirely through the silhouettes of her figures and objects: twodimensional cardboard cut-outs (Scherenschnitte; literally, “scissor cuts”) that could be moved and could move their limbs. Her best-known work is the nearly feature-length Arabian Nights fairy tale The Adventures of Prince Achmed (). How easily modern film scholars may go astray when examining, from whatever theoretical or critical perspective, ancient sources may be seen in a revealing recent instance. In “Primal Screens,” a chapter in an essay collection called Screen Genealogies, Francesco Casetti examines the story of Butades and his daughter alongside Ovid’s version of Perseus’ decapitation of Medusa. According to Casetti, Pliny’s text, which he quotes, expresses “nighttime desire” and “a sexual encounter” and “depicts a primal scene.” Casetti relates the daughter’s drawing to “protracting, symbolically, an act of (carnal) possession.” Nothing of the sort is implied in the story. The primal scene and all it entails seem to originate in Casetti’s Freudian subconscious (or some such). When he invents a “statuette” that Butades apparently formed from the clay relief of the young man’s face, Casetti’s unconcern for accuracy is obvious. The same may be said about his understanding of Perseus’ shield, which reflected Medusa’s image.
Francesco Casetti, “Primal Screens,” in Craig Buckley, Ru¨diger Campe, and Casetti (eds.), Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –; quotations at , –, and . Casetti, and note , wrongly states that Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric .., retold Pliny’s anecdote but changed it to daytime (with the sun providing light instead of a lantern). Quintilian only mentions shadow drawings among several other barely artistic imitations. Casetti uncritically follows Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, tr. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, ; rpt. ), , –, , and –. Casetti, “Primal Screens,” –. For no discernible reason he quotes Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the reprint of the translation by John Dryden et al. Casetti does not wonder how Perseus could actually have held the shield in his left hand, then striking with his right, but seems to assume that Medusa’s reflection appears on “the convex surface of the shield” (); i.e. its outside, which is impossible since ancient shields, even mythical ones, were too large and heavy not to be held by their inside handle or strap. That the shield “never reflects Perseus’s face” () is not necessarily the case; such a reflection is omitted from Ovid’s text simply because it is beside the story’s point. Casetti’s free associations are necessary because his theoretical stance demands them. Both versions of Clash of the Titans (, ) could have aided him in visualizing the crucial moment, even though they treat it rather freely. In both, Perseus sees Medusa reflected on the shield’s inner (i.e. concave) surface, which has two handles () or three (). In the earlier
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Shadows and Caves
Casetti does not mention it, but Butades’ daughter had a charming reincarnation of sorts in Robin Hood (), a two-and-a-half-hour silent epic. It was produced by, and starred, Douglas Fairbanks, who also received a pseudonymous writing credit. (There was no screenplay in the modern sense of the term.) Fairbanks, more even than director Allan Dwan, is the creative power behind the film. One romantic moment stands out. Before he becomes Robin Hood, the Earl of Huntingdon has been a close friend to King Richard the Lion-Hearted. The Earl meets Maid Marian, and it is love almost at first sight for both. A great feast is held in the royal palace; next morning Richard, Huntingdon, and the army will leave for the Third Crusade. The Earl and Marian find a private moment outside the royal castle, whose wall is covered with ivy except for one free area. The moon is shining, as it must be at such romantic moments. We see Marian tracing the outline of the Earl’s profile on the wall (Fig. .). This way she, too, will have a memento of her absent sweetheart. Later we see her return to the same spot, again in the moonlight. She puts her mouth close to the lips in her drawing and, over a fade-out, kisses them. It seems likely that Fairbanks himself invented these moments, presumably without being aware of their classical model or of one specific neoclassical painting. Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet, pupil of painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (or Vigée-Lebrun) and of sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, her first husband, exhibited her Dibutade Coming to Visit Her Lover’s Portrait in . Like Maid Marian, Chaudet’s maid has put her lips close to those in her beloved’s profile. Even if she does not kiss them, her longing is obvious. In both cases the women are looking to the viewer’s left while the profile is facing right. But Fairbanks would not be Fairbanks if there were not also a humorous side to the first scene, as there is throughout the film. While Marian is still tracing his profile, the Earl moves a few fingers around his chin, creating a wiggling-beard effect.
version, which is superior because longer and thus more suspenseful, Perseus also sees his own reflection. As Dwan said of Fairbanks: “He was the film. He was everything – the writer, the casting director, supervisor.” Quoted from Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (; rpt. New York: Ballantine, ), . Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting,” , describes it and provides an engraving after the painting (fig. ). Rosenblum, , also describes a satiric parody by Honoré Daumier: “Penelope’s Nights” (fig. ). It is rather amusing that actress Enid Bennett remembered something a little different: “Douglas Fairbanks . . . was very timid about love scenes, although we finally did a beautiful scene where my profile was drawn on the castle wall.” Quoted from Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By. . . (; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . There are several reprints of this classic work.
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The Platonic, Cinematically
Figure . Robin Hood. Lobby card of Maid Marian as Butades’ medieval descendant. Jerry Murbach Collection.
The Platonic, Cinematically As Allan Dwan remembered decades later about black-and-white cinematography in general and Robin Hood in particular: “We were painting with the light.” Thus, and in all manner of contexts, the combination of light and darkness can be an inspiration for creativity and for learning and understanding. Darkness itself is not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to knowledge. Even ancient caves could be sites of knowledge (and religious rituals) in a variety of ways. None other than Jean-Paul
Quoted from Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? . Cf. Kemp, The Science of Art, – and – (notes; chapter titled “Seeing, Knowing and Creating”). As shown, e.g., by Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Her starting point is Plato’s Cave Allegory. See further the essays in Stella Katsarou and Alexander Nagel (eds.), Cave and Worship in Ancient Greece: New Approaches to Landscape and Ritual (London and New York: Routledge, ). For Neoplatonic and related approaches see K. Nilu¨fer Akçay, Porphyry’s On the
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Shadows and Caves
Sartre provided a cinematic example. Although his screenplay for John Huston’s Freud () was rejected as unfilmable (and far too long), some of it did make it to the screen. Part One, Scene (“In the Mountains”) of its second version contains a dream sequence in which Freud is dragged against his will by his patient Karl, an Oedipally conflicted young man who is a fictional composite of actual patients, into a “deep, shadowy anfractuosity.” Eventually Freud “falls headlong into the abyss, screaming” and wakes up. His first words – he is still “semi-conscious” – are: “I must make a clear break.” The film shows a less dramatic dream and places greater emphasis on what Freud actually comes to realize in the cave. Huston, Marker, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky, and many other directors show us that, paradoxically as it may seem, the kingdom of cinematic shadows is capable of imparting enlightenment. One little-known French film in particular demonstrates this fact even in its pleasingly Platonic title: The Idea (). This animated -minute short by Berthold Bartosch with a score by Arthur Honegger was based on Belgian painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel’s allegorical story of . It consisted of eighty-three woodcuts and was entirely wordless. Notable films in which people reared in ignorance of the outside world undergo complex processes of enlightenment and education include François Truffaut’s The Wild Child (), Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (), and Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (). By contrast, the overprotective parents in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth () succeed in keeping their children unenlightened and intentionally misinform them about everything outside their secluded home. One
Cave of the Nymphs in Its Intellectual Context (Leiden: Brill, ), especially – (chapter titled “The Path towards the Immortality of the Soul”). See further Wilhelm Blum, Höhlengleichnisse: Thema mit Variationen (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, ). We saw in Chapter that culture (paintings) originated in caves, too. The case was made by, for example, David LewisWilliams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, ; rpt. ). Jean-Paul Sartre, The Freud Scenario, ed. J.-B. Pontalis; tr. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, ); quotations at and . The French original had appeared a year earlier. Huston’s Freud was cut by the studio by about twenty minutes and released as Freud: The Secret Passion. The uncensored film is available on home video. On this film see Richard Neupert, French Animation History (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, ), – (chapter section titled “Berthold Bartosch’s L’Idée: A Working-Class Allegory”), with illustrations and additional references. The film can be seen online at various sites. The children’s isolation is not as extreme as that in the first reported experiment involving small children: that by Pharaoh Psammetichus I. in the seventh century (Herodotus, The Histories .), which also had a definitive purpose. Still, the famous anecdote may not have been entirely absent from a Greek filmmaker’s mind.
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The Platonic, Cinematically
daughter’s attempt to escape ends ambiguously when she remains enclosed in a tight and cave-like dark space. In Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni wrote a preface to a book containing the screenplays of six of his films. In the context of how exposed film stock may be treated in the lab, Antonioni at one point became virtually Platonic: perhaps the film records everything, in any light, even in the dark . . . We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see.
The Platonic view of physical reality, of the idea or ideas which gave rise to it, and of the images which reproduce it and are furthest removed from the ideas, has never been expressed more eloquently and more concisely in connection with our primary image medium than here. Antonioni’s readers who remember the Cave Allegory will notice, perhaps with amused surprise, that the direction toward knowledge has been reversed (“under”). But this changes nothing essential. After all, as Plato’s Socrates says, there is “that which is obscure and invisible to the eyes but intelligible and eligible for philosophy.” Abel Gance once made a point comparable to Antonioni’s that has been adduced on numerous occasions. Gance wrote: “In a film, what counts is not the décor; the décor is only the accessory of the image; [what counts] is not even the image; the image is only the accessory of the film. What counts is the soul of the image.” Here, too, we may turn to Plato’s Socrates, if only indirectly. Xenophon, in his Memorabilia, quotes a dialogue between Socrates and Parrhasius, one of the most famous painters of antiquity. Socrates convinces an initially skeptical Parrhasius that humans can reveal certain characteristics by their physical appearance, whether stationary or moving, and especially by their facial expressions. The verb Socrates uses is diaphainein: “to show through.” Underlying abstracts become visible to the eyes; hence they become intelligible.
Michelangelo Antonioni, “Preface to Six Films,” tr. Allison Cooper; in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; US ed. Marga Cottino-Jones (; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –; quotation at . The original book: Antonioni, Sei film (Turin: Einaudi, ). Plato, Phaedo b. Translated from Les cahiers du moi, – (), . This was a special issue on cinema edited by director Marcel L’Herbier. Xenophon, Memorabilia ..–. None of Parrhasius’ works survives. Xenophon, Memorabilia ... Stephen Halliwell, “Plato and Painting,” in N. Keith Rutter and Brian A. Sparkes (eds.), Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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Shadows and Caves
To combine the words of Socrates, Gance, and Antonioni: the philosopher knows that behind what the eye sees and above or below the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and another, and yet another. These latter form an absolute reality that nobody will ever see but that is nevertheless intelligible and, at a minimum, eligible for serious contemplation in philosophy or art. Bergson, if perhaps not Gorky, already knew this. So did and do screenwriters and directors. So, in a way, did Plato. In , American educator Nelson L. Greene contributed an article titled “Motion Pictures in the Classroom” to “The Motion Picture in Its Economic and Social Aspects,” a special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Greene was credited as editor of The Educational Screen, a journal with an annual volume listing productions suitable for the classroom. He was by no means the first to extol educational films – but not Hollywood productions – for teaching purposes. Greene summarized the appeal of cinema and the intellectual advantages of educational films in contrast to teaching texts: It should be said to the lasting credit of the “movie,” now almost exactly a generation old, that it has been unquestionably the primary factor in the recent movement toward visual education. The “picture that moved” appealed to the world as no picture ever did before; it captivated and charmed as something actually new under the sun; it suggested life as no other mechanical device had ever done. The films furnished a wealth of new scenes, inaccessible actualities, new experiences that were instantly comprehensible; motion pictures broadened horizons swiftly and enjoyably; and thus inevitably started the world to thinking about the power of “the picture.”
Press, ), –, sees in Xenophon’s passage a background to Plato (as do others) and strongly emphasizes Socrates’ word choice (). In general: Eva C. Keuls, Plato and Greek Painting (Leiden: Brill, ). Arbogast Schmitt, “Der Philosoph als Maler – der Maler als Philosoph: Zur Relevanz der platonischen Kunsttheorie,” in Gottfried Boehm (ed.), Homo Pictor (Munich: Saur, ), –, offers a succinct survey. Alexander Nehamas, “Plato and the Mass Media,” The Monist, (), –, makes a compelling case for Plato’s importance to our visual media, especially the esthetics (and more) of television. Here are two earlier examples about teaching classical antiquity: B. L. Ullman, “Editor’s Letter,” Classical Weekly, no. (May , ), –, argued in favor of “the ‘Movies’” as “a valuable aid of the Classics” in the classroom. George Depue Hadzsits, “Media of Salvation,” Classical Weekly, no. (), –, regarded historical films as one of three important “ways and means of saving the Classics or, at least, of greatly strengthening their positions” in schools and with the general public. Both had European and Hollywood productions in mind. Decades later, American classicist William Arrowsmith was an ardent advocate of the cinema as an art form and as heir to Western literature. See William Arrowsmith, “Film as Educator,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, no. (), –. His article, although still worth pondering, now reads almost as a time capsule from a bygone era.
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“The Like Real World”
Such “pictures” have provided educators with “a tremendous opportunity” and “an immense stimulus” to using yet other visual teaching aids. All of these, Greene continued, are “means to a great and desirable end in education, namely, to let the mind work directly upon the realities of the physical world through facsimiles presented to the eye, rather than upon distorted images of those realities vaguely suggested to the mind by words.” Greene nowhere mentioned Plato or the Cave, and he had no cause to do so. Nevertheless, his words, when read in our context, will immediately remind us of the fallacy inherent in the images Greene extolled, not least because of Greene’s use of terms like facsimile and distorted images. On his following page he criticized “theatrical films” as “a colossal force in world education” because this, to him, was “lawless and uncontrolled education, quite accidental and without aim.” His criticism then soared: It is of vital importance to-day that teachers should reckon with the theatrical as a definite competitor, and frequently a dangerous opponent, of what they are trying to accomplish in the classroom. When this is widely realized, it will hasten the development of a type of film that will transform the motion picture into an invaluable ally of formal education.
How things and attitudes toward moving images and their ever-advancing technology and seductiveness have changed between then and now – and how similar they have remained at the same time!
“The Like Real World” Sight, thought, knowledge – all are of prime importance today, not only because of the visual nature of our culture in general but also because we live in a society of spectacle in which alternate facts, truthiness, post-truth, fake news, and various kinds of simulacra and simulations can trump everything else. Political propaganda films masquerading as documentaries are a case
Nelson L. Greene, “Motion Pictures in the Classroom,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (November, ), –; quotations at –. The same volume also contained Ernest L. Crandall, “Possibilities of the Cinema in Education” (–), with mentions of Homer (amusingly, in the context of “argonauts,” ) and Julius Caesar (). Crandall is credited as “Director of Lectures and Visual Instruction, New York City Board of Education.” On this topic see now, e.g., Jonas Grethlein, The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception: The Ethics of Enchantment from Gorgias to Heliodorus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (chapter titled “From Deepfake to Psychotherapy: The Aesthetics of Deception Today”), with examples from journalism, photography, cinema (some Hollywood films and, briefly, The Matrix), and Plato.
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Shadows and Caves
in point. The best example for the seductive insidiousness of such films may be Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (). As the saying goes: Mundus vult decipi. Its continuation is equally apt: Ergo decipiatur. In the words of Jean Baudrillard: “We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason.” Bazin, in , had anticipated such a development even if he did not envision as dire a state of things as Baudrillard did later. Bazin wrote about the inventors of the pre-cinematic apparatuses that first appeared in the sixteenth century: these precursors were indeed more like prophets . . . In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief.
In our age of virtual reality, such imaginings have become all too real. In the words of film scholar James Monaco about James Cameron’s gigantic Titanic (): Most of the cast of thousands were digital animations . . . With this retelling of the epitome of technological failure, he set a parallel model for digital reality. Titanic is an emblem of our quickening trans-Platonic crossing to the new world of virtuality.
Or, in the memorable words of Alex, the narrator and protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, both Anthony Burgess’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film: “It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.” To understand all
“The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” The saying is not ancient; it has been traced back to Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (). Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, in Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster; nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), –; quotation at . I also allude to the title of Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, ; several rpts.). André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema? New ed., ed. and tr. Hugh Gray, vol. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –; quotation at –. Cf. further Garcia, “The Cinematic Image as Platonic Simulacrum,” –, on Bergson and Deleuze. On this see, e.g., Jan Holmberg, “Ideals of Immersion in Early Cinema,” Cinémas, no. (), –. Although he examines the beginnings of film spectatorship (and quotes the passage from Bazin just given), he begins with an amusing experience he had while playing a virtual-reality video game. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond: Art, Technology, Language, History, Theory, th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), (in caption to fig. -). Quoted from Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, ed. Mark Rawlinson (New York: Norton, ; rpt. ), . This edition contains the full text of the novel, including the final chapter omitted from the first American publication on which Kubrick based his screenplay. In a slight misstep, his Alex omits the “like” in this quotation. The ubiquitous like as meaningless filler in modern teen lingo (a new Nadsat?) and beyond makes Burgess look almost prophetic.
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“The Like Real World”
this better, we are fortunate to have our guides, both philosophic and cinematic. Plato and Bergson, among others, lead us out of the cave of false appearances into the light of truth and understanding. Plato himself was not as disdainful of images as he is often considered to be; quite the contrary: “Plato is well known both for the harsh condemnations of images and image-making poets that appear in his dialogues and for the vivid and intense imagery that he himself uses.” Plato even has Socrates utter the wish to see animals portrayed in paintings stir into motion and action. This, Socrates says, also applies to real animals that are being observed while they are asleep. Distinctions between real animals and artificially created animals – earlier, in paintings; now in digital moving images – become virtually undetectable, even if spectators know that they cannot be real. This is the case, for example, in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World film series (–), in which various computer-generated dinosaurs realistically interact with real actors. A more striking case is the remake of the Disney animated musical The Lion King (), directed by Jon Favreau. It appears to be a live-action film: “If you examined stills from the movie, you might mistake it for a wildlife documentary.” But nothing alive is ever on screen – with one exception. The digitally created animals and their environment are indistinguishable from actual animals and their natural habitat, except that they speak and sing with human voices, the only indication of anything unreal. Favreau inserted a single shot of the African wilderness into The Lion King for the express purpose of testing if viewers could tell the difference between reality and artifice: “There are [digitally] rendered shots created by animators and CG artists. I slipped in one single shot that we actually photographed in Africa to see if anyone would notice.” It is safe to assume that no one did.
Quoted from Pierre Destrée and Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, “Introduction: The Power – and the Problems – of Plato’s Images,” in Destrée and Edmonds (eds.), Plato and the Power of Images (Leiden: Brill, ), –; quotation at . See further Zacharoula Petraki, “The Philosophical Paintings of the Republic,” Synthesis, (), –, and “Plato’s Metaphor of ‘Shadow Painting’: Antithesis and ‘Participation’ in the Phaedo and the Republic,” The Classical Journal, no. (), –. Plato, Timaeus b–c. Quoted from Anthony Lane, “Taming Nature,” The New Yorker (July , ), –, at . Director Jon Favreau had previously directed the live-action remake of Disney’s animated musical The Jungle Book () as a mixture of digital animals and three human actors: those playing Mowgli as a baby, Mowgli as a boy, and Mowgli’s father. The quotation by Favreau is taken from his Twitter posting of July , , now at https://web .archive.org/web//https:/twitter.com/Jon_Favreau/status/. Favreau included a still image of what he called “the only real shot” and identified it as beginning his film’s “The Circle of Life” part.
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Shadows and Caves
What Bazin identified in as a fundamental impulse in the history of Western painting since the fifteenth century has now become reality: “as complete an imitation as possible of the outside world.” Or is imitation too weak a term? Should we substitute replacement? The question human or simulacrum? has been a staple of science fiction forever. Classic screen examples occur in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (), Don Siegel’s and Philip Kaufman’s versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (, ), and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (), among many others. The last-mentioned is particularly telling: Is Deckard, the main character, a human or a “replicant,” as androids are here called? One of the replicants asks him: “Are you for real?” The answer is left open, but the question assumes a significance beyond its colloquial context. The name Deckard is an intentional echo of Descartes, as another replicant makes evident. “I think, Sebastian, therefore I am,” she tells a genetic engineer. In view of the real-vs.-faux animals referred to above, it is worth noting that the same matter had appeared in Blade Runner, too. “Is this a real snake?” Deckard asks a replicant who performs with it on stage. She replies: “Of course it’s not real. Do you think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?” But this large snake as well as a large owl and a few smaller animals are real. We are watching genuine animals representing fake animals. After Bazin and Blade Runner but before The Matrix and Favreau, director Peter Weir demonstrated life within a simulacrum in The Truman Show (). Will we soon be living in our own Your-NameHere Show? Or are we already in it? Postmodern cinema delights in blurring life and fiction, reality and imagination. One representative example is Synecdoche, New York (), written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. And the socially and historically committed documentary films of Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing, ; The Look of Silence, ) and Robert Greene (Bisbee’ , ; Procession, ) combine filmic documents with reenactments. Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris did so before them. The title of Greene’s
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. , –; quotation at . Latinists may be chagrined by the infelicitous word formation: the -nt indicates a present active participle. But replicants are passive, not active as far as their creation (in the past) is concerned. So the perfect passive participle replicate would be much more appropriate. Or simply call them replicas.
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“The Like Real World”
documentary is apt, even if it is about professional wrestling: Fake It So Real. To allude to the title of one of the Terminator film series in our context: Is the rise of the machines inevitable? As far as the cinema is concerned, Bertrand Tavernier had pointed the dystopian way in with his futuristic Death Watch, in which a human eye is replaced by a video camera that transmits what it sees to a television network. A more light-hearted approach to the matter can be seen in the Canadian Louis , King of the Airwaves, directed by Michel Poulette, and in EDtv, its American remake by Ron Howard. Although we have become far more sophisticated than the people who saw the moving shadows in Plato’s Cave and than Maxim Gorky, who watched those in the kingdom of shadows, the images surrounding us have kept up with us every step of the way. In their sophisticated deceptiveness – or deceptive sophistication – they may have left us behind. Whether literally or figuratively where moving images are concerned, we are usually left in the dark. By now, the real and the virtual cannot easily be separated. The author of a recent profile of science-fiction author William Gibson reports: “When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen.” That space Gibson termed cyberspace. His novel Neuromancer of (!) “unfolds partly in physical space and partly in ‘the matrix’ – an online realm”: “a computer-saturated world that felt materially and aesthetically real.” The result may be startling to all except youngsters, but film historians and cinephiles will feel on familiar ground: “the locomotive filmed by the Lumière brothers has finally burst through the screen.” American critic, essayist, novelist, and filmmaker Susan Sontag began her book On Photography with a chapter titled “In Plato’s Cave.” Its opening sentence is this: “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” Sontag turned Platonic in her invention of a photograph’s apostrophe to its viewer:
Joshua Rothman, “Mirror World,” The New Yorker (December , ), –; quotations at . Susan Sontag, Essays of the s & s, ed. David Rieff (New York: The Library of America / Penguin, ), . On Photography is on pages –; “In Plato’s Cave” (originally , in a different version titled “Photography”) is on pages –.
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Shadows and Caves The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deductions, speculations, and fantasy.
But not to truth, at least not as often as viewers tend to assume because the majority of photographic – and cinematographic – images look realistic or real. Sontag had written a little earlier: “An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs.” “The very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world,” Sontag had written in her first paragraph of “In Plato’s Cave.” To what extent filmic illusions can influence, with serious consequences, modern reality could be seen to chilling effect during the presidency of former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. All this was quite a while ago. Now we live in an age after photography and cinematography, the age of ubiquitous and inescapable images in digital media on our phones, computer screens, and all over the Internet: We have entered the digital age. And the digital age has entered us. We are no longer the same people we once were. For better and for worse. We no longer think, talk, read, listen, see the same way.
This cri de coeur appeared in print in – technologically, nearly an eon ago. More recently, there is this from Scottish physician and medical writer Gavin Francis: As a working family physician, I’m shown examples every day of the ways in which new digital technologies are Janus-faced, both boon and curse, strengthening opportunities to connect even as they can deepen a sense of isolation. “Virtual” means “almost,” after all, and was hijacked as a descriptor of the digital world because it was once taken for granted that the creations of Silicon Valley aren’t quite real. Many people now are less sure of the distinction between virtual and actual . . . I hear more and more
Sontag, Essays of the s & s, and . Sontag, Essays of the s & s, . On this subject see in particular Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes of Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), – and – (notes; chapter titled “Ronald Reagan, the Movie”), and Garry Wills, Reagan’s America (; new ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), – and – (“Part Four: Movies,” including chapter title “Hollywood on the Potomac”). This is the first text passage in Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: Norton, ), (opening of “Preface”). Ritchin was professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University.
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“The Like Real World”
patients complain that they emerge from sessions online feeling tense, anxious, low in mood, or with a pervasive feeling of unreality.
Since the floods of images are unlikely to recede, it will be incumbent on us to be aware of their nature and effects at least to some extent. Both writers and screenwriters occasionally alert us to the unreliability of the images around us. In novelist, playwright, essayist, and scriptwriter Gore Vidal’s satiric novel Duluth (), for example, characters from its plot appear, disappear, and reappear in a television series called, of course, “Duluth.” The cinema has a long tradition of characters entering a film within the film or descending from the screen into “real” life, as in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo (), which is also the director’s homage to his medium. Better known are Being There, the satiric novel by Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski and its American film version by Hal Ashby. Playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet’s film House of Games () cleverly plays with appearance and reality. So does, if in a more light-hearted manner, John McNaughton’s erotic thriller Wild Things (), which is famous for its plot twists: double-, triple-, quadruple-crosses. Comparable is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (), a supernatural thriller. In these films the reality on screen remains real but not in the sense that most or all of their protagonists and all viewers have been (mis-)led to believe. The power, often devastating, of images over reality has been a characteristic feature in the works of Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke since The Seventh Continent (), Benny’s Video (), Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (), a trilogy, and on to Hidden (). Unreliable, because ambiguous or enigmatic, images are a staple of cinema surrealism, as in much of the oeuvre of Lúis Buñuel, and in studies of abnormal psychology and of unhinged or tortured souls. Random but representative examples are Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (), Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (), a direct influence on Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (), Images (), and Women (), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (), and countless supernatural thrillers and shockers. Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (), elegant and charming, is something quite different.
Gavin Francis, “Scrolling,” The New York Review of Books (September , ), –; quotation at . This film even has classical analogies, on which see John Thorburn, “John McNaughton’s Wild Things: Pop Culture Echoes of Medea in the s,” in Heike Bartel and Anne Simon (eds.), Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the st Century (Abingdon and New York: Legenda, ), –.
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Shadows and Caves
More recently, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (both ) revisit the subject of appearance and reality in a romantic-mysterious manner. Then there is Reality TV. And LARP: Live-action role play, often connected to film franchises, e.g. Harry Potter, and even run by Walt Disney World (Star Wars). I , therefore I am. (Yes, it is a verb, too.) The concept of “bleeding,” as ers call the blurring of emotions between their real selves and those they assume, could be seen to sobering effect in . The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a Ukrainian er to observe about the ongoing war: We change reality so many times that the situation now is not so hard for us. Except when we lose our friends or members of our family. When I was driving through enemy territory [to help evacuate two Ukrainian families from their bombed-out city], I thought through different situations . . . It was a kind of larp adventure, but with more emotional depth.
Evidently, absolute boundaries no longer exist. A case in point is the “immersive virtual-reality environment” or “spatially immersive display,” as it is generally called, in which viewers wearing special equipment can see and walk around floating three-dimensional images of objects that are not there. The first of these was developed in at the University of Illinois at Chicago: Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. Its acronym repeats the first word in its name: CAVE. An allusion to Plato seems intended. In , D. W. Griffith, the American film pioneer who developed most of the language of narrative cinema, made a prediction about future viewers of historical films that, although partly illogical, has nevertheless largely come true. As he told an interviewer: Imagine a public library of the near future . . . Suppose you wish to ‘read up’ on a certain episode [of history]. Instead of consulting all the authorities . . . you will merely seat yourself . . ., press the button, and actually see what happened . . . You will merely be present at the making of history. . . Everything except the three R’s, the arts, and possibly the mental sciences can be taught this way.
Quoted from Neima Jahromi, “The Great Pretenders,” The New Yorker (May , ), –, at . On virtual reality, CAVE, and related issues see now Ariel Rogers, “‘Taking the Plunge’: The New Immersive Screens,” in Buckley, Campe, and Casetti (eds.), Screen Genealogies, –, with further references. Quoted from Richard Barry, “Five Dollar ‘Movies’ Prophesied,” The New York Times (March , ), . This article is now easily accessible in Anthony Slide (ed.), D. W. Griffith: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –; quotations at .
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“The Like Real World”
Forty years later, an unexpected voice almost echoed Griffith’s. In a article called “Diogène couché,” French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss maintained: What we know today . . . is that, despite the monuments, the statues and the books, we will never really know what Greek culture was. We have preserved disjointed members; but the essential, that is to say, the way in which it all cohered in a lived experience – and what only just one hour of intimacy with a Greek would reveal – has disappeared, and disappeared forever.
In a conversation held many years later, Lévi-Strauss called this observation “a jest” (une boutade) but added, tellingly for our context: “Which doesn’t mean that a five-minute film made in fifth-century Athens would not completely transform the vision of Greek culture the historians give us.” The jest is less jocular than Lévi-Strauss made it out to be, with his addendum a considerable hyperbole. Nevertheless, it is worth considering. Lévi-Strauss was doubtless thinking of documentary films, not of fiction films. But documentaries are subject to laws comparable to those which govern historiography. So even a great scholar was not entirely free from misapprehension. This does not in any way diminish Lévi-Strauss’s achievements, but it does, yet again, point us to the importance of watching images, especially moving ones, with attention and scrutiny. Additionally, the cinema has become a quasi-universal entity far beyond its own medium: Certainly since the early th century, and probably since the invention of the camera obscura, the most pervasive – material and mental – model by which to picture ourselves in this world and acting upon it, has been the ‘cinematic apparatus’. It is present as an arrangement of parts, as a logic of visual processes, and as a geometry of actions even when (especially when) camera and projector are absent. It existed as a philosopher’s dream in Plato’s parable of the cave, and it has a technical-prosthetic afterlife in surveillance videos and body scans, so that its noble golden age as the art form of the second industrial age represents a relatively brief lease on its
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène couché,” Les Temps Modernes, no. (), –, at ; rpt. in Cités, (–), –, at . The phrase “disjointed members” (des membres disjoints) is a common allusion to Horace, Satires .. (disiecti membra poetae, changed to disiecta membra). Les Temps Modernes was named after Charles Chaplin’s film Modern Times (). Quoted from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, tr. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), (in chapter titled “The Ragpickers of History”); French original: Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, De près et de loin (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, ), (in “Dans la poubelle de l’histoire”).
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Shadows and Caves overall life. Or to put it differently: the cinema has many histories, only some of which belong to the movies.
The preceding words alone justify the length of this chapter, perhaps even of my book. But there is more, especially if we consider memory and history, the topic of the chapter’s final section.
Varda and Ophuls on Memory and History Agnès Varda, whom we encountered in Chapter , offers an insight worth considering in this context. In Ulysse (), a film that starts with a photograph she took almost thirty years earlier, she comments on time and history in these terms: “The performers of history, who are its official memory, pass like shadows seen from Plato’s Cave.” And, a little later, about her photograph: “You see anything you want in it. An image is this and more.” Since the nineteenth century, Plato’s Cave has been the most suitable starting point for those surrounded by images of “the like real world.” Has homo sapiens evolved, if that is the right term, from homo pingens to homo photographicus and homo cinematographicus to the final stage of homo medialis? Thinking about Plato’s allegory in connection with moving images might show us the way toward the light, even if, as Sontag believed, we can never escape from the cave. There is, however, another side. Extolling the “prodigious spectacle” shown in an episode of the French television program Science de demain (“Science of Tomorrow”), in which a patient could watch his cardiac surgery on a screen as it was being performed, Bazin concluded in : “Thanks to TV, man has become his own Plato’s cave.” Today, a reconsideration of the history of images and simulacra since Plato’s time is more than advisable. The implications far exceed the
Quoted from Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist,” in Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –, at . Farocki was an influential German film director, especially of short documentaries, and a film and cultural critic, among other things. I take the last term from the title of Manfred L. Pirner and Matthias Rath (eds.), Homo medialis: Perspektiven und Probleme einer Anthropologie der Medien (Munich: kopaed, ). Their media anthropology is already turning into a kind of media archeology. André Bazin, “You Can Now ‘Descend into Yourself’,” in Bazin, André Bazin’s New Media, ed. and tr. Dudley Andrew (Oakland: University of California Press, ), –, at ; source reference at (note). On this see, e.g., Monaco, How to Read a Film, – (chapter titled “Multimedia: The Digital Revolution”).
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Varda and Ophuls on Memory and History
cinema, given people’s emotional attachments to robots, whether in human shape or not. And this is to say nothing of blessings like the Metaverse and Supranet that are already looming above us. A prophet and apologist defines the former from his inside knowledge: Here . . . is what I mean when I write and speak about the Metaverse: “A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
O brave new world! The last word quoted seems to let the cat out of its Metaversal bag. One film scholar has introduced a concept worth pondering in our context: “Plato’s Uncertainty Principle.” That this is an apt expression where images and their effects, both intellectual and emotional, are concerned, may be illustrated, by my final, and profound, example. Documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls (or Ophu¨ls) released his four-and-a-half-hour film The Memory of Justice in . It deals with twentieth-century German, French, and American war crimes and atrocities – the Holocaust and Nuremberg Trials, Algeria, Vietnam – and has this epigraph, which takes up the film’s title: believed that human beings were guided, in the course of their brief lives in this imperfect world, by the dim recollection of some previous and perfect state of the Soul, by the vague memory of Ideal Virtue and Ideal Justice.
The Memory of Justice contrasts such an ideal with the ever-present imperfections in human lives by means of documentary footage and interviews conducted by Ophuls. The epigraph is not specific about Plato, but his readers will immediately think of the Myth of the Pamphylian Er, which concludes the Republic. The film was controversial after its release and
Cf. Elyakim Kislev, Relationships .: How AI, VR, and Robots Will Reshape Our Emotional Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, ). The cinema was there before, from Metropolis () to Lars and the Real Girl (), Her (), and Ex Machina (), to mention only a few of the best-known examples. But classical myth, with the robots invented by Hephaestus and the moving statues invented by Daedalus, was there first. Quoted from Matthew Ball, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything (New York: Liveright, ), . Hediger, “Can We Have the Cave and Leave It Too?” especially –. Plato, Republic b–d. Related myths appear in Gorgias, Phaedo, and Phaedrus. – Plato himself has been put on screen a few times. One of these is little known but worth mentioning here as a mini-precursor of sorts of The Matrix. The (fake-)news TV program You Are There had news
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Shadows and Caves
even before, when Ophuls had to battle producers’ attempts at censorship. In one instance, the images and words of The Memory of Justice were used as a personal attack on Ophuls, who defended himself spiritedly. Decades later, after subsequent historical developments, including new documents (and documentaries) about the past that Ophuls had dealt with, the same words and images were interpreted to vindicate him. According to Aristotle, thinking without images was as good as impossible. But thinking with images, especially moving images, is often highly demanding. Robert Bresson, who never called himself a philosopher of the image or of the cinema and was not called one by others although he might well have been, once explained why. I give him the last word with the following aphoristic restatement of this chapter’s topic: The real, when it has reached the mind, is already not real anymore. Our too thoughtful, too intelligent eye. Two sorts of real: (i) The crude real recorded as it is by the camera, () what we call real and see deformed by our memory and some wrong reckonings. Problem [for the filmmaker]. To make what you see be seen, through the intermediary of a machine that does not see it as you see it.
To this Bresson added a footnote: “And to make what you understand be understood, through the intermediary of a machine that does not understand it as you do.”
anchor Walter Cronkite present famous moments from history as if they were just occurring. “The Death of Socrates ( ),” a episode, recreated the last hours of Socrates. Greek-American actor John Cassavetes played Plato. “You’re a clever young man, aren’t you?” he is told at one point. The half-hour episode was directed by Sidney Lumet, later an accomplished film director. Cassavetes played the husband in Rosemary’s Baby and became a distinguished writer-director. Harold Rosenberg, “The Shadow of the Furies,” The New York Review of Books (January , ), –; “‘The Memory of Justice’: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books (March , ), (Ophuls, Rosenberg, others). Fundamental information about Ophuls’s experiences during and after production (censorship, controversy) is in Frank Manchel, “A War Over Justice: An Interview with Marcel Ophuls,” Literature/Film Quarterly, no. (), –. Ian Buruma, “Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?” The New York Review of Books (August , ), –. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, tr. Jonathan Griffin (; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, ), .
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Static Flight: Zeno’s Arrow and Cinematographic Motion
The famous paradoxes of the fifth-century Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea have been fascinating and controversial to all who have come across them, including Aristotle. They seem to be perverse arguments about the nonexistence of motion in time and space. The two best-known ones involve Achilles’ race against a turtle, which has a head start but which Achilles, proverbial for his speed, can never catch up with; and an arrow that remains stationary during its flight. A modern philosopher’s point about Zeno’s paradoxes is a useful beginning for a new evaluation of the arrow paradox in our context: Since at least Aristotle’s time, philosophers have regarded the paradoxes as puzzles demanding solution, and their solutions have typically involved theories, concepts, and distinctions unknown to Zeno. It is remarkable that Zeno could formulate puzzles that go to the heart of our conceptions of space, time, and motion; this is a good reason to examine them in the light of our own theories.
As far as the arrow paradox is concerned, we may add: and in the light of our own media. Modern visual technology is capable of demonstrating that this paradox has lost none of its fascination. Our media can make it immediately understandable, and not only to philosophers, mathematicians, or physicists, with a higher degree of vividness than any scientists could hope for in their analyses and diagrams. The following pages examine Zeno’s arrow paradox in conjunction with the ways in which cinematic and digital technologies have displayed motion, beginning with Louis and Auguste Lumière’s camera-plusprojector and ending with The Chronicles of San Francisco. Stasis and motion – or, rather, stasis-in-motion – is the essence both of Zeno’s
Richard D. McKirahan Jr., “Zeno,” in A. A. Long (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; several rpts.), –; quotation at . Its context (–) should be kept in mind as well.
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Static Flight
paradoxes and of the technologies of motion images. In a long essay of called “The Intelligence of a Machine,” French filmmaker Jean Epstein, who was also a theorist and philosopher of the cinema, specifically linked the movement that we observe in the images on screen to early Greek science and philosophy: As is well known, a film is composed of a large number of images, juxtaposed on the filmstrip but distinct and a little dissimilar through the position, more or less modified, of the subject being filmed. At a certain rhythm the projection of this series of figures, separated by brief intervals of space and time, produces the appearance of an uninterrupted movement. And this is the most striking wonder of the Lumière Brothers’ machine, that it transforms a discontinuity into a continuity; that it allows the synthesis of discontinuous and immobile elements into a continuous and mobile harmonious whole [ensemble]; that it accomplishes the transition between the two primordial aspects of nature, which – since there exists a metaphysic of sciences – are opposed to each other and reciprocally excluded.
The above segment of text is accompanied by the heading “A Kind of Miracle” (“Une façon de miracle”). Subsequent segments address three kinds of appearance or manifestation; the second of these adduces Democritus, the philosopher of atomism. It is followed by a section on the transformation of the discontinuous into the continuous, which Zeno had denied but which the film camera has achieved: That one reality could do two things simultaneously, continuity and discontinuity; that one sequence without break should be a sum total of interruptions, that the addition [i.e. sequential accumulation] of immobiles should produce movement, this is what has astonished the mind since the Eleatic philosophers. So the film camera evidently becomes a mechanism mysteriously destined for an appraisal of the false precision of Zeno’s famous argument about the arrow, for the analysis of this fine and clever metamorphosis [subtile métamorphose] of rest into mobility [is. . .] a transformation as astonishing as the generation of living from inanimate matter.
Here we may compare what Andrei Tarkovsky wrote about time and the nature of cinema. Looking back on his life’s work as writer-director,
Jean Epstein, “L’intelligence d’une machine,” in Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vols. (Paris: Seghers, ), vol. , –; quotations at and . The heading of the section quoted last reads in French: “La transmutation du discontinu en continu, niée par Zénon, mais accomplie par le cinématographe.” Epstein referred to Zeno’s arrow again the following year in a short essay titled “La logique des images” (“The Logic of Images”), now collected in Epstein, vol. , –; Zeno is mentioned at . Epstein referred to or discussed Greek philosophers throughout his writings.
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The Filmstrip and the Arrow’s Flight
Tarkovsky concluded: “the cinema image is essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time.” And: “time becomes the very foundation of cinema.” On a sheer endless scale, cinema technology, now an inevitable aspect of our daily lives, artfully illustrates Zeno’s perspective. In a manner of speaking, cinematographic motion vindicates Zeno’s (il-)logical concepts even if they clash with physical reality. (Flying arrows do move.) Most filmmakers and visual artists today are unaware of the parallel. So are most of their viewers. This lack of awareness, however, justifies the historical survey and the conclusions offered in these pages.
The Filmstrip and the Arrow’s Flight The illusion of movement in cinema derives from the rapid change of still images exposed in the camera and projected on the screen. Here we may detect a classical parallel: Zeno’s paradoxical argument that motion does not exist. His paradox of an arrow’s flight is the most famous illustration of immobility underlying what he regarded as a false perception of motion. According to Zeno, a flying arrow never moves because at any one moment it occupies only one specific place. Zeno’s works do not survive, but Aristotle described and refuted his paradoxes. Nevertheless, they have elicited endless comments ever since. Here is part of Max Black’s
Quoted from Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, tr. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), and . The chief source on Zeno’s arrow is Aristotle, Physics b– and – (in Book , Chapter ). All that survives of and about Zeno is now easily available in a major new text: André Laks and Glenn W. Most (eds. and trs.), Early Greek Philosophy, vol. : Western Greek Thinkers, Part (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –, with – (D–D) on the arguments against motion (D is the arrow). H. D. P. Lee, Zeno of Elea: A Text, with Translation and Notes, corrected rpt. (Amsterdam: Hakkert, ), is still valuable; it had first appeared in from Cambridge University Press (reissued ). Lee, – and –, deals with the arrow. Also fundamental are Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, ), – (– on the arrow); G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rev. , rpt. ), – (– on the arrow). Readers who want to pursue the topic further may also consult Max Black, Problems of Analysis: Philosophical Essays (; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, ), – (– on the arrow); Wesley C. Salmon (ed.), Zeno’s Paradoxes (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, ), an anthology; Adolf Gru¨nbaum, Modern Science and Zeno’s Paradoxes (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, ), especially – and –; J. A. Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno (Aldershot: Avebury, ), especially – (the arrow) and – (motion). McKirahan, “Zeno” (with – on the arrow), and Christof Rapp, “Zenon,” in Hellmut Flashar, Dieter Bremer, and Georg Rechenauer (eds.), Die Philosophie der Antike, vol. : Fru¨hgriechische Philosophie (two parts in cont. pag.; Basel: Schwabe, ), – (– on the arrow), provide overviews, summaries, and bibliographical references. In spite of its title, Matthias Schramm, Die Bedeutung der Bewegungslehre des Aristoteles fu¨r seine Lösungen der zenonischen Paradoxie (Frankfurt am Main:
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Static Flight
restatement. Expressed in colloquial terms, it makes Zeno’s paradox immediately clear: During its flight, the arrow changes its position . . . for it starts in one place, ends in another, and passes through an enormous number of others on the way. Consider . . . the one exactly midway between the bow and the target. The arrow cannot stay in that place for any length of time, no matter how small; for the arrow is constantly moving during the flight, and therefore changes its position during every interval of time. The arrow must, therefore, be at that place . . . only for an instant. At this instant, the arrow is at a perfectly definite place, for a body cannot be in two places at once. And that place is exactly filled by the arrow at that instant . . . But doesn’t this mean that the arrow must be at rest at that instant? For, at that instant, it is confined to a space exactly equal to it – at that time it has no room in which to be moving. And . . . the arrow is not in that position for any length of time – it has, at that instant, no time in which to be moving. If this seems strange, consider the following comparison. After the arrow has reached the target, I pick it up, and hold it, once again, at the halfway mark. This time, there is no doubt that the arrow is motionless. But the first time the arrow was in exactly the same condition at the instant it was passing through the halfway mark. Both times, the arrow exactly fits the place in question. So the arrow must have been at rest the first time, just as it is the second time . . . I began by talking about the place at the halfway mark. But what I have said clearly applies to every place passed during the flight. The arrow is at rest at every instant of the flight; so, although it is at different places at different times, it is always motionless.
The conclusion that he was right, based on Zeno’s argument itself, is unavoidable. So he is when his argument is considered in modern technological hindsight: from a cinematographic point of view. H. D. P. Lee observed in on the motion of bodies in Zeno’s paradox “The Stadium”: Roughly speaking, the motion must be supposed to be cinematographic and not continuous . . . If motion is assumed to have [such a] cinematographic character . . . time must be assumed to be not continuous and infinitely
Klostermann, ), deals more with Aristotle than Zeno and has elicited some dissent; cf. reviews by D. W. Hamlyn, “Aristotle’s Theory of Motion,” The Classical Review, (), –, and, in greater detail, Friedrich Solmsen, Gnomon, (), –. Zeno took his inspiration from his teacher Parmenides, whose importance for Zeno I omit considering here. There is ample scholarship on their relation and on Parmenides’ thought. His surviving fragments and Plato’s dialogue Parmenides are the obvious starting points. Black, Problems of Analysis, –. His entire exposition of the paradox is a model of lucidity.
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The Filmstrip and the Arrow’s Flight
divisible, but discontinuous and made up of instants; for what we mean when we say that motion is cinematographic or discontinuous is that it consists in the occupation of a series of different positions at different instants.
He added: “Aristotle elsewhere mentions the view that motion takes place in a series of kinêmata, i.e. is cinematographic in the way I have described.” Lee then referred to Epicurus for a “similar view” and adduced Cyril Bailey, an expert on Epicurus, who had observed: “the action [of atoms’ motion according to Epicurus] is instantaneous and complete as soon as begun. This idea exposed him to much criticism on the ground that it was impossible to conceive of a continuous motion composed of these instantaneous ‘jerks.’” The last word quoted is the mot juste for our context because the filmstrip is indeed rapidly jerked into and out of sprocket holes during filming and projection. Matters are different in digital media. Black adopted a position similar to Lee’s. His visual terms are revealing: I have tried to reinforce the picture of the arrow frozen, as it were, at each place and each instant. To be even half persuaded, we have to think of motion as an infinite series of instantaneous states – a series of still lifes – tableaux of ‘arrested motion.’ These might be compared to the static pictures of which a cinematograph reel is composed.
The motion of bodies that the camera captures by exposing film at twentyfour frames per second, the now standard speed at which the filmstrip moves, is indeed discontinuous and made up of instants. We can see this when we hold a section of film to the light and look at individual frames, when we freeze-frame a film on our home-video systems, or when we take screenshots of frames as illustrations in academic books and journals.
Lee, Zeno of Elea, and . Lee, Zeno of Elea, note (Greek transliterated). His reference is to Aristotle, Physics b–a. Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus: A Study (; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, ), –; quotation at . See, in addition, Lee, Zeno of Elea, , on the possible origin of the theory of “a series of instantaneous transitions (my ‘cinematographic’ movement)” among the Pythagoreans, with which Zeno engaged. Black, Problems of Analysis, –. Here he adds a footnote ( note ) quoting Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy of on the cinematograph as showing continuous motion statically. On this topic see, e.g., Joseph and Barbara Anderson, “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures,” and Bill Nichols and Susan J. Lederman, “Flicker and Motion in Film,” both in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.), The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s, ), – and –, and Tom Gunning, “The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century ‘Philosophical Toys’ and Their Discourse,” in Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), –, with extensive additional references.
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Static Flight
Zeno and Motion on Film: Pro and Con Sixty years after Lee, J. A. Faris took up the matter of cinematographicity, as he called it, in considerably greater detail. Examining the Greek atomic theory of time, in which continuous motion is “ruled out,” he states about discontinuous motion within this theory: On the face of it there are two forms which such a theory may take. One is that motion is essentially cinematographic . . . instances of cinematographic motion . . . occur when a supposedly moving object occupies different places at different times. If the places are suitably related and the times are suitably related, an illusion of motion is given . . . A film of Zeno’s flying arrow according to this theory would be a sequence of still photographs in which the image of the arrow appears successively at a sequence of positions between the bow and the target. However, the image does not move . . . The image of the arrow a yard away from the bow is a distinct individual from the image of the arrow at the bow, though similar to it.
All this is accurate, sensible, and fundamental. So is the obvious conclusion to be drawn about this form of motion within the atomic theory: “From the orthodox point of view . . . these . . . cinematographic movements are cases of apparent rather than real motion: real motion, which is continuous, is distinct from though simulated by such apparent motion.” The matter becomes more complex and much more fascinating when we consider the second form of motion that Faris identifies. Here “all motion is essentially cinematographic. For example, it is not just that the motion of the image of the arrow in the film is cinematographic: the very motion of the arrow itself (of which the film is a representation) is cinematographic.” Faris then comments: “Now this is an extremely bold theory.” So it is, because it entails that just as the image of the arrow in any one frame of the film is an individual entity distinct from, though qualitatively similar to, the image of the arrow in the preceding frame, so the arrow itself at any one place in its flight is an individual entity distinct from (though qualitatively similar to) the arrow at preceding places in its flight.
The result is this: “the arrow, and similarly every object normally regarded as a continuant, is being . . .‘every moment annihilated and created anew.’”
All of the preceding quotations are from Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno, –. Faris’s own quotation is from George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (), section .
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Zeno and Motion on Film: Pro and Con
Faris next turns to single-space and multiple-space variants of cinematographic motion. He concludes: “We are left then with cinematographicity. It is a startling theory of motion. Can it possibly be accepted as true?” What Faris observes concerning the motions of insubstantial phenomena such as shadows as opposed to those of solid bodies is more important than any question of truth. Faris states about movements of shadows: There is a certain happening at [place] X and later there is a similar happening at [place] Y, but it is not the case that there is a single, individual, distinct thing that was first at X and later at Y. But this is the essence of the cinematographic theory, which accordingly may reasonably be regarded as a satisfactory account of movement.
This is entirely unobjectionable. But does it entail that the cinematographic theory of motion, which is applicable to insubstantial or representational kinds of movement, is also applicable to the motions of bodies? Since “Zeno’s arrow (the real arrow, not its image)” has “a single continuing identity,” the cinematographic theory may be said not to apply. Such an objection is, however, open to question. Decisive for us is what Faris concludes about Zeno in his summary of the arrow paradox in regard to “the theory that space and time are not infinitely divisible but consist ultimately of atomic spatial distances and atomic periods of time.” The atomic theory requires a cinematic account of motion. Such an account has indeed strange implications but it is consistent with the unnatural interpretation of Zeno’s conclusion, allowing as it does for an object to change place while always remaining at rest; and if the unnatural interpretation represents the sense that Zeno intended then he can perhaps be regarded as the father of the cinematographic theory.
As we saw in Chapter , the first modern philosopher to deal with the cinema (or, to use his own term, the cinematograph) as analogy to mental processes in general and to apply it to Zeno’s paradoxes (and to Plato’s Cave Allegory) in particular was Henri Bergson – and as early as only a few years after the invention of the cinematograph at that! He examined
Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno, –. Quotations from Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno, . On this Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno, –, with discussion of Bishop Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. Quotations from Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno, (number for note omitted). Faris, – (note ) refers to Diodorus Cronus on motion. Henri Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps: Cours au Collège de France , ed. Camille Riquier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), passim, and Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, ), –. On Bergson’s Zeno see, e.g., Hervé Barreau, “Bergson et Zénon
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Static Flight
Zeno’s paradoxes, especially the arrow, and concluded: “We must . . . escape from the cinematographical mechanism of thought.” And: “We must make complete abstraction of this mechanism, if we wish to get rid at one stroke of the theoretical absurdities that the question of movement raises.” Bergson turned to the arrow and Achilles’ race against the turtle in considerable detail. Bergson disagreed with Zeno about his paradoxes, especially the one concerning the arrow’s flight. Even so, Zeno’s arrow was of great importance to Bergson’s views on time, as becomes evident from his lecture course on the History of the Idea of Time, to which he refers in Creative Evolution. Bergson mentioned Zeno and his arrow very early in his first lecture and returned to the subject later. I have quoted Faris at length because he is the most intrepid advancer of the cinematographic view of Zeno’s arrow. But serious dissent has been registered, too, never more succinctly than by Jonathan Barnes. After thoroughly analyzing the paradox, he concludes a chapter section called “The Arrow” by stating: “it seems that Zeno is vindicated: the moving arrow does not move.” He elaborates a little later: “objects do, at every instant in their temporal careers, occupy a space exactly equal to their volume at that instant. And they do so even if they are in motion throughout their temporal careers. Why should anyone find that puzzling?” From this, demonstrated in much more detail than need be included here, it follows that “Zeno’s argument is valid; but it relies on a false premiss.” Shortly after, Barnes ends his analysis with “two negatively polemical remarks.” The first pertains to our topic:
d’Élée,” Revue philosophique de Louvain, (), – and –, at , , , and . For a concise overview of the matter (Parmenides and Zeno, Plato and Aristotle, including the latter’s Now, adduced in Chapter ) see Robin Durie, “The Strange Nature of the Instant,” in Durie (ed.), Time and the Instant: Essays in the Physics and Philosophy of Time (Manchester: Clinamen Press, ), –. Bergson, Creative Evolution, –; quotations at . Bergson, Creative Evolution, –. Zeno and his arrow make their first appearance in Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps, – (December , ; Bergson’s text begins on page ). Bergson returns to both in greater detail in his fifth lecture (–; January , ) and refutes the arrow paradox at the beginning of his sixteenth (; April , ). On this topic see further the editor’s notes –, at . For a critique of Bergson’s view of Zeno, see Marie Cariou, “Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting,” in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –, at –. The quotations are from Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, , , and . See also his “general portrait of Zeno” at , including an appropriate image from archery. Jonathan Lear, “A Note on Zeno’s Arrow,” Phronesis, (), –, at –, takes issue with Barnes’s argument. Lear, and , grants “victory to Zeno.”
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Zeno and Motion on Film: Pro and Con
in expounding and criticizing the Arrow I have neither explicitly nor implicitly invoked any theory of time. In particular, I have not accused Zeno of treating time as being ‘composed of instants’; nor have I ascribed to him the view that time is made up of ‘atomic minimal parts’; nor have I made him assume that motion proceeds cinematographically. The paradox . . . is innocent of any such theories: it presupposes only the two harmless and common notions that there are instants, as well as periods, of time; and that things move, if at all, at instants.
This throws a different light on our subject. It is not difficult to imagine how Barnes would have judged Faris’s view on Zeno’s cinematographicity had he been able to know it. Even so, Barnes himself mentions the cinema as analogy, if only in passing. But the question whether those among Zeno’s commentators who have lived in the cinema age are right or wrong about cinematic aspects in Zeno is not the real issue. Rather, what is decisive is the intellectual feasibility of approaching the paradox from a modern perspective on time and motion, especially a technological one, and of attempting to increase our understanding of an ancient thinker that way. This perspective may be dismissed for being anachronistic, but it can aid us in shedding new light on a fascinating logical conundrum and deepen our appreciation of Zeno’s mind. An example is a playful but fundamentally serious invention: a dialogue between the shades of Zeno and Socrates in Hades, in which the shade of Zeno has read and understood Zeno’s modern explicators and corrects a number of points. When modern mathematicians and physicists turn to Zeno and even use the term “Quantum Zeno Effect,” a cinematic approach may be permissible as well. Here we ought to remember what V. C. Chappell wrote more than half a century ago:
Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, . Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, (on stability and change) and (on Zeno). Here is a telling detail about how scholarly views change. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; corrected rpts., and later), , introduced the arrow paradox by noting that Zeno “now proceeds to ‘cinematographic’ motion.” The second edition (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield; see above) has eliminated this sentence (under Barnes’s influence?). Cinematic motion returns, however, in Rapp, “Zenon,” –. Philip E. B. Jourdain, “The Flying Arrow: An Anachronism,” Mind, no. (), –. Richard Schlegel, “Quantum Mechanics and the Paradoxes of Zeno,” American Scientist, no. (July ), – and ; B. Misra and E. C. G. Sudarshan, “The Zeno’s Paradox [sic] in Quantum Theory,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, (), –; Arysio N. dos Santos, “A Quantum Mechanical Solution of Zeno’s Paradoxes,” Manuscrito, no. (October ), –; Asher Peres, “Zeno Paradox [sic] in Quantum Theory,” American Journal of Physics, (), –. Cf. Rapp, “Zenon,” –.
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Static Flight Which view of motion or of time is correct, which is the true or right view, among these various alternatives? Or if it is not a matter of the correct or true view, which view is the most successful or defensible or adequate? It seems clear that an appeal to arguments such as that of Zeno, valid though they may be, can never settle this question decisively. What does “motion” mean, or what ought it to mean? What is motion, really? . . . Does what we now think, how we now conceive motion, the rules whereby the words “move” and “motion” are used in our everyday dealings with one another, have anything to do with philosophical inquiries into the nature of motion? Are there even rules for the use of “motion” in ordinary affairs, or rules that can be stated with any precision? I do not know the answers to these questions.
We may therefore leave the matter in the air, as it were. Time to move on. Echoing Faris, let us attempt to demonstrate that Zeno is indeed the intellectual father of cinematographic movement. His arrow paradox is illuminated by the medium of images that appear to be moving but are not. By way of introduction, I quote filmmaker and film theorist Peter Wollen: The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber. Nowhere, of course, is this trend more evident than when still photography is compared with film. The natural, familiar metaphor is that photography is like a point, film like a line. Zeno’s paradox: the illusion of movement.
High-Speed Photography, Bullet Time, and Beyond Modern cinema and related media, especially in our digital age, can illustrate Zeno’s arrow paradox with astonishing clarity. We can now slow down or altogether stop the flow of apparently moving images during projection. Freeze-framing the image of an object in flight will result in a blurred appearance if that object has been filmed at standard speed, but it will be razor-sharp if filmed at an extremely high speed. Shutter speeds of , exposures per second are nothing extraordinary. An example of the former is Odysseus’ shot through the holes of twelve axes in films of the
V. C. Chappell, “Time and Zeno’s Arrow,” The Journal of Philosophy, no. (), –; quotation at (in final paragraph). Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” Photographies, (), –; quotation at beginning. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Scrivere con la luce / Writing with Light (Milan: Electa / Aquila: Accademia dell’Immagine, ), vol. : La luce / The Light, and , briefly mentions Zeno’s arrow in connection with “the Infinite.” We came across Storaro in Chapter .
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High-Speed Photography, Bullet Time, and Beyond
Figure . The Matrix. An example of bullet time. Screen capture.
Odyssey, my topic in Chapter . Filmed and projected at normal speed, his arrow’s flight is nearly invisible because it is too fast for the eye to keep pace with; when slowed or stopped, the arrow appears blurred, as if it occupied immediately adjacent spaces simultaneously. Something similar could be said about The Runner, mentioned in Chapter . The statue’s blurred appearance equally suggests both simultaneity of time and arrested motion, if in an actual three-dimensional object and not in a twodimensional representation of that object. In science-fiction and fantasy films, bullets can now be watched flying at such slow speed that human targets see them coming and move out of their flight path. Since it occurs mainly during shoot-outs, this phenomenon is now routinely called bullet time. The process, popularized in the Matrix trilogy (–), is created by means of elaborate special effects via computer-generated images (Fig. .). An instructive behind-the-scenes featurette about the making of the first Matrix film, included on homevideo releases, explains some of the complicated technology involved. On various occasions, ultra-slow and ultra-fast motions of human and other
On this see, e.g., Lisa Purse, “The New Spatial Dynamics of the Bullet-Time Effect,” in Geoff King (ed.), The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond (Exeter: Intellect, ), –; Bob Rehak, “The Migration of Forms: Bullet Time as Microgenre,” Film Criticism, no. (), –; Darren Tofts, “Truth at Twelve Thousand Frames per Second: The Matrix and Time-Image Cinema,” in Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser (eds.), /: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford, : Stanford Business Books / Stanford University Press, ), –. This title alludes to the well-known definition of the cinema by Jean-Luc Godard as truth at twenty-four frames a second. On philosophical aspects of bullet time in The Matrix, see Elie During, “Trois figures de la simulation,” in During (intro.), Matrix: Machine philosophique, nd ed. (Paris: Ellipses, ), –, at –.
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Static Flight
bodies at variable speeds occur on screen together with realistic movements. The phenomenon appears in various other films influenced by the Matrix trilogy and may be observed within the context of pseudo-Greek history in the “hero kills,” as they were called, of () and, in the context of pseudoGreek mythology, in Tarsem Singh’s Immortals () and Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (). The same occurs in the instant replays of live sports broadcasts. Wonder Woman includes, early on, an especially clear instance of a killing when the Amazon Antiope crosses the trajectory of a bullet flying in slowed-down motion. The film’s time-travel plot is mainly set during World War I (Figs. .–.). Ironically, the clarity of such bullet-time images, not least Blu-ray and K HD video releases and with large-screen projection in home theaters, is so great that artificial motion blur is often added digitally to render them looking real. The result: a hyper-realistic unreality and an unreal realism. A precursor of such wizardry, much simpler but still astonishing for its time, appears in William Castle’s supernatural fantasy-comedy-romance film Zotz! (), in which a pre-Columbian amulet allows its owner to slow down time when uttering the title word, which is based on the name of a Mayan god. But all of this is, in principle, nothing new. The series of chronophotographs of running horses that Eadweard Muybridge started taking in began the process even before the advent of the cinema. Muybridge was the first to prove that all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at certain moments. Muybridge had his horses trip the shutters of twelve cameras arranged parallel to a racetrack. For The Matrix, as many as still cameras and two motion-picture cameras were arrayed in a partial ellipsis inside which the actors performed their stunts, their
On this see the highly technical description, with numerous illustrations, by Kensuke Ikeya et al., “Bullet-Time Using Multi-Viewpoint Robotic Camera System,” Proceedings of the th European Conference on Visual Media Production (), art. ; at dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=, with link to additional source materials (videos). See further Takasuke Nagai et al., “An On-Site Visual Feedback Method Using Bullet-Time Video,” Proceedings of the st International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports (), –; available from dl.acm.org/citation.cfm? id=&dl=ACM&coll=DL. Hans Christian Adam (ed.), Eadweard Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs (Cologne: Taschen, ; rpt. ), conveniently collects the images and contains a useful bibliography. On chronophotography see especially Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (–) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); François Albéra, Marta Braun, and André Gaudreault (eds.), Arrêt sur l’image, fragmentation du temps / Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time (Lausanne: Payot, ); Phillip Prodger (ed.), Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). See also Michel Frizot, “Comment ça marche: L’algorithme cinématographique,” Cinémathèque, (Spring, ), –; Deac Rossell, “Chronophotography in the Context of Moving Pictures,” Early Popular Visual Culture, (), –.
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High-Speed Photography, Bullet Time, and Beyond
Figure .
Wonder Woman. A bullet in flight. Screen capture.
Figure . Wonder Woman. Reverse angle of .. Screen capture.
movements pre-designed by computerized choreography. We can even watch time being reversed. Various pioneers and practitioners of bullet time on screen have acknowledged Muybridge as their precursor or inspiration. Additionally, any temptation to see an ancient analogy to a Muybridge sequence in the series of fourteen Roman paintings showing different body postures of tightrope-walking satyrs, discovered in the Villa of Cicero and now in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples, should probably not be resisted too strongly by anyone who sees these acrobats with a cinema eye. Obviously, the analogy is not close.
Attractive images by Geremia Discanno of these satyrs, who are holding thyrsi or musical instruments, were published in and are now impressively reproduced in a lavish trilingual facsimile volume: Fausto and Felice Niccolini, Houses and Monuments of Pompeii / Häuser und Monumente von Pompeji / Maisons et monuments de Pompei (Cologne: Taschen, ),
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Static Flight
Decades after Muybridge and before The Matrix, Harold Edgerton made time stand still with several extremely high-speed photographs of bullets flying through various objects, including a playing card and an apple. What Tom Gunning has noted about early photography is even more applicable in the digital age: “The snapshot resulted from a technological improvement of still photography, an increased sensitivity [to light] that allowed the exposure time to be sliced to instants so brief even Zeno might not conceive of them.” In one amusing and instructive but fundamentally serious updating of Zeno’s paradox of the race between Achilles and the turtle, we find Achilles trying to hit but missing a target with “a quick firing automatic weapon” and “magic bullets which travel at an incredible speed.” Bullet time is, in principle, familiar to Zenophiles and cinephiles. Flying bullets had first been captured on film in the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon of bullet time undergoes an arresting variation in John Kent Harrison’s television film Helen of Troy (). The moment in question is also a kind of Homeric teikhoskopia (“view from a wall”) in reverse. While fighting before the walls of Troy and with arrows audibly – whoosh, whoosh! – flying through the air, Menelaus at one moment looks up and sees Helen on top of the city wall. A bullet-time effect conveys the intense emotional impact that Helen’s sight has on Menelaus. Now everything and everybody slows down and eventually comes to a standstill; sounds and music stop (Fig. .). Arrows are frozen, as Black had called it, in midair. Only Menelaus moves in slow motion as if in a daze. When he turns away from Helen, the spell is broken. Everything and everybody begins to move realistically again. The arrows resume their flights, with their sounds cranked up for special emphasis on the supernatural atmosphere that has just passed.
(originally vol. , plate ). The publisher credits himself in filmic terms: “Directed and produced by Benedikt Taschen.” Who could disagree? Information and various images are at http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/galleries/iconic/ bullets. Quoted from Tom Gunning, “The ‘Arrested’ Instant: Between Stillness and Motion,” in Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon (eds.), Between Still and Moving Images (New Barnet: Libbey, ), –, at . Cf. Gunning, , on freeze-frames. Alan R. White, “Achilles at the Shooting Gallery,” Mind, n.s. (no. ; January, ), . White’s short note inevitably elicited dissenting comments: Bernard Mayo, “Shooting It Out with Zeno,” Mind, n.s. (no. ; April, ), –, and Donald Brook, “White at the Shooting Gallery,” Mind, n.s. (no. ; April, ), . I describe this moment in greater detail in “Troy and the Cinematic Afterlife of Homeric Gods,” in Winkler (ed.), Return to Troy: New Essays on the Hollywood Epic (Leiden: Brill, ), –, at .
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High-Speed Photography, Bullet Time, and Beyond
Figure .
Helen of Troy. Arrows stopped in mid-flight. Screen capture.
But bullet time is far from being the ultimate achievement in spacetime-motion depictions that are possible today. In association with Moving Picture Company (MPC), a special-effects production venue, and SLOimage, a digital software company, British artist and filmmaker Martha Fiennes created Nativity (), a kind of painting-with-movements inspired largely, if not exclusively, by perspectival Italian Renaissance paintings, especially Botticelli’s. The changes in the image are randomly generated by the program running the installation and can theoretically continue indefinitely. And they are slow – but not as slow as those in Douglas Gordon’s Hour Psycho (), which projects Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller at no more than two frames per second, extending its original running time a little more than twelvefold. And then there is French artist JR with some of his large-scale video collages. The Chronicles of San Francisco, exhibited at the city’s Museum of Modern Art in , is a mural about one hundred feet long. It consists of scenes in which over , people are moving. By means of a phone app, individuals or specific groups can be heard talking or singing. A book of photographs includes a large foldout of the entire work, and the same app gives voices to the
On Nativity see, e.g., Peter Stanford, “Jesus, Mary and Martha Fiennes – A Moving Christmas Story Like No Other,” The Telegraph (November , ), now at www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ /Jesus-Mary-and-Martha-Fiennes-a-moving-Christmas-story-like-no-other.html.
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Static Flight
book’s static images. The Chronicles of San Francisco had a precursor, on a smaller scale, in JR’s The Standing March (), made in collaboration with film director Darren Aronofsky. Images of a crowd of people were projected onto the façade of the National Assembly building in Paris. As Zeno’s arrow had done, the people in both collages move but remain in one and the same place. Meaningful distinctions between stillness and motion may no longer exist or, at a minimum, have become negligible. Motion is stasis and vice versa. Armand-Jean Cauliez wrote in : Between cinema and man, there is no difference left. Art itself, in its traditional aspects, crumbles. The unity of man and the world is outlined on a screen [sur une toile]. In this sense, the cinema is opposed to art. Art seized a moment in flight, separates it from life, ennobles it, immortalizes it. Cinema is “democratic”: it is not a moment or an image that counts in a film; it is the duration, the flow, the motion, the effort, the rhythm, the sense, the arrow, the tension toward the future. Art kills life. Cinema resuscitates art.
Whether or not Cauliez was thinking of Zeno when he included an arrow in his flight of cinematic fancy, the fact that he did so is telling. Plutarch once characterized Zeno as having possessed such great an ability to refute his opponents that they no longer knew whether they were coming or going. For confirmation Plutarch quotes the fourthcentury philosopher Timon of Phlius, who had called Zeno “the pouncer on everything” (pantôn epilêptôr) in one of his ironic poems, the Silloi. A twentieth-century tribute to Zeno came in from Alfred North Whitehead: I am fond of pointing out to my pupils that to be refuted in every century after you have written is the acme of triumph. I always make that remark in connection with Zeno. No one has ever touched Zeno without refuting him, and every century thinks it worth while to refute him.
Information may be found at, e.g., www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/jr/. Various videos are available online as well. The book: JR, The Chronicles of San Francisco (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, ). A.-J. Cauliez, “Le cinéma moyen intégral d’expression,” L’Age nouveau, no. (), –; quotation at . Plutarch, Life of Pericles ., quoting from Timon Fr. (Diels) = Supplementum Hellenisticum). Alfred North Whitehead, “Process and Reality”; quoted from Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, ; several rpts.), –, at ; source reference to original publication at . The essay’s title refers to Whitehead’s book by the same name.
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High-Speed Photography, Bullet Time, and Beyond
Figure . Cupid Productions logo. Screen capture.
What if Zeno were resurrected today and understood cinematography, bullet time, and all that? Would he not pounce on these as his ultimate triumph? After all, the invention of the still camera changed the ways of seeing. The invention of the film camera and of digital media then deepened the ways of seeing and understanding movement and time as had never been possible before. This includes seeing time in its tiniest – atomic – fragments. One result of the march of technology is a vindication of Zeno’s arrow paradox nearly two and a half millennia after he formulated it. Here is the proof: Zeno was the first to have thought consistently about the dismantling of movement into discrete individual pictures. Against his will, he became the philosopher of cinema. His thoughts on the motion paradox . . . offer an ideal foil for our topic. Just point to a flipbook [Blätterkino] in action and say: “There – the flying arrow!” What you would point to in this way would be nothing but a single sheet and thus a motionless still image. Here we have Zeno’s entire argument. In none of the individual images in a flipbook [Daumenkino] does the arrow fly. The man was right.
Q.E.D. So it is entirely appropriate that Cupid Productions, a company associated with one of the major Hollywood studios (Twentieth CenturyFox), should have a cute Cupid shooting an arrow for its classic black-andwhite logo (Fig. .). After the twentieth century, refutations of Zeno may have become superfluous.
Quoted from Peter Bexte, “Das Blinzeln Zenons,” in Daniel Gethmann and Christoph Schulz (eds.), Daumenkino: The Flip Book Show (Du¨sseldorf: Snoeck / Kunsthalle Du¨sseldorf, ), –, at . I have slightly changed the last sentence quoted: “Der Mann hat recht.” Bexte also turns to two other philosophers: Denis Diderot and Georg Simmel. The title of his all-too-brief piece means, roughly, “Zeno Blinks.”
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Static Flight
Zeno’s Onscreen Comedy Cameo Zeno himself has never appeared on screen (as far as I know), so a brief mention of his prominence in the Brazilian Carnaval Atlântida () may be appropriate (and amusing). This appealing musical-comedy farce, directed by José Carlos Burle, is an affectionate homage both to classic Hollywood and classical antiquity. In Rio de Janeiro, a Dr. (!) Cecílio B. de Milho (!!) is the boss of a studio named Acrópole Filmes (!!!). He plans to make an epic film about Helen of Troy and hires Professor Xenophontes, a teacher of Greek history at the local Colégio Atenas, for authenticity and to write the script. (As if!) Matters, of course, take a different course, and everything ends in samba do Brasil hilarity. Early on, when he first appears onscreen, the enthusiastic professor is expounding to his students the philosophy of Zeno, whose name he has written in large Greek capitals on the blackboard. But interest is no more than minimal. A pretty young thing interrupts the earnest professor to ask when he will finally start teaching them about somebody more to her, and presumably, their, liking: “Eros, the god of love.” Class – and Zeno – dismissed!
I myself dismiss from any consideration here the appearance of Zeno’s Achilles paradox at the beginning of Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (), written and directed by Danish enfant terrible (as he is to some) Lars van Trier. The scene that immediately precedes and thus introduces the paradox unintentionally reveals that Zeno has been dragged somewhat forcibly into an XXX-rated context. Adults only!
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
As we saw in Chapter , not a few savants have been ready to attribute the origin of moving-image reproductions to the ancients. From our perspective, they anticipated to an astonishing degree André Bazin’s point about the cinema as an idealistic phenomenon. The best pseudo-evidence for ancient moving-image projection was found in a particular passage of a first-century Roman work on a cosmic subject: Lucretius’ didactic epic On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), an exposition of Democritean atomism and Epicurean philosophy.
Cinematic Illusions: Lucretius on Dreams
Lucretius described various sense perceptions in Book of his epic. A famous passage deals with dream visions: it is not wonderful that images move And sway their arms and other limbs in rhythm – For the image does seem to do this in our sleep. The fact is that when the first one perishes And a new one is born and takes its place, The former seems to have changed its attitude. All this of course takes place extremely swiftly, So great is the velocity and so great the store Of them, so great the quantity of atoms In any single moment of sensation Always available to keep up the supply . . . And what when we see in dreams the images Moving in time and swaying supple limbs, Swinging one supple arm after the other In fluid gestures and repeating the movement Foot meeting foot, as eyes direct? Ah, steeped in art, Well trained the wandering images must be That in the night have learned such games to play! . . .
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite It sometimes happens also that the image Which follows is of a different kind: a woman Seems in our grasp to have become a man. And different shapes and different ages follow. But sleep and oblivion cause us not to wonder.
If dream images are not wonderful because they are a common phenomenon in everybody’s experience, their elegant and vivid – i.e. highly visual – description is completely wonderful in that it now has a meaning that Lucretius could not have, well, dreamed of. Today, in a passage such as this we can recognize precursors of film images, and not only because Hollywood is routinely referred to as the Dream Factory. The rapid movement of figures in our dream images and the changes in shapes or bodies correspond to those in screen images. Metamorphoses are the very essence of cinema, not only in dreams. Few modern Lucretius specialists are aware that his description of dream images are analogous to film images. The following example shows an exception: The Epicureans maintained that all objects give off a constant stream of images consisting of the superficial layer of their atoms. The senses receive such images, while the mind perceives similar images composed of finer atoms . . . the Epicureans . . . applied this theory to every kind of thinking. For example, Lucretius states that even acts of volition must begin with the mind perceiving an image of the action to be performed (.). The objection raised concerns how it is that we can think of whatever we wish, or even dream of a moving object. Lucretius’ answer is that actually innumerable mental images surround us at any given moment, passing in
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .–, –, and –. The quotation is from Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, tr. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ), –. (Below, quotations from Melville’s translation will be by last name and page number.) On this passage and its contexts, see primarily the edition, with translation and commentary, by Cyril Bailey, Titi Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex, vols. in cont. pag. (; corr. rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; several rpts.), vol. , – (on .–: “Thought”). Lucretius’ line reads: nam fit ut in somnis facere hoc videatur imago. More on it soon. On the matter see, e.g., my comments on Georges Méliès, the father of trick cinematography, in Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (chapter section titled “Méliès and the Discovery of Metamorphosis”). Early explanations of such astonishing tricks, including the charming example of The Little Milliner’s Dream, produced at Léon Gaumont’s studio, is in Gustave Babin, “The Making of Moving Pictures: How Their Effects are Obtained,” Scientific American Supplement, (July , ), –, and (July , ), –. This two-part article is a translation of a French original. Its author was a prolific journalist. Apparently, The Little Milliner’s Dream was remarkable enough to elicit detailed comments from Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (Philadelphia: Lippincott / London: Heinemann, ), –.
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Cinematic Illusions: Lucretius on Dreams
succession too rapidly to be perceived individually; therefore we are aware only of those to which our attention is directed. Thus we can imagine a moving object by attending to many separate images in rapid succession, i.e., cinematographically (.–) . . . the importance of these remarks is not limited to cinematographic dreaming.
The visual nature of dreams was known to scientists and psychologists. A telling example of a scientist is Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in . He became interested in dreams and eventually published his own dreams. Cajal “wanted to know where in the brain the physiological activity that causes dreams is happening . . . Through analysis of thousands of dreams, he concluded that there was no involvement from any cells in the retina.” More to the point in our context: Dreaming had interested him since the beginning of the century, when he first speculated about the role of neurons in complex psychological phenomena such as thought, will, and creativity. Cajal . . . focused on the mechanisms behind their visual, almost hallucinatory, qualities. His paper “On the Theory of Dreaming” included a study of a man who went blind as an adult yet still experienced visual dreams. Cajal concluded that the retina is not involved in dreaming and that the brain can generate images without sense-data from the eyes.
An example among psychologists is Sigmund Freud, to state the obvious. That he should have quoted Lucretius in The Interpretation of Dreams () is not surprising. In his first chapter, in which he reviews the state of dream research, he does not quote our passage but a later one in a section on the relations of dreams to waking life. Freud
Quoted from James Jope, “Lucretius’ Psychoanalytic Insight: His Notion of Unconscious Motivation,” Phoenix, (), –, at . P. H. Schrijvers, “Die Traumtheorie des Lukrez,” Mnemosyne, th ser., (), –, gives a classicist’s perspective on Lucretius’ dream theory. See now Diego Zucca, “Lucretius and the Epicurean View that ‘All Perceptions Are True,’’’ Francesca Masi, “Lucretius on the Mind-Body Relation: The Case of Dreams,” and Richard Stoneman, “Can You Believe Your Eyes? Scepticism and the Evidence of the Senses in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura .–”; all in Philip R. Hardie, Valentina Prosperi, and Diego Zucca (eds.), Lucretius Poet and Philosopher: Background and Fortunes of De Rerum Natura (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –, –, and –. A modern translation, with up-to-date background information, is Benjamin Ehrlich, The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (New York: Oxford, ). Quoted from Ehrlich, The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, . Quoted from Benjamin Ehrlich, The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), . Freud quotes Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .–, preceded by a summary of Herodotus, Histories .– (Xerxes’ and Artabanus’ dreams) and followed by a quotation from Cicero, On Divination ... See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
repeatedly examines, and quotes from, F. W. Hildebrandt’s study of dreams. Even though this book appeared twenty years before the first public exhibition of moving pictures, one passage in particular, which Freud quotes at length, is downright astonishing in our context. It is tempting to substitute film for dream: an intensification of mental life, an enhancement of it that not infrequently amounts to virtuosity, and, on the other hand, a deterioration and enfeeblement which often sinks below the level of humanity. As regards the former, there are few of us who could not affirm, from our own experience, that there emerges from time to time in the creations and fabrics of the genius of dreams a depth and intimacy of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clarity of vision, a subtlety of observation, and a brilliance of wit such as we should never claim to have at our permanent command in our waking lives. There lies in dreams a marvellous poetry, an apt allegory, an incomparable humour, a rare irony. A dream looks upon the world in a light of strange idealism and often enhances the effects of what it sees by its deep understanding of their essential nature. It pictures earthly beauty to our eyes in a truly heavenly splendour and clothes dignity with the highest majesty, it shows us our everyday fears in the ghastliest shape and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency. And sometimes, when we are awake and still under the full impact of an experience like one of these, we cannot but feel that never in our life has the real world offered us its equal.
This amounts to a wholly convincing pre-cinematic analogy to our modern medium. It is therefore rather puzzling that as great an authority on the cinema as Georges Sadoul should have characterized Lucretius’ passage as “otherwise obscure and controversial.” Numerous filmmakers, film critics, and others have pointed out the close ties between and among dreams, psychoanalysis, and psychology generally. In the early twenty-first century, for example, Antoinetta Angelidi said the following about her approach to film, echoing Lucretius: I believe that cinema . . . has as its model not reality but dreams. We never perceive reality in cinema . . . the oneiric and the cinematic are extremely akin. It’s about images moving, the one after the other, in time. They use
vol. : The Interpretation of Dreams, Part , corr. rpt. (London: Hogarth Press, ; several rpts.), –. F. W. Hildebrandt, Der Traum und seine Verwertung fu¨r’s Leben: Eine psychologische Studie (Leipzig: Schloemp, ). A second edition appeared in . Hildebrandt, Der Traum und seine Verwertung fu¨r’s Leben, –; quoted from Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, –. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. : L’invention du cinéma: –, rd ed. (Paris: Denoël, ), : “d’ailleurs obscur et controversé.” Sadoul quotes Lucretius’ lines – in French and Latin.
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Cinematic Illusions: Lucretius on Dreams
the same codes for the production of meaning: the two-dimensional images, their succession, movement, natural language, sounds. That’s why the new art of cinema is so familiar to us. Not because it resembles reality, but because it is like dreaming. In a sense, it is the oldest art, since we have been always dreaming.
She elsewhere observed: Finally, through my filmmaking practice, through my filmmaking experience and intuition, I came to realise that there is an even stronger structural affinity between cinema and the dream-mechanism . . . The structure of dreams has also taught me the incorporation of contradiction and the crucial importance of connection: between shots, as well as between the different elements inside the shots, and most importantly, the blanks in between, the voids. Signification depends on what is left out: out of the frame, in between the frames, out of consciousness, the ineffable, what is not and cannot be represented . . . My films are textually structured on a constant oscillation between the inside and the outside, like lucid dreams.
Dream images in the cinema are nearly ubiquitous and range from the usual – close-ups on dreamers as the screen image becomes blurred or wobbly to signal the beginning of the unreal – to something as complex as those in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (). These even have classical overtones. But an older, shorter, and simpler version in traditional animated images is far more attractive, not least because its dream shows a clever engagement with ancient myth. This is the cartoon short Porky’s Hero Agency (), directed by Bob Clampett as one of the classic Looney Tunes. It belongs in our Lucretian context because static things come to life – the very nature of animation – in various metamorphoses: the very things that Lucretius had described. Porky Pig, here still a piglet, has been reading a book called Greek Myths at bedtime and is fascinated by Medusa: “everybody in Greece might be statues by now if it hadn’t been for a great hero.” In a dream Porky sees himself as the mighty Porkykarkus. The name is a homage to radio and screen comedian Harry Einstein, who specialized in various funny dialects, especially Greek. Einstein’s chief persona was that of Greek chef Nick
Antoinetta Angelidi, “Poetic Cinema and the Mechanism of Dream,” quoted in Vrasidas Karalis, Realism in Greek Cinema: From the Post-War Period to the Present (London: Tauris, ), –. Karalis, note , provides an online source reference (no longer accessible). Quoted from Rea Walldén, “Conversing with Dreams: An Encounter with Antoinetta Angelidi,” FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, (), –; quotations at , , and . Cf. Julia D. Hejduk, “Facing the Minotaur: Inception () and Aeneid ,” Arion, rd ser., (), –.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
Parkyakarkus (or Parkyarkarkus), a pun on “Park your carcass.” Porky as Porkykarkus imagines himself slaying dragons, rescuing fair damsels, or going on quests like that for the Golden Fleece. He runs the “Hero for Hire” agency, which offers reduced prices (in dollars and cents, not drachmas) and can easily be reached by phone (“Olympia ”). A call promptly arrives from Emperor Jones, named after the titular character of Eugene O’Neill’s play. He is engaged in a fireside chat as if he were President Roosevelt, but with rather sinister overtones. He is addressing a crowd of Greek cardboard cutouts, who raise their right arms in the Fascist salute when he pulls their strings. The emperor explains that a “good-fornothing Gorgon” has decreased the population by increasing the amount of statuary but that she possesses a magic life restorer, whose needle reverses the process. Emperor Jones sends Porky on just the heroic mission he had hoped for. Porky is ready: “One hero to go? Yes, sir; coming right up!” His reply plays on another meaning of hero: sandwich. On winged sandals borrowed from a statue of Mercury (not Hermes), Porkykarkus flies off to a volcano, inside which Medusa runs a kind of photographer’s studio. Her motto: “Why go somewhere else to get yourself chiseled?” In her Gorgon Statue Factory, various people including the Three Stooges are petrified, but Porky manages to avoid such a fate. He hides inside the torso of handsome Dick A. Powello, a homage to crooner Dick Powell, and the Gorgon is instantly smitten. Porky relieves her of the life restorer and turns various statues to life and movement, including Myron’s Diskobolos and the Indian of James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail. The Venus de Milo acquires Popeye the Sailor’s arms, replete with anchor tattoos. Porky even animates two sacred buildings, named – what else? – Shirley and Temple. The Gorgon pursues him, but just when she has caught up with him (“Open your eyes; look at me”), she turns into his mother: “Time to wake up, Porky.” Little Porky is unheroically relieved to be back in safe reality. That’s all, folks.
Sinsteden and Plateau on Lucretius As early as , an eminent German scientist had seen something in Lucretius’ text that anticipated, in a necessarily rudimentary fashion, what Angelidi was to point out much later. It is illuminating and amusing in equal measure to resuscitate this largely forgotten episode in the Nachleben of one of Rome’s greatest poets and its ramifications. Wilhelm Josef Sinsteden was a German physician and physicist with special interests in optics and electricity. He is best known today in
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Sinsteden and Plateau on Lucretius
connection with the development of the lead-acid battery. He wrote a letter about Lucretius to the editor of the prestigious German science journal Annalen der Physik und Chemie, which regularly attracted contributors from abroad as well. His letter was published under the title “A Passage on Optics from Antiquity.” Sinsteden wrote: If the stroboscopic disc of the youngsters in ancient Rome had been a toy just as well-known as it has become among us shortly after its invention, L u c r e t i u s in his poem on nature could not have described it more prettily or clearly than he actually did in Book , lines ff. The matter is here set forth so easily comprehensibly that, were it not known that S t a m p f e r and P l a t e a u were led to their invention by F a r a d a y’s experiments, one might have hit upon the assumption that they had taken their idea for it from L u c r e t i u s.
In the s, Austrian mathematician Simon Stampfer (or von Stampfer) had been inspired by Michael Faraday’s experiments with optical illusions and developed the stroboscope. Around the same time, Belgian physicist and mathematician Joseph Plateau invented an identical device, usually called the phenakistiscope or, in Britain, the phantasmascope. These led to further inventions, such as William Horner’s cylindrical Daedaleum, named after the mythical inventor Daedalus, and the zoetrope. If the cinema had several fathers, so did pre-cinema. Sinsteden ended his epistolary note by quoting Lucretius’ passage, both in Latin (with the textual variant endo, ) and in a German translation. He began at line but left out the crucial line on dream images, presumably because it would distract, or detract, from a scientific view of the matter. His omission was to have a remarkable effect on a notable scientist in France, which had its own aftereffects. In , Abbé François Moigno, a mathematician, became editor of Cosmos, a new French weekly established to popularize scientific progress. In its fifth issue Moigno reported on Sinsteden’s letter and referred to Plateau’s invention: Dr. Sinsteden recently pointed out a passage in the fourth book of de Rerum natura [sic] by Lucretius, in which the poet describes the phantascope or phenakistiscope invented by M. Plateau with such great exactness that, if
[Wilhelm Josef] Sinsteden, “Eine optische Stelle aus den Alten,” Annalen der Physik und Chemie, nd ser., [= whole ser., ] (), . The “stroskopische Scheibe” in Sinsteden’s first sentence is a misprint for “stroboskopische Scheibe.” On all of them see especially Deac Rossell, Chronology of the Birth of Cinema – (New Barnet: Libbey, ). Rossell, –, deals with Plateau and Stampfer and illustrates their phenakistiscopes.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite one did not know by how long a series of theoretical and experimental considerations the learned Belgian physicist had arrived at the construction of his charming apparatus, one could well assume that he had borrowed the idea from the Roman philosopher.
Next come the passage from Lucretius, here called si curieux (“so curious”), and rather a free French translation. Both included Lucretius’ line on dream images. Moigno ended with a comment of soaring rhetoric: What, in effect, is the phenakistiscope? An instrument with whose help figures that gradually differ from each other in shape and position come to appear before the eye in succession at such close intervals in such a way that, with the persistence of vision [la persistence des impressions] joining the images together, the eye believes to see one and the same figure passing continuously from one state to the other. Now, could Lucretius describe it in any more precise or clearer terms?
The learned Abbé’s enthusiasm is almost as charming as he considered Plateau’s invention to be. But the inventor himself was anything but charmed and sent a dunning letter to Cosmos. To his credit, Moigno published it together with his own introduction: “We will always be found ready to retract the errors that have escaped us. Our learned friend M. Plateau today points out to us a translation surely made under the influence of a preconceived idea. He is right one hundred times.” Moigno, however, was wrong about the translation Sinsteden had quoted. Apparently, Moigno paid no attention to Sinsteden’s omission of Lucretius’ decisive line, which he himself included in both Latin and French. Plateau, after quoting Moigno’s conclusions, drew proper attention to the missing line in a tone of gentlemanly reproval: Here is quite a positive assertion, which hardly permits any doubt . . . So your article forces me to prevent the suspicion [me place donc sous la prévention] of having only resurrected an instrument already known in ancient Rome. As a result, I find myself obliged to return matters to their true merit in your journal. Struck, like you, by the uniqueness of the
My source is the complete Cosmos volume for . The text here to be discussed appeared on pages – in a section titled “Courrier scientifique” under the subheading “Nouvelles d’Allemagne.” It is unsigned and has generally been taken to be the editor’s, probably correctly. The persistence of vision mentioned by Moigno was first examined scientifically (and after Lucretius) by Claudius Ptolemy in his Optics; see especially Optics . and the experiments that follow. On this book see especially A. Mark Smith, Ptolemy’s Theory of Visual Perception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, ) and Ptolemy and the Foundations of Ancient Mathematical Optics: A Source Based Guided Study (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, ). Printed on pages – of the complete volume (in a section reporting weekly news).
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Sinsteden and Plateau on Lucretius
passage adduced by M. Sinsteden, a passage whose true meaning I could appreciate even less since M. Sinsteden omitted the line Nam fit ut in somnis facere hoc videatur imago which might have enlightened me about the poet’s intention, I examined . . . what precedes this same passage in order better to determine its precise meaning, and so I realized that the lines in question were not about an optical instrument but simply about images that appear to us in dreams.
Plateau set the record straight about Sinsteden. But then he turned directly to Moigno: “With your translation you have let yourself unwittingly be dominated by the idea that Lucretius really is describing the phenakistiscope, and the result is such that this translation deviates from the original in some important points, as you will be convinced soon enough.” Plateau next launched on an explanation of Lucretius’ theory of vision and its simulacra and rather severely criticized the translation that Moigno had provided: This is undoubtedly the principle on which the illusion produced by the phenakistiscope is based, but, as you see, it is by no means a matter of realizing this illusion by means of a physical instrument. The word simulacra should therefore not be translated, as you have done, as the object shown to the eye since it is only a question of the soul’s perceptions in dreams and thus there is no such thing as an object shown to the eye; you see, furthermore, that the line Nam fit ut in somnis facere hoc videatur imago must not be rendered, as in your article, as evolution so rapid and so magical that it resembles a dream; but really, as its literal translation indicates, as it happens, in effect, that in dreams the image seems to do this.
In all this Plateau was correct, as Moigno acknowledged. Moigno also let Plateau have the last word: “These few words will be enough, I hope, to appreciate the true relationship between the passage by Lucretius and the phenakistiscope and to free me from any suspicion of having borrowed the idea for my instrument from antiquity.” British film pioneer Henry Hopwood began his book on “living pictures” with this point: “In all branches of applied science the reflective mind derives pleasure from tracing a perfected instrument back to its simplest form.” Accordingly, he first dealt with persistence of vision: “the fundamental fact which renders possible so wonderful a result.” Its history began where we expect it to begin: A sentence, which is probably the first written reference to persistence of vision, is contained in the fourth book of “De rerum natura,” by Lucretius, dated about . [A quotation in English follows.] Though seemingly so
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite very à propos this passage is in reality only a reference to a theory of dreams, and its interest arises from the fact that Dr. Plateau found it quoted against him (by Dr. Sinsteden) on the invention of the phenakistoscope; and it seems of some interest as being the first-quoted anticipation of the first living picture apparatus. Indeed Lucretius only expresses the fact of persistent vision and mentions no apparatus for its demonstration.
That Hopwood should consider the Sinsteden–Plateau matter as being of apparently primary interest even above Lucretius’ own text shows yet again how influential the short article by this German savant had come to be. As a result, it fully deserves our attention.
The Aftermath
Although Plateau successfully defended himself against any charge of intellectual plagiarism, this episode about pre-cinema history repeated itself again after the invention of the cinematograph. There is no need here to go over all of this, but at least some of the ramifications are worth knowing. This is because in the cinema’s earliest years Lucretius was adduced, usually with quotations in modern languages, as a matter of course. Here is an example from . An article called “Animated Pictures” appeared in – I give its full title – The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger: A Magazine of Popular Science for the Lecture Room and the Domestic Circle. The article does not add anything we do not already know, but it is worth remembering for its date. Almost a quarter century later, Photoplay Magazine did add something that will dumbfound even the most knowledgeable scholars of Lucretius. In a brief notice of a short book whose title specifically mentions the date commonly assigned to Lucretius’ epic, an unnamed wit, possibly the magazine’s editor, reported: Now comes the discovery that the principle of “the persistence of vision,” which makes the motion picture move. . ., was known as early as . . . writing in that day Lucretius recorded his observation that a stone whirled at the end of a string gave the appearance of a solid disc. This observation
Henry V. Hopwood, Living Pictures: Their History, Photo Production and Practical Working (London: The Optician & Practical Trades Review, ), and . This is the book’s first edition. A summary, with references, appeared in F. Paul Liesegang, “Der römische Dichter Lukrez und der Grundgedanke des Kinematographen,” Die Kinotechnik, no. (), –, at . Edmund A. Robins, “Animated Pictures,” The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, no. (June ), –.
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The Aftermath
came about no doubt by watching some hardy hill man hurling stones with his sling. The whirling stone not only conveyed the principle of the motion picture but also made the enemy see stars.
No doubt at all! Apparently, our clever writer was not too well-informed about what had been au courant since the days of Sinsteden et al. And he misread the book he refers to (and misspells its author’s name) since the whirling stone is not attributed to Lucretius but is mentioned as just one example of the persistence of vision. A different view of the earliest history of cinematography had appeared in , when Colin Bennett introduced The Handbook of Kinematography, whose chief contributor he was, in rather surprising terms: The history of the kinematograph is long, complex, and infinitely stodgy. It is long because it reaches back from now till at least the year , at which date Lucretius, in his work “De Rerum Natura,” made certain pertinent remarks relative to persistence of vision – the rock upon which the whole theory of motion photography is built. It is complex by reason of the way in which evolution of the kinematograph proper has in its latter days been crossed and re-crossed by inventions and patents partly, yet not fully, relevant to the moving photograph machine. It is stodgy as cheap plum duff is stodgy, with many an interesting spot here and there, but oceans of plainness between.
At least Lucretius is not himself being charged with stodginess or irrelevance. Some of Bennett’s words were echoed – a term here synonymous with quoted almost verbatim without attribution – in a book on film and education. Here Lucretius’ time has turned into “the obscure ages of the year .” Sometimes early film historians, among others, transported our poet to the next century. For example, The Motion Picture News in dated Lucretius’ epic to “the first century of the common era.” So did L. A. Jones in his Presidential Address to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in
“Close-Ups: Editorial Expression Comment and Timely Comment,” Photoplay Magazine, no. (), . The preceding entry mentions “the immortal extravagance of Cleopatra.” The book in question: Ben J. Lubschez, The Story of the Motion Picture: B.C., to A.D. (New York: Reeland, ). The stone: Lubschez, (“rock”); he mentions Lucretius only on the next page. Colin N. Bennett et al., The Handbook of Kinematography: The History, Theory, and Practice of Motion Photography and Projection (London: The Kinematograph Weekly, ), i (beginning of “Author’s Historical Preface”). Quoted from M. Jackson Wrigley, The Film: Its Use in Popular Education (London: Grafton / New York: Wilson, ), (first page of text). The title page identifies Wrigley as chief librarian of the Liverpool Library.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
: “ .” Previously, in , the dream passage was said to come from “[o]ne of the works of the Roman poet, Titus Lucretius Carus” – as if Book were independent or self-contained. But we should not be overly surprised by a general lack of familiarity with ancient literature or culture. The writers being surveyed perceived antiquity as a somewhat nebulous era of the past. This is obvious from the following excerpt of an unsigned German article of : If one conceives of these precursors of today’s cinema apparatus technically in the wide sense of the term, one can go back to the mystical darkness [die mystische Dunkelheit] of antiquity. Thus the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius has been called prophet of the cinema because he . . . descriptively anticipates something similar to the cinema.
The detailed exposition that follows concludes with the statement that Lucretius anticipated stroboscopic vision – with the virtually obligatory, if abbreviated, reference to Moigno, Sinsteden, and Plateau. In spite of sundry misconceptions and misperceptions, Lucretius exerted a certain level of fascination from Sinsteden’s time on: Dr. Sinsteden and others in the th century who believed that Lucretius was describing an instrument were confused by failing to understand his words and confusing his theory of vision with an actual piece of apparatus and its effects. It was a simple mistake and accounts for Lucretius’ recorded connection with the origin of the motion picture which has been repeated in many books.
And, we might add, in journals. Here are two particularly telling examples, both from . Dr. Konrad Wolter, the editor of the German periodical Die Kinotechnik and an experienced film practitioner, contributed a brief article
“A Plea for Educational Subjects,” The Motion Picture News, no. (), ; L. A. Jones, “Presidential Address,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, (April, ), –, at . F. P. L., “History of the Kinematograph,” The Billboard, no. (), and . It appeared under the larger heading “Manufacture of Films in England.” The author is doubtless F. [= Franz] Paul Liesegang, whom we shall meet shortly. Cf. note . “Zur Geschichte der Kinematographie,” Der Kinematograph, no. (), and , at . This is an installment of a longer, unsigned, article. Quoted from Martin Quigley, Jr., Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures (Washington, : Georgetown University Press, ; several rpts.), (in chapter on Plateau). To maintain that Sinsteden was describing an actual instrument is, however, a bit of a stretch, and he should not be held responsible for starting it all. Hermann Hecht, Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image before , ed. Ann Hecht (London: Bowker-Saur / British Film Institute, ), , gives Lucretius his own entry (no. B) and refers to twentieth-century publications citing Lucretius and his use of an optical instrument; see Hecht, (no. /: a “fallacious argument”) and – (no. ), at .
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The Aftermath
on Lucretius, including the line on dream images, to its second issue. In its title he called Lucretius “the spiritual father of the cinematograph.” Before summarizing and then quoting Lucretius’ text in Latin and German, Wolter introduced it as “a highly interesting passage, which I wish to communicate to my readers as a literary curiosity [Merkwu¨rdigkeit] of the first order.” He then commented: It is doubtless a surprising phenomenon that the Roman poet here, thanks to his imaginative psychological musings [Gru¨beleien], developed and clearly expressed a thought which, completely unchanged although in a wholly different context, was discovered again years later but which was then made practical use of in order to lead to representations of apparently moving and living images.
Wolter sensibly rejected any speculation that Lucretius had used, let alone owned, an apparatus “with whose aid he could present to himself apparently moving drawings of moving objects.” Nevertheless, in Lucretius we find the clear first development of a thought that many centuries later led directly to the invention of the cinematograph, but whose priority cannot be denied ancient Lucretius, contemporary and fellow citizen of Cicero, Catiline, and Caesar.
Wolter’s mention of Cicero and Caesar may be somewhat surprising in this context; that of Catiline, the infamous conspirator, certainly is. But who would quibble about this charming conclusion to such a heartfelt tribute to Lucretius? Wolter’s article immediately called forth a second one, published in his journal’s fourth issue. It was written by F. Paul Liesegang, scion of a family business of photography, projection, and related equipment and a prolific author. The firm had been founded in and continued under the family name until ; Liesegang projectors are still on the market. In his article Liesegang reported on Sinsteden and Plateau, whom Wolter had not mentioned, and agreed with Wolter’s conclusion that Lucretius had not used any projection apparatus. Liesegang then turned to earlier passages from Lucretius’ Book on images to explain “the impression of movement.” Liesegang referred to Lucretius’ statement that the images of objects (simulacra rerum) fly hither and thither through the air as if they were thin skins (quasi membranae) that have been detached from their
The quotations are from Konrad Wolter, “Der geistige Vater des Kinematographen,” Die Kinotechnik, no. (), –.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
objects’ surfaces. Liesegang correctly translated quasi membranae as “gleichsam Häutchen” but missed an obvious connection. Häutchen is the diminutive (to indicate extreme thinness) of Haut (“skin”), which in Latin is pellis. The diminutive of pellis is pellicula, which in Romance languages was and still is used as the common term for the filmstrip: película, pellicola, pellicule. Liesegang concluded, in part: If we extend the poet’s train of thought further, we must logically say: bodies that carry out movements will emit every moment a differently shaped image of themselves, and the rapid succession of these images in turn will then communicate the impression of movement to us. This then must be the meaning that underlies the lines [on dream images] adduced by Dr. Wolter. How else should one interpret them?
Josef Maria Eder, one of the greatest historians of photography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once gave an appropriate summary of the matter in a chapter on stroboscopes and related devices. He wrote: The beginning of optical presentations of serial pictures reaches back far into the past. Here, also, we find presentiments on the part of the [ancient] Romans, who were endowed with a strong sense of imagination.
Eder then quoted and translated the dream passage of Lucretius, whom he called “the Latin poet and scientist.” He rightly, perhaps almost regretfully, concluded: “This vague statement of Lucretius Carus does not in any manner detract from the merit of Plateau and Stampfer, the later discoverers of stroboscopic viewing.” In this he is obviously correct. Nevertheless, some decades later a specific moment came about that could have reminded readers of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Alex, forced to watch extreme sex and violence onscreen as part of the stateordered reconditioning Ludovico Treatment (or Technique), comments on the first round of his experience and the resulting nightmare: “A dream
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .–. The quotations are from Liesegang, “Der römische Dichter Lukrez und der Grundgedanke des Kinematographen,” . F. Paul Liesegang, Zahlen und Quellen zur Geschichte der Projektionskunst und Kinematographie (Berlin: Deutsches Druck- und Verlagshaus, ), collects dates and source references beginning in with Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae. Daniel Gethmann, “Simulacra der Bewegung,” in Gethmann and Christoph Schulz (eds.), Daumenkino: The Flip Book Show (Du¨sseldorf: Snoeck / Kunsthalle Du¨sseldorf, ), –, provides a recent summaryrestatement. Josef Maria Eder, History of Photography, th ed., tr. Edward Epstean (; rpt. New York: Dover, ), . Eder next referred to Plateau’s knowledge of Lucretius’ passage. The German original appeared in .
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The Aftermath
or nightmare is really only like a film inside your gulliver, except that it is as though you could walk into it and be part of it.” Alas, it is virtually certain that Burgess did not have Lucretius in his gulliver. Sinsteden began something that had greater repercussions than he could have envisioned. A case parallel to his about Lucretius and the stroboscope appeared in a German photographic journal as late as , with quotation of Lucretius’ lines on dreams and with the same omission of the crucial one as Sinsteden’s. The author reported from New York City that he had found Lucretius in the Astor Library in New York: It appears to me to be without doubt that Titus Lucretius Carus . . . knew at least the basics of the reunion of sequential images [die Grundsätze der Wiedervereinigung von Reihenbildern], even if he might not have possessed an apparatus with which to make this practical experiment.
Sachers’ article elicited its own responses. Herbert von Steincker, for example, reported on it (and on Sinsteden and Plateau) but rejected both Sachers and Lucretius as unscientific. The Roman, for Steincker, only speculated about his images but did not proceed “from genuine cognition of nature” (“aus echter Naturerkenntnis”). Steincker, however, was not averse to adding his own speculation about ancient philosophers: Lucretius there [i.e. in his lines on dream images] simply seeks to bring his theory of seeing into congruence with the circumstance that not only the objects, seen by themselves, are being perceived but also their movements. Although quite clearly based on Epicurean and Empedoclean perspectives, still the teachings of Eleatic Zenon, that no motion exists, may not have been unknown to him and may here, perhaps unconsciously to himself, have contributed to forming his theory of the perception of motion.
Zeno here makes rather a surprising cameo appearance. Even if we disagree with Steincker, his consideration of Zeno in this Lucretian context might be worth a moment’s thought. As late as , Armand-Jean Cauliez still quoted from Lucretius’ lines. Pre-cinema historian Hermann Hecht observed about Sinsteden, Lucretius, and himself: “With this letter, Sinsteden started a discussion
Quoted from Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, ed. Mark Rawlinson (New York: Norton, ; rpt. ), . “Gulliver” is Nadsat (Alex’s lingo, based on Russian) for head. R. J. Sachers, “Zur Geschichte der objectiven Darstellung von Reihenbildern,” Photographische Correspondenz, (no. ; ), –; quotation at . The article is dated October , . Herbert von Steincker, “Aus den Uranfängen der Kinematographie,” Der Kinematograph, no. (), –; quotations at . This is an installment of a longer article. A.-J. Cauliez, “Le cinéma moyen intégral d’expression,” L’Age nouveau, no. (), –, at note ; cf. on film as dream.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
which, more than years later, I am perpetuating.” (So am I in these pages.) Decades later, a historian of early cinema concluded about Lucretius: “This [passage] was an early hint at what, much later, would become the first attempts at dissection and animation of movement, although by that time the issue was no longer intertwined with the perceptions of the soul during dreams.” If historians of pre-cinema can easily be led into unwarranted conclusions, to which their enthusiasm for their subject is doubtless a contributing factor, how do classical scholars see the matter? Here are two telling examples. W. H. D. Rouse, one of the most prominent early twentiethcentury British classicists, was appointed one of three founding editors of the Loeb Classical Library in . Rouse edited and translated Homer, Plato, Lucretius, and others. In his Lucretius volume, he annotated the passage we are concerned with by referring to the cinema: A moment of sensation, as he explains below (), is the shortest time in which one can feel or perceive. In this time many movements may combine to make one impression. The moving pictures make this easy to understand.
More than two decades later, Cyril Bailey, one of the greatest twentiethcentury scholars of Lucretius and Epicureanism, twice referred to film images in his monumental edition, translation, and commentary: The sleep-images move etc., because a succession of different images comes to the mind and produces the ‘cinematographic’ effect of its being the same image which is moving . . . it is not one image that moves, but a succession of images producing a ‘cinematographic’ effect.
We can only agree with Rouse and Bailey. Film historians past and present and other scientists could also profit from familiarity with them. Regrettably,
Hecht, Pre-Cinema History, – (A, which lists and summarizes Sinsteden’s letter), at . Sinsteden and Lucretius or, more often, the latter alone regularly appear in histories of film. A good example is G.-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe: De ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Éditions de ‘Cinéopse’ / Gauthiers-Villars, ), (quotation of Lucretius). Later, as already reported (above, note ) there was Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. , (Lucretius, Moigno, Sinsteden). So Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, ed. and tr. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, ), . Mannoni, note , is a little too harsh about Sinsteden. W. H. D. Rouse (ed. and tr.), Lucretius: De rerum natura (London: Heinemann / New York: Putnam, ), – note. Hecht, Pre-Cinema History, , also quotes this. The new edition of Rouse’s volume ( and later) has revised his note out of existence. Bailey, Titi Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex, vol. , (on .) and (on .–).
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Lucretius and Screen Media
most classical scholars today seem unaware, even when they examine the premodern and modern reception history of Lucretius in great detail.
Lucretius and Screen Media: Varieties and Vicissitudes In , prolific and versatile American journalist, translator, and author Pierre Loving made an astonishing discovery – astonishing to him, not to us – by pure accident. He reported on it in The Bookman, a widely read literary journal, with noticeable ambivalence and even more noticeable superiority to the still new medium of cinema: From the pages of a recent history of the movies . . . there jumped out at me the startling news that T. Carus Lucretius [sic], the Roman poet, had gone over into the movie camp . . . Why, I said, Lucretius has been dead these two thousand years. And even if he were not, what, pray, would he be doing in the movies? . . . Then I recalled some of the rumors that were rife in the motion picture studios, and my astonishment was a little mitigated. Homer, so ran one of them, chanted the sea thunder of his Odyssey for the screen; and another was that Virgil, thinking of upholstering his nest against old age, cast a potboiling eye upon future picturization . . . Was it only a noble flight of my historian’s imagination?. . . Lucretius, he [i.e. the author Loving had read] says, is responsible for the dawn of the moving picture idea. Amazing, is it not? A most monstrous indictment to tax anybody with and most of all the gentle Roman poet . . .
Next, Loving rehearses the gossip about Lucretius’ madness as caused by a love potion and his eventual suicide as tongue-in-cheek explanation “to hang the whole blame for starting the movies on.” He now turns into a visionary speculator:
Such is the case with Hardie, Prosperi, and Zucca (eds.), Lucretius Poet and Philosopher. The essays on modern receptions of Lucretius and his thought in this book do not extend beyond the Victorian age – during which the cinema was born. Similarly, the contributions to Jacques Lezra and Liza Blake (eds.), Lucretius and Modernity: European Encounters across Time and Disciplines (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), say nothing about film. Ryan J. Johnson, The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), shows Lucretius’ influence on a modern philosopher who is closely associated with film theory (and was adduced in my Chapters and ) but does not consider the cinema. Pierre Loving, “Lucretius and the Motion Picture,” The Bookman, no. (August ), –. The following quotations are taken from all three pages. These anecdotes are reported in Christian sources: St. Jerome, Chronicle ; Lactantius, The Works of God .. On the matter see Ilona Opelt, “Lukrez bei Hieronymus,” Hermes, (), –.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite Perhaps, after beholding in a vision the conquering grip of the movies on the imaginations of millions of people . . . he lackadaisically . . . feigned madness . . . It was his tutelary goddess [i.e. Venus], probably, who lured Lucretius to stumble upon the principle of the movies, at that time lurking unknown in the world . . .
This is followed by an examination of the Lucretian theory of moving images, with a sarcastic gibe at the “nimble witted historian” in whose book Loving had made his discovery. To identify the historian or the book is, however, infra dig for the nimble-witted journalist. Loving summarizes, with quotations, what Lucretius had to say about the Roman stage and imagines a low slapstick comedy based on Lucretius’ lines: what better two reel comedy than the solemn robed senators capering about in all their superadded glory of color! A crazy accordionlike staircase, a custard pie or two – and the picture is ready to be hatched or “shot” . . . But what of Lucretius while the camera men are “shooting” away for all they are worth? . . . Is he shouting commands with the megaphone at his lips? Not he! He is in hiding somewhere, I fancy, maybe inside that rustic cabin set for a thrilling five reeler . . .
Loving further imagines Lucretius’ death in tranquility, if “with a sinking heart” and “a penetrating nostalgia for beauty and death,” and finds occasion to show off his own learning. He quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lines from “A Vision of Poets” about Lucretius as “chief poet on the Tiber side” – Loving writes “of,” not on – and then begins his grand peroration: When we put down Lucretius’ book at last . . . we cannot help thinking that the motion picture producers all over the world owe him at least the tribute of a memorial urn or granite block. I dare say, when they are fully acquainted with the part Lucretius played in assisting at the birth of the cinema industry, they will not hesitate to do something.
The three examples that Loving lovingly concocts are all meant to show up the crass commercialism and tastelessness of barbaric movie moguls in contrast to his own wit. But this wit is not without a soupçon of crudeness: Some will, I suppose, burn an electric bulb to his memory in their [own] luxurious shrines. Sufficient enthusiasm might be awakened to dispatch an expedition of savants to Rome for the purpose of exhuming his sacred ashes and so transplant them to New York or Los Angeles or Fort Lee [in New Jersey, the birthplace of American cinema] where . . . they may be said now to belong. A number of directors will wish to have struck a small marble likeness of the Latin poet to preside over the inner sanctum of their studios. Others may hit upon the inspirational idea of distributing photographs of the poet instead of dividends . . . Whatever the producers do, it may be
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Lucretius and Screen Media
reasonably expected that they will not inscribe the portraits of the gentle poet with the following cloistral lines taken from his great poem . . .
Here Loving quotes an English version of lines – from Lucretius’ Book and thus ends on a high note, both for Lucretius and for himself. He presents – or pretends – a loving appreciation of Lucretius but seems to be chiefly interested in showing his own erudition. His text is an example of the sniffiness that the educated upper and upper-middle classes used to exhibit as a matter of course where the early (and not so early) cinema was concerned. Still, Loving’s ironical appraisal of Lucretius and the new medium is worth knowing today: as a summary account of what Sinsteden had begun, as a sign of its own time, and as a reminder of a different side of Lucretius’ influence in the modern age – regardless of whether it was earned. At a minimum, Lucretius’ description of dream images has a greater claim to our attention than Aristotle’s camera obscura. After Loving’s somewhat forced appreciation of Lucretius in a cinema context, it is a relief to come across a genuine appreciation in , when Lucretius appeared in a kind of imaginative screenplay. It consisted of a series of scenes (“Pictures”) tracing the life of Virgil, the epic poet of the age of Augustus. The author of this contribution, titled “Virgil,” was Giuseppe Fanciulli, whom we have encountered in Chapter . His “Virgil” traces its subject’s life. Since Virgil was closely familiar with Lucretius’ epic, Lucretius makes a brief appearance. In Scene a young Virgil sees “a rock pierced by a great door, on which is written: De rerum natura. The shadow of the poet Lucretius stands near Virgil and offers him the key of the door. The poet opens with trepidation.” Scene shows what he sees – an Epicurean philosopher’s school: “Distinguished students. An hour of study.” Here is the next scene: Virgil steps into the interior of the cave to which the key of Lucretius has given access. Virgil stands before a statue of Epicurus. The statue comes to life and leads Virgil through mazes where scenes of earthly enjoyment are enacted. Virgil asks: – And after? – Epicurus leads Virgil to a smooth wall on which is written: Nihil. After a moment of anguish, Virgil tears a pole from the ground which in his hands is transformed into a lyre. He strikes the dark wall with his lyre; the rock splits and through its opening are revealed scenes of love, faith and human activity. The rock closes up again and the words which Virgil will some day write in his Georgics appear in luminous letters: . . .
Quoted from Giuseppe Fanciulli, “Virgil,” The International Review of Educational Cinematography, no. (), –, at –; layout slightly adjusted. The lines which follow (in Latin) are Virgil, Georgics .–.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
The great charm of Fanciulli’s scenes makes one regret that nobody put all this into a film. The fact that Virgil learns about philosophy in a cave adds a moment of poignancy and yet another example that enlightenment can come out of darkness. So does the elegant way in which Virgil, after learning what the Epicurean dictum Carpe diem summarizes, is immediately shown the reason why we should enjoy life while we can: what follows it is nihil: “nothing.” And that Epicurus’ statue should come to life and guide Virgil is appropriate as an echo of the Sibyl and Anchises, who guide Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic, through the Underworld in Aeneid ; as a kind of foreshadowing of Virgil himself guiding Dante in Inferno and Purgatory; and as an indirect reference to the cinema, in which statues have become animated since the days of Georges Méliès and whose essence it is that static images seem to move. Beyond all this, the lines from Virgil that appear in Fanciulli’s Scene show that the nihil of Epicurus can be overcome. So does the cinema overcome death. Additionally, as the high-class publication in which we read this script for a Virgilian “biopic” indicates, the cinema does have educational value. But is education all there is? What about some fun with Lucretius? That, too, was on hand, as Picture-Play Magazine revealed in . An article with information and helpful hints about organizing and running a fan club contains this topic for a meeting’s program: Evolution of motion pictures. (Divide the following experiments in motion picture inventions among the members, and ask them to look up further information, to give in a short talk at the meeting.) Lucretius, a Roman physicist, born about , first recorded the scientific principle of moving pictures, or rather pictures that appear to move.
Plateau, Muybridge, Edison, and others are next. Clearly, the film fans ought to know that it all started with Lucretius and not limit their interest to stars and starlets.
An example in this context is the scene in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (), in which the camera moves into a book illustration showing Virgil as guide and then proceeding into a movingimage recreation of sinners’ punishments, based on Gustave Doré’s engravings: “Thousands of Restless Souls Drifting Forever through Hell’s Caverns,” as one of the lines advertising the film proclaimed. The American silent Dante’s Inferno of , directed by Henry Otto and released by the same studio, had shown comparable moments. There were yet other films based on Dante’s Inferno, with Virgil and other classical poets. Quoted from Marjorie Powell Fohn, “When a Fan Club Meets – Then the Fun Begins,” PicturePlay Magazine, no. (December, ), – and , at .
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Lucretius and Screen Media
And what about the cinema’s chief offspring: television? Here, too, Lucretius must not be missing. Two examples may suffice, one serious (and by now familiar), one tongue-in-cheek. The New York Times of December , , published an editorial that begins with quotations from the Book of Job in preparation for stating that, although nothing was once impossible only for God, now man has achieved something comparable: the transmission of, first, speech and, later, “by telephotography, the carrying of images across thousands of miles.” The editorial continues: Now comes in prophecy of actual achievement the almost instantaneous flight of images in motion across seas and continents, just as Lucretius, nearly two thousand years ago, explained their movement in his theory of the visibility of objects near and far . . . But the amazing thing is that images do now actually cross one another in every direction and in “infinite complexity” and yet keep their forms intact and become visible to the eyes thousands of miles away.
With the spread of television, this ceased to be news. But in Lucretius was back, this time in the pages of Variety, the most widely read trade publication about mass media. An article on the presentation of women on daytime American TV begins like this: Just in case any anti-feminist or mid-Victorian curmudgeon still carries around the notion that the average American woman, particularly the housewife, dotes on daytime soapers and other agony-saturated video features, it must be dismaying news to him to learn that he’s as warped in his viewpoint as a weather-beaten shack. CBS-TV last week came up with cheering corroborating evidence that the hausfrau is far from frivolous in her thinking and possesses, undeniably, a greater and more concentrated interest in contemporary problems than usually credited with by pollsters, slide-rule statisticians and middleaged misogynists.
This is clearly good news about modern women, whether hausfraus or not. But how does Lucretius fit in? He does when the writer turns to the daytime programs for “the hardy breed of womenfolk at home” and contemplates a speculative prediction: “the fall pattern could easily shape up as ‘Proust Faces Life,’ ‘Niccolo Machiavelli [sic], the Prince is Right’
I quote the Times editorial (“Television,” page ) from Orrin E. Dunlap, The Outlook for Television (New York: Harper, ), –, at . The words in quotation marks in the longer excerpt refer to the author’s summary of Lucretius’ theory.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
and ‘I Love Lucretius.’” Other punning titles follow. Too bad that television’s beloved Lucy never did meet her Lucretius! Modern scientists are aware of Lucretius, too. One of them, reviewing the history of rapid-eye-movement sleep, aptly states: “Seldom do major research discoveries go unheralded by premonitory signs . . . Already, in ‘De rerum natura,’ Lucretius . . . described in detail both dreaming and behavioral correlates of it in animals and humans.” The source of his familiarity is a publication, whose author had reported: During sleep, several animals present episodes characterized by striking motor unrest. Lucretius, who described at length these phenomena in the horse, in the hunting dog, and in the house dog, put them in relation with dreams.
All this is fascinating and adds quite a chapter to Lucretius’ modern afterlife. But it is now time to turn to Lucretius from a kind of reverse angle and to consider Lucretian themes in one particular film. It shows us a modern analogy to Lucretius’ account of what German classicists term a Kulturentstehungslehre: a theory on the origins and progress of civilization. Such a theory, based on familiar mythology, had been prominent in Greek thought for centuries among philosophers, orators, and poets. It was prominently associated with the Presocratic philosopher Protagoras, whose writings are lost except for a number of fragments. In the dialogue Plato named after him, Protagoras himself gives an outline to Socrates.
: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
The Lucretian qualities of Stanley Kubrick’s : A Space Odyssey () are not intentional, and there is no evidence that Kubrick, although he was extremely well read, was familiar with Lucretius. But, as Robin Wood once put the matter in regard to interpretations of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (): “whether or not Hitchcock consciously intended these
Quoted from “‘Woman! Thy Name Is Euphoria’; CBS-TV Walking on Daytime Air” (unsigned), Variety (June , ), and ; quotations on both pages. Quoted from Claude Gottesmann, “The Golden Age of Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Discoveries. I: Lucretius – ,” Progress in Neurobiology, (), –, at . Immediately following this, he quotes Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .–, albeit with incomplete reference, in Bailey’s English translation. Gottesmann, , turns to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and his comments on dreaming states and libido and again mentions Lucretius. Erroneously, he asserts that Freud does not mention Lucretius in his book “in spite of his magnificently broad knowledge of classical literature.” G. Moruzzi, “Active Processes in the Brain Stem during Sleep,” The Harvey Lectures, (), –; quotation at , with note reference to Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .–. Plato, Protagoras d–d.
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: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
interpretations [i.e. those Wood advances] is quite immaterial: The only question worth discussing is whether they are sufficiently there, in the film . . . there is no need to suppose them consciously worked out.” To make my case for , I will let Lucretius speak for himself as much as possible; hence my longer-than-usual quotations. Although it does not attempt to develop a systematic account of the nature of the universe, Kubrick’s epic film bears a number of close thematic resemblances to Lucretius’ epic. The primary links between both are the question of man’s place in the world and of the nature of life and death. Here is a summary view of human existence in the world, a Weltanschauung in the literal sense of the term: Man is the only creature aware of his own mortality and is at the same time generally incapable of coming to grips with this awareness and all its implications. Millions of people thus, to a greater or lesser degree, experience emotional anxieties, tensions and unresolved conflicts that frequently express themselves in the form of neuroses and a general joylessness that permeates their lives with frustration and bitterness and increases as they grow older and see the grave yawning before them. . . . fewer and fewer people find solace in religion as a buffer between themselves and the terminal moment.
This may strike us as an accurate description of On the Nature of Things, but it is not. Rather, it is a quotation from Kubrick concerning . What Kubrick said applies to On the Nature of Things, too. Now on to notable parallels and analogies. . The Monolith. It symbolizes a superhuman and providential intelligence that governs the universe. Its mysterious nature is in accordance with Epicurus’ and Lucretius’ view of the gods as beings remote from mankind. Lucretius described a remarkable kind of stone, the magnet, in these terms: Now I propose to discuss what law of nature Makes iron to be attracted by that stone
Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Most of my comments involve Book of Lucretius’ epic. The modern commentaries by C. D. N. Costa, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), and Monica Gale, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura Book (; rpt. London: Aris & Phillips, ), provide a wealth of information. Quoted from Eric Nordern, “Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick,” in Gene D. Phillips (ed.), Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –, at –. The interview, which first appeared in September, , was previously reprinted in Jerome Agel (ed.), The Making of Kubrick’s (New York: Signet, ), – (here ). Literature on Kubrick and is by now immense. On the film’s production see especially Agel’s book and now Michael Benson, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (New York: Simon & Schuster, ).
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite Which the Greeks call magnet, naming it from its home, Since it is found within the Magnetes’ land. Men find this stone amazing, since it can make A chain of little rings that hang from it. Five you may see sometimes or more hanging down In succession, swayed by a gentle breeze, Where one hangs from another, clinging beneath, And each from each learns the stone’s binding power; So deep the penetrating force prevails. In matters of this kind you cannot grasp The real explanation unless first Much is established; the approach must be Extremely lengthy, winding, roundabout. So all the more I crave attentive ears and mind.
Although the monolith is not a magnet, it still exerts an irresistible attraction on all who find it. Lucretius’ account shows us that understanding of the power of magnets can be reached, if at all, only with great difficulty. In the monolith’s case, this difficulty extends over all of human history: from humanoids to the titular year. The monolith remains enigmatic throughout, and its force is impenetrable. The quest of astronaut David Bowman, the protagonist of , bears this out. Lucretius’ mention of ears is an amusing detail if we remember the piercing sound the monolith can emit. More important, however, is the aspect of astonishment and even reverence which people accord both magnet and monolith. The awe accorded the monolith as a quasi-divine or religious entity with its own powers is a thematic thread that runs through the entire film, from the hominids to modern man and to Bowman on his deathbed. Just as people touch sacred objects to be near the divine, so the apes and the astronauts who discover the monolith touch it. By this touch the former receive their mental powers: a kind of discovery of the mind, as the title of a classic book on Greek literature and thought once put it. The monolith’s appearance on the moon instigates the voyage of the spaceship Discovery One to the planet Jupiter, on which the monolith has been sighted again. This journey extends “Beyond the Infinite,” as an onscreen text tells us. At journey’s end, and moments before he dies, Bowman stretches out his arm toward the monolith (Fig. .). This final gesture represents a kind of last rite before his metamorphosis.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, tr. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell, ; several rpts.). The German original had first appeared in .
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: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
Figure . : A Space Odyssey. Bowman’s final vision of the monolith. Screen capture.
. The Dawn of Man. The monolith makes its first, and entirely unexplained, appearance in the film’s “Dawn of Man” sequence. This opening echoes Lucretius’ description of prehistoric and archaic human society in Book , with the thematically insignificant difference that Kubrick describes tribes of humanoids, not of early homo sapiens. The monoliths or megaliths excavated at the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia since are the oldest ever discovered and attest to the importance of such artifacts for the beginning of culture and civilization. The site was inhabited from about , to , . The most important correspondences between Lucretius’ Book and are the following: . All forms of life, including the early humans, depend on their cunning and agility. Those who achieve excellence over others ensure the survival of their tribe or race: In those days many breeds of animals Must have died out, unable by procreation To hammer out a chain of progeny. All those that you see drawing the breath of life Either by guile or courage or by speed From the beginning of time have been preserved. . The tribal horde. The one in Lucretius resembles that of the hominid apes in very closely. The main aspects of comparison are these:
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ).
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite .. Their bodies, their environment, and their way of life. In particular, they live like animals in mountain caves – Kubrick omits Lucretius’ groves and forests – and depend, before intelligence, on what nourishment is available by chance: And in those days the men that roamed the earth Were hardier by far, as was most fitting, Since hard earth made them. Larger bones they had And solider, with stronger sinews fitted; And neither heat nor cold could readily Subdue them, nor strange food, nor ills of body. Through many lustres of the circling sun They led their lives, wide-wandering like wild beasts . . . Nor yet they knew how to work things with fire Nor skins for clothes, the spoils of animals, But woods and forests and the mountain caves They made their homes, and hid their uncouth limbs Beneath the bushes, when they must needs Seek shelter from the lash of wind and rain. They could not look to any common good Nor guide their lives by custom or by law. What nature gave a man for prey, he kept, Taught that his own will gave him strength to live. .. Their communication is only by means of crude sounds and gestures: As for the various sounds of speech, ’twas nature That made men utter them, and convenience Found names for things, rather as we see children Driven to make gestures by their lack of speech And point with fingers at things in front of them. For every creature feels the purpose For which he can use the power that lies in him. .. The threats that wild animals pose to their existence is illustrated in by the leopard which jumps one of them from a rock. Later, when the leopard has feasted on his kill and growls into the surrounding darkness, the hominids huddle together in terror and dare not make a sound, just as Lucretius had described it: Much more they worried that the hours of rest Brought danger from marauding animals . . . And at dead of night they’ld yield their leaf-strewn beds In terror to their savage visitors.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– and – (Melville, –). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– and – (Melville, –).
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: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
.. Their hunt and their earliest experience of killing, first animals and then someone of their own kind: And with their marvellous powers of hand and foot They hunted the beasts that roamed the woods and plains, With stones for missiles or with heavy clubs. Many they killed; from few they hid themselves. Especially striking in this passage is Lucretius’ phrase about the club (in Latin, singular): magno pondere clavae. It fits if we make one obvious word change to indicate that an animal’s bone is being used: magno pondere ossis. (The change even fits Lucretius’ meter.) With the discovery of their first weapon, the humanoids are now beginning their developmental journey towards knowledge, technology – and destruction. The discovery of the mind is, to many, deadly. .. Change and progress come about through discovery of what Lucretius calls novae res (“new things”), a phrase that in his own day carried political overtones as well since it could mean a violent turn to the worse. (New things equal revolution.) In , to make use of their new things, hominids and humans need brains and courage. That is how the horde defends itself against a hostile tribe of hominids and survives. The last line in my next quotation describes, in a nutshell, the essence of mankind in : And as the days passed, more and more they learnt To change their former life and way of living By new inventions [novis . . . rebus] and by fire, well taught By those pre-eminent in heart and mind. .. Their weapons, as Lucretius lists them, are different from those the hominids use in ; there, the animal bones are even more archaic. But the result of their use is identical. The wielders of these weapons are victorious and survive: “For all things naked and unarmed must yield, / An easy prey, to men equipped with arms.” We watch this in the killings of animals and fellow-apes. Both epic and film have in common a clear emphasis on the moment in which something old becomes a res nova, for the change from useless dead matter (a bone) to useful but also destructive tool is imminent once illumination strikes. Lucretius writes: “as soon as they [the new things] were known.” The film reveals the spark of cognition in Kubrick’s ingenious bone-to-spaceship cut, which summarizes all of mankind’s progress from the beginning. Here the
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Line is in the manuscripts. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things . (Melville, ). Fritz Kahn, whom we met in Chapter , anticipated the point in an illustration from with two “savages,” one of them looking up, in a savannah setting and with a zeppelin in the air.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite ultimate achievement of the minds and of the skills and discoveries to which ingenuity leads become apparent in Lucretian terms. An exultant ape, pre-eminent in mind, throws the bone he had been experimenting with high into the air, where it metamorphoses into a spaceship. His upright posture is to be understood symbolically as well, for this one creature’s rise is the beginning of mankind’s giant leap into outer space. Lucretius’ lines are applicable to perhaps more than any of those quoted before: So each thing in its turn by slow degrees Time doth bring forward to the lives of men, And reason lifts it to the light of day. For as one concept followed on another Men saw it form and brighten in their minds Till by their arts they scaled the highest peak.
This is the ending of Book and of Lucretius’ history of culture and civilization. Its correspondence in the film is both the end of “The Dawn of Man” and the beginning of the main plotline. Kubrick omits the slow degrees of discoveries that Lucretius had traced. The highest peak, Lucretius’ summum . . . cacumen, is already within man’s reach: Jupiter, the Infinite, and Beyond the Infinite. Or so it seems. . The Engine of the World and the Extent, Origin, and End of the Universe. The idea of the machina mundi (in Greek, the mêkhanê kosmou) appears in Lucretius only briefly, but it was a concept long familiar in ancient thought: Since night and moon are seen to cross the sky, Moon, day, and night, and the stern sights of night, Night-wandering torches of heaven, flying flames, Clouds, sun, rain, snow, winds, lightnings, hail, And thunderclaps and mighty murmurings.
The movements of sun and moon are the clearest proof of the world engine:
A reproduction is in Uta and Thilo von Debschitz, Fritz Kahn: Infographics Pioneer (Cologne: Taschen, ; rpt. ), . Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Here is the inimitable original with its own majestic movements in rhythm and elevated style: per caelum volvi quia nox et luna videtur, / luna dies et nox et noctis signa severa / noctivagaeque faces caeli flammaeque volantes, / nubila sol imbres nix venti fulmina grando / et rapidi fremitus et murmura magna minarum. On the connections between the Greeks and Lucretius, see, e.g., David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ).
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: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
sun and moon the watchmen of the world Circling with light the vast rotating vault [magnum versatile templum] Have taught men well that seasons of the year Revolve, and that in all things is established A pattern and order fixed which governs them.
The idea of a mechanical universe was famously restated in the “Dream of Scipio” passage of Cicero’s De re publica. Its description of planetary zones and the harmony of the spheres corresponds to the eerie but still harmonious sounds of the universe on the film’s soundtrack. This is Györgi Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna of , composed only a short time before the film’s premiere. The sounds of , traditional compositions such as “The Blue Danube” and electronic effects follow and express a cultural and technological development from the classical to the ultramodern. Questions about the extent, origin, and end of the universe and the related question about the existence of higher beings are principal aspects of . Lucretius posed them as well: When we look upward to the heavenly realms Of the great firmament, and see the sky Bedecked with sparkling stars, and when we think Of the sure courses of the sun and moon, Then in our hearts already worn with woes A new anxiety lifts up its head, Whether some power beyond all reckoning Hangs over us perchance, of gods, that make The bright stars in their varied courses move. The doubting mind is racked by ignorance Whether the world had a beginning, whether Some final end is set for it, when all The mighty bastions of the world no longer Can bear the forces of its restless motion, Or whether by power divine forever sure They glide eternal through the course of ages And scorn the power of time immemorial.
. Lucretius’ “Door of Death” and Kubrick’s Star Gate. The comparable views of the nature of the universe and of the divine in epic and film lead both Lucretius’ readers and Kubrick’s viewers to a heightened
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Cicero, On the Republic .–. The work is usually called by its Latin title. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ).
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
awareness of the necessity of death. The cataclysmic end of the world, as Lucretius envisions it in unforgettable detail, includes these lines: Therefore the door of death [leti . . . ianua] is never closed To sky and sun and earth and sea’s deep waters. No. It stands open, and with vast gaping mouth It waits . . .
In , Bowman’s quiet final moments and his subsequent metamorphosis parallel Lucretius’ exhortation to accept death. The Star Gate sequence is a visual rendition of Lucretius’ description of the infinity of the universe and of his prophecy of its dissolution. Both works emphasize the speed with which the known world ends and the chaotic mixture of everything with everything else. Lucretius says about earth, sea, and sky: These three, a threefold nature . . ., One day will give to destruction; all the mass And mighty engine of the world, upheld For many centuries, will crash in ruin.
Lucretius anticipated this destruction in Book : But if it were the nature of air and fire To move always upwards, then there is a risk That suddenly the ramparts of the world Would burst asunder and like flying flames Rush headlong scattered through the empty void, And in like manner all the rest would follow, The thundering realms of sky rush down from above, Earth suddenly withdraw beneath our feet, And the whole world, its atoms all dissolved, Amid the confused ruin of heaven and earth Would vanish through the void of the abyss, And in a moment not one scrap be left But desert space and atoms invisible, For at whatever point you first allow Matter to fail, there stands the gate of death [ianua leti]. And through it all the crowding throng of matter Will make its exit and pass all away.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things . and – (Melville, ). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, –).
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: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
Constant movements, headlong rush, confusion: Kubrick illustrated all this in the Star Gate with computer graphics, rapid editing, color distortions in images of the natural environment projected as negatives, and on his soundtrack. Additionally, the Star Gate is a crucial prelude to the astronaut’s last moments as a human. . The Star Child. The ending is the film’s most puzzling part and has given rise to numerous interpretations, many contradictory and none wholly satisfactory. Bowman, now metamorphosed into the gigantic embryonic Star Child suspended high in the sky, has in the course of the film become an Everyman figure, as the final and almost shocking appearance of the monolith at the foot of his bed had indicated. He is also firmly in the tradition of mythic and epic heroes when he embarks on a space odyssey and a quest for knowledge on Discovery One. As usually in such tales, this heroic journey is a journey of self-discovery. If we translate his last name into Latin (Sagittarius), we find another layer of star mythology represented by him. We might also remember that the very first appearance of a sagittarius in Western literature is that of a god: Apollo’s in Book of the Iliad. When Bowman is reborn as a cosmic child, we have a modern analogy of a classical katasterismos: the mythical process of a human becoming immortal by being transported among the stars. In the film’s final shot, the new child’s position on the screen shows him facing another luminous planet, presumably the Earth, and in this way turns him into a new guardian of the universe and, literally and figuratively, into its illumination (Fig. .). After all, the film was based on a story called “The Sentinel.” As a symbol of life, death, and rebirth, the Star Child has obvious ancient analogies. It eventually appeared as the cover image on a classical scholar’s book on Virgil’s Eclogues (Fig. .). Famously, Eclogue prophesied the birth of a child who would restore a
Benson, Space Odyssey, -, quotes Arthur C. Clarke, author of the story from which the film was expanded, on the connections of the name to Homer’s Odysseus, a deadly archer, and to the film’s story. Cf. also Benson, . Bowman’s name was originally not intended as a specific Homeric reference. HAL , the computer whose multiple Cyclopean eyes are another Homeric analogy, was first called Socrates, then Athena (Benson, , , and ). The sole eye of the film camera and projector (except for D cinema) has often been called Cyclopic, so by a film scholar’s article published in a classical journal: Jean-Louis Leutrat, “Le cinéma, art cyclopéenne, ou: Dans le sillage d’Homère . . .,” Gaia, (), – (author’s ellipsis). Kubrick and Clarke often referred to Homer in connection with ; so have many others ever since. On Clarke’s story and its publication history, see e.g., Benson, Space Odyssey, –. It has been frequently reprinted, as in Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s , –. M. Owen Lee, Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia (Albany: State University of New York Press, ).
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
Figure . : A Space Odyssey. Star Child and Earth. Screen capture.
Figure . Cover of M. Owen Lee, Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia.
Golden Age: a nova progenies in this puer nascens. This is because a great order of the ages is being born from a pure new beginning. Unlike Bowman, who has rapidly aged before his death and metamorphosis, HAL , the rogue computer on board Discovery One, regresses to childhood before its “death.” This indicates the difference between man
The expressions are at Virgil, Eclogues .–. Virgil, Eclogues .: magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
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: A Space Odyssey as Lucretian Film
and machine. We might juxtapose the Star Child as guardian over a yet-tocome world engine to Lucretius’ sun and moon as watchers over the world. Mankind, then, is completely integrated into the ordered and harmonious workings of the universe. As such, man has become as godlike as is possible for him. Here we may think of the phrase “Beyond the Infinite” that introduces the film’s last section. Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” provides a related parallel: the dawn of a new man and his immortality. This in turn leads to a positive and reassuring understanding of our nature vis-à-vis the cosmic world. As Kubrick himself put it, echoing Lucretius’ words about the sun’s and moon’s light: The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
The very opening of illustrates this. We observe the conjunction of planets in a particular alignment, with rays of light extending across and beyond planetary surfaces. The same point applies to the first extended flight we witness: Soon after the bone-to-spaceship cut, another spaceship is traveling, majestically, toward a rotating space station. The man-made objects, products of mind and inventiveness, are basked in light. Although the space station remains partially in shadow, Kubrick shows it in such a way that it looks ravishing. The space vessels are surrounded by a nature, the universe, whose predominant appearance is dark, but the presence of countless tiny stars and the light surrounding the objects in space make for a painterly chiaroscuro effect. “The Blue Danube,” which has risen on the
Cicero, De re publica .– and –. Quoted from Nordern, “Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick,” . As mentioned, it seems likely that Kubrick was not specifically thinking of Lucretius in regard to . Later, however, this may well have changed. For example, Kubrick incorporated Krzyzstof Penderecki’s compositions De natura sonoris nos. – (, ) into the soundtrack of his psychological thriller The Shining (). Both were (mis-)named in tribute to Lucretius’ De rerum natura. The correct Latin is De natura sonorum (or . . . soni). – Scholars have sometimes imputed Lucretian aspects to Kubrick as well; recent examples are Marco Caracciolo, “Bones in Outer Space: Narrative and the Cosmos in : A Space Odyssey,” Image [&] Narrative, no. (), –, at (in passing); Graham Allen, “The Alien World of Objects: Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing,” in Bernadette Cronin, Rachel MagShamhráin, and Nikolai Preuschoff (eds.), Adaptation Considered as a Collaborative Art: Process and Practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –, at –, is not entirely persuasive about the swerve of the atoms as they are moving through space in connection with this film’s plot. Lucretius’ term for this swerve is clinamen; its Greek equivalent is parenklisis.
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Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite
soundtrack for this scene, may even signify the harmony between man and universe, at least at this stage of the story. What Italian classicist Gian Bagio Conte once wrote about Lucretius’ epic may readily be applied to , especially its ending: “Lucretius often repeats that the ratio [“reason,” “rational mind”] he expounds heralds, for the person who truly assimilates it, inner serenity and freedom, which originate in the rational understanding of the mechanisms of birth, life, and death of man and the cosmos.” Conte’s words are the other, and complementary, side of my first quotation from Kubrick. I close with Lucretius’ Epicurean moral: The sum of things [rerum summa] Is thus forever renewed, and mortals live By mutual interchange one from another.
In , an article titled “Men of Destiny,” published in a technical cinema journal, reported that “the Roman poet, Lucretius,” prophesied “that which would be apparently real but [was] only visionary.” Now that prophetic vision has become reality. Such is rerum natura: the nature of things.
Gian Bagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, tr. Joseph B. Solodow, rev. Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . Lucretius, On the Nature of Things .– (Melville, ). James J. Finn, “Men of Destiny,” The Motion Picture Projectionist, no. (February ), –; quotation at .
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The Cinematic Nature of the Opening Scene in Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story
An Ethiopian Story by the Greek novelist Heliodorus of Emesa, written around , is the last in a series of surviving ancient Greek novels combining romance, adventure, and mystery. With the exception of Antonius Diogenes’ mammoth tale The Wonders beyond Thule, which is lost, Heliodorus excels over all his predecessors with an extremely clever plot of almost fiendish complexity. He puts his readers in medias res, then returns to his opening scene exactly halfway through the text; he also provides two first-person accounts embedded in a story otherwise told by an omniscient and impersonal narrator. Given such a plot structure, it is not surprising that Heliodorus should present us with a prime example of mystery fiction. He is the first author in the Western tradition to employ a wily and not always trustworthy detective, Calasiris, who gives us a detailed account of his search for a missing person. This missing person is the Ethiopian princess Charicleia, who was exposed at birth by her mother, the queen. When she grew up, Charicleia became the priestess of Artemis at Delphi. One year, at the Pythian Games, a young man called Theagenes falls in love with her, as she does with him.
On Heliodorus’ novel as mystery cf. J. R. Morgan, “The Aithiopika of Heliodoros: Narrative as Riddle,” in Morgan and Richard Stoneman (eds.), Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (London: Routledge, ), –. Cf. Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, “Ancient Greek Romances and Modern Mystery Stories,” The Classical Journal, (), – and . The classic discussion of ancient mystery fiction is the lecture “Aristotle on Detective Fiction” by Dorothy L. Sayers, published in Sayers, Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-One Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), –. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” Harper’s Magazine (May, ), –, an affectionate anatomy of detective fiction, prominently refers to Greek tragedy and Aristotle at its beginning. Cf. recently Jonas Grethlein, The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception: The Ethics of Enchantment from Gorgias to Heliodorus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (chapter called “The Ethics of Deception Reconfigured in Heliodorus’ Ethiopica”). More generally: Ioannis M. Konstantakos and Vasileios Liotsakis (eds.), Suspense in Ancient Greek Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, ). I have dealt with two ancient novels, including Heliodorus’, and mystery films in my Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), – (chapter titled “‘More Striking’: Aristotelian Poetics in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Alfred Hitchcock”).
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
They elope together with Calasiris, who had found Charicleia, and after a number of adventures both preceding and following Calasiris’ death reach Ethiopia, where Charicleia is recognized and acknowledged as the daughter of the king and queen. She marries Theagenes and lives with him happily ever after. The novel’s most famous scene is its opening. Heliodorus begins his story at daybreak near one of the mouths of the Nile. A gang of bandits is coming over the top of a hill and stumbles upon a strange scene. They discover a ship at anchor, loaded with cargo but without a soul on board. On the beach they see the aftermath of a feast which has turned into a massacre. Corpses and half-dead people are lying along the beach. When they come closer, the bandits notice among the carnage a beautiful maiden, at her feet a handsome young man so seriously wounded as to be near death. These will soon turn out to be Charicleia and Theagenes, the lovers and the novel’s heroes. This opening is designed in such a way as to arouse our curiosity by showing us a fascinating mystery. But what modern readers who come to Heliodorus for the first time may not have expected is that the opening of this ancient text appears almost exactly like the transcript – the “novelization,” as it is often called today – of a scene in a mystery film or thriller. On the following pages I address the cinematic quality of Heliodorus’ opening scene by adapting it into a film script and then compare Heliodorus’ highly visual opening with the opening shots of two famous mystery films. Their directors’ narrative purpose is the same as Heliodorus’: to draw the audience irresistibly into their stories. But unlike Heliodorus’ romantic adventure story, these films are nightmarish thrillers which suck their unsuspecting and helpless viewers into a dark world of crime, corruption, and abnormal psychology. Both, appropriately, are milestones of film noir: Touch of Evil () and Psycho (). Finally, to round off my discussion of Heliodorus and cinema, I will examine the novel’s midway return to its opening as an analogy to a flashback in film. I do not claim any conscious influence of Heliodorus or any imitation of his text in these films; in fact, their writers and directors are unlikely ever to have heard of this ancient author. Rather, I intend the similarities in the ancient literary and modern visual modes of storytelling to illustrate that certain key strategies to unfold a mystery or adventure plot were and are fundamental to the genre then and now. The Greeks knew it first.
John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; rpt. ), is an excellent introduction.
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Heliodorus’ Opening and Cinematic Technique
Heliodorus’ Opening and Cinematic Technique My claim that Heliodorus’ opening is inherently cinematic may be substantiated by a long tradition of literary storytelling. Looking back on literary history from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can easily see that literature has always used techniques comparable to those employed in the cinema. Moreover, the perspective on cinematic style on the part of some of the greatest mystery and adventure storytellers in the history of film is directly applicable to Heliodorus’ literary mode of presentation. As early as Alfred Hitchcock described his approach to cinema as follows: I played about with “technique” in those early days [the s and early s] . . . I have stopped all that today . . . Nowadays I want the cutting and continuity to be as inconspicuous as possible, and all I am concerned with is to get the characters developed and the story clearly told without any directorial idiosyncrasies.
Parallel to his words are the following observations by Howard Hawks, made in : I don’t like tricks . . . most of the time my camera stays on eye level now. Once in a while, I’ll move the camera as if a man were walking and seeing something. And it pulls back or it moves in for emphasis when you don’t want to make a cut. But, outside of that, I just use the simplest camera in the world.
Action director John Sturges concurred in : The perfect camera technique is one the audience doesn’t even know is existing. The whole idea is, they become so engrossed in what’s going on, they don’t even know they’re looking at a movie. It’s happening . . . you do things that by themselves have visual interest, but mostly you try to do it in a way that’s so called for that you’re not even aware of it [as a member of the audience].
In general see John L. Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition, nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –, with additional references. Alfred Hitchcock, “Close Your Eyes and Visualize!” Stage (July, ), –; rpt. in, and here quoted from, Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –, at . Quoted from Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (; rpt. New York: Ballantine, ), . Quoted from the director’s audio commentary on the Criterion Collection laserdisc edition of his film Bad Day at Black Rock (now out of print).
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
In the words of two British film scholars: Not only are many technical effects in a film extremely subtle, despite their contribution to the total impact, but part of a director’s job is to ensure that they do not beg for attention, but affect the spectator even though he remains unconscious of their presence. In most cases technique is, and should be, invisible.
Heliodorus’ Opening as Screenplay I now turn to demonstrating in detail the visual quality of Heliodorus’ opening scene, as if for a film whose credits might read . In my adaptation of the individual details, which Heliodorus reveals to us one after the other, into a film’s continuity script, I first quote the text and then follow it with directions for filming and editing. I use the standard English translation of An Ethiopian Story, with page and line references for all quotations. For reasons of economy I exclude detailed descriptions of static moments or of costumes and the brief dialogue which Heliodorus gives his heroes. My adaptation uses as little technical detail as possible. Individual shots are numbered (–). Shots and are subdivided further. Such segmentation will make a shot of some duration clearer; the shots themselves are continuous and involve no editing. All cutting from shot to shot is
Ralph Stephenson and Guy Phelps, The Cinema as Art, nd ed., rev. (London: Penguin, ), . The first to observe the cinematic nature of the opening scene was Otto Weinreich in his “Nachwort” to a German translation of the novel; he expanded this afterword in Weinreich, Der griechische Liebesroman (Zurich: Artemis, ), reprinted in part in Hans Gärtner (ed.), Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman (Hildesheim: Olms, ), –. Weinreich was followed by Tomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), , among others. Winfried Bu¨hler, “Das Element des Visuellen in der Eingangsszene von Heliodors Aithiopika,” Wiener Studien, (), –, provides a longer but rudimentary cinematic appreciation of Heliodorus’ opening. On the connections between text and image, see also Wolfgang Stechow, “Heliodorus’ Aethiopica in Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (), –. On connections between the opening and Homeric ecphrasis, see Mario Telò, “The Eagle’s Gaze in the Opening of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica,” The American Journal of Philology, (), –. A recent juxtaposition of The Ethiopian Story and cinema is in Jonas Grethlein, Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity: The Significance of Form in Narrative and Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), – (chapter titled “Beyond Heliodorus: François Ozon, Dans la Maison”). Ozon’s film dates to . Grethlein adduces several other films in passing. Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, tr. J. R. Morgan; in B. P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –. In my quotations below, the numbers in square brackets refer to page , line through page , line (= An Ethiopian Story .–a). J. R. Morgan, “Heliodoros,” in Gareth Schmeling (ed.), The Novel in the Ancient World, rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, ), –, gives a detailed introduction.
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Heliodorus’ Opening as Screenplay
identified. Camera movements are either lateral () or vertical (). The following abbreviations will serve as cinematic shorthand:
= = = = = = = =
close-up extreme long shot medium close-up medium long shot medium shot long shot point of view reverse-angle shot
A close-up is a shot of an actor whose head or head and shoulders fill the screen or shows us a close view of an object. A medium shot reveals an actor’s whole body, e.g. standing up. Long shots display actors or scenes from a distance. All of these are flexible and admit numerous variations and intermediate camera positions, such as , , or . An Ethiopian Story .-a EXTERIOR, DAY. Early morning. Nile landscape near the seacoast. Shot “The smile of daybreak was just beginning to brighten the sky, the sunlight to catch the hilltops, when a group of men in brigand gear peered over the mountain that overlooks the place where the Nile flows into the sea.... They stood there for a moment...” [.-] .. ELS or LS (depending on actual location), at eye level or slightly higher: Group of brigands approaches and walks past camera (LS to MS); camera pans to keep them in view and then (LS) follows behind them as they ascend a hill, where they stop. “...scanning the expanse of sea beneath them: first they gazed out over the ocean, but as there was nothing sailing there that held out hope of spoil and plunder, their eyes were drawn to the beach nearby.” [.-] .. Camera (LS) rises above bandits’ heads or shoulders (MS from high angle) and reveals (bandits’ POV in ELS) the sea and the mouth of the Nile; camera pans over horizon and empty sea (ELS), then tilts down closer to shore (LS). “This is what they saw: a merchant ship was riding there, moored by her stern, empty of crew but laden with freight. This much could be surmised even from a distance, for the weight of her cargo forced the water up to the third line of boards on the ship’s side.” [.-]
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene .. LS from bandits’ POV, ctd.: camera reveals merchant ship at anchor, loaded but without crew; camera moves in for a closer look at the ship (zoom into MLS). “But the beach!—” [.] .. MLS from bandits’ POV, ctd.: camera tilts further down and momentarily stops to reveal the scene on the beach: aftermath of a massacre. “a mass of newly slain bodies...” [.-] .. Camera moves closer (MLS to MS). “...some of them quite dead, others half-alive and still twitching, testimony that the fighting had only just ended.... Amongst the carnage were the miserable remains of festivities.... In that small space the deity had contrived an infinitely varied spectacle, defiling wine with blood and unleashing war at the party, combining wining and dying, pouring of drink and spilling of blood, and staging this tragic show for the Egyptian bandits.” [.- and .-.] .. Camera pans along the massacre scene, showing details in CU: people lying about dead or dying (twitching); they have obviously been attacked during a banquet, as tables with food, tables overturned or held as weapons near some of the corpses indicate [this information at .-]. CUT Shot “They stood on the mountainside like the audience in a theater, unable to comprehend the scene...” [.-] REV (MCU): Reaction of bandits staring at the aftermath. CUT Shot “So they cast themselves in the role of victors and set off down the hillside. They had reached a point a short distance from the ship and the bodies when they found themselves confronted by a sight even more inexplicable than what they had seen before.” [.-] REV (from the beach uphill): MCU of bandits rejoicing [laughter and brief exclamations to indicate their anticipation of booty]: they begin to walk (camera now moving back into MLS), then run downhill toward camera, which moves out of their way and pans degrees (still MLS) to follow them as they approach the beach where they all suddenly come to a halt; camera pan stops.
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Heliodorus’ Opening as Screenplay
CUT Shot “On a rock sat a girl, a creature of such indescribable beauty that one might have taken her for a goddess. Despite her great distress at her plight, she had an air of courage and nobility.” [.-] .. MLS, bandits’ POV: young woman, armed [this information from ., below], sitting on rock among the dead and dying, with young man, severely wounded, lying at her feet on the ground [this information from ., below]. “On her head she wore a crown of laurel; from her shoulders hung a quiver; her left arm leant on her bow, the hand hanging relaxed at the wrist. She rested the elbow of her other arm on her right thigh, cradling her cheek in her fingers. Her head was bowed...” [.-; above, key words indicating the direction of the observers’ gaze are in italics] .. Camera (still bandits’ POV) moves into ECU of young woman’s bowed head, then (in ECU) tilts down from her head along the left side of her body, across and up the other side back to her head. Camera now moves around her into MCU to follow her gaze and to reveal what she sees. “...and she gazed steadily at a young man lying at her feet...” [.-; description of Theagenes omitted here; on film it is only a briefly held static shot] .. MCU of young man, wounded, lying at her feet. He, in turn, is looking up into her eyes [this information from .-]. CUT Shots - Dialogue between Theagenes and Charicleia (.-) CU on man’s face from girl’s POV. He speaks. CUT REV (MCU) on girl’s face from man’s POV. She speaks. CUT Shot “As she spoke, she leapt up from the rock.” [.] MLS: Woman leaping up suddenly. CUT Shot “Thunderstruck with wonder and terror at the sight, the bandits on the hillside scattered and dived for cover in the undergrowth.” [.-]
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene REV (MCU to MLS from girl’s POV) of bandits’ reaction: scared by her sudden movement, they run off and hide. Camera moves closer and follows them, panning as necessary and perhaps moving closer to individual bandits or small groups.
Comments Heliodorus’ opening is fully integrated into the plot and not simply an instance of virtuoso pictorialism. Readers know that Heliodorus was aware of the visual nature of his scene because at the very outset he directs their attention to it, employing words and phrases such as “spectacle” and “staging this tragic show” and comparing the bandits to an “audience in a theater,” all quoted above. The words italicized in the text of . clearly show us both the direction of the brigands’ gaze when their eyes glide over Charicleia and their undivided attention; this is the literary equivalent for a combination of a film director tilting and panning his camera in close-up. This moment is as implicitly cinematic as anything in literature could be. Moreover, the detailed description of what the aftermath of the banquet on the beach looks like – this is the text for ., quoted in excerpts – provides such precise information that the entire set could be built and dressed. We may compare this to the practice of storyboarding which many directors employ, most famously Alfred Hitchcock, whose general practice since the s was to have reached all creative decisions before beginning the actual filming except for his work with the actors on set. Even the dialogue between Charicleia and Theagenes, uncomplicated as it is, could be kept virtually unchanged. More specifically, Heliodorus’ opening is the literary equivalent of a kind of sequence which appears regularly in mystery films when someone comes upon the scene of a crime. Corpses and clues are scattered about, and neither the observer on screen nor the viewer in the theater can understand anything yet. In cinematic mysteries such an observer is usually a policeman or detective rather than, as in our case, a gang of outlaws. When the Egyptian bandits piece some of the evidence together for a partial explanation, as Heliodorus describes them as doing (cf. text for .), they momentarily resemble fictional detectives. Even more importantly, they resemble film audiences shown a similar setting and carrying out the same mental exercise. After all, such scenes are staged primarily for the viewers’ benefit to create an aura of mystery and suspense. Only much later, usually at the end of the narrative, can all the loose
On this aspect see, among others, J. W. H. Walden, “Stage Terms in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, (), –; Thomas Paulsen, Inszenierung des Schicksals: Tragödie und Komödie im Roman des Heliodor (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, ), –; Morgan, “Heliodorus,” .
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Welles’s Touch of Evil and Hitchcock’s Psycho
threads be pulled together and explained. But initially the clues must not present a coherent picture; the scene has to remain mysterious to all observers both inside and outside the narrative. Nevertheless, viewers and readers ought to be well informed about the scene both as a whole and in its details; otherwise, they would feel cheated later because vital information has been withheld. (Short or incompetently presented mysteries, such as half-hour installments of television crime series, often work according to this principle, and the solution is likely to induce groans in viewers.) Competent mystery authors take pains to familiarize their audiences with key locations for the solution of a mystery, often including even charts or diagrams in their texts, a regular feature of the golden age of the detective story in the s and s. Careful film directors, too, who want to create suspense built on characters and their environment rather than merely aiming for sudden shocks, e.g. with explosions or special effects, show us the exact surroundings of mystery scenes or of action sequences in great detail. A famous example appears in a film set in Greco-Roman antiquity, although it is not a mystery. This is the detailed overview of the racetrack in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (). Wyler intentionally added the charioteers’ parade before the race because he wanted to ensure that viewers knew the set: not only to enhance their anticipation but also to increase their suspense during the spectacular action sequence that followed.
Cinematic Parallels: Welles’s Touch of Evil and Hitchcock’s Psycho Touch of Evil is rightly famous for the intricate crane shot which opens the film and lasts for three minutes and twenty seconds without cut or dissolve. Except for the absence of editing, the film’s opening is analogous to what Heliodorus’ opening would have been in a film, as my adaptation, with only little editing and fluid camera movement, has shown. In fact, a director wishing to be Wellesian could even film
On this cf. Jan Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), . A description of the scene as part of the film’s continuity script appears in Terry Comito (ed.), Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, ; fourth, rev., printing, ), –. See Comito, – and –, for critical descriptions and diagrams by the editor and by film scholar Stephen Heath. The filming is described in an interview with actor Charlton Heston (Comito, –). Touch of Evil was taken away from Welles by the studio and released with cuts, changes, and additional scenes added against Welles’s intention. (Cf. below.) Welles’s version was restored in according to a detailed memorandum he had written in . For excerpts see Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum; rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, ), –; its full text is on home-video editions of the restored film.
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
Heliodorus’ opening entirely without cuts if he treated the text slightly more freely than I did above. The continuous shot which moves around a film studio in Robert Altman’s The Player () and the opening shot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights () leave no doubt that Heliodorus’ opening would present no technical problem at all for an adaptation without cuts. Both of these films imitate and pay homage to Welles’s virtuosity. Welles introduces us to a tawdry town that straddles the border between the United States and Mexico and to two of his three protagonists. The third one, to whom the film’s title makes oblique reference, will appear soon after. The two are the Mexican “Mike” Vargas, a drug fighter for the Mexican government, who has just concluded a major case, and his American wife Susan; they are on their honeymoon. We follow them as they are crossing the border to the US. During their walk a car passes them and shortly afterwards explodes, killing an American businessman and the striptease dancer who is with him. Welles creates suspense in this shot by first showing us the bomb being activated and placed in the car trunk and by following the car’s journey from the Mexican parking lot through the checkpoint to the American side. The following assessment of this opening scene well expresses its narrative importance and reminds us of the atmosphere of both mystery and inevitability, one that Heliodorus achieved with his opening, too: Dark corruption is suggested immediately in the one-take opening scene, the most famous piece of virtuosity in Welles’s career. We are looking down from a high angle onto a busy Mexican square, at night, and while we look through the camera’s eye in the slow sweeping movement of the boom shot that covers the whole area of the square, we see an action, the key action of the film . . . The interest and power of the scene come from the sense of mastery with which we watch the whole of it; but our sense of mastery is a kind of illusion, for we watch with only half-comprehension . . . the scene solidly inaugurates not only the atmosphere of the film that follows but its main action.
As was the case with Heliodorus, Welles’s opening embodies, in nuce, the nature and essence of the mystery about to unfold. Indeed, Welles intended nothing less. As he stated many years later: “the whole story was in that opening shot.” He went on to point out its significance:
Robert Garis, The Films of Orson Welles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
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Welles’s Touch of Evil and Hitchcock’s Psycho
The directors I admire the most are the least technical ones . . . I think great shots should conceal themselves a little bit. But that, by its nature, had to show it [a director’s technique], because it told the plot. There was no way of not doing a kind of virtuoso shot that announced itself. But I prefer the ones that don’t, that conceal themselves.
These words may remind us of the quotations from Hitchcock, Hawks, and Sturges given earlier. Heliodorus’ visual technique is equally unobtrusive. We can best discern the full extent of its intricate simplicity, to put it in an apparent but nevertheless appropriate oxymoron, when we look at it in cinematic terms. In subordinating their style to the narrative, both Welles and Heliodorus are in complete agreement with one of the best-known fundamental ancient perspectives on artistic creativity, the concept that ars est celare artem: True skill lies in the artist’s very hiding of his technique, rather than in calling attention to it. Ovid pays his Pygmalion’s art the highest compliment in the phrase ars adeo latet arte sua: “so much is art hidden by his art.” Hitchcock’s words about technique being “as inconspicuous as possible” amount to a modern restatement of Ovid. Even in what now looks to us to be an obvious case of cinematic fireworks, Welles has managed to hide his virtuosity underneath the action which we observe; the continuous camera movement and the absence of all editing are often lost on film audiences watching this scene for the first time. From its first moment on, we are absorbed in the narrative events themselves, as Welles wants us to be. The constantly moving camera, the snippets of background noise, and the sparse exposition dialogue all form a non-stop assault on our eyes, ears, and minds with their intricate and incessantly changing visual and aural points of orientation; they demonstrate the very constancy of flux – another appropriate oxymoron – which noir thrillers require, both in their visual style and to uphold the element of suspense in their plots. In such a world little if anything ever turns out to be what it originally appeared to be. The objection might be raised that the style of Welles’s opening is too elaborate to be considered an analogy to the less intricate but visually equally effective opening in Heliodorus, an objection which I will address shortly. Still, the narrative function of both is identical, as we have seen. A consideration of the opening of Hitchcock’s Psycho will reinforce my argument for such
Both quotations are from Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, –; see – on the film’s themes of corruption and betrayal and on its moral meaning. On Welles’s approach to technique, see also Welles and Bogdanovich, (“hide the mechanics”). Ovid, Metamorphoses ..
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
parallelism. There is indeed every reason to consider the opening scenes of these two films together; they share thematically significant features. Hitchcock originally wanted to outdo Welles with “the longest dolly shot ever attempted by helicopter” – a “four-mile scene,” which proved technically impossible. While they are the sole creative artists in their respective films, both Welles and Hitchcock had to be able to rely on accomplished technicians to carry out their vision. In our case the cinematographer of Psycho, John L. Russell, had been the camera operator on Touch of Evil. Russell and his crew were chiefly responsible for the fact that Welles’s vision of his opening could actually be put on film. Welles has said about their importance: I had a great camera operator – one of the last great ones . . . And we had a marvelous key grip . . . he’s the man who steadies that arm [of the camera crane] on its truck marks, and he’s as important as the operator. And if he hasn’t got a marvelous touch and absolutely sure grasp of what he’s doing, you’re lost.
Now on to Hitchcock. The composite opening shot of Psycho after the film’s credits lasts fifty-nine seconds. The camera, panning right, shows us the skyline of Phoenix, Arizona, in extreme long shot, and then, via a zoom, hesitatingly singles out a particular building by going from its sweeping pan into a close-up of one of the building’s windows, even creeping through this window into a darkened room and now again panning right. This last pan reveals two lovers, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis, after their erotic encounter in a hotel room. The remainder of the scene explains their plight and serves as exposition to the plot: they can only see each other occasionally; on this day Marion even had to give up her lunch hour to be together with Sam. While their dialogue gives us the
Quoted from Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (New York: Dembner, ), . Twelve years later, Hitchcock’s Frenzy () opened with a long helicopter shot surveying London, traveling above and along the Thames, and finally focusing on a small crowd of people on the bank shortly before a corpse is discovered floating down the river. The shot, which contains one dissolve, lasts for two minutes and thirty-four seconds. Writer-director Samuel Fuller wanted to open his thriller The Crimson Kimono () with a continuous shot from a helicopter starting at feet high and moving down across Los Angeles and into a close-up of an advertising poster, but municipal flying regulations made this impossible. See on this Fuller’s own words as quoted in Lee Server, Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground: A Critical Study, with Interviews, a Filmography and a Bibliography (Jefferson, : McFarland, ), . Quoted from Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, . The fact that, among other connections between the two films, the roles of Susan Vargas and Marion Crane were played by the same actress (Janet Leigh) is telling but not relevant to my argument. Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (; rpt. New York: Limelight Editions, ), and –, examines further analogies between the films.
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Welles’s Touch of Evil and Hitchcock’s Psycho
necessary background information – Marion’s motivation to embezzle a large sum of money – the earlier visuals have already determined the atmosphere and tone of the whole film. In the words of Robin Wood: Arbitrary place, date, and time, and now an apparently arbitrary window: the effect is of random selection: this could be any place, any date, any time, any room: it could be us. The forward track into darkness inaugurates the progress of perhaps the most terrifying film ever made: we are to be taken forward and downward into the darkness of ourselves. Psycho begins with the normal and draws us steadily deeper and deeper into the abnormal; it opens by making us aware of time, and ends (except for the releasing final image) with a situation in which time (i.e., development) has ceased to exist.
Hitchcock achieves his goal of completely involving viewers in his dark story by putting them in the position of voyeurs: throughout the film, their gaze will continue to intrude on the secrets of the main characters. Psycho, not least because of its opening, has rightly become a textbook example for the power of cinema to turn audiences into Peeping Toms. But it is technically impossible even for the virtuosity of a Hitchcock first to survey the downtown of a large city and then to sneak inside the room of one of its buildings in one single camera take. His solution to the problem of moving the camera over an impossibly far distance without breaking the viewer’s spell is most ingenious, as well as being an instance of simplicity itself. The screen identifies for us place and time, the latter down to the minute, and so reinforces our sense of becoming intimately and inextricably involved in the film’s plot. But these texts disguise three dissolves, which in turn disguise the different camera set-ups Hitchcock needed for the panoramic view of Phoenix and the hotel up to the moment when he focuses the viewer’s attention on a particular window. The dissolves occur, respectively, after eleven, twenty-three, and thirty-four seconds from the shot’s beginning under the information , ; , ; - . . A somewhat awkward cut forty seconds after the opening then signals the transition from location filming to the studio; this cut occurs in the close-up of the window before the camera enters the room. The next cut
Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –; cf. also – on the opening’s documentary-like realism. Hitchcock himself said so in François Truffaut (with Helen G. Scott), Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . In general see William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, ).
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
shows us Marion’s uneaten lunch, an image for which Hitchcock prepared us one second earlier when Sam begins speaking to Marion: “You never did eat your lunch, did you?” These are the first words of dialogue in the film. The opening of Psycho is intended to deceive viewers into believing that everything is continuous. It does so quite successfully, because no viewer is likely to notice that the window on the screen is really two, one on a real building and one on a studio set. The opening’s technique is artfully disguised – cf. Hitchcock’s words quoted earlier – and can be fully discovered only through careful and repeated viewing of the opening. Only then are viewers likely to notice that there are two different windows with their blinds in different positions. Hitchcock’s cleverly created continuity in turn parallels the whole first part of the film, which, despite the changes in settings from city to country highway and finally to a lonely and deserted motel, gives us a seamless and uninterrupted narrative. The film’s first half, until the search for the now dead and missing Marion begins the long and equally terrifying dénouement of the story, is one of the best illustrations of how effectively the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action can be applied to a modern medium. As Heliodorus and Welles had done in their opening scenes, Hitchcock, too, hides his technique for the sake of compelling and irresistible storytelling. Through his largely unobtrusive use of technique, the principle that ars est celare artem applies to Hitchcock’s cinema even more than to that of Welles.
Classical Rhetoric and Cinematic Style Heliodorus’ novel is famous not only for its intricate plot but also for its author’s accomplished style. Heliodorus wrote during the Second Sophistic, as scholars have come to call it, when the style of a literary presentation, orally or in writing, is at least as important as its substance. That the manner of presenting an argument or a story is as crucial as its content is an insight which authors have followed since the time of Homer. For this, ancient rhetorical theory formulated the concept of enargeia, vividness of presentation. A fundamental strategy to achieve enargeia is to make one’s audiences eyewitnesses of what is being described; Cicero calls this “an almost visual presentation of events as if practically going on” at the moment at which they are being mentioned. The
Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric .., a passage referred to in Chapter , note . The quotation is from Cicero, On the Orator .., in the translation by H. Rackham (tr.), Cicero, vol. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press / London: Heinemann, ; several rpts.), .
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Classical Rhetoric and Cinematic Style
author is the first of such eyewitnesses: His powers of imagination conjure up a scene to himself. When he puts it into words, he must draw his audience’s imagination into the scene as well. Direct speech and detailed descriptions are required. Long sentences convey these details, including minutiae. Cicero summarized the power and effect of enargeia in virtually cinematic terms: It is this department of oratory which almost sets the facts before the eyes – for it is the sense of sight that is most appealed to, although it is nevertheless possible for the rest of the senses and also most of all the mind itself to be affected . . . The one helps us to understand what is said, but the other makes us feel that we actually see it before our eyes.
According to Quintilian, it is a great achievement to present one’s topics clearly and in such a way that they appear to be seen or shown to the mind’s eye. It is evident that such visually oriented strategies of presentation can be applied to film – indeed more so, because a film director puts his material immediately and literally before his audience’s eyes. From the perspective of classical rhetoric, we can better appreciate the baroque nature of Welles’s opening shot in Touch of Evil: It is an example of classical enargeia even in a post-classical medium. In terms of style, the film is comparable with Heliodorus’ novel, whose literary nature classical scholar J. R. Morgan summarizes as follows: “The style is florid and artificial, but exuberant and alive, employed with a zest and love of words and the games that can be played with them. The vocabulary is wide and highly nuanced.” This succinct description could be a summary of Welles’s style, his filmic “vocabulary.” If we consider the sentence of a text to be analogous to an individual shot in a film, we may yet again compare both works from Heliodorus’ perspective: “The formal patterns within sentences can often become quite complex,” Morgan has observed. He concludes: “taken at its own terms it is a richly nuanced prose of great exuberance and emotional effect, whose devices combine with the author’s characteristic narrative technique to produce an experience of immediacy and involvement with the action.”
Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, th ed. (Stuttgart: Steiner, ), , and Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric ..–. On minutiae cf. Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric ... Cicero, Partitions of Oratory ; quoted from Rackham, Cicero, . Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric ..; quotation in Chapter . In the introduction to his translation in Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, . Quoted from Morgan, “Heliodoros,” and .
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
Here now is Morgan’s characterization of Heliodorus’ opening and its connections to the gradual unraveling of the initial mystery in the course of the novel: The opening paragraph alerts us . . . to another feature of the novel. The narrator knows what the scene on the beach means, but he is not telling. The reader is compelled to share the ignorance of the bandits; their eyes are our eyes. So throughout the novel the narrator stays very much in the background. The truth emerges dramatically from the characters, and their learning is our learning. This quality in its turn entails another of the Aithiopika’s greatest delights: its sheer convolution and intricacy . . . As connections emerge, seemingly of their own accord, over long spans of text . . ., we are invited to admire the virtuoso skill of the self-concealing author who has engineered the whole complex mechanism.
This, too, applies to Welles: We have only to make minor adjustments in regard to setting and characters and to exchange the literary terms in the quotations (“paragraph,” “novel,” “reader,” “words”) for cinematic ones (scene, film, viewer, images). Heliodorus’ rhetorical and stylistic flourishes heighten his readers’ powers to imagine the scene presented verbally and increase their emotional ties to the story’s mystery and its protagonists. The sinuous camera movement in Welles’s opening serves the same purpose. Just as casual readers may pay no heed to Heliodorus’ phrasing, beginning with the seductive “smile of daybreak,” casual viewers of Welles’s film do not notice exactly how Welles shows them what they are seeing. In both cases, the style remains partially hidden and affects its audiences only subliminally. By contrast, the deceptive artlessness of Hitchcock’s opening is balanced by a highly emotional dimension which is instrumental to produce apprehension and suspense. This is the music, famously played by strings only. The score is the chief rhetorical aspect in the opening of Psycho. Overall, then, there is a direct stylistic parallel between the openings of An Ethiopian Story and Psycho. In Heliodorus a simple if still arresting moment in the plot is complemented by verbal fireworks; in Hitchcock the simplicity of what we see on the screen is complemented by what we are hearing. In both, the two sides round off each other to make for one perfect whole. Anything added or subtracted would only destroy this balance. For the release of Touch of Evil, the studio altered Welles’ version of the opening in two ways, both against his wishes. It superimposed the credits
Morgan, introduction to his translation in Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, –, at .
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Complex Flashbacks
on most of the tracking shot and added a jazzy soundtrack. From the point of view just discussed, all this is out of place. It distracts the viewer from the scene’s visual quality because it is virtually impossible to concentrate on the images. Ironically, the only artistic justification for the soundtrack can be that the obtrusive credits have ruined the elegance of Welles’s virtuosity and turned an intricate shot into a visually boring beginning, thereby making Touch of Evil no more than a standard thriller. The studio even marketed the film as such. By contrast, in his own opening Welles had aimed at an almost documentary-like atmosphere: no credits, natural background sounds only. The realism which he achieved makes the seamy black-and-white world into which he draws us authentic. That is why Touch of Evil is terrifying.
Complex Flashbacks There is one additional important cinematic parallel to Heliodorus’ opening scene. The second part of Calasiris’ story (.–) contains a detailed recapitulation of the opening from an entirely different point of view at .. We now learn that there had been another observer, the “detective” Calasiris himself, who had been watching the bandits watching the aftermath of the massacre. Heliodorus prepares his readers for this return to the opening by a first indication at . that he will now take us back to the narrative’s beginning for the long-awaited explanation of its mystery. We may compare this technique with the identical purpose of flashbacks on screen, correcting what we have seen earlier and revealing what had “really” happened. (I here exclude those flashbacks which merely fill in a
On the flashback technique in the ancient Greek novel, see, e.g., Tomas Hägg, Narrative Technique in Ancient Greek Romances: Studies of Chariton, Xenophon Ephesius, and Achilles Tatius (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, ), – and – (both passages on recapitulations). He does not refer to cinematic parallels of this technique. On equivalents of, or parallels to, cinematic flashbacks and flash-forwards in Heliodorus, cf. Marílla P. Futre Pinheiro, “Time and Narrative Technique in Heliodorus’ ‘Aethiopica,’” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, .. (), –. See in general Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, ; rpt. ), with discussion of the connections of flashbacks to literature, primarily modern, at –. Her book is now to be supplemented with David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; rpt. ), who details all manner of flashbacks (and flashforwards) throughout, including some mentioned in this chapter. Cf. further Gilles Ménégaldo, “Flashbacks in Film Noir,” in François Gallix and Vanessa Guignery (eds.), Crime Fictions: Subverted Codes and New Structures (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, ), –; David Bordwell, “Grandmaster Flashback,” in Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Linda Aronson, Screenwriting Updated: New (and Conventional)
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
gap in the narrative, another of their primary functions.) The flashback, often with a voice-over narration from the perspective of the person giving us the information we are watching, makes a character or characters re-live an earlier part of the plot. In this way a viewer witnesses a dramatic reenactment. As scholars have observed, the first-person stories which Cnemon, a secondary hero who eventually turns into a “bad guy,” and in particular Calasiris tell their listeners in An Ethiopian Story are just such detailed reenactments rather than summaries of necessary information. In mysteries on page and screen, the flashback technique is a ubiquitous part of the dénouement. The detective takes his listeners through the case and then reveals the guilty party. A representative example is Sidney Lumet’s film of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (). There are many others. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, An Ethiopian Story has often, even routinely, been characterized as a mystery novel. The strongest evidence for this comes at the very beginning. Heliodorus’ opening resembles the discovery of a corpse – here, of many corpses – at the beginning of a detective story, a discovery that sets the plot in motion. In our case: “The scene of the crime is even more like a detective story than the audience at first reading can guess, for one sentence is a Clue.” Similarly, the long flashback in which Cnemon tells his story contains “multiple narrators, hidden motives, betrayal and double-dealing, false accusations and shocking revelations.” Related to the use of cinematic flashbacks just described is the recapitulation of a particular narrative moment from a different point of view or even from multiple ones. The director, as it were, turns back the narrative clock, either once or several times. A well-known literary instance is Joseph
Ways of Writing for the Screen (Los Angeles: Silman-James, ), –, devotes four chapters to detailed examinations of various uses of the flashback and analyzes several examples. Cf. the director’s own description in Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (; rpt. New York: Vintage, ), –. Rudolf Helm, Der antike Roman (; rpt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ), , asked, rhetorically only: “Ist es nicht, als ob wir einen antiken Kriminalroman vor uns hätten?” So John J. Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” in Winkler and Gordon Williams (eds.), Yale Classical Studies, vol. : Later Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; rpt. in Simon Swain (ed.), Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; quotation at (rpt. ). Immediately after, Winkler discusses suspense, including Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (), and refers to the shower murder in Psycho. Grethlein, The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception, takes a somewhat different view on Cnemon and Calasiris in his chapter on Heliodorus. Winkler was one of the classicists who appeared in Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy, examined in Chapter . Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” (rpt., ). Throughout, Winkler uses the term flashback as a matter of course.
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Complex Flashbacks
Conrad’s Lord Jim (); the most famous instance in film history is Welles’s Citizen Kane (). The most famous film in which narrative returns lead to contradictory accounts of what happened, with the story starting up again once or several times, is Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (), a philosophical murder mystery and the inspiration of several other films. Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing () is a classic American example. So, earlier, was Alfred Werker’s Repeat Performance (), a little-known film noir. The same or related narrative strategies occur, sometimes to great emotional effect, in all manner of contexts: Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction () and Jackie Brown (), Mike van Diem’s Character (), Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (), Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (), Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (), Tom Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (), and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist () and Nymphomaniac (). These are only a few remarkable examples. The return to an opening scene at the end of a film has a long history; William Wellman’s Beau Geste (), the remake of a silent film, and William Wyler’s The Letter () are good example from the Hollywood studio era. François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women () and The Woman Next Door () are love stories about life and death in opposite modes: once as bittersweet romantic comedy, once as erotic tragedy. A particularly elegant case, in which the end of a long flashback seamlessly turns into the continuation of the opening scene, is John Farrow’s mystery The Big Clock (). The plot of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty () returns to the film’s opening scene after about eighty minutes of screen time; so did, roughly, Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre () in a notably clever way. Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (), one of the pivotal Hollywood melodramas, is another instant, noteworthy for its baroque style and tragic theme. Aleksander Ford’s medieval epic Knights of the Teutonic Order (or Knights of the Black Cross, ), Martin Scorsese’s Casino (), and Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci () do so more than two and a half hours later. Susan Seidelman’s Cookie (), a mafia adventure-comedy,
A British example, all too little known today, is Anthony Asquith’s The Woman in Question (; US release title: Five Angles on Murder). It was remade in India by Sundaram Balachander as Andha Naal (“That Day”; ). This in turn was remade under the same name by Vishnu Priyan in . See especially Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, and Jan Walls (eds.), Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon, and Their Legacies (London: Routledge, ). Regrettably, they do not mention Mario Bava’s comic-erotic Four Times That Night ().
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
anticipated, as it were, Casino by adding a double twist when it returns, after about eighty minutes, to its opening. Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (; not a mystery) returns to its opening set-up after more than three hours of its running time – but with the original character set-up reversed. Claude Chabrol’s The Flower of Evil () opens with a dead man lying on the floor and closes with a deceptively similar shot of another corpse – a clever twist. All the preceding are random instances. As Kurosawa’s example shows, the technique of using flashbacks or dramatic turn-backs for narrative complexity and temporal dislocation is not at all restricted to the cinema of the West; as Heliodorus shows, it is certainly not restricted to modern modes of storytelling, either. Regardless of its medium, the device can be highly effective. This alone accounts for its frequency. One of the emotionally most involving and elegant cases of a film unfolding the true meaning of its opening only at the end is David Lean’s Brief Encounter (). Although it is not a mystery film, its flashback structure is an object lesson in the mystery storyteller’s fundamental task of successfully withholding important information at the beginning and gradually revealing it in the course of the narrative. As uninvolved and uninformed observers, we are first shown the scene only on the surface level of social proprieties being observed; when we return to it again, we are shown, and now feel, its complex emotional and psychological undercurrents. A well-known example of flashbacks from a perspective that contradicts a scene shown earlier occurs in John Ford’s late Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (). It has a framing narrative set in the modern West. The flashback revealing the truth about the titular outlaw’s death occurs within the long flashback which tells the film’s story about order and civilization coming to the Western frontier. The main storyline thus turns out to operate on a false assumption. In a comparable manner, Calasiris’ story of his earlier adventures occurs as a lengthy insert into Heliodorus’ main narrative; its climax is the revelation of what had caused the massacre whose aftermath the Egyptian bandits had witnessed. While flashbacks within flashbacks are part and parcel of traditional cinema, as Ford’s example shows and as, for instance, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall () replays in a comic vein, narrative structures involving more complex flashbacks occur in mainstream Hollywood films and in modern, especially French and Japanese, films of the s and later. A flashbackwithin-a-flashback-within-a-flashback could be seen in Michael Curtiz’s World War II film Passage to Marseille (), while John Brahm’s noir-
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Complex Flashbacks
mystery thriller The Locket () had a uniquely intricate flashback structure on four levels of stories within stories and a surprise resolution that connects them all. A well-known example from more recent French cinema, with different levels of flashbacks and flash-forwards, is Alain Resnais’s Mon Oncle d’Amérique (). Christopher Nolan’s Inception, mentioned in Chapter , presents a variation on the theme through its dreams within dreams. A brief return to Virgil may be appropriate here. We encountered his flash-forward and flashback technique in Chapter in connection with epic ecphrasis. The Aeneid as a whole may well be the most sophisticated example of Virgil’s pre-cinematic technique, as when, for example, the Roman future is revealed to Venus in Book (in Jupiter’s prophecy) and to Aeneas in Books (by Anchises in the Underworld) and (in the images on Aeneas’ shield) – all this at moments in the main narrative when no Romans yet existed. The future as flash-forward is contained in the past, whose story itself contains an extensive flashback in Books and : Aeneas’ own account of the fall of Troy and his and the survivors’ subsequent journey. W. H. Auden’s strong criticism in his poem “Secondary Epic” ( or ) unintentionally pays tribute to this temporal complexity: No, Virgil, no: Not even the first of the Romans can learn His Roman history in the future tense, Not even to serve your political turn; Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.
And again: No, Virgil, no: Behind your verse so masterfully made We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.
But this denies the fascination that the structure of the Aeneid has always exerted on readers because it is an integral part of Virgil’s compositional approach to an old myth as pre-history to actual history, Anyone who has
Details in Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood, –. W. H. Auden, “Secondary Epic,” – and –; quoted from Edward Mendelson (ed.), The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, vol. : – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), and . On its composition, publication history, and variants, see the textual note at Mendelson, –.
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
ever fallen under the spell of the Aeneid is likely to disagree with Auden. Yes, Virgil, yes!
Lying Flashbacks We already saw that An Ethiopian Story is a complex narrative with complex flashbacks. But Heliodorus goes further: there are also lying flashbacks. The first one, rather short, occurs early on (.–). To safeguard her chastity and her lover before their captors, Charicleia says that Theagenes is her brother and tells a false story. She achieves her goal and then tells him the reason for her lie: “My deception is our protection, my love, and we must maintain it and say nothing . . . Sometimes even a lie can be good, if it helps those who speak it without harming those to whom it is spoken.” Far more striking, however, is the novel’s longest flashback, the story of Calasiris. His tale has been characterized, completely accurately, as being mendacious and duplicitous, but this does not make its teller a “bad guy.” Even more than with Charicleia’s lie, “Kalasiris’ duplicity is morally good” because “duplicity itself is the proper moral attitude.” And more: “Kalasiris is its [the novel’s] duplicitous saint.” The fact that Heliodorus uses lying tales in flashbacks is in itself not remarkable. The first liar-in-flashback in classical literature had been Homer’s Odysseus. What is remarkable about Heliodorus’ flashbacks is his clever and astonishing virtuosity. The result, overall: “Without understanding Kalasiris, we cannot understand Heliodoros’ novel.” Lying flashbacks are generally considered not to be advantageous even for experienced mystery writers or directors. A case in point is Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (). The film is famous for a particularly shrewd use of flashback in a mystery plot: to the audience’s surprise, the evidence given in the opening flashback by one of the suspects in a murder case turns out
Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story .; quoted from Morgan in Reardon, . On Charicleia’s lie see Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” – (rpt. –). The quotations are from Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika,” , , and (rpt. , , and ). Ken Dowden, “Heliodoros: Serious Intentions,” The Classical Quarterly, (), –, and “Kalasiris, Apollonios of Tyana, and the Lies of Teiresias,” in Stelios Panayotakis, Gareth Schmeling, and Michael Paschalis (eds.), Holy Men and Charlatans in the Ancient Novel (Groningen: Barkhuis, ), –, takes a somewhat different view of Calasiris. So Dowden, “Kalasiris, Apollonios of Tyana, and the Lies of Teiresias,” . This is his opening sentence.
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Lying Flashbacks
to have been a deliberate lie. The hostile reaction of some contemporary critics to this plot twist seems to indicate that, in their opinion, Hitchcock violated an unwritten rule of cinematic storytelling: that a flashback must reveal the truth, must tell “what really happened” – as if such a rule had ever existed. The one compelling rule for creative artists at any time and in any narrative medium is to tell their story in the most effective way. How they achieve this is left to their creativity. But even Hitchcock eventually came to believe that he had been in error. As he told François Truffaut: Strangely enough, in movies, people never object if a man is shown telling a lie. And it’s also acceptable, when a character tells a story about the past, for the flashback to show it as if it were taking place in the present. So why is it that we can’t tell a lie through a flashback?
Hitchcock had by this time come to believe that the lying flashback in Stage Fright had been a dramatic mistake. By contrast, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, two of his most ardent admirers in France, eloquently came to his defense. They characterized it as “a cinematic version” of what really happened:
On this see Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, tr. Stanley Hochman (New York: Ungar, ), , and the perceptive comments at Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, . Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – (chapter titled “Duplicitous Narration and Stage Fright”), and Turim, Flashbacks in Film, –, provide details. Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood, , calls Hitchcock’s flashback “diabolical”; cf. Bordwell, . The same year as Stage Fright, Asquith’s The Woman in Question played with the same narrative structure, although the flashback that turns out to have been a lie is not the first. Bordwell, , observes that Hitchcock probably knew about the lying flashback in the British thriller Dear Murderer () before making Stage Fright. Truffaut, Hitchcock, . See Truffaut, Hitchcock, . Three years earlier, American director John Reinhardt anticipated Hitchcock with his little-known mystery film The Guilty, based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, but did not entirely overcome the problems that may be inherent in lying or unreliable flashbacks. An ingenious variant on uses of flashbacks occurs in Flavio Mogherini’s The Pyjama Girl Case (), an Italian giallo (crime thriller-shocker). The plot strand that leads to the title character’s murder and that in average films would be told in flashback is here shown in tandem with the police’s attempts to find her killer. The solution occurs only when both strands finally merge – to viewers’ considerable surprise. In modern (or postmodern) cinema, the matter can be much more complex, as in Federico Fellini’s / (). In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (), for example, flashbacks are completely hidden, as when a character walks through a door and emerges on the other side in a different place at a different time. On this see, e.g., Stuart M. Kaminsky, “Narrative Time in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, (), –. Kaminsky worked with Leone on the film’s English dialogue. Christian Uva, Sergio Leone: Cinema as Political Fable, tr. Fabio Battista (New York: Oxford University Press, ), , calls it “one of the most outstandingly atemporal films in the history of cinema.” The temporal changes and discontinuities in these and many later films virtually require a complete invisibility of flashbacks.
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene By a logical process, the spectator thinks that the images have lied with him [the flashback’s narrator]: indignation . . . But such is not the case. In Hitchcock films, the images never lie, though the characters do. The same sequence shown without the soundtrack can illustrate the true version of events. It is the commentary that makes it false, that lies, that assigns the actions another cause, another goal.
Rohmer and Chabrol put their case eloquently and can remind us of the sophisticated quality of Heliodorus’ narrative construction, chiefly in Calasiris’ account. A comparable narrative situation occurred in Rebecca (), Hitchcock’s first film made in Hollywood, which had opened with a dream whose images do not entirely fit the off-screen narrator’s description: “the images, rather than depicting the memory of a cherished place, actually begin to contradict the voice . . . It [i.e. the look of Manderley] is in keeping with the tone of the voice, if not with what the voice is saying.” Even so, there is one major lying image in Psycho: Marion Crane’s (and our) first view of Mrs. Bates. It does not fit the psychiatrist’s explanation why Norman Bates assumes his mother’s appearance. A comparable point can be made about Citizen Kane. Dying Charles Foster Kane’s final word “Rosebud” sends a newspaper reporter on a mission to discover its meaning, but the screen shows that nobody heard it, so nobody could have known that Kane even uttered it. His nurse, the first to enter Kane’s room, does so only when he is already dead. Near the end, Kane’s sinister butler claims to have heard it, but the flashback showing his version of what happened does not even contain the moment. As Hitchcock once said: “I suppose people are so accustomed to flashbacks being true that it was just confusing when it was untrue.” In view of the preceding, some further comments and examples are called for. They are intended to reinforce my point about Heliodorus as early master
Rohmer and Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, . Rohmer and Chabrol, , called this “a technical innovation” for the discrepancy between the flashback’s images and words. Hitchcock aficionados may here be reminded of “What Really Happened,” a episode of the television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It contains two pairs of contradictory flashbacks. Quoted from Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Boston: New Harvest / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ), . He adds immediately: “Is it possible to betray a book by sheer fidelity to it?” I examined the discrepancy in “‘More Striking’: Aristotelian Poetics in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Alfred Hitchcock,” . Quoted from Andrew Sarris (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors (; rpt. New York: Avon, ), .
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Lying Flashbacks
of mystery. Of course they do not exhaust the subject. I begin with the cinema’s Master of Suspense. Lying flashbacks appear in Hitchcock’s work for television. In “I Killed the Count” (), a three-part story of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Season , Episodes –), four people involved in a shooting murder all claim to have been the only killer. Three incompatible flashbacks “prove” the statements of three of them, while the fourth does not receive a flashback. As it turns out, the four have been in cahoots with each other, but Hitchcock leaves it open which of them actually fired the fatal shot. At least two of the flashbacks must be lies, perhaps all three. Two years later, “A True Account” in the same series (Season , Episode ), shows a flashback within a flashback which contains a lie. Hitchcock was far from the first director to have a character tell a lie in a flashback. The entire plot of Harold Lloyd’s silent comedy Grandma’s Boy () hinges on a lie told by the grandmother and seen in flashback. Her lie is what Winkler had said about Calasiris’ duplicity: It is “morally good.” Three years later, Johannes Guter’s The Tower of Silence, a littleknown German silent melodrama, includes a lie that is told to an onscreen audience verbally and to the offscreen audience visually. This film is furthermore remarkable about its handling of time, switching from its main narrative to various kinds of flashbacks in order to tell its tale of two interconnected love triangles. Jacques Feyder’s The Kiss () also plays with the concept. Edward Dmytryk’s murder mystery Crossfire () contains a flashback, with voice-over, by the character eventually discovered to be the killer. His account ends in a false statement that is borne out by the images illustrating it. The same year Lawrence Huntington’s British mystery The Upturned Glass contained a long flashback in which a murder is shown (and described in voice-over) which will take place only later, and not within the flashback but in the main story. We find out that the end of the flashback presented us with an intended, not an accomplished, deed. Since the crime has not yet been committed when we first see it and since the actual murder differs somewhat from the intended one, part of the
Regrettably, most of the mentions of Hitchcock by some of the contributors to Konstantakos and Liotsakis (eds.), Suspense in Ancient Greek Literature, are only superficial. Turim, Flashbacks in Film, –, discusses two other silent films: Clarence Brown’s The Goose Woman () and Roy Del Ruth’s Footloose Widows (). Cf. further Bordwell, “Grandmaster Flashback,” .
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
flashback comes close to being a lie. The plot of Nicholas Ray’s A Woman’s Secret () largely hinges on an early flashback which most viewers will automatically suspect of being a lie – the film’s heroine implicates herself in a shooting – but which the victim later corroborates in another flashback; a final flashback reveals the truth by elaborating, with additional images, what we were shown only in part. The earlier flashbacks now turn out not to have been lies, strictly speaking, although still not quite telling the truth. Rashomon, already mentioned, may be the most famous film with a very complex structure: a frame story going into two sequential flashbacks, the second interrupted and then continuing several times; four flashbacks within that second flashback; finally, a return to the frame story. Three of the inner flashbacks show a situation that is incompatible with the others, and what “really” happened is left undecided. One of the characters in the frame story calls the teller of the first outer and last inner flashbacks a liar. In spite of this, the actual narrative is lucid and easy to follow even though the whodunnit is unresolved. After Stage Fright, Nunnally Johnson’s whodunnit Black Widow () contains a lying flashback. Two years earlier, Phone Call from a Stranger, directed by Jean Negulesco from a script by Johnson, contained two lying flashbacks back to back but surrounded by two truthful ones. Since we know the characters telling the lies, we also know immediately that their statements are false. The visual cues – unusually, the lying flashbacks begin and end with the screen images shown as negatives – are not necessary. In Negulesco had directed the two-reeler At the Stroke of Twelve, taken from Damon Runyon’s story “The Old Doll’s House.” Here a gangster’s killer tells a lie in flashback as testimony against an innocent man on trial for that murder. A more complicated flashback from the suspect’s perspective then reveals the facts. The plot contains further twists of truth and lies. Wojciech Has’s The Saragossa Manuscript () is an elegantly baroque mystery epic with supernatural overtones and one of the most complex film narratives structured by flashbacks within flashbacks. One of its narrators tells a story in flashback that later turns out to be a lie. But then, the entire tale is extremely ambiguous in its hallucinatory nature. Various flashbacks in Duccio Tessari’s mystery-thriller The Bloodstained Butterfly () appear to reconstruct aspects of a murder but contradict other flashbacks and are contradicted by evidence. None helps solve the crime. Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare () is set in the milieu of Hollywood film production and contains two different versions of the title character’s death, both reported by eyewitnesses. The second reveals the
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Lying Flashbacks
first to have been a deliberate lie. The political assassination that is the central event in Costa-Gavras’s political thriller Z () is shown as it occurs, i.e. objectively, and then twice more in flashbacks of eyewitnesses. The first is a deliberate lie; the second, from a different perspective, confirms the facts viewers know. The lying flashback is immediately evident as a falsification: not only because we have already been shown the truth but also because we know that the liar is one of the crime’s plotters. The film recreates an actual event, the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis, that occurred in Greece in . An instance comparable to that in Z but barely known today occurred, also in , on British television. The feature-length Maigret at Bay returned to the popular BBC series Maigret of to . A flashback near the beginning illustrates the words in a false statement accusing Maigret himself and incorporates images already shown; viewers know that the flashback is a mixture of truth and lie. As all accomplished liars know, a lie that sticks closely to the truth has a good chance to succeed. But not in mystery fiction. A flashback that is a complete lie reappears, greatly expanded, in Bryan Singer’s mystery thriller The Usual Suspects (). It structures the entire plot and leads to a clever dénouement when the story’s ending returns to its beginning. The title character of Zhang Yimou’s Chinese epic Hero (), which is somewhat comparable to Rashomon, gives a false account in a flashback, too, before the complicated truth is revealed. A lying flashback also appears among the flashbacks in Juan Jos Campanella’s Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes (). Those in François Ozon’s Frantz () are poignantly linked to the main narrative’s exploration of moral justification of lying in the aftermath of death in war. John Madden’s thriller The Debt () presents a more complex case. Its nonlinear plot switches back and forth among different time periods; a crucial event in one of these is first shown as if it were a factual narrative – i.e. not a character-based report – and then turns out to have been a lie. Madden’s film is a remake of Assaf Bernstein’s Israeli film of by the same title. After wholly ambiguous narratives or unreliable narrators became established in the early s – the star witness is Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad () – nothing need surprise us any longer. By now, unreliable flashbacks are a staple of television dramas, too: True Detective, The Affair (both –), Big Little Lies (–), others. Today’s viewers who take pleasure in clever plot constructions might appreciate knowing that Heliodorus had used lying flashbacks long ago.
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The Cinematic Nature of Heliodorus’ Opening Scene
The ancient novel and modern mystery films are distant in time and different in their narrative media. But they are closely related in their narrative strategies and goals. What director Sirk said about the flashback structure in Written on the Wind, mentioned above, may serve as a suitable coda, going beyond the novel to the endings of drama: This is where the flashback comes in . . . You start with an end situation. The spectator is supposed to know what is waiting for him. It is a different type of suspense. The audience is forced to turn its attention to the how instead of the what – to structure instead of plot, to variations of a theme, to deviations from it, instead of the theme itself. This is what I call the Euripidean manner.
And the Heliodoran.
Quoted from Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, ), .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
This chapter considers the mask of classical Greek theater as a kind of precursor of the close-up on screen. My argument hinges on the comparable nature of the spectators’ emotional involvement and on the similarity of the psychological effects of masks on stage and faces on screen, even though the size of the classical theater precluded any close-up view of an actor. I am, then, not arguing for a one-on-one correspondence. Today in the West, masked acting is unfamiliar to most playgoers and to those who know Greek tragedy only as literature. So I hope to enhance the modern appreciation of classical stage practice with a discussion of close-up cinematography of apparently expressionless faces. I discuss two kinds of films: those based on classical texts and those dealing with tragic subjects in a more general sense. I demonstrate, with sample films, the influence of Greek tragedy on the cinema and, on a larger scale, a parallel continuity: classical playwrights’ and modern filmmakers’ artistic goals concerning audience involvement. To present as coherent an argument as possible in this examination of stage and screen across almost , years, I will adduce quite a number of films as evidence and quote various classical and cinema scholars, many wellknown filmmakers, and some actors as my expert witnesses. I begin by reviewing some of the fundamental aspects of ancient theater practice.
Tragedy on Stage and Screen Most people today encounter Greek tragedy mainly as works of literature, read silently in translation. Given the rarity of stage productions except for
See Kenneth MacKinnon, Greek Tragedy into Film (; rpt. London: Routledge, ), and Pantelis Michelakis (ed.), Greek Tragedy on Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). On the concept of “the tragic” see, e.g., H. A. Mason, The Tragic Plane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); M. S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); Glenn W. Most, “Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic,” in Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (eds.), Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), – and – (notes).
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
some academic performances preserved on video, we are largely limited to reading, nor do we pay much attention to the stage directions that our translations include. As a result, the original nature of tragedy as a work of art presented on a stage has become alien to us. But, if we experience tragedy in this way only, we miss out on an integral part of the playwrights’ artistic creations composed for performance: to be seen and heard. Tragedy is a form of drâma, a Greek word which denotes acting and doing. (The verb drân, on which drâma is based, means “to do.”) Tragedy was acted in what the Greeks called a theatron, a “viewing space” or “watching place.” In his definition of tragedy Aristotle expresses its nature very clearly. Tragedy is “the representation of an action.” It is primarily a visual enactment of a story familiar to audiences, if not in every detail, and composed for actors, even if the texts could be, and were, appreciated on their own: as literature. Since the playwrights were their own stage directors and producers, they were both great poets and practical men of the theater, whose involvement ended only after the plays had been staged. Word and action – the varying combinations of dramatic dialogue, choral odes, the movements of actors and chorus, set decorations, props and machinery (the ancient equivalent of modern stage effects or filmic “special effects”), musical accompaniment, etc. – all these elements complement each other. Together, they make for the emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic experience of the spectators. The artistic achievement of the Greek playwrights derives from the interaction between the verbal and the visual, which gives full meaning to their works. While this meaning is fixed in both the texts and the ancient ways of producing them, there exists one important factor which is not and cannot be fixed: the audience. After , years or more, we can no longer watch a performance of Greek tragedy in the way the Athenians watched it because the performance practice of the fifth century cannot be recovered. Even if we could achieve the impossible goal of authentic re-creation, perhaps no more than a museum piece would be the result. Such a thing might involve us intellectually by appealing to our historical curiosity, but most likely it would not greatly involve us emotionally. Academic re-creations of Greek performance practice are important but must be taken with a grain of salt,
Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is at Poetics b–. On the visual side of tragedy in connection with the Poetics, see Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; rpt., with corrections, ), –. Cf. on this the comments by Greek stage and film director Michael Cacoyannis in Marianne McDonald and Martin M. Winkler, “Michael Cacoyannis and Irene Papas on Greek Tragedy,” in Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, ),
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Tragedy on Stage and Screen
because, regardless of how knowledgeable modern producers or directors are about their sources and how faithfully they wish to present them, changes and interferences are unavoidable even in supposedly accurate stagings. An example is the production, in the original language and with masks, of Euripides’ Medea by the New York Greek Drama Company, directed, as the credits on the video inform us, by separate people “for stage” and “for television.” The video has an introduction by classical scholar William Arrowsmith, who outlines some of the central features of ancient performances in connection with this re-creation. As Arrowsmith acknowledges, it does not conform to all we know about Greek theater practice. The very fact that a scholar’s introduction was considered necessary is revealing. At best, such attempts, undoubtedly labors of love, provide us with strange experiences, which may be appealing for a while, especially to dedicated students and teachers of the classics. But can we sustain this interest for two and a half or three hours? Because most modern audiences watching such re-creations lack intense emotional involvement, it is not only sensible but also legitimate and desirable to adapt Greek tragedy to one’s own stage – that is to say, to the conventions and sensibilities of other places and other times. In this way we can best keep our classical heritage alive and meaningful even after millennia. This is just what has occurred in the history of the theater. Classical Greek tragedy has proven itself infinitely adaptable, as countless different translations, adaptations, and re-creations have shown since the Middle Ages, even since the days of ancient Rome. So we can still become emotionally involved in Greek tragedy and its beauty and power. Today, we even have a technological medium combining the verbal and the visual that is capable of deepening our appreciation of the ancient stage in a new way, the cinema. Like the theater, if for a much shorter period of time, it has given us enduring masterpieces. The cinema is able to bring new life and meaning to Greek tragedy, and numerous works exist in which filmmakers have tackled Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The films by Pier Paolo Pasolini of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex () and of Euripides’ Medea () and by Michael Cacoyannis of Euripides’ Electra (), The Trojan Women (), and Iphigenia in Aulis (as Iphigenia, ) deserve special mention.
–, at –. Cf. Oliver Taplin, “An Academic in the Rehearsal Room,” in John Barsby (ed.), Greek and Roman Drama: Translation and Performance (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), –. MacKinnon, Greek Tragedy into Film, examines the different ways (“modes”) in which filmmakers may approach their classical material.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
The cinema also provides a rich field for comparative approaches to literature, history, and other disciplines in the humanities. Films are visual texts, which can be analyzed in ways similar to those of literary interpretation. For example, when we interpret a film, we may focus our attention on the development of its narrative and on the director’s style of presentation, especially when the work of a serious artist is concerned. Films of Greek tragedy are a rewarding object of such study because they take recourse to fundamental and archetypal narratives and ways of presentation. Ultimately, watching or studying films of Greek tragedy is to inquire into tragedy’s flexibility, modernity, and significance in our visually oriented culture.
Masks and Faces in Tragedy To modern practitioners and audiences, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of ancient performance practice is the actor’s mask. Greek theaters were large outdoor buildings, although performances took place in smaller venues as well. Many of the viewers would sit too far from the stage to be able to observe an actor’s face, the part of the body which has come to be associated most closely with the art of acting. Ancient acting style and technique was, as a result, significantly different from the naturalistic or realistic acting with which we are familiar and which constitutes, to us, the chief criterion of how convincing and accomplished a performance is. The exaggerated gestures and body language to be found in the early twentieth century in theater and silent films now strikes us as dated or ridiculous. But gestures were necessary for an audience whose majority was hundreds of feet away from the performers on stage. Facial expressions, and their changes in reaction to turns in the story, would have been invisible to most of the audience. The nuanced acting style of a modern Kammerspiel, in which a small troupe of actors performs on a small stage before a small audience and so exerts maximum involvement from the viewers, is inconceivable for the classical Greek stage.
See, e.g., Hans Rupprecht Goette, Athens, Attica, and the Megarid: An Archaeological Guide (London: Routledge, ), –. Scholars debate the question whether Roman tragedy (Seneca) was meant for performance or for recitation – the answer has obvious implications for the use of masks – and whether Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence) employed masks. On these issues see, e.g., George W. M. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance (London: Duckworth / The Classical Press of Wales, ); Frederick Ahl, Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Seneca’s Oedipus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), – (section entitled “Staging Seneca”); Timothy J. Moore, The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), and , with references to
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Masks and Faces in Tragedy
The masks and costumes worn by actors indicated the type of character being portrayed. The mask was therefore an obvious means to enlarge the size of the actor’s presence – the original masks went over the actor’s entire head, not only his face – and to help identify the type he represented. The mask also hid the bare face, which may have looked unrealistic in surroundings characterized entirely by artifice: painted backdrops, props, stylized costumes, and speech and song in verse. The theory of the megaphone effect, which postulated that masks were used to ensure that the actors’ voices were audible throughout the spectator area, has rightly been abandoned. This theory was based on a false etymology that derived the Latin word for mask (persona) from the verb personare (“to sound through”). The open mouth of the mask provided the actor with the possibility to project clear pronunciation, but the mask carried no device for amplification and produced no such effect. Primarily, “clear visual communication over distance seems to be the principal benefit of fifth-century mask-wearing.” To illustrate more specifically the dramatic function of the mask, I quote three experts: . [The mask was intended to] direct attention, not to the unexpressed thought inside, but to the distant, heroic figure [of mythology] whose constant ethos it portrays. The mask will present a person in a role rather than the changing aspects of a fleeting personality. . . passion and suffering are not introvertedly wrung out through tiny, intimate gestures and facial
earlier scholarship at note and note . More recently and in greater detail: C. W. Marshall, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), – (in chapter titled “Masks”). On this cf., e.g., Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, nd ed., rev. John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; corrected ed., ), – and Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), –. See also David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, and Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Some scholars have linked persona to Etruscan phersu. The chief ancient source for deriving persona from personare is Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights .. Further discussion in George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment, nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), –. On masks and individual characterization, especially in Sophocles, see further Frederick Ahl, Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. C. W. Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” Greece & Rome, (), –, quotation at . See further, e.g., Angeliki Varakis, “Body and Mask in Aristophanic Performance,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, no. (), –. For a notable cognitive approach, see Peter Meineck, “Mask as Mind Tool: A Methodology of Material Engagement,” in Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns, and Mark Sprevack (eds.), Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up movements, but are put directly before the audience’s sympathetic concentration. The characters may still weep and even refer to facial expressions; but the emotions of Greek tragedy are presented openly in word and action, they are not left to be inferred or guessed at. The mask is in keeping with this broad explicitness. . [The actor’s gains of wearing a mask were chiefly psychological, for] by putting on a mask, a man concealed the distinct features of his personality . . . the painted features of the masks help the onlookers to identify the characters in the play and to follow them through the twists of their fortunes without having to rely solely on the subtler testimony of voice, gait, or physical shape, cues which in the vast hollow of the Greek theater could easily get lost. . [The effect which the mask has on even a very large number of spectators is that it] draws the audience in, for each spectator projects his or her imagination onto its surface . . . a theatre audience revises and reconstrues a mask’s physiognomy, when the circumstances, attitudes, and emotions of the character change. One of the great discoveries of Greek drama is that the imagination of the audience is the theatre’s greatest resource. The convention of masked acting brings that imagination vitally into play, as the spectators fill out the fixed visage of a tragic character caught in radically changing situations.
Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, . Cf. W. B. Stanford, Greek Tragedy and the Emotions: An Introductory Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), –. On tragedy and emotions in general see Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth / Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –, and several later publications of his. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Art of Aeschylus (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, ), . Rehm, –, gives a detailed account of acting with masks. See also Siegfried Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie: Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides auf der Bu¨hne ihrer Zeit (; rpt. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, ), – and – (notes), and J. Michael Walton, Greek Theatre Practice (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, ), – (chapter on “Masked Acting and the Electras”), and The Greek Sense of Theatre: Tragedy and Comedy Reviewed, rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, ), – (with brief mention of modern performances of classical tragedy by means of marionettes). A still fundamental discussion of masks on the Greek stage is Margarete Bieber, “Maske,” PW . (), –. See also Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theatre, nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press / Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), especially – (“The Evolution of the Art of Acting”), and Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, –. For the masks of Greek comedy and for Roman masks, see David Wiles, The Masks of Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). About six centuries after the classical Greek stage, Pollux, Onomasticon .–, provides a list of forty-four mask types; overview in Pickard-Cambridge, –. An English translation of Pollux’ list is in Eric Csapo and William J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ; rpt. ), –; cf. also the discussion by Wiles, –. On ancient acting see the essays collected in Pat Easterling and Edith Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),
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Masks and Faces in Tragedy
The Greek word prosôpon (“mask”) originally refers to what is “toward the eyes” or “toward view.” It then comes to mean “face,” “mien,” or “gaze,” and, by extension, “mask.” From all these derives the closely related meaning of “dramatic character.” (Cf. the post-classical convention of listing characters in a play under the heading Dramatis Personae.) So a mask did not pretend to be a face; instead, it communicated to the audience what the face meant for the action being presented. An ancient work on physiognomy, attributed to Aristotle, observes that the area around the eyes, the forehead, head, and face (prosôpon) are most favorable for the examination of someone’s character. The emotional power of the mask becomes most intense when the moment demands the highest concentration from the actor: when he must observe complete silence. At such moments, all eyes are fixed on the actor’s mask, and all look through or behind the mask, imputing to the unseen face what they believe to be the character’s emotion. This power of empathy also explains why the ancient playwrights had no hesitation to refer in their texts to specific facial expressions, e.g. of joy or sorrow, as appearing on an unchanging mask. “In Sophocles’ Electra the Chorus weeps for joy, while all three Electras [in plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides] weep from grief.” An example from the Roman stage is Seneca’s Medea. The
with extensive references; cf. in this Kostas Valakas, “The Use of the Body by Actors in Tragedy and Satyr-Play,” –, especially –. Mae J. Smethurst, The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and Nô (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –, compares acting with masks in a nonclassical context to Greek practice, as does Martha Johnson, “Reflections of Inner Life: Masks and Masked Acting in Ancient Greek Tragedy and Japanese Noh Drama,” Modern Drama, (), –. On Noh (Nô) versions and other modern adaptations of Greek tragedy see especially Marianne McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Wiles, The Masks of Menander, Chapter (“Masks East and West: Contrasts and Comparisons”), examines masks in Noh theater (–) and in the commedia dell’arte (–) in more detail, with extensive references (–). On masks for the latter, see also John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook (London: Routledge, ), – and – (notes). Cf. Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance, and , on the use of masks in Brecht’s theater. Demosthenes, On the Embassy , is the first textual evidence for prosôpon meaning “mask.” At Euripides, Bacchae –, however, the mask of the actor who has played Pentheus is substituted for Pentheus’ severed head when his mother Agave enters carrying it. On the scene and the importance of the mask for it, see Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, –. (Pseudo-)Aristotle, Physiognomics b. So Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie, –. For the power of silence, see Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre, , on Pylades in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Euripides’ Electra. Cassandra observes unbroken silence over three hundred lines of text in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, –, lists instances. Quoted from Walton, Greek Theatre Practice, . Cf. Rosenmeyer, The Art of Aeschylus, : “what the masks cannot provide is, in many instances, . . . furnished by verbal cues; the imagination does the rest.”
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
nurse describes Medea’s mad rage, with Medea on stage (–). The chorus observes that “her restless face is rigid with rage” (–: vultus citatus ira riget). Later, Medea weeps (). Then there is Jason’s telling observation: “utter grief is in her mien” (: totus in vultu est dolor). The conclusion that the mask is “one of the most powerful weapons at the actor’s [and, we may add: playwright’s] disposal” is entirely justified. And: “the mask was the actor’s first means of communication.” As has been observed about ancient Greek acting, “at the living heart of the tradition, the actor is the mask.” Modern productions of Greek tragedy performed with masks bear out the ancient playwrights’ insights into the psychology of their audiences. A prominent example is British poet, translator, and filmmaker Tony Harrison, who adapted Aeschylus’ Oresteia for the National Theatre of Great Britain, directed by Peter Hall. Harrison has described the purpose of his decision to use masks in these terms: I’ve brooded about their use for a long time, but it’s very difficult to brood about use without working to find out what kind of language works through the mask. It’s no good imagining that people spoke as they spoke in ordinary conversation, . . . in a vast theater with masks, which always forced [the actors] to turn outwards, toward the audience. I was interested in exploring the world of masks and the language that was spoken in order to get a better idea of what the poetic nature of the language was.
From his practical experience, Harrison concluded: In actual fact, the mask, even though it’s static, changes according to what it says. There’s no doubt about it . . . the same mask changes depending on who wears it and what is said.
Walton, Greek Theatre Practice, and . John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (; rpt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), . Both quotations are from McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light, –. Tony Harrison, “Facing Up to the Muses,” Proceedings of the Classical Association (Great Britain), (), –, discusses his views on masks in greater detail at –. A reprint appears in Neil Astley (ed.), Tony Harrison (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, ), – (– on masks). More on Harrison’s drama, films, and poetry, and on his use and eventual abandonment of masks, with extensive references and quotations, may be found in the essays collected in Sandie Byrne (ed.), Tony Harrison and the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance, , summarizes modern drama teacher Jacques Lecoq’s perspective on the mask: “all masks must create the illusion of mobile features if they are to succeed in the theatre.” Cf. Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy, : “The mask [is] not a thing on the face to be viewed, but [is] endowed with agency.” Cf. Wiles, and notes –. David Wiles, “The Use of Masks in Modern Performances of Greek Drama,” in Edith Hall, Fiona Mackintosh, and Amanda Wrigley (eds.), Dionysus Since : Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford:
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Masks and Faces in Tragedy
A classical scholar, experienced with staging Greek plays, concurs: acting “combined human voice, posture, and movement. . .with an inanimate mask. When properly combined a mask will seem to become an animate face, capable of representing multiple expressions.” Here a brief consideration of a famous fifth-century Greek painting is appropriate. Timanthes was well known for his genius and technique. He won at least two victories over other painters. His greatest masterpiece, now lost but probably preserved in Roman copies which include a wall painting discovered in Pompeii, showed the sacrifice of Iphigenia, a topic to which I turn later. Iphigenia is being brought to Calchas, the priest waiting at the altar, by Odysseus and Menelaus; her father, Agamemnon, has turned away and covered his head in agony over the death he cannot prevent. He is furthest away from his daughter but still the viewer’s eyes are irresistibly drawn to him – not just because Iphigenia is desperately appealing to him with arms raised and because Menelaus is likewise looking at Agamemnon, presumably for a last-moment reprieve, but especially because of Agamemnon’s posture and gesture. Cicero explains why: Timanthes painted a sad Calchas, an even sadder Odysseus, a Menelaus in mourning, and a veiled Agamemnon because his brush or stylus could not express a father’s highest degree of grief. Quintilian, the Roman teacher of rhetoric, later elaborated: For the sacrifice of Iphigenia, when he had painted Calchas sad and Odysseus even sadder and had given Menelaus the highest degree of grief
Oxford University Press, ), –, surveys and comments on recent developments in masked theatrical acting. See also Angeliki Varakis, “Research on the Ancient Mask,” Didaskalia, (), art. , and “‘Body and Mask’ in Performances of Classical Drama on the Modern Stage,” in Lorna Hardwicke and Christopher Stray (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ; rpt. ), –. The electronic journal Didaskalia devoted a special issue ( no. []) to masks. See especially Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy. Sandie Byrne, “Harrison’s Deployment of Some Elements from Classical Greek Culture,” in Byrne (ed.), –, further comments on Harrison’s uses of masks and links them to his films (–). Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” , with additional support at note . According to Cicero, Brutus .. On the painting in Roman contexts see J.-M. Croisille, “Le sacrifice d’Iphigénie dans l’art romain et la littérature latine,” Latomus, (), –. Mathias Hanses, “Page, Stage, Image: Confronting Ennius with Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things,” in Sergio Yona and Gregson Davis (eds.), Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, at – deals with the painting in connection with Lucretius and Ennius. Cicero, Orator .. Even more briefly: Aetna – (in the Appendix Vergiliana). Veiling one’s head as sign of extreme grief or sorrow was (and is) a common phenomenon. An early instance occurs in Homer, Iliad .– (Priam grieving over Hector). The Byzantine commentator Eusthatius wrote that Timanthes’ painting ultimately derived from Homer’s description of Priam’s grief (Commentary on Homer’s Iliad , .–); he referred to him as Semanthes of Sicyon.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up that his skills were capable of, he had used up all possible expressions of feeling and could not find any other way of expression with which to render the father’s face. So he veiled Agamemnon’s head and left it up to viewers to estimate the degree of his pain in a seemly and worthy manner in their own minds.
Before Quintilian, Valerius Maximus had made the same point: Did he [Timanthes] not confess, by veiling Agamemnon’s head, that the bitterness of extreme sorrow could not be expressed by his art? For that reason his painting is practically wet with the tears of the seer [Calchas], the friend [Odysseus], and the brother [of Agamemnon]. But he left it to the viewer’s emotions to estimate the father’s crying.
Pliny the Elder best summarized Timanthes’ achievement when he observed that more can always be understood in his works than Timanthes painted because his genius exceeded the art of painting itself. A head covered is not, strictly speaking, a head masked, but the impact of either on viewers in certain highly emotional circumstances is comparable: they create a mental image of what they cannot physically see. And that image is entirely dependent on their own sensibilities. As a result, something invisible – a hidden face – and unchanging – a mask, a veil – becomes animated, as it were. Moreover, there is a direct connection between Timanthes’ painting and the stage. In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, a messenger reports how the offstage sacrifice had occurred and specifically mentions Agamemnon veiling his head in unbearable grief. A stage phenomenon related to what we have examined so far is the puppet theater, which, however, has turned to Greek drama only rarely. American classicist Peter Arnott was also an experienced puppeteer who, in one-man performances, staged ancient tragedy by means of marionettes. As he saw it, the Greek actor had many visual affinities with the marionette. He wore a mask, and so was denied the subtlety of facial expression which is the modern actor’s chief stock-in-trade. He wore formal costume which merely suggested his character and in no way realistically represented it . . . Also, he was limited by the size of his theatre and his relationship to the audience. This factor of scale is vital to the understanding of Greek drama . . . Greek theatres were huge . . . the acting area was dwarfed by the auditorium.
Quintilian, Handbook of Rhetoric ... Quintilian is closely followed by Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, tr. John R. Spencer; new ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), . Alberti’s influential Della pittura is from –. Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings . ext. . Pliny the Elder, Natural History .. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis –.
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Visual details would have been lost on a large proportion of the audience. Many of them would have been conscious of the actor only as a colored dot . . . It has been calculated that the spectator in the back row of the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens would see the actor as only three quarters of an inch high.
From this derive the “aesthetic advantages of the puppet” for modern performances of Greek drama: The limitations of the marionette almost exactly equate those of the Greek actor. The marionette too is deprived, by reason of his rigid features, of the nuances of facial expression. He too is confined to a relatively small range of broad and simple gestures. And in the scale of the performance, the Greek actor-audience relationship is almost exactly restored. The spectator watching a marionette play in a modern theatre will see the performers small, as the Greeks saw them. When a Greek play is performed in this medium, the correct balance returns.
Not all experts may agree with Arnott’s views about Greek actors, but he deserves at least a hearing. A performance with puppets whose emotional appeal on a modern audience, although not of Greek tragedy and significantly shorter than a whole play, can be seen to great effect in a particular film. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique () contains a short sequence in which small school children are watching a puppet performance of the tragic story of a ballerina’s death. The director later reported: He [puppeteer Bruce Schwartz] animated those dolls and immediately, within the space of a second, a whole new world appeared. He’s exceptional in that unlike most puppeteers . . . he shows you his hands. And, after a second or two, you forget that those hands exist, because the doll lives its own life, even though you can see his enormous paws all the time. Yet you don’t notice them; you only see the dancing, the puppet dancing beautifully . . . It was extremely moving. We shot this sequence . . . in a school . . . The whole school comes [sic] to the show. He’d always performed to tiny audiences of thirty or forty people. We brought in about children, and the whole event took place in an enormous school sports hall. He was convinced that nothing would come of it. Well, of course, it turned out that the children understood him a hundred times better than the adults.
Peter D. Arnott, Plays without People: Puppetry and Serious Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), . Arnott, Plays without People, .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up We shot the show several times because first we had to film the audience, then the stage, then the stage a little closer, then the details, then close-ups of the audience and so on . . . We did the first show as if with a documentary camera, concentrating on the children’s reactions, so the camera was only on the children . . . There were some beautiful reactions. Beautiful . . . Wonderful material. Very beautiful faces and wonderful reactions. The children immediately surrounded him [afterwards]. [Schwartz had been] afraid that the children wouldn’t understand him at all . . . and suddenly it turned out that this romantic, delicate story about a certain tragic ballerina had moved the children immensely. Some of them started to cry . . . They understood absolutely everything. Everything he’d wanted them to and even more.
Kieślowski’s observations are borne out by Arnott’s experiences with performances for children: Children make a lively and intelligent audience. They are highly critical, with a stern sense of logic and dramatic propriety; they are more demanding than many performers realize, and will not be fobbed off with half-finished work. It is not easy to play to them, and all the more rewarding to elicit a satisfactory response from them. But it goes without saying that their comprehension is limited. If the play’s subject-matter is beyond their understanding they will soon be bored, regardless of whether they are watching puppets or human beings.
But adults can react as readily emotionally as do children to puppet performances of serious drama. One effect is revealing: The device of contrasting human with puppet performers is the one that most operators [i.e. puppeteers] have used at one time or another . . . Many puppet troupes bring the manipulators onto the stage with their figures as a finale to the show, and the sudden readjustment from one scale to another rarely fails to raise a gasp from the audience.
So it is not at all a merely academic or esoteric exercise to perform classical drama with masks. On the contrary: Masked actors can emphasize certain features of classical theater and the playwrights’ texts more clearly than unmasked actors.
Kieślowski is quoted from Danusia Stok (ed.), Kieślowski on Kieślowski (London: Faber & Faber, ), –. Arnott, Plays without People, . What Arnott, , reports on children’s reaction to a marionette performance of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scarpin (or Scapin: “Scapin the Schemer”) is instructive as well. Arnott, Plays without People, .
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Masks and Faces in Tragedy
The decision whether or not to use masks is of particular importance for modern directors. In the cinema, the use of masks is easiest in the most straightforward approach to tragedy, the recording on film of a stage production. Such films are hybrids, equally restricted by the double nature of their origin in theatrical performance and by the demands of cinema superimposed on the staging that is being transferred to film. An example is Tyrone Guthrie’s Oedipus Rex (). Filming indoors – most likely, on a sound stage imitating the stage of his theatrical production – Guthrie used a number of the conventions of the ancient stage, prominently masks, to help convey to modern audiences the emotional power as well as the strangeness of Sophocles’ play. What he was to state ten years later about his production The House of Atreus describes his general approach to Greek tragedy: In brief, our performance will make an endeavor to suggest the removed grandeur of the archetypal events and persons presented. In doing so, we shall make use of some of the devices which the Greek theater is known to have used – not only choral speech but impersonal masks and so on . . . The classical scholars in our audience will be asked to forget, if they can, their preconceptions . . . Rather let them consider whether the archetypal situations have been re-created in a manner which makes them an interesting and vivid theatrical event.
In keeping with this perspective, Guthrie’s cast in Oedipus Rex wear masks and color-coded costumes. Oedipus, while in power, wears golden robes and a gold mask with a golden crown; even his hands are gilded. After he blinds himself, his robes and mask are red, and he wears a black veil over his face. Guthrie was making an obvious enough point with his color choices, but his double stylization by means of mask and color increases, effectively if paradoxically, our emotional involvement. Reviving as well
Quoted from Karelisa V. Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater, – (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, ), . On The House of Atreus, Guthrie’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, cf. James Forsyth, Tyrone Guthrie: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, ), –. The costume change mentioned follows ancient practice, at least as the mask is concerned: after Oedipus blinds himself in Sophocles’ play, the actor reappears on the stage with a mask painted to show streaming blood. Cf. Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie, and –; Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, ; contra: Stephen Halliwell, “The Function and Aesthetics of the Greek Tragic Mask,” in Niall W. Slater and Bernhard Zimmermann (eds.), Intertextualität in der griechischrömischen Komödie (Stuttgart: M & P Verlag fu¨r Wissenschaft und Forschung, ), –, at . Further discussion in Claude Calame, “Vision, Blindness, and Mask: The Radicalization of the Emotions in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex,” and Richard Buxton, “What Can You Rely on in Oedipus Rex? Response to Calame,” both in Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic, – and –.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
as updating ancient stage conventions, Guthrie presented a strongly unsettling version of the play. He did not merely intend a documentary record of his stage production, for he created suspense and emotions in his audience cinematically. The most powerful example involves masks. At the moment when Oedipus and Jocasta begin to realize who he is, their masks seem to come alive – not in reality but through viewers’ emotional involvement. While the Corinthian messenger explains to Oedipus why the king and queen of Corinth are not Oedipus’ parents, the truth is already dawning on Jocasta. Guthrie shows us, in medium closeup, a slow horizontal movement of her head, right-to-left from the audience’s point of view (Fig. .). The shot lasts for a long eleven or twelve seconds, the more effective for the slow, stately, and subdued nature of Jocasta’s reaction to the news being told. Immediately and joltingly, Guthrie cuts to a much tighter frontal close-up of Oedipus’ head, the camera looking up at him. In an even slower movement than Jocasta’s, Oedipus lowers his head toward the Corinthian messenger in front of him to ask, quietly, where he had found him (Fig. .). Viewers already know not only the answer to Oedipus’ question but also the full implications of this interrogation and the eventual outcome of the story. Their impression at this moment is that Oedipus has been struck a blow from above, as if by fate or the gods. He is changing from the mighty and somewhat arrogant king of Thebes to a figure of woe. The close-up on Oedipus’ head movement is virtually identical in length of time to that of Jocasta’s and visually reinforces the fact that both
Figure .
Oedipus Rex. Jocasta realizing the truth. Screen capture.
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Masks and Faces in Tragedy
Figure . Oedipus Rex. Oedipus at a crucial moment. Screen capture.
are doomed. The two close-ups express the Aristotelian concepts of recognition (anagnôrisis) and change of fortune (peripeteia), here occurring simultaneously for the greatest possible impact, as Aristotle said, to evoke pity and fear (eleos and phobos) in the spectator. It is the viewer’s psychological involvement, not the actors and not the director, that makes the masks appear alive at these moments. Throughout the film, Guthrie’s “camera edges forward, circles, leans; it can read nothing in these fixed features,” as one reviewer noted. But we do read meaning into these fixed features; at the moments described, we observe changes of expression on the unchanging masks. With his use of masks, Guthrie overcame any risk of alienating his audience with the unfamiliar. A notable problem with actors’ faces is that, in prominent cases, one face is really two: the face of the character portrayed and the face of the actor who plays this character. For instance, when we watch famous films of Shakespeare’s plays, we also see Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Maggie Smith, or Kenneth Branagh. The more the actors subdue their personalities to their characters’, the less we pay attention to their faces and the
Aristotle, Poetics a–b. Dilys Powell in the London Sunday Times (August , ); quoted from MacKinnon, Greek Tragedy into Film, . Forsyth, Tyrone Guthrie, –, describes the stage and film versions of Guthrie’s Oedipus and its emotional power. Cf. on this Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, ), – (“The Actor’s Two Bodies”).
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
more we concentrate on those characters. So it may at first appear paradoxical or perverse to conclude that, at moments of great emotional tension, actors are most successful the less expression they show. But as the Greek theater reveals, this is indeed the case. The conclusion holds true not only for the stage but also for the cinema, perhaps more so if we consider the extensive star cult and the ubiquity of the faces of popular actors and actresses. Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, to name only a few obvious examples, are always themselves, regardless of whom they portray. (It is not by accident that many characters played by John Wayne are called “John.”) And we are all familiar with the different reactions we have to great acting in a conscious – or self-conscious – art film as opposed to that in a genre film. Regarding the former, we are often awed by an actor’s performance (Wasn’t Olivier great?); regarding the latter, we may take the quality of the acting for granted or overlook it. John Wayne’s greatest performance, that in John Ford’s The Searchers (), was ignored for decades. In Wayne’s major films, actor and character have fused into one.
The Emotional Power of Mask and Close-Up A step beyond filmed theater is to “open up” a tragedy and to shoot on location or in realistically dressed studio sets. Films made this way combine visual realism with the verbal stylization of the theater. But actors’ masks or the presence of the chorus present obstacles to screen realism. Accordingly, writer-director Michael Cacoyannis in his three films of Euripides approached tragedy with increasing realism, which he presented cinematically. Cacoyannis said about this: “As long as filmmakers are not absolutely tied down by a text, they are not making ‘film theater,’ which was never my intention . . . I . . . took liberties. I edited or rearranged the text . . . visually I explored what on stage only happens in the wings.” Cacoyannis saw his chief responsibility in staying faithful to the spirit, not the letter, of Euripides’ plays. His justification was that “modern audiences . . . should . . . be as moved as Euripides intended his audiences to be. And they are – deeply moved.” Regarding masks in realistic films, Cacoyannis said: “A mask on the screen would be an absurdity . . . I don’t use masks because that way I would only tell the audience: ‘You are looking at a museum piece.’ Why should I put such a barrier between audience and author?” But in his
The three quotations are taken from McDonald and Winkler, “Michael Cacoyannis and Irene Papas on Greek Tragedy,” –, , and –.
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The Emotional Power of Mask and Close-Up
Figure . Iphigenia. Agamemnon in his “war mask” after the sacrifice. Screen capture.
Iphigenia he does use a kind of mask to make a particular point. When Agamemnon and Menelaus hide behind mask-like helmets during a council, their “war masks,” as Cacoyannis called them, draw attention to the fact that they are too cowardly to face the other leaders. They retreat behind a barrier to avoid facing what they expect to be dangerous opposition. Agamemnon wears the same mask at the end of the film, after the sacrifice of Iphigenia. When the winds have risen and the army is running to the ships to sail to Troy, an abandoned Agamemnon forlornly wanders among them. His mask, turned at one moment to the camera and so to the viewer, reveals his complete isolation (Fig. .). Now we no longer interpret the mask as being warlike; for us, its expression has changed. But the most powerful mask-like effect occurs a little later, at the film’s very end. Cacoyannis shows Clytemnestra leaving along a coastal road on her journey home. The cart in which she is traveling stops, and she looks out across the sea. From a medium shot the camera zooms in on an extreme close-up, her rigid face glowering and filling the entire screen, her raven-black hair blowing in the wind that has been rising (Fig. .). Cacoyannis holds this close-up for almost half a minute, until the end credits appear over a freeze-frame of it. He intercuts an extreme long shot
Images are in Michael Cacoyannis, “Iphigenia: A Visual Essay,” in Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, –, this one at .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Figure . Iphigenia. Clytemnestra’s mask-like gaze of doom. Screen capture.
of the fleet sailing away and appearing tiny and helpless, not least through the contrast with Clytemnestra’s face. The effect is that we see the ships with her eyes, because dark strands of her hair are flickering across the image of the fleet, indicating her point of view. Not a word is spoken; only dirge-like music and the wind can be heard. Cacoyannis said about this scene: “To me, the human face seen in huge close-up on the screen is even a kind of mask.” Clytemnestra’s expressionless look is meant to foreshadow a double doom. On the one hand, there will be retribution exacted from the Greeks in the course of the Trojan War, for the army and its leaders have all colluded in her daughter’s death and become morally tainted; their later suffering is described in detail in Homer’s Iliad and forms the subject of several tragedies. On the other hand, Clytemnestra herself will exact revenge and a sort of savage justice by murdering Agamemnon after his return. We now realize why Cacoyannis had just shown us Agamemnon without army and without power. Since the consequences of Iphigenia’s death are familiar to Euripides’ and Cacoyannis’s audiences, there was no need for the latter to make any of it explicit. Instead, Cacoyannis let the images speak for themselves because each viewer will immediately understand the point he makes with his close-up. The fact that Clytemnestra’s gaze over the fleet occurs at dusk reinforces our understanding
McDonald and Winkler, “Michael Cacoyannis and Irene Papas on Greek Tragedy,” .
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Figure .
La Llorona. A supernatural gaze of doom. Screen capture.
and our emotional involvement: What engulfs the Greeks is both literal and figurative darkness. Night falls so rapidly within seconds of screen time that it strikes the viewer as unrealistic, but this circumstance reveals Cacoyannis’s intent to achieve extreme stylization in a realistic film. But darkness surrounds Clytemnestra as well: She also is doomed. Years later, her son Orestes, whom we have seen as a little boy, will kill his mother for the murder of his father. This, too, the audience knows. An equally powerful shot, although longer and more elaborate, appears in Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona (), a politicalsupernatural cri de coeur about the military dictatorship of Guatemala in the early s and its genocidal terrorism (Fig. .).
The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible We may relate Cacoyannis’s words about the ending of his Iphigenia to Soviet film pioneer Lev Kuleshov’s experiments with film editing to create meaning out of images on the screen. Subconsciously, film viewers link individual shots of film in their mind, even if the shots are completely unrelated to each other. In his most famous demonstration, Kuleshov juxtaposed shots of a bowl of soup, a young girl playing with a toy, and a woman’s corpse in a coffin with the identical close-up of the face of Ivan Mosjukhin (transliterations vary), a famous stage actor. In this way, Mosjukhin appears to be looking at the different scenes although Kuleshov had taken the footage of him from an archive. With each
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
combination of shots, viewers read different reactions into his face and were reported to have praised him for the subtlety of his acting. Kuleshov demonstrated the power of editing to alter the viewers’ perception of the subject shown, in this case revealing the actor’s emotions or thoughts. Vsevolod Pudovkin, another Russian film pioneer, was involved in the experiment and reported on the result in : The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.
This combination, a new whole made up of disparate fragments, has even been linked to a famous classical quasi-analogy. Greek painter Zeuxis attempted to do justice to the supernatural beauty of Helen by combining different physical features of five models in his painting of her: The assemblage of depictions of features from a number of women to render an impression of a unitary ideal is at least as old as Zeuxis. Kuleshov and Zeuxis follow a similar procedure, deviating from the mere imitation of nature, the difference is that Zeuxis organises his parts into a simultaneous objective whole whereas Kuleshov offers them successively.
Kuleshov said about his experiments: “we chose close-ups which were static and which did not express any feeling at all.” In his study of the
Quoted from V. I. Pudovkin, “Types Instead of Actors,” in Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, tr. and ed. Ivor Montagu; rev. ed. (; rpt. New York: Grove Press, ), –, at , with source reference at . Quoted from Amy Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (London: Tauris, ), . The best-known version of the story of Zeuxis’ painting is at Cicero, On Invention .–. The painting is also said to have been of Aphrodite-Venus. Quoted from V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), . There exist various accounts of Kuleshov’s experiments, differing in some details. On Kuleshov and his experiments, see especially Kuleshov’s book Iskusstvo Kino, easily accessible as “Art of the Cinema” in Ronald Levaco (ed. and tr.), Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –, in particular –. The French film journal Iris devoted a whole issue to “L’effet Kuleshov”: Iris, no. (). A critical introduction, with extensive references to English and translated Russian sources, is in Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley, “The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment,” The Cinema Journal, no. (Winter ), –. Bruce F. Kawin, How Movies Work (; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –, provides a summary. Alfred Hitchcock repeatedly described the Kuleshov effect in connection with his film Rear Window (), e.g. in François Truffaut (with Helen G. Scott), Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, ; rpt. ), and , and in Richard Schickel, The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, and William A. Wellman (; rpt. Chicago: Dee, ), –. On close-ups in general, see the pioneering essays by Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
films of Ernst Lubitsch, Joseph McBride writes about “pure Cinema,” the term with which Alfred Hitchcock summarized Lubitsch’s style: Conveying thought is perhaps the most difficult challenge in filmmaking; a novelist can easily enter into the minds of his or her characters, but a filmmaker has to use other means, especially if he is trying to do so through implication and primarily through visuals. In The Marriage Circle [, silent] . . . Lubitsch and his screenwriter . . . use the cinematic medium with a subtlety and depth that still seems astonishing all these years later. Lubitsch is able to suggest more than his characters could actually see or hear. He relied only slightly on intertitles.
As American actress Louise Brooks once put it, also in retrospect: “The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.” Such words could describe Cacoyannis’s Clytemnestra. Most directors have been aware of the connections between theater and cinema. Representative for many others, Henry Hathaway, an all-round professional, expressed just this awareness in regard to the close-up: close-ups should be determined in this way: in a stage play, you sit back and the curtain goes up and you see it’s a living room and the window’s open and the curtains are blowing a little bit and the maid is dusting. That’s a long shot. Now the guy comes down the stairs and in comes the leading man and somebody else comes from the side and they get together. That’s a medium shot. But as soon as there is a point in the story where somebody in the audience would like to have opera glasses to see a little closer, that’s a close-up. I think that they abuse them so much that the close-up doesn’t
Art), tr. Edith Bone (; rpt. New York: Arno Press and New York Times, ), – (“The Close-Up”) and – (“The Face of Man”). Balázs, – (on Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa), describes an example of the effective use of facial close-ups at a moment of great emotional intensity while the actor’s “hard Japanese face is a mask of stone” (). Cf. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – and , on the early use of close-ups by D. W. Griffith. On the subject see further Paul Coates, Screening the Face (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), especially – (face and mask) and – (close-up), and now Mary Ann Doane, Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham, : Duke University Press, ). Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (New York: Columbia University Press, ; rpt. ), . McBride, , reports that “pure Cinema” was Hitchcock’s “highest term of praise because it was what he always aimed for in his work.” Quoted from Kenneth Tynan, “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” The New Yorker (August , ), –, at . Tynan’s profile of Brooks first appeared in the issue of June , . Her words have been quoted frequently. The helmet refers to Brooks’s signature hairstyle. She is best known today for two German silent films directed by G. W. Pabst: Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl (both ).
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up mean anything any more. I think close-ups should only be used for dramatic effect when in a play you would want to be in close. You’ve seen people all move forward in a theatre – because something is happening and they don’t want to miss any of it. They want to zero in on it.
Close-ups and medium close-ups are most powerful when used sparingly. Director William Wellman explained: to me a closeup is an exclamation point. And if you don’t use it for that, then you’ve lost it, but if you use it properly, it’s a great thing from a directorial standpoint because then it means something. You use closeups to bolster a sequence, to get a point over. Cut in to a closeup and it means something. Some [young actress] . . . was telling about one of the pictures she’d been in in TV and she told how good it was because of the number of closeups she had. And I couldn’t believe it. I interrupted. I said, “You mean that your performance is valued by the number of closeups that you get?” “Yes, that’s what it is on TV.” I said, “Well, thank God I wasn’t in TV.” And yet they have to have, I suppose, an overload of closeups because it’s such a little screen.
Decades of television practice to go as closely as possible to actors’ faces in order to counteract the small size of the screen has led to a ubiquitous presence of “talking heads” and has largely destroyed the power of the close-up. The power of the close-up, well used, results from the power of the camera to convey more than what meets the spectator’s eye. Playwright, painter, poet, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau once observed: “the cinematograph, as I understand it, is a powerful weapon for the projection of thought.” “The camera,” Greek-American stage and film director Elia Kazan said, “is more than a recorder, it’s a microscope. It penetrates, it goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts.” To this we should add: and their emotions. Elsewhere Kazan elaborated on this:
Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Henry Hathaway: A Directors Guild of America Oral History (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, ), . Quoted from Schickel, The Men Who Made the Movies, . On this cf. the views of director Howard Hawks in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (; rpt. New York: Ballantine, ), . Quoted from André Fraigneau, Cocteau on the Film; tr. Vera Traill; new ed. (New York: Dover, ), . Kazan is quoted from Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (New York: Miramax Books / Hyperion / British Film Institute, ), .
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
I . . . learned . . . that the camera is not only a recording device but a penetrating instrument. It looks into a face, not at a face. Can this kind of effect be achieved on stage? Not nearly! A camera can even be a microscope. Linger, enlarge, analyze, study . . . The close-up underlines the emotional content . . . Of course, the close-up has simpler uses – to show off the beauty of a lady, for instance. But above all it keeps the story’s progress clear. We see in close-up that a person is undecided; the “tight shot” shows the indecision on the person’s face, we can read it as clearly as if it were spelled out in words – but with all the values of ambivalence. Then we see the decision being made and the new course taken. Except for that close-up, the change of intent or direction would be inexplicable. Because of it, the progression of the story, the “inner line,” is kept clear.
So the camera is “an instrument for photographing the invisible.” The viewer must look at the visible in order to be able to reach and interpret the invisible. About film pioneer D. W. Griffith one of his cameramen once observed: “his highest objective, as nearly as I could grasp it, was to photograph thought. He could do it, too.” Wellman once said about his cameramen: “they photograph what you’re thinking.” Perhaps Orson Welles, who was a stage and radio director and actor before he became involved in films, put the case most eloquently, if a little idiosyncratically:
Elia Kazan, A Life (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), . So Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century (; rpt. New York: Norton, ), . O’Brien, –, mentions the work of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Roberto Rossellini as examples. Other directors’ names could be added. On the subject cf. the study by Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer; new ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, ). The first edition of Schrader’s book had appeared in , before he became a screenwriter and director. A comparable perspective informs Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Kawin’s book is a detailed study of the cinema’s representation of mental processes. Earlier, and on a significantly larger scale, Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt. ), had made the case for German cinema between World War I and . As Kracauer states: “Inner life manifests itself in various elements and conglomerations of external life, especially in those almost imperceptible surface data which form an essential part of screen treatment. In recording the visible world, whether current reality or an imaginary universe, films therefore provide clues to hidden processes” (). Those he analyzes “expos[e] the German soul” (). A more recent individual example is the description by Michael Chapman, director of cinematography on Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (), of this film as “a documentary of the mind”; quoted from “Making Taxi Driver” (), a documentary included in home video editions of the film. Quoted from Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, ed. Kevin Brownlow (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), . Brown illustrated this by describing an instance of Griffith’s photography of thought in his biblical epic Judith of Bethulia (). Quoted from Schickel, The Men Who Made the Movies, .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up That’s my profoundest conviction in this whole business of moviemaking: the camera is not so much a lie-detector as a Geiger counter of mental energy. It registers something that’s only vaguely, suppositionally detectable to the naked eye, registers it clear and strong: thought. Every time an actor thinks, it goes right on the film.
John Ford, a major influence on Welles, once said: “The camera photographs your innermost thoughts and picks them up. If you concentrate, the camera can look into your innermost feelings.” Similarly Douglas Sirk: “the camera sees with its own eye. It sees things the human eye does not detect . . . The camera has X-ray eyes. It penetrates into your soul.” Or Raoul Walsh: “With the old-kind mm camera [i.e. before the age of widescreen cinema], you could get right up to a fella’s eyes and head and know what he was thinking about.” Mitchell Leisen was more specific: “The closer the camera gets, the less you [i.e. the actor] project [by facial expressiveness] until you get a really big close-up and then all you have to do is think. Thoughts alter the muscular structure of the face and you [the viewer] are able to read the thoughts going through their minds without dialogue.” As early as a viewer exclaimed about film actors: “Why, you can see them thinking.” A similar perspective applies to comedy, especially the work of Buster Keaton, the “Great Stone Face.”
Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, rev. ed.; ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Da Capo, ), –. A large further step, controversial but probably unavoidable, then attributes thought to film itself, as Jean-Luc Godard once did in : Marguerite Duras and JeanLuc Godard, “Entretiens télévisé,” in Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Alain Bergala; nd ed., vol. : – (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, ), –, at . On this wider context see Volker Pantenburg, Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, tr. Michael Turnbull (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), especially – (chapter titled “Le film qui pense: Image, Theory, Practice”). Quoted from Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s, ; rpt. ), . Quoted from Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, ), and . Quoted from Patrick McGilligan and Debra Weiner, “‘Can You Ride a Horse?’ Interview with Raoul Walsh,” in McGilligan, Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends (New York: St. Martin’s, ), –, at . Quoted from David Chierichetti, Mitchell Leisen, Hollywood Director (Los Angeles: Photoventures Press, ), . Reported by Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema – (New York: Scribner’s, ), . Additional examples of the emotional power of close-ups appear in Edgar Morin, The Stars, tr. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. Morin’s book was first translated into English in . A later French edition: Morin, Les Stars, rd ed. (Paris: Seuil, ). Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –, gives a useful analysis. Cf. below. Marshall, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy, –, briefly adduces the Marx Brothers and mentions Chaplin, Keaton, and Harry Langdon in passing.
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Further corroborations of such insights could be added. Here is one by Clarence Brown, who made seven films with Greta Garbo from to , more than any other director. Brown later reported on her unique acting abilities: Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn’t see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other.
Recently it has been said about Garbo’s performance as the title character of Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (): “The director makes full capital of the most expressive face in screen history; her deadpan expressions in Ninotchka are as fully alive with wry humor and obliquely unsentimental emotion as Buster Keaton’s.” Welles’s, Ford’s, and others’ insights into the intangible but undeniable affinity of the film camera to actors’ projection of thoughts and feelings were reaffirmed when Ellen Burstyn commented on Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show () almost three decades later. As she came to realize that in a particular scene she had to convey various emotions in quick succession and without any dialogue, she turned to her director: “How am I gonna do that?” And he said: “Erase everything else from your mind and just think the thoughts of the character, and the camera will read it.” And that was the best acting lesson I ever got in my life.
Later in this chapter we will encounter what may well be the most famous case in film history of an actress erasing everything, not just everything else, from her mind. The actor’s thoughts recorded by the camera and observed by the viewer call forth an emotional response. Close-ups are one of the chief cinematic means to reveal qualities or meanings that would otherwise remain hidden or incomprehensible. Filmmakers and others have grasped this power of
Quoted from Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By . . . (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), . Cf. the title of the autobiography of a distinguished British stage and screen actor: Michael Redgrave, Mask or Face: Reflections in an Actor’s Mirror (London: Heinemann, ). Quoted from McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? . Quoted from the documentary The Last Picture Show: A Look Back (), included on home-video releases of the feature film. Welles and Ford, among others, were particularly strong influences on Bogdanovich.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
film since the earliest days of cinema. Sergei Eisenstein defined the function of the close-up for Soviet montage cinema as “not so much to show or to present, as to mean, to denote, to signify.” In the words of Béla Balász: “Close-ups are often dramatic revelations of what is really happening under the surface of appearances.” A revealing instance occurs near the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (). In the first book ever published on Hitchcock, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol drew attention to what they summarized as “one of the most significant close-ups in the entire history of cinema” until then. The emotionally unstable heroine has just suffered through a great shock and is close to fainting, but: A very large close-up then shows us Henrietta slowly opening her eyes, and her face immediately expresses such a wealth of different feelings (fear and self-control, candor and calculation, rage and resignation) that the most concise pen would require several pages to express it all.
This is disarmingly hyperbolic but not without substance. And it tells us how much a film can reveal in mere moments to attentive (and enthusiastic) viewers that eludes all others. Not only film theorists but also scholars from other disciplines have been aware of the importance of the close-up on the screen. Two are worth quoting at some length. Art historian Erwin Panofsky once commented on the use of the close-up for dialogue passages and contrasted theater and film: What does the close-up achieve? In showing us, in magnification, either the face of the speaker or the face of the listeners or both in alternation, the camera transforms the human physiognomy into a huge field of action where – given the qualification of the performers – every subtle movement of the features, almost imperceptible from a natural distance, becomes an expressive event in visible space and thereby completely integrates itself with the expressive content of the spoken word; whereas, on the stage, the
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves,” in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. : Writings, –, ed. Richard Taylor; tr. William Powell (; rpt. London: Tauris, ), –; quotation at . Cf. Eisenstein, “In Close-Up,” in Selected Works, vol. , –, at : things seen in close-up, such as an eye or hand “at the right moment, expose man in each detail by which he reveals or betrays his true self.” Balász, Theory of the Film, . Cf. further Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (; slightly different new ed. New York: Schocken, ; rpt. ), –, at –. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, tr. Stanley Hochman (New York: Ungar, ), .
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
spoken word makes a stronger rather than a weaker impression if we are not permitted to count the hairs in Romeo’s mustache.
More recently Colin McGinn, a philosopher of the mind, made these points about close-ups: the type of audience perception that comes into play here is not merely the perception of material things but of states of mind . . . The close-up affords a uniquely powerful window onto the mind of the character, more powerful than any encountered in the world of ordinary perception . . . the close-up of the eye is the central means of this cinematic mind reading. Without the close-up movies would lack much of their psychological power, their peculiar dramatic punch.
So we can concur with the view of André Bazin, one of the most important film scholars ever: “the close-up is an element essential to psychological expression.” In film history, the most famous – because most extensive and most moving – instance revealing this psychological power and dramatic punch is Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (), a film that consists almost entirely of close-ups. Dreyer’s own perspective on his use of such close-ups is instructive since he was a highly articulate artist: I had a particular purpose in using them . . . This face-to-face battle [at the trial] could only be interpreted on the screen through large close-ups, which showed with unsparing realism the heartless cynicism of the judges which was concealed behind hypocritical compassion – opposed to this were the close-ups of Joan, whose pure face showed that her strength came from God alone . . . With puzzled looks and rapt attention the viewers followed the unequal battle between Joan and the judges – and that was exactly the purpose of the close-ups: to stir up the viewers until they felt in their own skin the agony that Joan experienced . . . I don’t know how I could have possibly told the story of Joan’s trial and death if I had not had the help of the close-ups in getting the viewers completely inside of both Joan’s and the judges’ hearts and souls . . . The film is built not on mass scenes but on intimate studies of the soul.
Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, ), – and (notes); quotation at . Information on its publication history appears in Chapter , note . Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, ), –. André Bazin, “The Trial of CinemaScope: It Didn’t Kill the Close-Up,” in Bazin, André Bazin’s New Media, ed. and tr. Dudley Andrew (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –; quotation at . Bazin’s short essay first appeared in . Quoted from Jean and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, ), –. Cf. Dreyer’s words about the transcripts of Joan’s
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
When he first approached French stage actress Renée Falconetti about playing Joan, Dreyer realized that the artistic quality of the film was already inherent in her face: “For, behind the make-up, the pose, behind that modern and ravishing appearance, there was something. There was a soul behind that façade.” Dreyer later observed: I went and I became interested in her for the part. I asked her then to come to the studio the next day for a test entirely without makeup. I liked her naked face. I was so moved by the pictures [of the screen test] because I saw so many things in them . . . I don’t know what it was that I saw in her face, but I felt I couldn’t find a better one anywhere. She didn’t act for me; she just used her own face.
Dreyer himself best summarized what he intended and achieved with his film: I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life. What streams out to the possibly moved spectator in strange close-ups is not accidentally chosen. All these pictures express the character of the person they show and the spirit of that time. In order to give the truth, I dispensed with “beautification.” My actors were not allowed to touch makeup and powder puffs . . . Rudolf Mate, who manned the camera, understood the demands of psychological drama in the close-ups and he gave me what I wanted, my feeling and my thought: realized mysticism. But in Falconetti, who plays Joan, I found what I might, with very bold expression, allow myself to call “the martyr’s reincarnation.”
These words are no exaggeration (Fig. .). As Balázs wrote about Dreyer’s film: “We move in the spiritual dimension of facial expression alone.” By rigorously dispensing with all the outward splendor generally found in films on medieval subjects, Dreyer could convey the agony of Joan’s death at the stake and her spirituality more effectively than he would have been able to do otherwise. American director Sidney Lumet acknowledged this: “As the range of visual language was reduced, the movie took on wider and
trial necessitating close-ups in Andrew Sarris (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors (; rpt. New York: Avon, ), . On the film see in particular David Bordwell, Filmguide to “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), and The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), – and – (notes). See further Vincent LoBrutto, Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, ), – (“The Close-Up: The Passion of Joan of Arc”). For Dreyer’s use of faces, see Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, –. Quoted from Sarris (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, . Quoted from Drum and Drum, My Only Great Passion, . Carl-Theodor Dreyer, “Realized Mysticism” (), in Donald Skoller (ed.), Dreyer in Double Reflection: Translation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s Writings About the Film (Om Filmen) (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, n.d. []), and ; quotation at . Balázs, Theory of the Film, .
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Figure .
The Passion of Joan of Arc. Suffering Joan. Screen capture.
wider implications. Finally, a simple close-up of Falconetti in Joan’s last moment of suffering said it all: war, death, religion, transcendence.” Robert Bresson’s version of the same subject (The Trial of Joan of Arc, ) is close to Dreyer’s film in spirit and emotional impact on the viewer, not least because Joan’s face again appears mask-like. Bresson greatly admired Dreyer’s film although he took a different approach to Joan. Nevertheless, he intended “to provoke certain specific, profound expressions on Joan’s face, to record the movements of her soul on film.” Elsewhere he wrote in a kind of self-exhortation: Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen . . . Your camera passes through faces, provided no mimicry (intentional or not intentional [of any emotions]) gets in between. Cinematographic films [are] made of inner movements which are seen.
Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (; rpt. New York: Vintage, ), . Robert Bresson, Bresson on Bresson: Interviews –, ed. Mylène Bresson; tr. Anna Moschovakis (New York: New York Review Books, ), . Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, tr. Jonathan Griffin (; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, ), . The term “cinematographic films” defines Bresson’s own kind of
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
By contrast, the very pageantry on display in, for example, Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc () makes this a less involving work. In this context we may compare two brief comments by Bazin on the main characters in Federico Fellini’s La Strada (): “they do have a soul. And La Strada is nothing but their experience of their souls and the revelation of this before our eyes.” And: “La Strada [is] a phenomenology of the soul.” Further instances can be seen in mainstream genre films. Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful () is a melodrama about the dream factory Hollywood. It delivers a practical lesson in the power of the close-up. A hard-boiled producer has hired a history professor, whose scholarly book is a bestseller, to write the screenplay for the film to be made from his book. The academic from rural Virginia has no experience with film work. During a story conference with his producer, he innocently proposes to write dialogue for an emotional farewell scene between a mother and her son going off to war: “The boy’s going away, probably to be killed. So when the mother speaks–.” The producer immediately interrupts him: She doesn’t speak. We move the camera in close on her. She opens her mouth to talk, but she can’t, she’s too emotional to be able to speak. And what she’s feeling we leave for the audience to imagine. Believe me, Jim, they’ll imagine it better than any words you and I can ever write.
Hitchcock pursued a comparable strategy to present a mysterious woman in Vertigo (), one of his most profound films: As I tried to explain to Kim Novak in Vertigo, “You have got a lot of expression in your face. Don’t want any of it. I only want on your face what we want to tell the audience – what you are thinking.” I said, “Let me explain to you. If you put a lot of redundant expressions on your face, it’s like taking a sheet of paper and scribbling all over it – full of scribble, the whole piece of paper. You want to write a sentence for somebody to read. If they can’t read it – too much scribble. Much easier to read if the piece of paper is blank. That’s what your face ought to be when we need the expression.”
filmmaking, which he distinguished from commercial and popular “cinema.” Cf. Chapter note . André Bazin, “La Strada,” in Bazin, Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo; tr. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (London: Routledge, ; rpt. ), –; quotations at and . Bazin’s essay was written in . Quoted from Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It, .
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Figure .
Psycho. Marion Crane’s dead gaze. Screen capture.
Similarly, film pioneer Allan Dwan: audiences mustn’t be insulted by being given too much. They have to work. They must be given a suggestion of what the emotion is and be allowed to interpret it themselves. And sometimes the most silent scene with the least gesture provokes the greatest emotion in the audience . . . Their imagination must be stimulated.
Many films support this perspective, not least among them Hitchcock’s own Psycho. At the end of its shower sequence Hitchcock shows, in an ever tighter close-up, water swirling into the drain. A dissolve takes us to an extreme close-up on one of Marion Crane’s eyes (Fig. .). The camera then slowly tracks back, and we see her face in profile. Here Hitchcock demonstrates that even a face frozen in death can be highly expressive. Raymond Durgnat described the effect in these words: “She’s peeping back at us from beyond the grave, from down the drain, with protest and
Quoted from Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It, and . In the words of Fredric March, actor of both stage and screen: “I keep forgetting – this is a movie and I mustn’t act”; quoted from Kracauer, Theory of Film, , where see also another quotation from Hitchcock. The issue of screen violence is pertinent to the present theme as well. Cf. the different views of Fritz Lang and Hitchcock on the emotional involvement of audiences in scenes of violence not shown (with viewers filling in the details) vs. scenes of explicit violence at Bogdanovich, – (Lang) and (Hitchcock). The two versions of Cat People allow for instructive comparisons. The one directed by Jacques Tourneur in is a highly effective psychological thriller without any onscreen violence at all; the remake, directed by Paul Schrader in , drowns its emotional appeal in a sea of blood.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
indignation, eternal and colossal – or surprise and fear – or just nothing.” A drop of water at the corner of Marion’s eye looks like a tear – a visual substitute, perhaps, for a silent scream. Hitchcock is famous for turning even inanimate objects into mysterious or menacing “characters” in his films. Prominent examples occur in Spellbound (), Notorious (), and Dial M For Murder (). An unusual, and unusually moving, example is the face of the eponymous donkey in Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar (), in whose eyes we see the mistreated animal’s feelings of his own suffering, including his death, and Bresson’s indictment of people’s cruelty against Balthazar and their fellow man. Bresson and his crew did not abuse, let alone kill, the animals they used for their film, nor did the donkeys understand that they were being filmed or in what kind of story they were appearing. Since the donkeys did not act, they did not express the feelings we impute to Balthazar. By contrast, the opening fifteen seconds of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange show the brooding and menacing face of Alex, the film’s ultra-violent protagonist, unblinkingly staring directly at the viewer, before the camera relents and pulls back. The rigid face is made more unsettling because of its mask-like appearance, not only through its immobility but also because Alex is wearing false lashes, but around one eye only (Fig. .). Kubrick said about the effect he intended with this opening: “We’ll start out with one eye and people will think there’s something weird, something wrong, without really knowing why.” The last scene of François Truffaut’s largely autobiographical The Blows (), filmed in widescreen black and white, ends with the young runaway Antoine Doinel by the seashore, his face turned to the viewer in the freeze-frame of a close-up: “One might read into that expressionless face a degree of disillusionment and a struggle to adjust to a developing
Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (London: Faber & Faber, ), . Cf. Durgnat, , on the film’s final close-up on Norman Bates, now irrevocably mad: “Briefly our entire world is his face, the thoughts behind it, his world.” Durgnat’s chapter on Psycho (“Inside Norman Bates,” –; first published as an article in ) is marred by several errors; these do not affect my argument. Cf. Kracauer, Theory of Film, –. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –, examines the importance of the Kuleshov effect on Hitchcock’s work in general. Bresson, Bresson on Bresson, –, collects the director’s views on this film; see especially – on his work with the adult donkey and its sensitivity. Jerzy Skolimowski’s onomatopoetically titled EO () is a loose remake of, and moving tribute to, Bresson’s film. The quotation is taken from an interview with Malcolm McDowell, the actor who played Alex, in Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, tr. Gilbert Adair and Robert Bononno (New York: Faber & Faber / Farrar Straus Giroux, ), –, at .
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Figure . A Clockwork Orange. Alex’s menacing gaze. Screen capture.
comprehension of life.” The freeze-frame image contains a wealth of implications, as Truffaut intended: “I avoided solving the problem [of indicating Antoine’s future] by dramatizing it.” The close-up forces us to search for the boy’s emotions at this moment: fear, bewilderment at a world run by uncomprehending or hostile adults, and, most strongly, loneliness before others’ indifference (Fig. .). The effect is overwhelming because we read the meaning into the image. We can do so, and are meant to do so, because Truffaut has made us care deeply for the boy. To us, Antoine ends up being “trapped by the camera, his pursuers, and the audience in one of the most moving last shots in all cinema.” At the end of Summer with Monika (), Ingmar Bergman has his restless and dissatisfied young protagonist begin an adulterous affair with someone she had previously rejected. Monika meets him in a noisy café, with boisterous jazz music coming out of a juke box. Bergman shows Monika beginning her dalliance in a medium close-up profile shot. She
So C. G. Crisp, François Truffaut (London: Praeger, ), ; cf. Crisp, , on the importance of the widescreen format for this scene. Technically, the final moments consist of camera zoom, freezeframe combined with optical zoom into closer freeze-frame, and freeze-frame held for several seconds. The open but enigmatic face of the young boy in several close-ups of Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher () is comparable to that of Antoine Doinel. Quoted from Jim Shepard, “A Mild Rebellion, Then a Revolution,” The New York Times (December , ), AR . Quoted from Graham Petrie, The Cinema of François Truffaut (New York: Barnes / London: Zwemmer, ), .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Figure . The Blows. Final close-up of Antoine Doinel. Screen capture.
Figure .
Summer with Monika. The final image. Screen capture.
then turns her head to look directly at the viewer, while the camera moves into an extreme close-up which lasts for over half a minute (Fig. .). Monika does not even blink an eye but stares straight ahead. Robin Wood aptly described it:
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Monika sits in a cafe picking up another man. She turns her face in close-up straight to the audience, and Bergman darkens the screen around her – almost the only departure from strict naturalism in the film. The shot is held, the eyes, at once ashamed and defiant, lost and determined, stare into ours. Gradually we find it difficult to face this terrible steadiness . . . The shot is the perfect cinematic equivalent of “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”
Monika’s face, although utterly expressionless, signals her unhappiness, her isolation even in crowded surroundings, and, above all, a mute and hopeless appeal to us, the audience. In a brief essay on the film, critic and future director Jean-Luc Godard called this close-up “the saddest shot in the history of the cinema.” At that time no doubt it was, even if the long last close-up on the young woman whose story is told in Mikio Naruse’s Street without End () comes close. Godard did not know this film. The fade-out on the close-up, however, is not quite the end. A more recent candidate may be the final close-up on the female protagonist’s face in Claude Chabrol’s Nightcap (Merci pour le chocolat, ), one of his many mystery-thrillers that are also indictments of bourgeois hypocrisies. The film’s last shot includes a complex because extremely enigmatic closeup of Isabelle Huppert that lasts for almost two minutes. Her character has been revealed as a pathological murderess who has now come face to face with her own nature (“I am nothing”), and to viewers she is a figure of both horror and pity. Her face is expressionless, but not quite: some tears are gently flowing. The power of the close-up to reveal psychological complexity has rarely been this profound. In the figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (), Bergman shows us a character whose face and mask have become inextricably fused (Fig. .). Bergman described the actor’s white makeup as “an amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull . . . a delicate and dangerous artistic move.” To no small degree, the film’s emotional impact and worldwide success have depended on this eerie apparition of Death and on the contrast to the moving close-ups on the faces of his victims. Bergman’s artistic gamble paid off, most powerfully in the close-ups in which the chalky face of Death, surrounded by his black hood and cloak, appears as if disembodied,
Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman, new ed.; ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), –. Jean-Luc Godard, “Summer with Monika,” Arts (July , ); quoted from Jean Narboni and Tom Milne (eds.), Godard on Godard, tr. Milne (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), –, at . Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, tr. Marianne Ruuth (New York: Arcade, ), .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Figure .
The Seventh Seal. The face of Death. Screen capture.
no more than a lifeless visage hovering in midair. Unemotional in his very essence, Death must not and cannot show any facial expression, and the only movement we ever see in his face is when he speaks. He does so in a monotone as if from beyond the grave. With The Seventh Seal Bergman exorcised much of his own fear of death and helped his audiences do the same. Through evocation of pity for the humans and fear of Death, Bergman’s film firmly belongs to the tradition of Greek tragedy, as do several other of his films. A comparison of how Death, and especially
Bergman has said about this: “That’s why I made it. It’s about the fear of death. It freed me from my own fear of death”; quoted from Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, tr. Paul Britten Austin (; rpt. New York: Da Capo, ), . And: “As far back as I can remember, I carried a grim fear of death, which during puberty and my early twenties accelerated into something unbearable”; quoted from Bergman, Images, ; cf. . In The Rite () Bergman himself would play a priest as a Death figure; illustration in Björkman, Manns, and Sima, . Noteworthy among these are The Magician (; also titled The Face) and Persona (). On the latter film, originally to be titled Kinematography, in connection with masks, see Björkman, Manns, and Sima, Bergman on Bergman, and . Bergman described close-up and long shot in Björkman, Manns, and Sima, –; the latter, he said, can be “immensely revealing” (). On Persona see also Bergman, Images, –, and Kawin, Mindscreen, –.
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Figure .
Orphée. The Princess, Orphée’s Death. Screen capture.
Death’s face, has been portrayed in the course of film history is instructive. The Princess in Cocteau’s Orphée (; Fig. .) and Death in Fritz Lang’s Destiny (), whose original title is Der mu¨de Tod (“Death the Weary”) can, in their different ways, take their places beside The Seventh Seal for their profundity and intensity. Works as different as Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast () and George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy (–) reveal that, even in films in which there is no mask in the strict sense of the word, audiences interpret the unchanging appearance of an actor’s facial makeup according to their emotional reactions to particular scenes. The face of the Beast and Darth Vader’s helmet-cum-respirator both appear menacing at first. We see the Beast hunting and killing a deer and Vader killing people in cold blood. Later on, the face of the Beast strikes us as lonely and pitiful when we have become involved in his as yet unfulfilled love for Beauty, a love which leads him to the brink of death. Similarly, at the climax of Return of the Jedi, a defeated and dying Darth Vader looks pitiful as well. Within the course of a few minutes of screen time, we have come to see him change from the ultimate menace – a father engaged in a deadly duel with his son – to a figure of woe which deserves and receives our compassion. Similar observations apply to the episode involving the bronze giant Talos in Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (), a special-effects creation by Ray Harryhausen. (More on this film in Chapter .) The extensive makeup disguising actors’ faces in films of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Dame, e.g. Wallace Worsley’s and William Dieterle’s versions, and in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man () also serve as masks which at certain moments call forth empathy. Comparable feelings can result from the facial appearances of the simian costumes in the various Planet of the Apes films (–, ). Darth Vader’s helmet even has an “ancient” parallel in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus at the fateful crossroads kills one of Laius’ helmeted guards. This man at first appeared a threat, with his face and thus his humanity hidden from Oedipus. But when he is lying on the ground while Oedipus looms above him for the kill, we read a mute and hopeless appeal for pity into the mask-like helmet. A variant on the Beauty and the Beast theme is The Phantom of the Opera, filmed most famously as a silent directed by Rupert Julian. The Phantom’s mask was a major reason for the film’s success. In the littleknown “B movie” The Face Behind the Mask (), directed by Robert Florey, an East European immigrant to the United States hides his hideous facial deformations behind a mask. Because of his appearance he is shunned by society and unable to find work. To survive, he resorts to crime. On the surface, the film is no more than a cheaply made thriller, but it makes poignant comments on social injustice and hypocrisy. That it does so successfully and convincingly is due largely to its expressionistic style, which is heavily influenced by the set design and the mask-like faces of the characters in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (), the high point of German Expressionist film. Concerning Eastern cinema, I mention, honoris causa, only two notable Japanese films as representative of the power of the mask. Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge () is a tribute to actor Kazuo Hasegawa, who here plays a dual role as a low-class thief and as a famous Kabuki actor specializing in female characters. The film is a remake of a version, in which he had starred as well. Remarkable here are the contrasts between and among Hasegawa’s different faces: natural (as thief ), with stylized mask-like white makeup for stage appearances as a woman, and somewhat in-between as actor offstage who nevertheless stays in character. Mikio Naruse’s Sound of the Mountain () is based on a novel by Nobel Prizewinning novelist Yasunari Kawabata. It includes a revealing moment. A potential buyer of a little child’s Noh mask asks a young woman to put it on and to move her head up and down, then comments: “It seems to have a life of its own.” Someone else’s reaction later is quite different: “It gives me the creeps.” The cinema of Sergio Leone is notable for extreme close-ups, about which a critic has written:
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The Close-Up: Revelation of the Invisible
Basic to the style [especially of Leone’s Westerns] is the extreme close-up, a trademark technique. The fragmenting and abstracting effect of the closeup is crucial to the transformation of character into iconic sign in Leone’s expressionistic approach. Huge close-ups of secondary characters chosen principally for their bizarre looks create a grotesque, predatory and unbalanced world of masks.
Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar confirmed the other artists’ perspective on the importance of the expressionless face when he said apropos his film All about My Mother (): “Sometimes I almost said to the actresses they shouldn’t do anything, I mean, nothing, with the face, because sometimes the character . . . is beyond pain. Then you don’t express anything.” Director George Cukor reported on a comparable moment during the filming of A Woman’s Face (). The protagonist, played by Joan Crawford, is about to make a dramatic revelation in a long speech. Cukor instructed her as follows: The audience has been built up to this moment . . . It occurred to me, what she has to say is so dramatic, she mustn’t do any acting. I told her, “Just speak the lines as if you’re saying the multiplication table.” Then she did it, and I said, “No, no, Joan, it’s still got emotion, I want no emotion at all, just say it. The audience will do the rest.” And finally that’s how she did it.
One of the most beloved Hollywood classics also exhibits instances of the mask-like nature of the human face in close-up. In Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (), the face of the heroine points to the film’s underlying meaning – or to the absence of that meaning: Above all, the sustained close-ups of [Ingrid] Bergman’s expressionless face declare themselves to be pregnant with significance, without specifying exactly what is being signified: viewers are invited to supply their own interpretations, or else simply to contemplate her luminously photogenic features.
Similarly, John Wayne once commented on one of the most powerful moments in John Ford’s The Searchers, in which his character looks at two women whose horrible fate has driven them to insanity: “I turn back.
Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, ), –. The quotation is taken from an interview included in the film’s video edition. The pain refers to a mother’s loss of her son, killed in a car accident. Quoted from Gavin Lambert, On Cukor, rev. ed.; ed. Robert Trachtenberg (New York: Rizzoli, ), . Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Terrific shot. Helluva shot. And everybody can put their own thoughts to it. You’re not forced to think one way or the other.” Charles Chaplin’s City Lights () ends with the reunion of the Little Tramp with the previously blind flower girl. The film’s final scene is justly famous, although it has sometimes been criticized for being too sentimental. Such it is, but to exactly the right degree. In close-up, the tramp is awaiting the girl’s reaction: Will she recognize him, acknowledge him as her benefactor, and perhaps even love him as he loves her? Or will she reject him as someone unworthy of her status in society? Whatever emotion we see on the tramp’s face is our own. Three and a half decades after making the film, Chaplin observed about this close-up that, for him as actor, there existed a beautiful sensation of not acting, of standing outside of myself. The key was exactly right – slightly embarrassed, delighted about meeting her again – apologetic without getting emotional about it. He was watching and wondering without any effort. It’s one of the purest inserts – I call them inserts, close-ups – that I’ve ever done . . . I detached myself in a way that gives a beautiful sensation. I’m not acting. Sort of standing outside of myself and looking, studying her reactions and being rather slightly embarrassed about it. And it came off. I took several takes before that, but they were all overdone and overfelt. But this one, for some reason, was objective and apologetic. It’s a beautiful scene, beautiful; and because it isn’t overfelt.
The fact that Chaplin here refers to the tramp in both the first person and the third is especially poignant because we viewers, too, are standing outside ourselves, identifying with the Little Tramp and studying the girl’s reactions. A recent description of the effects that Buster Keaton could evoke through his unchanging face provides us with an apt parallel: Keaton’s face is equally capable of expressing complacent contentment, inhibited longing, controlled panic, dawning awareness, unspoken sorrow, resigned acceptance, or the supremely focused attention of the scientist on the brink of a discovery or the gymnast calculating the geometry of a
Quoted from Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors (; rpt. New York: Ballantine, ), . I discuss this close-up in “Homer’s Iliad and John Ford’s The Searchers,” in Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman (eds.), The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classics Western (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), –, at –. Quoted from Jeffrey Vance, Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (New York: Abrams, ), and . Chaplin’s words were part of several interviews he gave for a article in Life magazine. Vance, –, reprints them, if not in their entirety.
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Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero
daredevil leap. In its subtle transitions it registers a wary reckoning with appearances that so often prove deceptive. In its prevailing calm it reveals itself also as a face of singular and at times almost otherworldly beauty.
Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero A famous example from the early s illustrates the accuracy of Kuleshov’s experiment and the mask-like character of the close-up particularly well. It occurs on a famous face of otherworldly beauty and in a Hollywood film which most viewers would not associate with ancient tragedy at all. Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina () starred Greta Garbo as the queen of Sweden and John Gilbert as the Spanish ambassador, her lover. Their love is doomed. Christina has just abdicated and is on board a ship, waiting for her beloved to join her. But he is killed in a duel. In the film’s last shot, the best-remembered single moment in Garbo’s entire career, a solitary Christina stands at the bow of the ship, looking ahead but lost in her memories. The camera moves into a tight and long close-up, giving a telling illustration of the psychological effect of tragedy (Fig. .). Then the image fades out. This ending has “the weight of a goal to which a whole narrative has been tending.” Mamoulian’s description of how he came to film the ending this way comes close to the perspectives of Kuleshov before and Cacoyannis after him. Since Mamoulian was also an experienced stage director, his words express some of Aristotle’s perspectives on the emotional effects of tragedy. I quote Mamoulian at length because an eloquent artist can explain his subject far better than any critic or scholar could: a queen resigns, abdicates her throne for love, she gets on the boat and her lover is dead – what are you going to do? What words are you going to use? Anything you say is going to sound phony, silly. So I thought, “The only way to do it is with silent imagery.” Just before I was going to shoot this, Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer called me in. He said, “Look, we forgot something . . . You must change this ending.” “What do you mean, change it?”
Quoted from Geoffrey O’Brien, “Keep Your Eye on the Kid,” The New York Review of Books (October , ), –, at . Quoted from Coates, Screening the Face, , in the context of a detailed examination of Garbo’s face (–).
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Figure .
Queen Christina. The beautiful zero of Garbo’s face. Screen capture.
He said, “Make it a happy ending. You can’t have John Gilbert dead.” I said, “Let’s not be ridiculous. The whole film is written for that.” “But,” he says, “it’s depressing. It’s very unhappy.” I said, “Mr. Mayer, I don’t believe in depressing people any more than you do. If an audience leaves a film of mine, or a play, [depressed,] then I have failed miserably. Because the purpose of the theatre and its function is to excite, to stir, to stimulate, to uplift a person. The greatest uplift comes from a tragedy. A tragedy is not cheerful, but when you leave a tragedy you feel marvelous, because the final effect of an artistic thing is uplift . . .” So I shot it purely visually and rhythmically. . . Now, [Garbo] comes to me and says, “What do I do?” Indeed, what? What do you play? Do you cry? Do you have little glycerine tears running down? Or do you smile for no reason or do you laugh? What do you do? Everything is wrong . . . Therefore, I said to myself, and this works – if you do it right it always works – “I’m going to have every member of the audience write his own ending. I’m going to give him a blank piece of paper. . . nothing on it. Let them write sadness, inspiration, courage, whatever they choose, whatever they prefer. We have prepared the scene. They’ll fill it in.” So I said to Garbo, “Nothing. You don’t act. Nothing. You don’t have a thought. In fact, try not to blink your eyes. Just hold them open. Just wear a mask.”
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Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero
And she did just that, for ninety feet [of film]. You’d be amazed. Some people say, “Ah, the courage of this woman.” Others say, “Oh, the sadness that is beyond tears.” “You know, the serenity . . .” Everybody thought she felt the way they wanted her to feel. So everybody’s satisfied. But actually, what they’re looking at is zero, a very beautiful one, but zero.
One critic has observed about this close-up: “The effect is devastating, drawing on everything that has gone before and yet drawing on nothing.” As Bresson later said about his own approach to working with non-professionals: “I ask them one thing: ‘Don’t think about what you’re doing, don’t think about what you’re saying.’” All this parallels the appearance of the Greek tragic mask, as contemporary visual evidence, chiefly from vase painting, makes clear: Though some cases are arguably inconclusive, most of the relevant images seem unambiguously to show masks whose features lack a ‘readable’ cast of expression . . . For it is not just exaggeration or enlargement of features which is absent from the tragic masks depicted by artists; it is clear facial expression of any kind.
A literary analogy, revealing although not identical, from a few years earlier may be found in a letter by Virginia Woolf about her novel To the Lighthouse (). In reply to a point concerning the symbolism of the lighthouse, she wrote:
Quoted from Eric Sherman, Directing the Film: Film Directors on Their Art (; rpt. Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, ), –. Mamoulian described this ending several times in slightly different terms. Cf. Tom Milne, Rouben Mamoulian, nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, ), ; Sarris (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, –; Norman Zierold, Garbo (New York: Stein & Day, ), –, or Garbo (rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d.), ; Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (; rpt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. The scene had been filmed several times before Mamoulian thought of the idea of the mask; so John Bainbridge, Garbo, nd ed. (New York: Galahad Books, ; rpt. ), . Mark A. Vieira, Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy (New York: Abrams, ), – and (illustrations), provides background information on how the ending was conceived, altered, and eventually filmed, with additional quotations from Mamoulian and others. Vieira, , reports that Mamoulian was inspired by the final close-up on Barbara Stanwyck at the ending of Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (). On Garbo’s face see also Balázs, Theory of the Film, –. On the pleasure of tragedy, see in particular Elizabeth Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Milne, Rouben Mamoulian, ; see also –. Cf. Mark Spergel, Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, ), . Bresson, Bresson on Bresson, . Quoted from Halliwell, “The Function and Aesthetics of the Greek Tragic Mask,” (emphasis in original). I have quoted his sentences in reverse order. Exaggeration and enlargement of facial features on masks becomes prominent in Hellenistic and Roman times. On the lifelike appearance of the mask in fifth-century tragedy, see Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, –, followed by Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, –.
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up I meant nothing by The Lighthouse . . . I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another.
Woolf did not herself know or care what something meant; Mamoulian did know and did care. But in both cases the effect was virtually identical upon viewers and readers: They filled in the meaning – their meaning. Just as viewers write sadness, inspiration, courage into Garbo’s masklike face, Timanthes had done something comparable in his painting of Iphigenia’s sacrifice when he left it up to viewers to estimate the degree of Agamemnon’s pain. Mamoulian was not aware of Timanthes, but the ancient painter and the modern director were aware of how to elicit the greatest impact of something that cannot be shown. Spectators show it to themselves. The two artists did something fundamentally similar and perhaps even identical in their different media across millennia. Mamoulian was therefore entirely justified to refer specifically to Greek tragedy in his discussion of Queen Christina with MGM boss Louis B. Mayer. In his own words, recorded on another occasion: I said, “Mr. Mayer, you know Greek tragedy?” He said, “Oh, yes, I know Greek tragedy.” I said, “Well, usually it has an unhappy ending but it never depresses the audience. It exhilarates them.”
Roland Barthes, writing in the mid-s, analyzed Garbo’s face in classical terms. Despite some enthusiastic hyperbole, his comments are pertinent: Garbo . . . belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, . . . when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. In Queen Christina . . . the make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask . . . Among all this snow at once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive, are two faintly tremulous wounds. In spite of its extreme beauty, this face [is] not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and friable . . . Now the temptation of the absolute mask (the mask of antiquity, for instance) perhaps implies . . . an archetype of the human face. Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt. The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person,
Quoted from Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. : – (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), – (letter to Roger Fry; May , ), at . The British edition of this volume had appeared under the title A Change of Perspective. Quoted from Paris, Garbo, .
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Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero
descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light . . . The face of Garbo is an Idea . . .
The serenity on Garbo’s expressionless face, to which Mamoulian refers, has a precursor in one of the most important and famous Greek sculptures, that of Apollo on the west pediment of Zeus’s temple at Olympia, which a modern theater historian once called a mask. The face of Apollo is utterly withdrawn from the scene of violence, rape, and death which surrounds the god and which he ends by the sheer force of his presence. When caught by an expert photographer, the beauty and power that derive from the symmetry of the sculpted head viewed faceon – prosôpon! – can be overwhelming (Fig. .). At least on one occasion this head of Apollo inspired nearly hymnic praise: Words fail in the face of the epiphany of the divine ideal of a heroic age. It bespeaks spirituality [Geist], seriousness, clarity, purity, and nobility. The perfection of his features is not lovely but austere [herb]. With changes in light, one believes to feel a hint of contempt [Zug der Verachtung] or the slight melancholia of higher knowledge around his lips. But with this we are imputing too much of our own that depends on the moment into the face [Antlitz], whose features are inapproachable and unmoved. The expression of [divine] grace is given this head [Haupt] only by the power inherent in its turn [to the right] and its inclination.
Such words are telling. They indicate how easily, even naturally, the face in art can evoke a powerful emotion. They also reveal that here the ecstatic viewer had to force himself back onto the solid ground of academic rationality. As has been well said: “The human figure becomes more indeed like a piece of sculpture” when an actor is masked. Like Garbo’s, Apollo’s face
Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (; rpt. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), –. Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie, . My illustration is one in a series of photographs taken by German photographer (and cinematographer) Walter Hege in for a volume on ancient Olympia in connection with the Olympic Summer Games in Berlin the following year: Olympia: aufgenommen von Walter Hege, beschrieben von Gerhart Rodenwaldt (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, ). Images of Apollo’s statue are on the book’s frontispiece and on plates –, including striking close-ups, none more than the one on plate (my Fig. .). The book was reissued more than once. Hege, from to a professor at the Weimar Kunsthochschule, was a pioneer in the use of photography to illustrate art and architecture. His images of Olympia and of the Acropolis became rightly famous and were collected by various museums. Hege advised Leni Riefenstahl on classical art for her epic film Olympia, on which he was an uncredited cameraman. He was director and cinematographer on short films about nature, art, and architecture, including the propagandistic Die Bauten Adolf Hitlers (“Adolf Hitler’s Buildings,” ). This Kulturfilm, as it is called in the credits, includes some Riefenstahl footage. Hege had joined the Nazi party in . On him see Friedrich Kestel, “Walter Hege (–): ‘Race Art Photographer’ and/or ‘Master Photographer’?” tr. Judith Supp; Visual Resources, (), –, with lists of Hege’s art books, articles on photography, and filmography. So Rodenwaldt in Olympia, . So Walton, The Greek Sense of Theatre, .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up
Figure .
The face of Apollo from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Author’s collection.
lacks any expression at all. This very neutrality constitutes one of the chief defining features of what we call “the classical” in ancient art, allowing for idealization of the human form and especially of the head and face. A historian of Greek art and scholar of modern media has written about the mask-like effect on sculpted faces: Classical sculpture characteristically invites beholders to project “what we call mind and soul and love” onto a blank or neutral screen: the expressionless faces of the Classical ideal . . . But . . . this studied neutrality is integral to their effect. Long before Kuleshov’s experiments in cinema, Greek sculptors had learned that a blank face takes on character from its
On this cf. the comments by Halliwell, “The Function and Aesthetics of the Greek Tragic Mask,” – and –.
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Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero
immediate context . . . The neutral expression is a standing invitation to imagine an êthos [character] where there is none. In short, Classical statuary works by constituting an absence . . . the beholders of these images find character in a blank visage.
Garbo’s face at the close of Queen Christina conveys a comparable remoteness: “The heavy emphasis on the close-up [throughout the film] also serves . . . to isolate Garbo from others, emphasising her separateness in addition to conveying the desired affect of the scene.” So it is evident that Mamoulian’s Garbo is anchored firmly in the classical tradition, as her originally European director was well aware: I was sure that the dramatic effect of this silent sequence would produce a feeling of exaltation, the classical catharsis. When Mr. Mayer and all the big brass were shown the film . . ., nary a one of them mentioned depression; in fact, they were all exhilarated. My trump in this was the final close-up of Garbo’s face . . . I gambled much on this last shot.
Mamoulian’s gamble paid off – handsomely. What has been observed about Garbo’s face in general applies principally to this ending: “the face begins to acquire some of the qualities of the mask, and the nearunchanging nature of its form allows that form more opportunity to impress itself on memory and become icon-like: ‘Divine’ indeed.” Mauritz Stiller, the director who discovered Garbo, launched her career, and exerted the greatest influence on her long after his death, had known this from the beginning: “her face when she is acting becomes a face to make the gods happy.” Film professionals who worked with her sometimes marveled at her mystique. Writer-director Billy Wilder wondered: The face, that face, what was it about that face? You could have read into it all the secrets of a woman’s soul. You could read Eve, Cleopatra, Mata Hari.
Quoted from Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; rpt. ), . His quotation is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s second lecture on Auguste Rodin, whose private secretary he was. Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Paintings: The Craft of Democracy, circa – BCE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), examines parallels in Greek vase paintings in his third chapter. Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo, Queen Christina (London: British Film Institute, ), . Quoted from Sarris (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, . Quoted from Coates, Screening the Face, . Quoted from Robert Gottlieb, Garbo (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), . Early audiences were similarly impressed. Garbo’s friend Salka Viertel remembered a screening of The Saga of Gösta Berling () she attended in Berlin in her memoirs: “There was a loud gasp from the audience when the extraordinary face of the young Greta Garbo appeared on screen.” Quoted from Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, ), .
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The Face of Tragedy: Mask and Close-Up She became all women on the screen. Not on the sound stage. The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?
An amusing and serendipitous corroboration of Mamoulian’s insight into the mask-like expression on a face came in with writer-director Sacha Guitry’s comedy Quadrille, adapted from his stage play of the year before. A popular American star, still in the early stage of his career, has traveled to France in order to learn from great European actors. Being something of an innocent abroad, he tells some French sophisticates about his American directors’ instructions concerning close-ups: They tell me: “Do nothing. Just say your lines.”. . . For close-ups they tell me: “Ready! Now think!” I ask: “About what?”. . . They tell me: “About nothing.” So I think about nothing as hard as I can, and I think that shot could be used for anything.
So, of course, it could. Classical art and the classical Greek stage have one important thing in common with cinema, especially in regard to the human face and to masks and close-ups. All of them support what John Ford once said: “The most interesting and exciting thing in the world, a human face.” Orson Welles concluded: “The closer we are to the face, the more universal it becomes.” Fritz Lang wrote in : “The film has made us witnesses of the magic of the human face, it has taught us to read what lies behind the silence of this face and has shown us the reaches of the human soul.” In the words of one of the main characters in Godard’s Le petit soldat (): “When photographing a face . . . you photograph the soul behind it.” Godard wrote the script himself; the sentiment is as much his as the speaker’s. Bresson, whom Godard greatly admired, once put the matter in the following terms: The camera . . . can penetrate a face, and if you are really paying attention, can penetrate into the very core of a person, into the heart of hearts that Proust speaks of, which we must try to get to.
Quoted from Gottlieb, Garbo, . Garbo had played the title role in Mata Hari in . Wilder’s words unintentionally resemble Dreyer’s about Falconetti, quoted above. Ford is quoted by director John Sturges, “How the West Was Lost!” in Richard Koszarski (ed.), Hollywood Directors – (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –, at . Sturges’ article originally appeared in Films and Filming (December, ). Quoted from Sarris (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, . Quoted from Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Film Makers, tr. and ed. Peter Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Bresson, Bresson on Bresson, . He added: “That’s what I’m most passionate about.”
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Garbo’s Face: A Beautiful Zero
More recently, American writer-director Darren Aronofsky said: The best invention of the twentieth century was the closeup. That you could put a camera right in front of Paul Newman’s eyes and look into his soul changed storytelling.
So it did, but not, as we have seen, in a fundamentally novel way. What a theater historian has said about masks on stage is applicable to close-ups on film: “The Masks live in the eye of the beholder, not of the actor.” Altogether, then, we can agree with Jean Cocteau: “A close-up is the mask of classical tragedy.”
Quoted from Tad Friend, “Heavy Weather,” The New Yorker (March , ), –, at . Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte, , cited with approval by Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” note . Quoted from Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, ed. André Bernard and Claude Gauteur; tr. Robin Buss (London and New York: Boyars, ; rpt. ), (section titled “Cinematography and Poetry”). Cocteau’s aperçu dates to . Cocteau, , made the case for this identity even more concisely: “Greek masks (close-up).”
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The Cinema Imagines Difficult Texts
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece; or, The Case of the Missing Ecphrasis
Among all supernatural objects found in classical mythology, the Golden Fleece may be the most famous and the most influential in inspiring poets, dramatists, and painters since antiquity. A golden-fleeced ram had once saved Phrixus and his twin sister Helle from the machinations of their evil stepmother by carrying them east. In the best-known version of the myth, the ram had wings and could talk. Either its fleece was naturally golden, or Hermes had made it so. Helle fell off the ram’s back and drowned in the Hellespont, the sea named after her. The ram then gave verbal encouragement to Phrixus and took him to Colchis, a kingdom at the ends of the earth. Here the ram was sacrificed. Its fleece became a symbol of power, royalty, and authority. As King Aeëtes’ possession, it was kept in a tree inside a grove sacred to Ares and was guarded by the kind of dragon we saw in Douris’ painting. In Greece, evil Pelias had killed his brother Aeson, the legitimate ruler of the Thessalian kingdom of Iolcus, and usurped his throne. When Aeson’s son Jason came to reclaim the kingdom that was rightfully his, Pelias sent him off to obtain the Golden Fleece for him. This was meant to be a mission impossible: Pelias intended to keep the throne and to get rid of Jason once and for all. To undertake his dangerous task, Jason gathered about fifty heroes and sailed to Colchis. Jason’s companions were called Argonauts after their ship, the Argo. But King Aeëtes would not willingly relinquish his greatest possession and imposed deadly tests upon Jason. But with the help of Aeëtes’ daughter Medea, who possessed magic powers and
See Hermann Fränkel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich: Beck, ), –. A concise summary of the myth and its variants is in A. J. Boyle (ed., tr., comm.), Seneca: Medea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), lxi–lxxviii, with references. According to Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History .., the never-sleeping dragon was coiled around the Fleece. Diodorus tells the whole myth at .–.
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
was in love with Jason, the best of the Argonauts succeeded. He got the Fleece – actually, Medea got it for him – he got the girl, and he got back home. But Jason and Medea did not get to live happily ever after.
The Golden Fleece in Apollonius’ Argonautica What did the Golden Fleece look like? We can imagine a golden ram, but that is hardly enough to impress on us a sense of the inherent or symbolic value of the Golden Fleece. It has to be supernaturally beautiful to function in a credible manner as the object of a quest as dangerous as the Argonauts’ and remarkable enough to deserve being called a thauma idesthai: “a wonder to behold.” Ancient visual artists depicted the Fleece on several occasions, but they could not do justice to its golden sheen. Nor, apparently, could poets. Classical descriptions of the Fleece are too brief adequately to convey a sense of its beauty; they consist mainly of summary statements or assertions. A case in point is Apollonius of Rhodes, whose Argonautica is the most detailed retelling of the myth about Jason and the Fleece in classical epic. Apollonius was a poet and literary scholar; he may also have been the head of the famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the greatest centers of learning in the Hellenistic Age. Surprisingly for an epic poet who knew his Homeric models and was familiar with Homeric ecphrases, Apollonius does not have very much to say about the look of the Fleece. It is as if its extraordinary quality had defied him. The ram was “that wondrous creature, all gold.” In the Ram’s Rest, as a meadow in Ares’ grove was called, there stood “that vast oak on which the Fleece / was spread out, just like some cloud that blushes ruddy gold, / caught by the fiery rays of the sun at its rising.” Once Medea has put the dragon to sleep, Jason takes down the Fleece, which is as large as an ox hide. And “the bright glint of its texture / cast a ruddy blush like a flame.” Its thick wool appeared “golden throughout.” And: “Brightly the earth / gleamed ever
I here allude to the title of James. J. Clauss, The Best of the Argonauts: The Redefinition of the Epic Hero in Book of Apollonius’s Argonautica (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ). On ancient images of the Fleece, see Jenifer Neils, “Iason,” Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae V. (), –, especially – (sections H–K and N on Jason, the dragon, and the Fleece), and the illustrations at V., –, especially plates , –, and (in black and white). See further Karl Schefold and Franz Jung, Die Sagen von den Argonauten, von Theben und Troia in der klassischen und hellenistischen Kunst (Munich: Hirmer, ), – on Phrixus and the ram and – on Jason and the Fleece. Apollonius, Argonautica . and –. Quoted from Peter Green (tr. and comm.), Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
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The Golden Fleece in Apollonius’ Argonautica
in front of his feet as he [Jason] strode on forward.” Jason’s men “were amazed” at “the great Fleece gleaming / like Zeus’s lightning.” Later, Jason and Medea spread “the bright Golden Fleece” on their marriage bed: “A glow like firelight shone round them, / so bright the light that glittered from the Fleece’s golden tufts.” Apollonius echoes the archaic poet Pindar, who centuries earlier had Pelias speak of “the deep-fleeced hide of the ram” and had Aeëtes call it “the imperishable coverlet, / the fleece fringed with gleaming gold.” Pindar then speaks of “the shimmering fleece.” What do we learn from all this? In his annotated translation of Apollonius, Peter Green observes that the Fleece looked “a deep metallic red-gold” so strong that it illuminated its environs. In his own epic retelling of the myth, the imperial Roman poet Valerius Flaccus later spoke of “the sheepskin’s golden cloud that shines with the dazzle of Iris’ / glowing robe.” Flaccus’ final, and summary, mention of the Fleece is even briefer and more disappointing: radiantia . . . vellera (“the shining fleece”). We are left wanting to know in much greater detail what this magical object actually was like. We may be reminded of Virgil’s expression non enarrabile textum about the shield of Aeneas: The “texture” which Hephaestus, the divine craftsman, imparts to the images decorating the shield “cannot be told.” Green comments on the Fleece: “Perhaps most remarkably, the Fleece . . . remains a complete (and highly numinous) mystery . . . We are not even told what generates its unearthly magical glow.” He draws an inevitable conclusion: Ap. [Apollonius] betrays a certain confusion in these lines regarding the exact nature of the Fleece: not altogether surprisingly, since several conflicting versions were known. The scholiast ([on lines] –) reports it variously described as golden, white, or purple . . . Cf. schol. –,
Apollonius, Argonautica .–; the quotations from –, , and – are at Green, Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, . Apollonius, Argonautica .–; Green, Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, . Apollonius, Argonautica . and –; Green, Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, . Pindar, Pythian ., –, and . The quotations are from Frank Nisetich (tr.), Pindar’s Victory Songs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), and –. At Pythian . Pindar calls the Fleece “wholly golden.” So does Euripides, Medea . Bruce Karl Braswell, A Commentary on the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), – (on line ), provides further details about the Fleece, with source references. Green, Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, . Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica .–, with rutila pellis at . The quotation is from David R. Slavitt (tr.), The Voyage of the Argo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica .–. Virgil, Aeneid . (clipei non enarrabile textum) and –. Green, Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, .
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece where again the two main versions have it gold (the majority opinion, seemingly) or dyed sea-purple . . . Even if we treat it as a purely imaginary literary artifact, there is an elusive aspect to Ap.’s presentation: his Fleece is singularly hard to visualize.
A dissenting opinion has also been advanced. Classicist Paul Murgatroyd comments on the Fleece and its surroundings in the grove of Ares: The wood is dense and shadowy, too, i.e. sombre and menacing . . . And there is the effective chiaroscuro of the Fleece’s unearthly effulgence amid the darkness of night. That highlights and focuses attention on the prize, which is like a cloud (i.e. glowing, fluffy, high up, beautiful and ethereal). Presumably the Fleece provides just enough light . . . so that the overall effect of the eerily lit blackness is decidedly atmospheric.
All this is very much to the point, although it also reveals that Apollonius may be more concerned about the setting in which the Fleece has been kept than about the Fleece itself. What Murgatroyd says about Apollonius’ dragon may be applied to his Fleece: “he gives his readers a few bold strokes and leaves us to fill in the rest in our imagination.” More recently, Richard Hunter has remarked on Apollonius’ two lines devoted to the Fleece’s extraordinary size: the very precision of the specification of size, combined with a focus, not just on the Fleece as a whole, but on the individual clumps of wool (), creates a powerful ecphrastic effect. Even readers who are puzzled by the glosses of – are pushed towards a very precise image of this extraordinary (mythical) artefact.
Whether readers of Apollonius remain puzzled or are capable of a precise image, one thing becomes evident: All are called upon to use their powers of imagination to visualize the Fleece. To adduce Virgil’s expression again: Whether something is enarrabile in a poetic textum or not, it certainly is imaginabile. Readers themselves create the wondrous object in their mind’s eye, thus making it a thauma idesthai. Today, the cinema and related media take things further. A supernatural object becomes visibile when placed before our eyes. On the screen, each and every object, whether realistic or imaginary, must become visible in all its specificities.
Green, Argonautika by Apollonios Rhodios, (on Argonautica .–). Both quotations are from Paul Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters in Classical Literature (London: Duckworth, ), . Richard Hunter (ed. and comm.), Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica Book IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
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Neo-Mythologism
Neo-Mythologism: Hercules, The Giants of Thessaly, Jason and the Argonauts () To date, seven films, all in color, have shown the Fleece to good effect. In this chapter I examine the different filmmakers’ imaginative approaches to the visibile textum of the Fleece. Five of these are examples of mainstream commercial cinema (and television); two of these come from the age of computer technology. The remaining two are examples of art cinema. All are revealing about the ways in which filmmakers present us with modern versions of a classic tale. One specific aspect deserves our attention first. It pertains directly to the films’ storylines and their recreations of the Golden Fleece. Adaptations of narrative literature in other media are rarely faithful to their sources. This is practically always the case with the cinema. A distinguished filmmaker provides us with a useful perspective. Animator Ray Harryhausen once observed about his approach to, and experience with, Greek myth: There are few other sources where you could find so many adventures, bizarre creatures and larger-than-life heroes . . . However, we soon realized that the storylines needed some modification if we were to translate them to the cinema screen . . . Sometimes we may have played a bit fast and loose with the plots, or introduced creatures from one story into another, but that is the great thing about those tales: you can keep to the spirit of the original without slavishly following it . . . I suspect that the ancient Greeks would have been pleased with what we did – even if the academics have not always been quite so impressed.
Italian writer-director Vittorio Cottafavi, who made two noteworthy films about Hercules, referred to this phenomenon as “neo-mythologism.”
I omit some minor instances. The short Russian animated Argonavty (“The Argonauts,” ) is one of five such films produced for the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Education and directed by experienced animator Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya. The Fleece, seen only briefly, emits golden rays but is overall unimpressive. The fifty-minute BBC production Jason and the Argonauts: The Journey from Boy to Man (or Ancient Greek Heroes: Jason and the Argonauts, ) is an example of (pseudo-?)educational videos that are neo-mythological in their own ways. In this instance, the very few and very brief glimpses of the Golden Fleece add nothing to what I examine here; greater emphasis is on the dragon. The wise narrator explains to viewers what the myth of Jason and Medea is really about: “Perhaps it’s a gentle reminder to the young men of Greece that, while the fairer sex may lead them astray, they wouldn’t get far without a good woman.” Perhaps. Quoted from Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton, The Art of Ray Harryhausen (London: Aurum Press, / New York: Billboard Books, ), . Michel Mourlet and Paul Agde, “Entretien avec Vittorio Cottafavi,” Présence du cinéma, (December ), –, at . Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, tr. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (New York: Praeger, ), –, discusses Cottafavi and his term. See further Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), – (chapter titled “Epic into Film”).
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
But, given the great flexibility inherent in the oral and literary traditions of ancient myth, Greeks and Romans were themselves highly neomythological. Numerous different and often contradictory versions of myths attest to this. Harryhausen is unlikely ever to have heard of Cottafavi’s coinage, but his statement in defense of the sort of thing that Cottafavi had in mind is as eloquent as it is sensible. Italian writer-director Pietro Francisci hired American bodybuilder Steve Reeves to star in Le fatiche di Ercole (“The Labors of Hercules,” ). The film became an international success, especially when savvy American producer and distributor Joseph E. Levine launched it in the United States under the simplified title Hercules. The original title might lead us to expect that the film illustrates Heracles’ famous twelve labors. But they are only a loose string of adventures, so Francisci and his cowriters introduced a clever change. Although they incorporated some of the labors, their storyline includes Jason and the Argonauts. Heracles had been one of the Argonauts in the myth but left their expedition before they reached Colchis. In this way the greatest of all Greek heroes did not overshadow Jason, the Argonauts’ leader but a lesser hero. A title card in the film’s opening credits explicitly acknowledges Apollonius’ epic as main source. This is the only time Apollonius has received such a screen credit. The card is honest enough to admit that everything has been treated freely (Fig. .). There is, for instance, no Medea. The sequence in which the Fleece is found is a bit of a disappointment although by no means a failure. Jason and not Hercules, the hero whose film this is, kills the dragon and gets the Fleece. The sequence is neither filmed nor edited imaginatively. Having just landed in Colchis, the
Figure .
Hercules. Apollonius of Rhodes’ English-language credit. Screen capture.
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Neo-Mythologism
Figure . Hercules. The Golden Fleece on its tree. Screen capture.
Argonauts are being attacked by non-mythical savages who look like humanoid apes from prehistory. When the monsters flee, Jason is suddenly missing. A cut shows us a deserted rocky landscape; another cut reveals the tree with the Golden Fleece in extreme long shot. Dead leaves cover a mound of earth below the tree. Jason now sees the Fleece, and Francisci gives us a closer look (Fig. .). The Fleece is not overly large, and its golden color appears subdued except for the ram’s bright golden horns. Head and horns move a little in the breeze; this makes for an eerie effect. The music heightens mystery and suspense. Jason walks up the mound and stretches out his arms to take down the Fleece. Suddenly the ground he stands on begins to move, and he tumbles down. The mound rises – it is the dragon! And it is huge. In close-up or medium shot it looks impressively menacing, although in long shots it appears quite silly because of its disproportionately tiny head. Francisci stages Jason’s fight with the dragon as if he were in a medieval epic. Jason, for instance, is caught and cast aside by the dragon’s whipping tail more than once. But he manages to dispatch the beast with a single spear throw through its eye. He looks up at the Fleece again, which receives another close-up. Jason climbs onto the dead dragon’s back. So he does in Valerius Flaccus, following Medea’s advice. Jason pulls down the Fleece and runs off to join the Argonauts. But first he takes a closer look at the Fleece and discovers on the inside large bloodstains and a message from his father, written in blood. In voiceover we are told what it says:
Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica .–.
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece My brother killed me. Pelias’ are the hands that struck me as I slept. May the gods forgive him for what he did, but may they persecute and curse him if he harms my son. I commit Jason into your hands, o gods, and I ask of you to free his thoughts from revenge, for no more blood must be shed because of my death.
This is a noble sentiment, accompanied on the soundtrack by a female choir delivering a kind of warbling hymn. But Aeson’s message is improbably long to have been composed by a dying man. Nor is it mythical. Still, viewers are by no means perplexed by Aeson’s final words because they already know what no ancient Greek or Roman knew: that the Fleece had originally belonged to Aeson. In an expository early flashback, Francisci had shown the Fleece prominently displayed behind Aeson’s throne, stretched out on a frame formed by spears (Fig. .). The Fleece, Hercules was informed, is considered “a royal symbol” which “seemed to give off a mysterious presence; it seemed to vibrate.” “You know,” Hercules was further told, “reigning without the Golden Fleece is almost impossible.” So the Fleece had originally been in Iolcus, and the story of Phrixus and Helle is quietly erased. The Fleece vanishes during the night of Aeson’s assassination, which made Pelias king. The killer is one Eurystheus, an evil schemer and assassin who later will be among the Argonauts. Although the name is taken from the Heracles myth, everything else about this Eurystheus is invented. He finally gets what he deserves from Hercules. The Fleece had vanished from Iolcus when Jason’s teacher Chiron, who here is not a centaur but fully human, had secretly taken it to prevent it from falling into Pelias’ hands. Justice is finally restored, and Pelias commits
Figure .
Hercules. The Golden Fleece behind Aeson’s throne. Screen capture.
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Neo-Mythologism
suicide. But first he burns the Fleece. This is entirely neo-mythological. Pindar, for instance, had called the Fleece “imperishable.” A sequel to Francisci’s film appeared a year later. Francisci and Reeves started a whole cycle of pseudo-mythical muscleman epics. Jason and the Argonauts returned in , if without Hercules, in a film directed by Riccardo Freda. It has two titles. It is commonly known as I giganti della Tessaglia (The Giants of Thessaly) but was also called Gli Argonauti (“The Argonauts”). Apollonius is never acknowledged. The story is only loosely based on ancient sources. Freda, too, once broke a lance for neomythologism although he did not employ the term: The chief difficulty . . . is to tell something exceptional in a believable and acceptable manner . . . So for this reason it’s much more difficult to make a costume film than a modern film – more difficult and more interesting . . . The difficulty is to render plausible and close to ourselves characters who proceed in very different costumes, in an altogether strange décor. So it is necessary to reach the point to give them a way of saying and doing things that would at the same time be suitable to our own sensibilities and to these decorative elements.
Freda’s version of the Argonauts’ story is a free invention, but it is simpler than what Francisci and his writers had concocted. There is no Pelias because Jason is already king of Iolcus and has a family. Ironically, his wife’s name is Creusa, the best-known name of the Corinthian princess for whom Jason will later abandon Medea in their myth. The film’s narrator informs us that the Fleece is a sacred gift from Zeus and a sign of his favor. But it vanishes, and the people are faced with imminent destruction from volcanic eruptions. These are Zeus’s punishment for the loss of the Fleece. Jason and the Argonauts set out for Colchis to appease the god and prevent the worst. During his absence, an evil schemer plots to take over as king. He also has designs on Jason’s wife. The setting in which Jason finds the Fleece is bold in its visual presentation and surprising to anyone familiar with the myth. While the Argonauts wait on their ship, Jason climbs up a rocky cliff and a steep wall of stone. He then opens a large gate and looks up. Freda cuts to a long shot of a huge stone statue of a male figure, a kouros (“youth”) type patterned on archaic Greek art. It is standing in front of a wall and inside
Pindar, Pythian .. Quoted from Jacques Lourcelles and Simon Mizrahi, “Entretien avec Riccardo Freda,” Présence du cinéma, (), –, at . Freda is not generally well known but has acquired cult status among cognoscenti; information about his body of work, in which costume films feature prominently, is in Stefano Della Casa, Riccardo Freda (Rome: Bulzoni, ).
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
a large pool of water. The statue’s right hand, palm up, is at its shoulder and holds the Golden Fleece. Columns topped by flames indicate that this is a temple or sanctuary. The myth’s grove of Ares thus becomes a manmade space. There is no dragon. But there are also no priests, attendants, or guardians, just as there is not a single Colchian and no Aeëtes. That there is no Medea does not surprise us, for we know that Jason already has a wife. In a cleverly designed composition achieved with a wide-angle lens, Freda frames Jason’s and our first view of this place with mighty pillars on left and right, thus lending a greater sense of three-dimensional depth to his image (Fig. .). Dramatic music underscores the uncanny setting. Very soon, small reddish clouds wafting before the back wall and across the statue’s top enhance the supernatural atmosphere of the scene even if they look artificial. Jason, amazed, looks at the statue’s hand, which appears in an extreme close-up. A close-up on its palm reveals the Fleece screen left, balanced screen right by part of the statue’s face. The Fleece is rather large and looks reasonably attractive. Its locks are gently wafting in the air. Jason approaches, his footsteps dramatically resounding through the empty space. He swims across the pool – more echoing sound effects – and climbs onto one of the statue’s feet. Suddenly he seems to be outdoors. The mismatch shows experienced viewers that what had come before was filmed separately and that the statue, when we get a full view of it, is a miniature. Hacking footholds into the stone, Jason climbs to the top and reaches the statue’s left shoulder and left ear. Music and a male choir’s wordless sounds enhance the drama. Jason carefully works his way across
Figure .
The Giants of Thessaly. First view of the statue holding the Golden Fleece. Screen capture.
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Figure . The Giants of Thessaly. Jason with the Golden Fleece in the statue’s palm. Screen capture.
the forehead to the other side. Standing on the right eyebrow, he looks down and over at the hand with the Fleece. Then he jumps. He lands on the palm next to the Fleece, which he lifts into the air in triumph (Fig. .). Freda now cuts to Iolcus, where the villain’s machinations develop apace, back to the Argo, and again to Iolcus. He skips Jason’s return to the Argo. In his defense we could say that ending the kouros-and-Fleece sequence as he does provides a memorable climax, although a jump by Jason into the pool below would have been thrilling. But it might have been technically difficult or impossible, and a wet Fleece would not have looked good. So Freda hastens to conclude his film. The Argo is suddenly back home, the bad guy is killed in a fight, and we hear that “a new era of happiness” can begin. A priest announces that Thessaly is again “under the protection of the sacred Golden Fleece, a prodigious sign of the omnipotence of great Zeus.” The final shot is of the god’s statue. This is an appropriate ending, although Zeus’s statue is a letdown after the impressive kouros we saw before. At the film’s beginning, a credit for animation lists, by last name only, Carlo Rambaldi, the future special-effects and creature wizard. Rambaldi was to receive numerous awards, including three Oscars, during his career. The alien in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial () is probably his best-known creation. Rambaldi had begun by creating, without screen credit, the dragon in Sigfrido (The Dragon’s Blood, ). There followed a Minotaur in Teseo contro il minotauro (The Minotaur, ), makeup effects for Cottafavi’s La vendetta di Ercole (Goliath and the Dragon, ), a strange Medusa for Perseo l’invincibile (Perseus against the Monsters or
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
even Medusa against the Son of Hercules, ), and special effects in the Polyphemus episode of the six-hour Odissea (; to be examined in Chapter ). We will encounter Rambaldi again below. The best-known film of the Argonaut myth came in . Don Chaffey directed a British-American production from a screenplay co-written by playwright and librettist Beverley Cross. It was filmed in attractive Mediterranean locations and had a remarkable score by Bernard Herrmann. But its greatest asset is its fantasy creatures designed and animated by Ray Harryhausen: the Harpies, the bronze giant Talos, the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece, and the skeleton warriors sown from the dragon’s teeth. This dragon, modeled on the Hydra of Greek myth, is the most magnificent monster ever to grace a screen version of the Argonauts’ tale. Harryhausen perfected a process of stop-motion animation (“Dynamation”), in which minute movements of miniature figures are photographed with a still camera and then projected sequentially to create the illusion of movement. The film emphasizes the importance of the Fleece from the beginning. In its first scene Pelias, about to make war on Thessaly and usurp the throne, receives a prophecy from a priest who is really Hermes in disguise. “I see a great tree at the end of the world,” Hermes tells Pelias. “And in its branches hang the skull and skin of a ram. They gleam and shine, for it is a prize of the gods. A golden fleece.” Twenty years after this, Jason encounters Pelias without realizing who he is; he tells him that he will take back his rightful throne and return Thessaly to its former state of glory and happiness. “But people need more than a leader,” Jason continues. “They feel deserted by the gods. They need a miracle.” He already knows about the Fleece. Pelias tells him: “They say it’s a gift of the gods.” Jason on his own proposes to get the Fleece for the good of his kingdom: It has the power to heal, bring peace, and rid the land of famine. If I could bring it to Thessaly, it would inspire the people and wipe out the years of misrule. My land will be as rich as it was before Pelias murdered my father.
Detailed information about the art of Harryhausen’s animation appears in Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (London: Aurum Press, / New York: Billboard Books, ), The Art of Ray Harryhausen, and A Century of Stop Motion Animation: From Méliès to Aardman (London: Aurum Press / New York: Billboard Books, ). A brief appreciation of Jason and the Argonauts is in my “Greek Myth on the Screen,” in Roger D. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, at –. Harryhausen had made the animation short The Story of King Midas in with a medieval setting. He returned to Greek myth with the version of Clash of the Titans, also written by Cross.
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This is an appropriate, if neo-mythological, characterization of a sacred object. Jason’s words inform viewers about the Fleece’s supernatural qualities, not least its closeness to the gods. They also heighten our eagerness to see it with our own eyes. It is, however, not Jason but Pelias’ son Acastus, one of the Argonauts, who first finds the Fleece. It is hanging from its tree in a dark and sinisterlooking grove. Acastus is Jason’s enemy and a saboteur; he attempts to preempt Jason and get the Fleece himself. Chaffey first shows the Fleece from Acastus’ point of view in a long shot that turns into a medium closeup. The Fleece is large but not huge and has a magnificent golden sheen (Fig. .). Its horns are elaborately curved (Fig. .). This appearance justifies the verbal buildup the Fleece has received. No dragon has ever been mentioned, so Acastus does not expect any danger. Neither do viewers unfamiliar with the myth. The Fleece is there simply for the taking, it seems. As Acastus moves toward it, Chaffey cuts to the Argo. When Jason appears in the same spot a while later, everything is tranquil. But the Fleece is hanging in the tree exactly as before. Jason, sword drawn, cautiously approaches. Herrmann’s mysterious music makes for a suspenseful atmosphere. Jason looks around, sticks his sword into the ground, and reaches up to the Fleece. A hissing sound from off-screen makes him turn around in close-up. Several dragon heads are writhing before his face, also in close-up. Viewers are just as shocked as Jason is.
Figure . Jason and the Argonauts (). First view of the Golden Fleece. Screen capture.
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Figure .
Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece in its glittering beauty. Screen capture.
When the dragon approaches, we learn about Acastus’ fate. The monster is holding him suspended in the coils of its tail before it deposits him on the ground. Then it attacks. Jason’s fight with the dragon takes almost three minutes of screen time. He kills it by stabbing it in the neck and chest without help from Medea, who has come upon the scene just a little earlier. The creature collapses below the tree. During the fight the Fleece receives a short close-up, in which we see its fur gleaming and glittering. This is a clever reminder of the great prize for which Jason has undertaken this deadly fight and his entire voyage. Acastus, dying, confesses his treachery. Some of the Argonauts and the Colchian warriors, led by Aeëtes, arrive. Jason commands Argus, his helmsman: “Get the Fleece!” Now comes a memorable visual twist on the myth. As soon as Argus touches the Fleece, its luster vanishes. The golden beauty turns into a drab grey (Fig. .). Now the Fleece is just a decaying old pelt. The divine object seems to have been defiled when touched by human hands. This contradicts what we have heard and seen so far. Jason’s journey had been sanctioned and protected by the gods, especially by Hera, who had told him to get the Fleece. So we are left with
Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters in Classical Literature, – and – (notes), considers Apollonius and this film side by side. (My earlier quotation comes from this chapter.) But he is extremely critical of the film.
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Figure .
Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece: desecration. Screen capture.
an inconsistency. But perhaps we should not think about it too deeply. The emotional impact on us of the Fleece’s unexpected transformation is worth any loss in logic. It is a magic moment, which exists for its visual sake alone. It also echoes, no doubt unintentionally, one aspect of the version of the myth given by Valerius Flaccus. There it was not the Fleece but the tree, which it had illuminated, that went dark: “the tree at that moment . . . / . . .groans in pain and chagrin / as a gloom, deep and uncanny, descends to settle around it.” This is both realistic about the darkness that results when a light source is being removed and highly mythic: The animistic tree has emotions and utters them. The darkness symbolically foreshadows later events as well.
CGI: Jason and the Argonauts () and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters The American television film Jason and the Argonauts, directed by Nick Willing, takes us to a new phase in the cinemetamorphoses of our myth,
Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica .–; Slavitt, The Voyage of the Argo, . At Ovid, Metamorphoses ., the dragon is “guardian of the golden tree” (custos . . . arboris aureae). This striking expression draws attention to the Fleece’s shining splendor but should not be understood as implying that the tree had turned golden. Rather, the adjective is a transferred epithet: from what the tree holds to the tree itself.
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
that of computer-generated images (CGI). Willing’s version premiered within two days of the release of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which gave a new lease on life to the ancient world on the big screen. Gladiator presented a cyber-Rome. Computer effects had already begun to appear in historical and mythical epics, and the time of painstaking handiwork like Harryhausen’s was largely over. Willing’s film, partially indebted to Chaffey’s, reflects its era in various ways: through feminism (an Amazon-type called Atalanta), multiculturalism (Orpheus is played by a black actor), and graphic violence. (A minor glitch is the mispronunciation of Iolcus as “Eye-óclus.”) Pelias is a sadist, played by Dennis Hopper, an actor famous for his portrayals of psychopaths. Willing and his screenwriters incorporated material from Apollodorus, as may be seen by Jason’s mother’s name: Polymede rather than Apollonius’ Alcimede. More importantly for us, the film demonstrates the two-sided nature of CGI filmmaking, its advantages and disadvantages. The Argonauts’ discovery of the Golden Fleece is a case in point. But why have they traveled to Colchis? Jason’s tutor is the centaur Chiron, created with the help of CGI. He informs Jason about Pelias’ murder of Aeson and the fate of his mother, who was forced to marry Pelias. An old lady who is really Hera and whom Jason helps across a river tells him more about Pelias. His villainy goes so far as to squeeze his country dry for taxes because “searching for the Golden Fleece is an expensive business.” The Fleece is “the greatest gift from gods to man,” the woman continues, “craved by Pelias beyond all reason. He believes it will grant him his heart’s desire.” Pelias has already sent at least one expedition after the Fleece. His people, he tells his son who is eager to lead the next trip, are not clear about “the great benefits the Fleece will bestow upon them.” Confronting Pelias, Jason offers to find the Fleece for him: “I can find it because I have protection of the gods.” This suits Pelias just fine. He offers Jason the throne after his death and a ship for the journey. But he threatens Jason with his mother’s death if he does not return in time: “Your mother for the Fleece.” Polymede warns Jason that Pelias will kill him even if he delivers the Fleece to him, which is “his obsession.” She, too, calls it “his heart’s desire.” Then she reveals what that desire is: “Immortality. Eternal release from his doom so he may reign forever.” This is quite a twist on the common versions of the tale.
Apollodorus, Library of Mythology ..; Apollonius, Argonautica .. Apollodorus summarizes the myths of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts at ..–.
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Figure . Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece on its tree. Screen capture.
To Pindar, who called it imperishable, the Fleece is an “object of immortal life.” But it does not bestow eternal life on others. In Colchis, a few of the Argonauts and Medea hasten to the Fleece across a desert plain surrounded by high mountains. The Fleece’s first appearance is impressive, although it is not quite clear from whose point of view Willing is showing it. In an extreme long shot that moves closer and closer but not into a close-up, we see the broken-off trunk and roots of a large dead tree. A deep canyon is visible immediately behind it. The Fleece is hanging high in the air, draped over a branch that is disproportionately thin for its position on the trunk. The Fleece appears small from a distance, but its color is strong enough to draw the viewer’s eyes (Fig. .). Again the Fleece is swaying gently. Willing cuts back to the Argonauts, who observe it with wonder, and back to the Fleece. Suddenly the ground begins to shake, and the gigantic head of a horned dragon rises
The quotation is from Charles Segal, Pindar’s Mythmaking: The Fourth Pythian Ode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . Segal then speaks about “the immortality-conferring quality of the fleece” in regard to the fame of Battus, ancestor of the ode’s recipient.
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Figure .
Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
Jason and the Argonauts (). The Golden Fleece above the abyss. Screen capture.
from an abyss behind the tree. The monster climbs up on the plateau and menaces the Argonauts. In long shot it looks much less ferocious than it should. It appears to have been designed on the model of some prehistoric dinosaur and looks disappointingly artificial. We know immediately that it comes straight from a computer. Seen closer, of course, it is terrifying. Its tail strikes one of the Argonauts, who has been climbing up the tree to reach the dragon’s back. At this moment Willing inserts an attractive lowangle view of the Fleece (Fig. .). Orpheus’ lyre distracts and calms the beast, which has just snapped up one of the men. Jason ties one end of a rope to the tree. A string on Orpheus’ lyre breaks and ends the spell of his music. In the ensuing melee Jason lures the dragon toward the abyss. It loses its balance and falls to its death; Jason saves himself with his rope. He climbs up the tree for the Fleece, which he raises into the air as Freda’s Jason had done. The Argonauts and Medea cheer. On the return journey, Pelias’ son steals the Fleece and wears it the way Heracles wears his lion’s skin. “I’ve sailed with Jason and gained the
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Figure .
Jason and the Argonauts (). Pelias wearing the Golden Fleece. Screen capture.
Fleece,” Acastus tells his father, who is next seen clutching it to his chest as if he were a child holding a favorite toy. Pelias commands his men to kill Jason and all the Argonauts. Soon he is wearing the Fleece as if he were Heracles (Fig. .). Then he becomes interested in Medea’s healing powers. She tricks him into bathing in a pool into which she pours her magic blood-red liquid. “You must bathe in these waters,” she explains to Pelias. “The waters will release the power of the Fleece. Then once more you will be young. You will rule forever.” That may not sound convincing to us, least of all if we know the myth, but it does to Pelias, who is obsessed with the Fleece and with his immortality. But it does not come to that. When Jason and his men fight their way into the palace, Pelias holds a sword to Medea’s throat. “I see you wear the Fleece, uncle,” says Jason. “Has it brought you your heart’s desire? Has its power revived you? Made you immortal?” The villain unexpectedly falters. “Do I look like an immortal?” he almost whines. “The Fleece has no power,” Jason tells him, “except that imagined by those who seek it. We make our own destiny, by our own
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
actions.” After a little more of this life lesson, Pelias relinquishes Medea and hands the Fleece over to Jason: “do with it what you will.” Jason simply drops it to the ground. Pelias treacherously attempts to knife his nephew but dies on his own blade. “My destiny is to rule,” Jason says before Pelias falls into the pool. Jason and Medea marry. They inspire even Zeus and Hera, the bickering couple on Olympus, to be reconciled to each other with a kiss. A happy ending on earth as it is in heaven – all thanks to the Fleece. The next version to be discussed may be the most neo-mythological of all, for it transports ancient myth in time, the twenty-first century, and place, the United States. Percy Jackson, a boy-next-door type of teenager, is the hero of a series of bestselling young-adult novels by Rick Riordan. Percy turns out to be the son of Poseidon and encounters gods, demigods, creatures, and monsters while saving the Olympians from doom and destruction. In the second novel, Sea of Monsters, he and his small group of intrepid friends go on a quest for the Golden Fleece. The film of the novel was released in as Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. German special-effects expert Thor Freudenthal directed. The Fleece is being kept in the Sea of Monsters, commonly known as the Bermuda Triangle. Its current owner is the Cyclops Polyphemus, a giant who lives in a cave on Circe’s island deep in that sea. There is a specific reference to Odysseus, although this Polyphemus has not been blinded. He contrasts with the human-sized Cyclops in Percy’s company, a nice and decent teenage boy. The Fleece’s touch, we are informed, “can heal every person and every thing.” The film’s villain needs it to resurrect the Titan Kronos, who then will destroy the Olympians and reinstate himself as ruler of the world. Percy and Co. succeed in thwarting this dastardly scheme in the nick of time. At the end the Fleece is draped over the roots of a tree that used to be a teenage girl, a daughter of Zeus. She had been killed at the beginning, but Zeus preempted her death by changing her into a tree, a vague echo of the Philemon and Baucis myth. The girl is now resurrected. All credit goes to the Fleece: “It was even more powerful than we thought.” The Fleece is first shown in a painting that has been called up on a hand-held device – via Google, presumably. Its actual appearances are disappointing because we barely get to see it. Only at the end does it receive a full close-up. This Fleece is not golden but white, with non-figurative golden decorations (Fig. .). It compares unfavorably with those in earlier films, especially the Jason and the Argonauts.
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Film Technology and the Supernatural
Figure .
Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. The Golden Fleece in white. Screen capture.
Film Technology and the Supernatural Monsters predominate as visual attractions in Chaffey’s and Freudenthal’s films: first Harryhausen’s intriguing miniatures, animated by hand; then computer-generated creatures. The digital monsters look more dangerous than Harryhausen’s; they are also louder and faster. They look hyperrealistic but move realistically. This realism diminishes, perhaps undermines, our sense of wonder and awe. Since we know that even with all their sound and fury they could never kill off the heroes of the tales in which they appear, their menace is significantly lessened. Harryhausen was aware of this phenomenon and its implications. About myth and cinema he observed: Fantasy in art and literature is as old as mythology itself. Film fantasy, being a more recent form of expression, has the added excitement of utilizing a flowing image and being in a state of constant motion; of combining sight, sound and imagination. No other medium of expression can project the complications of the imaginative, the wondrous or the bizarre as well as the motion picture.
This fully applies to the myth of the Argonauts, which is chock-full of the wondrous and the bizarre. Concerning the two opposite ways of creating bizarre wonders on screen, Harryhausen concluded:
Ray Harryhausen, Film Fantasy Scrapbook, rd ed. (London: Tantivy Press / San Diego: Barnes, ), .
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element – a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings . . . removed from the st century . . . [and] creatures from the mind . . . Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know . . . The way the creatures moved encouraged a sense that one was watching a miracle, but when the miraculous becomes commonplace, the concept of miracles ceases to be miraculous.
Carlo Rambaldi would make the same case later: Any kid with a computer can reproduce the special effects seen in today’s movies. The mystery’s gone. The curiosity that viewers once felt when they saw special effects has disappeared. It’s as if a magician had revealed all of his tricks . . . There’s no question that these computer films are well packaged but the charm has disappeared . . . The secret of creating what technology is unable to express lies in the work of the artisan, who is able to develop characteristics that touch our deepest emotions.
A comparison of the old and the new Jason and the Argonauts fully bears out Harryhausen and Rambaldi. It may be telling that in Willing’s version there is no bronze giant Talos, whose heroic death in Chaffey’s film has become a mini-epic in its own right and surpasses Apollonius’ version. Willing and his CGI technicians may have been smart enough to realize that they could not match the intensity of Talos’ agony – despite the fact that he is a monster and a deadly threat to the Argonauts. That Talos is made of bronze and cannot alter his facial expression but, in Harryhausen’s art, does express his suffering in such a way that viewers feel sorry for him is extraordinary. Willing instead has Jason subdue a giant bronze bull – not two, as in the myth – with which to plow the field. This bull looks impressive at first but soon becomes monotonous. Freudenthal gives his teen heroes an even bigger and more ferocious bovine monstrosity to fight, one that has a second jaw inside its toothy big one. Film buffs may remember the double-mawed monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien (). Here the smaller maw has three rotating drills that make us think of oil-well explorations. The three drills are probably not a vague echo of the dragon with triple tongue and hooked teeth that guards the Golden Fleece in Ovid. Willing’s and Freudenthal’s bull monsters are huge, noisy, fast, and
Harryhausen and Dalton, An Animated Life, and . Quoted from Rambaldi’s obituary notice in The Telegraph; www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries//Carlo-Rambaldi.html. A brief appreciation of this sequence is in my “Classical Myth on the Screen,” –. Ovid, Metamorphoses .–.
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Medea
ferocious. Like Willing’s dragon, they are not very smart. Harryhausen’s Talos was huge, too. But he was silent except for the eerie creaking of his bronze joints, calm, slow but deliberate in his movements, which thus became more menacing, and resourceful. He was humanized because human sympathy and understanding created him, not a machine. My quotations from Harryhausen and Rambaldi may not pertain directly to the different film presentations of the Golden Fleece, but they are worth considering because they relate, centrally, to everything that surrounds the Fleece and permeates the aura in which it functions, both visually and in the manner in which we are, or are not, gripped by that aura. Riccardo Freda was very clear about this aspect. In the context quoted above he went on to say: “The secret of cinema is the gradual discovery of décor, of the world that surrounds the characters.” Vittorio Cottafavi was equally emphatic: “Décor is a fundamental part of a film’s dramatic structure. It contributes no less to a film than the actors.” These statements apply to our subject. Harryhausen’s creatures provide the perfect context and supernatural surroundings for a Fleece that is more beautiful, more magical, and more mysterious than all those examined so far. There remain, however, two memorable presentations of the Fleece that were created by significantly different cinematic minds. Art films are often highly idiosyncratic. The personalities of our final films’ creators determined their works’ style and content. Art cinema is auteur cinema.
Medea One of the greatest auteurs in European cinema is Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was not only a screenwriter, director, and occasional actor but also a poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, translator, and painter. His work in cinema is an important aspect of his work as a poet. Pasolini developed the concept of the “cinema of poetry” (cinema di poesia). His Medea (), an adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, is a good illustration.
Harryhausen’s detailed account, with illustrations, in Harryhausen and Dalton, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, –, is revealing in this regard. Lourcelles and Mizrahi, “Entretien avec Riccardo Freda,” . Mourlet and Agde, “Entretien avec Vittorio Cottafavi,” . Literature on this aspect of cinema is immense. An overview in connection with classical literature and culture is in my Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), –. Summarized in my Cinema and Classical Texts, –.
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
The Argonauts’ voyage is the backstory to Euripides’ play, but Pasolini made it an integral part of his film. As he had done with Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles, Pasolini retold the entire myth. Medea begins with a five-year-old Jason in the care of his tutor, the centaur Chiron. He teaches Jason about life, the nature of myth, and the origins of human culture. As part of his lessons Jason learns about Phrixus, Helle, and the Golden Fleece. It brought fortune to kings and guaranteed that their rule would not end. (Willing later made even more of this.) Chiron then tells Jason about Aeson and Pelias: “It’s a complicated story.” Francisci and Chaffey filmed their Colchian locations in Italy, while Freda stayed mainly in the studio. Willing shot his exteriors near Antalya on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast. Pasolini outdid all of them. His Colchis was located at Göreme in Cappadocia, Turkey, now a World Heritage Site. It is striking for its rock formations, caves, and archaic Byzantine churches. This setting contrasts with the Italian locations that represent the city of Corinth, in which the tragedy of Medea unfolds. The opposition of nature and culture – the primeval rocks and caves of Colchis, Greece as seen in High Renaissance Italian architecture – could hardly be stronger. For Pasolini, the supposedly barbaric Colchians have a genuine civilization, whereas the Argonauts are a gang of ruffians mainly interested in loot. The exploitation of the Third World by First World capitalism and colonialism underlies Pasolini’s retelling of the myth. Colchian religion is personified in Medea, princess and priestess. She visits the temple, cut deep into a rocky hill, in which the Golden Fleece is
Figure .
Medea. The Golden Fleece in its sacred space. Screen capture.
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Medea
Figure .
Medea. The Golden Fleece: a profane touch. Screen capture.
being worshipped. It is spread out on wooden beams (Fig. .). In a vision Medea sees Jason entering but immediately withdrawing. She collapses. Then she looks at the Fleece pensively and, for a moment, smiles mysteriously. Expressive close-ups on her face tell us that she knows what is going to happen. Medea then shakes the Fleece as if to make sure that it is safely fastened. Or is she testing her strength to take it down? She leaves the temple after a long vigil. At home she rouses her brother Apsyrtus; both return to the temple. Apsyrtus removes the Fleece, and Medea delivers it to Jason. The great quester of myth is relieved of his task and of all danger; in the process he is stripped of all heroism. There is no guardian dragon, no Aeëtes to set up impossible tasks. When Jason’s hand touches the Fleece in close-up, Pasolini makes it look much less beautiful than it appeared before, although its color remains the same. Its empty eye sockets, previously barely noticeable but prominent in close-up, are clearly a bad omen (Fig. .). They contrast with Medea’s and Jason’s eyes as they look at each other in close-ups across the Fleece. It unites them now but will eventually become the precondition for their ruin. Not one word has been exchanged between them. Back in Iolcus, the Fleece has lost all its sheen. Pelias matter-of-factly informs Jason that kings are not obliged to keep their promises and that he has no intention to hand over his kingdom. Jason stays calm. Almost contemptuously, he drops the Fleece on the floor. Willing’s Jason later does the same. A final close-up on the Fleece reinforces Pasolini’s cultural criticism: still golden but no more than an old animal skin (Fig. .).
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
Figure .
Medea. The Golden Fleece: now worthless. Screen capture.
Jason tells Pelias: “Look there. Take your fleece, the sign of the perpetuity of power and of order! My undertaking has at least served me to realize that the world is greater than your kingdom.” Going well beyond Chiron’s earlier words, Jason adds what his own experiences have taught him: “that ram’s pelt, far away from your country, has no meaning at all any more.” He leaves with Medea. Shortly after, Jason sees Chiron again, who is now both a centaur and a human. Chiron tells Jason about Medea’s “spiritual catastrophe” and the disorientation of “an ancient woman [donna antica] in a world that does not know the one in which she has always believed.” Medea has helped Jason in Colchis; in Greece she is forced to abandon her origins and beliefs. After coming from Pelias’ palace, she is stripped of her elaborate native garment and dressed in Greek clothes. Symbolically, Medea’s fate is comparable to what happens with the Fleece: Far away from where either belongs, existence has no meaning any more. In Iolcus Medea’s appearance, like that of the Fleece, loses its luster. Soon Jason and Medea are in Corinth. It is now years later, and Medea’s life has acquired new meaning as wife and mother. But this does not last. Medea finds a new connection to her Colchian identity, and tragedy ensues. In retrospect it becomes clear why Pasolini chose to include the backstory to Euripides’ play in his adaptation. The Fleece has a more profound meaning in this than in any other film.
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The Golden Thing
The Golden Thing A notably different art film is this German version by four directors. Edgar Reitz, best known today for his epic three-part series Heimat (, , ), collaborated with Alf Brustellin, Ula Stöckl, a pioneer of feminist filmmaking, and Greek Nicos Perakis. Stöckl and Reitz wrote the script; Reitz also handled the cinematography. The English title of their film does not quite capture the tone of irony and slight contempt that the original implies: Das goldene Ding is better rendered “That Golden Thing” or “That Thing of Gold.” Since this is the least known of all versions, I translate some of the statements about it that Stöckl has published on her website. There she writes: The film takes place at a time when humans were still children (and the children humans) and everybody wanted only one thing: the golden thing. Eleven-year-old Jason, and with him Heracles, Castor and Pollux, Orpheus and other sons of Greek kings go on a treasure hunt on the Argo, their ship . . . In contrast to the myth as transmitted, here the Argonauts do not overcome dangers through their heroic courage or help from the gods but through reason. The divine powers can be explained logically, and the Argonauts reach their goal because they put their scientifically trained minds to use and leave nothing to the gods.
The filmmakers’ rationalizing approach to myth with all its supernatural elements is far from unique. It was a notable feature of the ancient understanding and criticism of myths. Concerning the Argonauts, it resurfaced, for example, in astronomer and archeologist (and more) Francesco Bianchini’s Hesperi et Phosphori nova phaenomena sive observationes circa planetam Veneris of . A modern commentator speaks of “the astronomical achievements of the argonauts” as understood by Bianchini and further writes: “the argonauts . . . he [Bianchini] regarded as the originators of the practice of naming celestial features after people.” Ancient sailors, of course, both in myth and reality, had to navigate according to the heavenly bodies whenever possible and thus practically
Source: www.ula-stoeckl.com/Film-Seiten/_Das_Goldene_Ding.html. My next two quotations are taken from this page as well. Greta Hawes, Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), is a thorough modern study of the subject. Quoted from J. L. Heilbron, The Incomparable Monsignor: Francesco Bianchini’s World of Science, History, and Court Intrigue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), and . Jason and the Argonauts appear elsewhere in the book, especially at – and–. Heilbron mostly denies the Argonauts their capital letter and occasionally calls the Argo “Argos” (, ).
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
had to acquire expertise in astronomy, mathematics, and related sciences. But the filmmaker’s view of myth is surprising as a practical modern application of an ancient concept: that in the age of myth mankind was in its infancy, which it eventually outgrew through greater understanding of the world. This knowledge came with the development from mythos to logos, as the title of a classic study on the subject once put it. So the Argonauts and Medea are here played by children. Stöckl reports that the four directors carried out prodigious amounts of research: We pored over whole libraries, chiefly relying on sources in J. J. Bachofen’s Mother Right, Hermann Fränkel’s Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios, and Apollonios himself. They confirmed our assumption that most of the ancient heroes must, in fact, have been children. The majority of them had put their chief heroic deeds behind them at age , ; Theseus, for example, who does not appear in our film, killed the Minotaur when he was .
The filmmakers’ research is admirable, but their conclusion about the Greek heroes’ age is unsupported by either Fränkel or Apollonius. To ancient Greeks and Romans, the Argonauts were not children but adults. Pindar, for example, specifically gives Jason’s age as twenty. Is then The Golden Thing a misbegotten undertaking, a labor of love doomed to failure from the start? Not at all. Once our initial surprise or disbelief has worn off, we take the young actors as seriously as we would take adults. This is by no means a kiddie movie. As Stöckl has put it: the team of filmmakers . . . were concerned in presenting to television viewers and filmgoers the ancient Greek Argonaut myth in such a way that they can readily understand it and also feel entertained . . . This intention is already expressed in the title, which popularizes the legendary Golden Fleece in the land of Colchis as a “thing.” Still, the filmmakers did not want to lower the myth to the level of pop culture or a cartoon, nor did they want to flatten it out; rather, and after intensive study of sources, they wanted to make it readily understandable, suspenseful, and demystified according to recently gained insights.
What then do the directors do with Apollonius and the myth? Their Aeson has previously failed at bringing the Golden Thing from Colchis and now wants to get another expedition under way. The reason is that the gold of
Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates (Stuttgart: Kröner, ; nd ed. ; several rpts.). For later contributions to the subject see, e.g., Richard Buxton (ed.), From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; rpt. ). Pindar, Pythian ..
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The Golden Thing
Colchis will make everybody in Iolcus rich and happy. The key to all this gold, we will learn later, is the Fleece. But Aeson realizes that a conventional ship cannot get through the Clashing Rocks. So he proposes to Argos to build “the fastest and most beautiful ship in the world.” Scienceminded Jason shows them what kind of ship to build. Then Pelias launches a coup d’état. Jason decides to sail and calls for all young princes to join him. The voyage of the Argo, filmed on locations on the Traunsee in Austria, takes up most of the film’s running time. In Colchis Jason boasts to Aeëtes that a large number of Greek kings have arrived to get the Golden Thing. Aeëtes is unfazed and tells Jason that, if only he has the courage, he could get it on his own. Aeëtes also summons Medea and announces that Jason will fight against his Invincibles, the film’s substitute for the sown warriors in the myth. The Invincibles are monstrous fighting machines worked by slaves from a large subterranean cave. In keeping with the filmmakers’ rationalistic approach, there is no dragon. Medea, who has been warned against helping Jason, nevertheless gives him some necessary information about the Invincibles. Jason asks her what the Golden Thing is. “An animal skin,” Medea says. “It is as valuable as all the treasures in the world.” While Jason defeats the Invincibles, Medea fetches the Golden Fleece from its subterranean hiding place in the temple of Hecate and joins the Argonauts on their flight from Colchis. She does not, of course, kill her brother Apsyrtus; instead, the two have a tender farewell scene. Together with the Argonauts, we get a first good look at the Fleece on board the Argo. Its outside is a pure white color, and it looks just like what it is: a real fleece. “Is that it?” asks one of the Argonauts. Medea turns the Fleece over and holds it up for all to see. Its underside is a realistic brown. A large map of the ancient world is drawn on it, with its bodies of water painted in gleaming gold and its rivers in black (Fig. .). The Argonauts gaze at it, and their point of view becomes ours when the camera, in a slowly traveling close-up, moves across the map. Its gold is now partly in the sunlight and partly in shadow. The sight is extremely beautiful. Red dots on the map, Medea explains, represent treasures. We see these in a tighter close-up. “Good luck, kings!” says Medea and holds the Fleece higher. The image freezes, the end credits roll, and the screen slowly fades to black. This ending could not be more moving. It is highly poetic, not least because Medea’s innocent wish has a deeper resonance for viewers who know what is in store for Jason and herself than it has for either of them at this moment. After all, they are still children. The Golden Thing thus
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Apollonius and the Golden Fleece
Figure . The Golden Thing. Medea displaying the Golden Fleece. Screen capture.
turns out to be more than just a thing. The Golden Thing is not entirely in the spirit of Apollonius or other classical authors, but it fully delivers what the directors wanted to achieve. Spectators may be entertained as much as they were intended to be and may even understand the myth better, but more than all that they are moved – perhaps more than they were intended to be. All the neo-mythological versions demonstrate a pleasing range of expressed or implied meanings of the Golden Fleece. As I quoted in Chapter , director Freda once put the matter succinctly: “The image must be a continual surprise to the eye.” A film should be a thauma idesthai. In a few of our films the Fleece itself is a golden wonder: a khryseion thauma idesthai.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey; or, The Case of the Insoluble Enigma
As early as , French pioneer Georges Méliès, the first wizard of cinema, made the first Homer film: L’île de Calypso: Ulysse et le géant Polyphème. In English it has variously been called The Mysterious Island and Ulysses and the Giant Polyphemus. This three-and-a-half-minute romanceand-adventure film condenses and combines two separate episodes of the Odyssey. Méliès’ free treatment of his source set the stage for all other films based on Homer. After a brief French film of (cf. below), the first long version the Odyssey was made in Italy in . Homer and the Odyssey have been integral to cinema history ever since. By necessity, film adaptations of long texts omit, rearrange, or otherwise tamper with the original in order to present a coherent story in a manageable amount of time. But what if a literary work or particular passage do not contain enough detailed information for visual adaptation? How is a filmmaker to translate into images what the text does not express clearly enough? Book of the Odyssey contains just such a situation: How does Odysseus shoot an arrow through twelve axes?
The Textual Problem The contest of the bow is one of the most suspenseful episodes in the Odyssey and a turning point of its plot. In Book , Penelope announced the contest to Odysseus, providing ancient and modern listeners or readers with basic information: those axes which, in his palace, he [Odysseus] used to set up in order so that, twelve in all, they stood in a row like timbers to hold a ship. He would stand far off, and send a shaft through them. Now I will set these up as a contest before my suitors, and the one who takes the bow in his hands, strings it with the greatest
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey ease, and sends an arrow clean through all the twelve axes shall be the one I will go away with . . .
In Book , the Homeric narrator reports on the arrangement of the axes: He [Telemachus] began by setting up the axes, digging one long trench for them all, and drawing it true to a chalkline, and stamped down the earth around them; wonder seized the onlookers at how orderly he set them up.
Odysseus, seated, strings his bow effortlessly and tests the string’s quality. Stringing a bow while seated is a feat in itself because of the great force required to bend the bow in order to set the string. (Modern archers, standing, use a bow stringer even for small bows.) Odysseus then puts an arrow on the string and the bow, aims, and shoots, all the while keeping his seat. He does not miss the hole of the first axe nor, as a result, any of the others, through which the arrow then passes. Here is his shot: He chose out a swift arrow that lay beside him uncovered on the table . . . Taking the string and the head grooves he drew to the middle grip, and from the very chair where he sat, bending the bow before him, let the arrow fly, nor missed any axes from the first handle on, but the bronze-weighted arrow passed through all, and out the other end.
More recent translations are comparable. Odysseus’ shot is a magnificent feat and worthy of a great hero. But several questions arise, for the text does not tell us all that much. How exactly are the axes set into the ground: helves down and blades up or the other way around? What is the size and shape of their blades? In the sequential arrangement of the axes, does one side of the blades face Odysseus, or does the cutting edge face away from him? What is he to
Homer, Odyssey .–; quoted from Richmond Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer (; rpt. New York: Harper, ), . Homer, Odyssey .–; Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer, . Homer, Odyssey .– and –; Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer, . Stanley Lombardo, Homer: Odyssey (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), , is similar if less vivid: Odysseus “Drew the bowstring and the notched arrow back. / He took aim and let fly, and the bronze-tipped arrow / Passed clean through the holes of all twelve axeheads / From first to last.” Emily Wilson, Homer: The Odyssey (New York: Norton, ; rpt. ), –, is matter-of-fact: “He laid it [the arrow] on the bridge, / then pulled the notch-end and the string together, / . . . With careful aim, / he shot. The weighted tip of bronze flew through / each axe head and then out the other side.” Cf. her note on Odyssey .– (). The same year Peter Green, Homer: The Odyssey (Oakland: University of California Press, ), , was more dramatic: Odysseus “set it [the arrow] on the bow’s hand grip, then . . . / . . . drew the string with the notched arrow, / took careful aim, and let fly. He did not miss one helve base / of all the axes: clean through and out at the end / flew his bronzeheavy shaft.” Note “helve base”! The technical terms notch and nock that appear in several of my quotations are used interchangeably, even though archers may disagree.
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The Textual Problem
shoot through, the metal of the blades or the wood of the helves? Both are unlikely. Or is he to shoot through holes, which is more likely? But which holes: the blades’ helve holes, set up so as to face Odysseus, or holes in the wood of the helves? How wide or narrow are these holes? Scholars have advanced various proposals and counterproposals about how Odysseus may have shot through twelve axes, but consensus seems to be out of reach. The standard modern commentary on the Odyssey provides us with a concise and clear summary and reviews all the problems. Even so, as a recent translator has concluded: No remotely credible explanation of this feat has ever been advanced . . . the holes [either of sockets in axe heads or hanging rings; cf. below] would seem likely to have been far too narrow; indeed, it seems more than likely that the feat as described is a physical impossibility.
Below, I will concentrate on the chief ways in which the axe arrangement and the shot have been understood by classical scholars, archery experts, and filmmakers and on how it has been presented on the screen. I omit any further consideration of the fact, now demonstrable with high-speed photography, that arrows shot from bows do not move rigidly and not in an absolutely straight line. A charming illustration occurs in the Pixar film Brave (), an animated feature made digitally. We observe the young heroine’s greatest shot in slow motion: The feathers of the arrow’s fletching leave a mark on her cheek, and the arrow itself flexes as it passes the bow. A well-known prose translation of the Homeric passage, with comment, gives us a practical demonstration of the difficulty inherent in it. British novelist Samuel Butler was famous for his eccentric theory that the Odyssey had been composed by a young woman. In , he rendered the lines in question like this: he laid it [the arrow] on the centre-piece of the bow, and drew the notch of the arrow and the string toward him, still seated on his seat. When he had taken aim he let fly, and his arrow pierced every one of the handle-holes of the axes from the first onwards till it had gone right through them.
Manuel Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” in Joseph Russo, Manuel Fernández-Galiano, and Alfred Heubeck, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. : Books XVII–XXIV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; rpt. ), –, at –. These pages and their bibliographical references to earlier scholarship are a good starting point for any analysis. A survey, with references, appears in Mario Zambarbieri, L’Odissea com’è: Lettura critica, vol. : Canti XIII–XXIV (Milan: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, ), –. Even so, there is controversy. Ralph Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, ), , has charged Fernández-Galiano with “special pleading.” Green, Homer: The Odyssey, (in introduction). The continuation of this quotation is valuable as well. Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, the Use She Made of the Iliad, and How the Poem Grew under Her Hands (London: Fyfield, ). A second edition appeared in . The book has been reprinted frequently.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
A note number follows the last word here quoted. The part of the note that is of interest reads as follows: Surely the difficulty of this passage has been overrated. I suppose the iron part of the axe to have been wedged into the handle, or bound securely to it – the handle being half-buried in the ground. The axe would be placed edgeways towards the archer, and he would have to shoot his arrow through the hole into which the handle was fitted when the axe was in use. Twelve axes were placed in a row all at the same height, all exactly in front of one another, all edgeways to Ulysses whose arrow passed through all the holes from the first onward . . . The feat is absurdly impossible, but our authoress sometimes has a soul above impossibilities.
Surely the difficulty of Butler’s own passage has been underrated, for he is far from providing a lucid exposition of the axes’ set-up. If, as he says, the handles were half-buried in the ground so that the axe-heads were raised to the level at which a seated archer could shoot at them, then the axe blades must have been wedged into the handle holes. So the holes apparently were filled, not empty for an arrow to pass through. The feat is absurdly impossible. Only Butler’s alternative – one that no one else seems ever to have considered – in which the axe blades are somehow fastened (with strings?) to the side of the handles could be said to make the shot possible. But this is far-fetched. Our author, we may conclude, sometimes has a soul above the impossible or the outlandish. Butler’s comment is revealing about the quandaries that Homer’s lines have caused scholars and translators. In general, philologists have convinced or persuaded only themselves. Nor have they succeeded in drawing a majority of others on their side. A striking example involved two of the twentieth century’s greatest Hellenists: Denys Page and Walter Burkert. Page proposed a set-up of the axes that Burkert roundly rejected. (On this below.) The conclusion is unavoidable that the Homeric poet did not himself understand how exactly the contest of the bow was to have taken place. Hence the endless fascination that this scene has exerted.
From the Verbal to the Visual Philologists proceed from textual considerations. But what if we were to give the visual nature of our scene greater weight? Screen adaptations render
Butler’s Odyssey translation was intended as a companion piece to his book on the authoress, which had included selections from the Odyssey. His translation is here quoted from Henry Festing Jones and A. T. Bartholomew (eds.), The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, vol. : The Odyssey Rendered into English Prose (London: Cape, ), (both passages). The volume reprints () a floor plan (“The House of Ulysses”) from Butler’s earlier book that shows Odysseus’ seat and the set-up of the axes.
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From the Verbal to the Visual
readers’ mental images of a text specific. This process may come at some cost to a reader’s freedom of imagination, but there are advantages. Mental images evoked by a text are replaced by concrete images that in turn call for intellectual engagement from their viewers. This circumstance can become significant for critics who deal with problematic passages in a text. These they approach and analyze in their minds and with their minds’ eyes, but they do not usually re-create their visual qualities, let alone stage such scenes in order to get at the heart of their problems. Here the choices of directors who film a difficult scene can be of value because they may show re-creations that offer new ways of thinking about source texts or of demonstrating textual complexities more vividly than any strictly philological analyses could do. Such a gain is not always to be expected, and screen adaptations frequently do not adhere closely to the originals on which they are based. But accomplished and dedicated filmmakers can give all readers of Homer what no other creative artists can contribute to the various ways in which an enigmatic text passage may be understood. For this reason alone, familiarity with the nature of filmic narrative and mise-en-scène can become important for our appreciation of Homer’s influence in our time. Its study might even be considered as an extension of what traditional philology is concerned with. The insoluble enigma of a text evokes – and provokes – various options in moving images that seem to solve the original mystery but, when viewed in their totality, reveal that such a solution is still not the case. From this point of view, we may be reminded of all the visual and textual approaches to Douris’ dragon vase examined in Chapter . There, too, the totality of interpretations did not solve the original’s mysterious character. The following pages approach the Homeric text from a perspective not previously considered: the re-creations of Odysseus’ shot in moving images. Here, too, there is no agreement, but the different ways in which motion pictures have rendered the flight of Odysseus’ arrow through, across, or between the axes are instructive. Renditions in moving images from the cinema’s silent era to computer videos represent a major stage in the long reception history of Homeric epic. They also demonstrate Homer’s undiminished presence in the time of the image. A disclaimer is appropriate here. The Homeric text itself reveals that the problems inherent in the set-up and shape of the axes and in the exact manner of Odysseus’ shot have proven insoluble. It is therefore not my intention to advance a new interpretation, let alone one to supersede all others, but to examine the imaginative ways in which the contest of the bow has been shown on screen. These are radically different from each other, sometimes mutually exclusive or contradictory. But so are scholarly theories.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
No Clear Picture T. E. Lawrence, who published his translation of the Odyssey in , was the first to adduce the cinema in connection with the difficulties inherent in Homer’s passage. (I turn to his translation below.) About one particular view of Odysseus’ shot, Lawrence commented: “it would require a slowmotion cinema to prove that his arrow passed so and no higher.” Lawrence was right. Only seeing is believing. Thirty years later Robert Fitzgerald, who published his Odyssey translation in , turned to the problem in a long “Postscript,” dated the following year: “How precisely are we to visualize the contest with Odysseus’ hunting bow . . . in Book XXI? . . . The Greek is ambiguous or sketchy.” Walter Burkert later went so far as to observe that this passage is in strong contrast to Homer’s general enargeia: “Homer’s vividness, often praised, leaves us in the lurch.” The year before, one scholar had begun his analysis with a reference to Aristotle’s to alogon: “irrationality.”
The quotation is from a letter dated February , . It is no. in David Garnett (ed.), The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London: Cape, ), –, at . There are several later reprints and editions. I return to this letter below. Robert Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey (Garden City: Doubleday / Anchor Books, ), . The original edition, by the same publisher, did not contain Fitzgerald’s reflections on the Odyssey and his version (= pages – of the reprint). There are several other reprints and later editions of this translation, including a posthumous one for Everyman’s Library () with an introduction by Seamus Heaney. Walter Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” Grazer Beiträge, (), –; quotation at : “Homers oft gepriesene Anschaulichkeit läßt uns im Stich.” This article links Odysseus’ shot to ancient Egyptian textual and visual parallels and contains extensive listings of previous scholarship. It was reprinted in Walter Burkert, Kleine Schriften, vol. : Homerica, ed. Christoph Riedweg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ), –. Future references will be to its original publication. On the Egyptian background see further Wolfgang Decker, Sports and Games of Ancient Egypt, tr. Allen Guttmann (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), – and – (notes; chapter section titled “Target Archery”) and (bibliography); more briefly: Zambarbieri, L’Odissea com’è, –. Additional discussion and detailed references are in P. Walcot, “Odysseus and the Contest of the Bow: The Comparative Evidence,” Studi micenei ed egeo-anatolici, (), –, and in Christoph Auffarth, Der drohende Untergang: “Schöpfung” in Mythos und Ritual im alten Orient und in Griechenland am Beispiel der Odyssee und des Ezechielbuches (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), –, especially –. Bernard Sergent, “Arc,” Mètis, nos. – (), –; Pierre Sauzeau, “A propos de l’arc d’Ulysse: des steppes à Ithaque,” in André Hurst and Françoise Létoublon (eds.), La mytholgie et l’Odyssée (Geneva: Droz, ), –; and, much more briefly, Joseph Russo, “Odysseus’ Trial of the Bow as Symbolic Performance,” in Anton Bierl, Arbogast Schmitt, and Andreas Willi (eds.), Antike Literatur in neuer Deutung (Munich: Saur, ), –, all examine Indo-Iranian and Indo-European (including Greek and some later) aspects of archery. Later references to Egyptian and Near Eastern parallels and a detailed discussion of Odysseus’ bow are in Jonathan L. Ready, “Why Odysseus Strings His Bow,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, (), –. Carlo Gallavotti, “Note omeriche e micenee,” Studi micenei ed egeo-anatolici, (), –, at – (“La gara dell’arco nell’Odissea”). Cf. Aristotle, Poetics a and its context.
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No Clear Picture
Presumably for such reasons, early translators like George Chapman and Thomas Hobbes could leave the matter concise but not precise: Chapman (1614–1616): He measur’d by his arme (as if not knowne The length were to him), nockt it then, and drew, And through the Axes, at the first hole, flew The steele-charg’d arrow. Hobbes (1675): Then to the Bowe he set a shaft, and there Sitting, he shot through the Axes, not one misses.
How then is Odysseus’ shot to be presented in a visual adaptation? A stage or film director’s task is more difficult than a translator’s, for the entire sequence has to be shown clearly on the screen, from preparation to shot to result. Fitzgerald, too, directed his readers’ attention to this matter: “If you think of the poem as a play or a cinema – inevitable if not irresistible thoughts – you will find many problems for the set designer and the property man.” And not only for these. Fitzgerald may have been rather sniffy about the cinema (“not irresistible”), but he identified it as an important medium (“inevitable”) for our understanding of the contest. Three decades later, readers could consult Ralph Hexter’s guide to Fitzgerald’s translation. At the beginning of his “Preface,” Hexter praises Fitzgerald’s version as “astoundingly vivid” and “a truly monumental accomplishment” and observes: “it seems to me to capture in English what I appreciate in Homer’s Greek.” Still, Hexter announces that he will, on numerous occasions, disagree with Fitzgerald. Odysseus’ shot is a case in point: There has been much controversy about exactly what the shot consisted of, controversies based on difficulties in interpreting the Greek, which the translator [Fitzgerald] has quite rightly smoothed. Even more than a commentator, at controversial points a translator must decide on one interpretation and present it coherently . . . There are some controversies on which
George Chapman, Homer’s Odysses .–; quoted from Allardyce Nicoll (ed.), Chapman’s Homer, vol. : The Odyssey and the Lesser Homerica, nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; rpt. ), . Thomas Hobbes, Odyssey .–; quoted from The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. : Odyssey, ed. Eric Nelson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey, . Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, xi.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey the book will never be closed, and Odysseus’ shot is likely to belong to that group.
Fitzgerald discusses the matter in some detail; Hexter briefly explains his dissent and his own preference. He concludes with this observation: “Of course, enjoyment of the shot and our understanding of its place in the larger narrative is not dependent on our having an absolutely clear, much less a certain, picture of the technical details.” Here Hexter echoes Burkert, who correctly pointed out that the very momentum of Homer’s storytelling art made the lack of clarity regarding specific details insignificant. Whereas scholars may easily become obsessed with specifics, listeners of Homeric epic and readers of the Odyssey may momentarily wonder but need not become distracted. For any visual retelling, however, the situation is dramatically different. Here, as preliminary cases, I turn to two versions on the stage. Gregory Doran, then an assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company and later its artistic director, once said on the matter in connection with a production of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, a version of the Odyssey: no safety officer would allow us to fire an arrow with the audience sitting so close. It had to be done by trickery . . . We settled for pairs of double headed axes crossed with fixed blades, set up in a row one pair behind the next so that the test is to fire between the holes made by the curving axe tips. When Odysseus fires the arrow we misdirect the audience’s attention, like any good stage magician. The arrow seems to leave Odysseus’ bow and ends up shivering in the mast behind the axes. In fact Odysseus has palmed his arrow and a second arrow has been secretly lodged in the mast when no one was looking and “twanged” to look and sound as if it has just hit the target. The twang is in fact provided by flicking a spring doorstop attached behind the mast.
The following year, German stage director Hansgu¨nther Heyme used a laser beam and hissing sound effect for Odysseus’ arrow in Die Heimkehr des Odysseus (“Odysseus’ Return”), a theatrical adaptation by Heyme and a collaborator that was based on German classicist Wolfgang Schadewaldt’s
Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, . See Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey, –; Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, –. Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, –. Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” : “der Schwung des ganzen die Unklarheiten des Details bravourös u¨berspielt.” Greg Doran, “Staging the Odyssey,” Omnibus, (), –; quotation at –. The anachronism that ancient (or medieval, etc.) archers fired their arrows is amusing but has no bearing on the matter at hand. No mast is involved in the original.
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No Clear Picture
well-known translation of the Odyssey. This, too, is a clever, appropriate, and effective modernization. Both versions must have worked splendidly on the stage, but misdirection of the audience’s attention would not be appropriate in a film even if it were possible. Film directors face a tougher task than stage directors. The decisive point is Hexter’s expression clear picture. Such a picture can be static – a painting or drawing – or moving: a moment in a film. Ancient art is no help for our understanding of Odysseus’ shot, for we have no vase paintings or sculptures that reveal the exact set-up of the axes. Images on Greek vases only show us Odysseus shooting at the suitors. This lack of images may be the more remarkable in that Odysseus’ bow is the most heroic weapon in all of ancient epic. The text gives us a long description of its history – rather, of its ancestry. We are, however, not told what exactly it looked like. Odysseus’ bow is “impractically large.” It may well have been what scholars call the composite or “Scythian” bow. The Trial of the Bow, a painting by American artist N. C. Wyeth, one of the illustrations in George Herbert Palmer’s prose translation of the Odyssey, seems fairly close to that kind of bow. The most magnificent bow that Odysseus has ever wielded on screen is the one that he uses in Franco Rossi’s Odissea. It consists not of wood but of deer
I owe this information to Horst-Dieter Blume, an eyewitness. On the adaptation see the director’s alltoo-brief comments in Hansgu¨nther Heyme, “Homer heute,” in Anton Bierl and Peter von Möllendorff (eds.), Orchestra: Drama, Mythos, Bu¨hne (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, ), –, at –. Heyme had previously worked on television and stage adaptations of the Iliad. Descriptions and images are at LIMC VI.–, s.v. “Mnesteres II,” B–, especially –. The bow’s history is given at Odyssey .–. It exceeds all other comparable reports, including that of Agamemnon’s scepter at Iliad .–. So Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” , with references to the relevant lines in the Odyssey. On this bow see the comments by Frank H. Stubbings, “Arms and Armour,” in Alan J. B. Wace and Stubbings (eds.), A Companion to Homer (London: Macmillan, ; rpt. ), –, at –, with figs. (a drawing of such a bow) and (drawing of Theban coin showing a bow being strung by an archer in sitting position). Stubbings’s fig. is reproduced in Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, xci (fig. ); the attribution of this image on the book’s copyright page (iv) is erroneous. See also LIMC VI.–, s.v. “Odysseus” b (Odysseus, seated, with bow). Details about the bow in Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” –, at –; and Decker, Sports and Games of Ancient Egypt, –. Fernández-Galiano, , reproduces the drawing of a Skythian bow from Édouart Delebecque, “Le jeu de l’arc de l’‘Odyssée’,” in Jean Bingen, Guy Cambier, and Georges Nachtergael (eds.), Le monde grec: Pensée, littérature, histoire: Hommages à Claire Préaux (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, ), –, at (fig. ). See especially D. L. Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), – and – (notes), a section titled “Appendix: The Arrow and the Axes” (hereafter cited as “Appendix”). The painting, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, can be viewed online at www.philamuseum .org/collections/permanent/.html?mulR=|.
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Figure .
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Odissea (). Telemachus, holding Odysseus’ bow, and Odysseus. Screen capture.
antlers and looks spectacularly heroic (Fig. .). Here the bow’s brace height – the distance between the string and the bow at rest – is far too large for anyone to pull back the string at sufficient length, or with sufficient tension of the string, to achieve the force necessary to transfer the bow’s energy via the string to the arrow. The longer this “power stroke,” as modern archers call it, the greater the energy being transferred. The bow is impractically large – one can hardly imagine anyone taking it on a hunt in forest or underbrush – but realism is not the point. This bow more than any other deserves the heroic ancestry that Homer gave it. While the film’s narrator tells us about the bow in an abbreviated version of Homer’s lines, we watch Penelope and a few of her faithful maids entering a dark storage room and retrieving the bow, a quiver full of arrows, and a basket that contains the axe blades. This scene and our first glimpse of the bow prepare us for the dramatic turning point that is to follow. As we have seen, the Homeric passage does not provide enough information for any clear picture. Wyeth had to imagine various details of the
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Odissea ()
scene he painted and invented several specifics, not least his color choices. The task of filmmakers is more complex because they must show an entire scene, not only the particular moment a painter can choose. How then is Odysseus’ feat to be presented in a visual adaptation, from preparation to shot to result? A director has to take modern sensibilities into account as well. In Homer, for example, Odysseus strings the bow and shoots while being seated, as he is in Wyeth’s painting. But in no motion picture made for adult audiences does any actor so shoot; rather, he is either standing or kneeling. The reason is that, in a decisive and suspenseful moment like this, a seated archer would not appear heroic enough. Greeks and Romans, of course, had no problem with seated archers. Apollo, the first archer to appear in the Western literary tradition, sits down while he shoots his pestilential arrows into the Greek camp in Book of the Iliad. The gilded statue of Apollo as seated archer in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (; director’s cut, ) looks certainly heroic, but it is only a statue, not a living archer. The direction of Odysseus’ shot is the subject of considerable debate as well: Does it take place entirely within the hall, or does Odysseus shoot into the courtyard outside, as Wyeth has him do? Films and videos all keep the action completely indoors. And the table mentioned in Homer has never once made it onto a liveaction screen. It is highly unlikely that any screenwriter or director consulted Homeric scholarship, although there may have been one exception. Nevertheless, similarities to scholarly hypotheses in set-ups on the silver screen, on television, and in animation are astonishing. Let us now see how imaginative filmmakers have tackled the set-up of the twelve axes and Odysseus’ shot. Comparisons of their different presentations with some of the theories scholars have advanced will prove instructive.
Odissea () This is first full-scale epic version of the Odyssey, about forty-five minutes long and emphasizing action and spectacle. It was made by Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe di Liguoro, and Adolfo Padovan. At this early stage of epic filmmaking, everything is still kept simple. Odysseus’ slim composite
Nevertheless, as Penelope reports (Odyssey .–), Odysseus had performed such a shot several times before: from a distance and standing up. This, too, has been variously proposed by scholars; cf. Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” note , and Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” –.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure .
Odissea (). Odysseus (extreme l.), the axes, and the suitors. Screen capture.
bow is noticeably large, spanning about two meters. It is already strung when Penelope shows it to the suitors. The spacious but crowded hall in Odysseus’ palace is decorated with fancifully painted pillars. But it is quite dark. This darkness is realistic for a Bronze-Age interior, highly atmospheric as a hint at the imminent doom of the suitors, and disappointing to viewers when Odysseus’ arrow flies from the foreground into a virtually black background. His feat is barely visible. The axes, of which there seem to be only six, are not aligned as carefully as Homer had Telemachus set them up. They resemble Minoan-type double-bladed axes (pelekyes, labryes; more on these below) and are stuck into the dirt floor by their handles and with their blades, sideways, at the top (Fig. .). But the way Odysseus’ shot is staged and filmed borders on the bizarre. Odysseus shoots standing up but with his back to the viewers. His body blocks out the row of axes as he shoots. Given the current state of the film stock, which has severely deteriorated, we have to look very closely even to see Odysseus’ arrow flying, a bit wobbly, into the distance – and a little to the right of the axe blades! Moreover, their height is only about half Odysseus’
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Odissea ()
height, so he cannot have shot his arrow horizontally through or across the top of the blades. Instead, the arrow flies well above the axes. Immediately afterwards Odysseus shoots a second arrow at one of the suitors, and the massacre is on. Penelope then recognizes him, and the film is over. Why did the directors present Odysseus’ shot in such a manner? The scene may not have been all that disappointing over a century ago, when viewers were much more easily thrilled. The film’s surviving footage, here and elsewhere, looks a bit jumpy, especially when the images continue after an intertitle. This is the case, too, shortly after Odysseus’ shot: a superimposition of Athena, Odysseus’ guide and helper, is missing several frames. We should therefore not judge the filmmakers too harshly. More important, however, is another consideration. If Odysseus’ shot is almost impossible and the source text unclear about its set-up, how could anyone in the early days of the new medium stage and film this scene? The fact that Odysseus is virtually hiding his feat from eager viewers probably owes less to the filmmakers’ clumsiness than to sheer necessity. They simplify and abbreviate matters and fudge the decisive moment by barely showing Odysseus’ shot. Presumably they had to. Their film may fall short of the expectations of later cinephiles and lovers of Homer, but in spite of its anticlimactic contest, it is still an honorable attempt to introduce Homer to popular culture. By contrast, the scene in Le retour d’Ulysse (“Ulysses’ Return”) in the short (ca. twelve minutes) French version of three years earlier had included only Antinous’ futile and Odysseus’ easy bending of the bow but no axes. An intertitle characterizes Antinous as having become effeminate by a soft life of pleasure. Odysseus, contemptuous of him and the other weaklings, shoots Antinous, kills one of the suitors with his sword, and is reunited with wife and son. The film consists of fourteen tableaux. It was a prestigious Film d’Art production, with a script by a member of the Académie Française. Actors came from the Comédie Française, of which Charles Le Bargy, one of the film’s directors, was also a member. His co-director was André Calmette; together they had made The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, a milestone of early epic cinema, just prior to their Odyssey film. Both were history and Homer for the educated.
A contemporary article, with illustrations, of the film while in production is appropriately hagiographic: Gustave Babin, “Le théâtre cinématographique,” L’Illustration, (October , ), –. The issue’s cover showed another moment behind the scenes.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Ulysses () The first adaptation of the Odyssey in the sound era, abbreviated and free but still attractive, was the Italian-American co-production Ulisse (Ulysses, ), directed by versatile veteran Mario Camerini in a widescreen format, color, and D (but generally released in D). Kirk Douglas plays an Odysseus who proves himself cunning, very energetic, and as bloody as the early s would allow an action hero to be. The screenplay was principally by British-born Hugh Gray, a man with a broad education in classical and modern languages and literature, ancient philosophy, the theater and, to a smaller degree, archeology and history. Although no details are available, it is tempting to assume that Gray is behind the unusual arrangement of the axes through which Odysseus shoots his arrow. Their basic shape and alignment, in which the archer sees the handle holes but not the blades, do not violate Homer’s text, but the axes are not put into a ditch in the ground. Instead, servants carry into the hall a long wooden pole, into which one-bladed axes (hêmipelekka) have been struck by their blades (Fig. .). The holes to be shot through are for the helves. With the exception of the wooden beam, this is one of the chief possibilities that
The obituary by R. Hawkins, J. Young, and H. Goodman, “Hugh Joseph Gray, Theater Arts: Los Angeles – Professor Emeritus,” in David Krogh (ed.), University of California: In Memoriam, (Oakland: University of California, ), –, gives an outline of Gray’s academic and cinematic credentials. It is accessible at http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId= hbdnbm&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div&toc.depth=&toc.id=. The production history of the film, which had begun with a different director and a script that was never used, makes any assessment nearly impossible. Information on the scripts, unfortunately not very detailed, is in Bernard Eisenschitz, “Ulysse: Homère, pas Joyce,” in Alberto Farassino (ed.), Mario Camerini (Locarno: Éditions du Festival international du film de Locarno / Editions Yellow Now, ), –, at –, and in “Dossier Odyssée,” in Farassino (ed.), –. Gray is not mentioned in Farassino’s book. Earlier, Sergio G. Germani, Mario Camerini (Florence: Il Castoro Cinema / “La Nuova Italia” Editrice, ), analyzed the film (–) and reported that, according to Camerini’s recollection, contributions by Gray and others to an earlier script were not used. The term hêmipelekkon occurs at Iliad ., , and in an archery context with single- and double-headed axes as prizes; cf. the note on line in Nicholas Richardson, The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. : Books XXI–XXIV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), –. P. V. Jones, Homer’s Odyssey: A Companion to the Translation of Richmond Lattimore (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, ; rpt. ), (on Odyssey .) comments that Odysseus’ axes may well be double axes since he won them in a contest (or contests; Odyssey . and ) and Meriones, the winning archer in the Iliad, receives the pelekyes, not the hêmipelekka. Jones, –, summarizes and briefly comments on the chief possibilities for the axes’ set-up; his illustrations on the following page are taken from Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” and Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey. Jones’s caption is slightly misleading (read “commentary” for “edition”). Figs. A–D in Ill. of James V. Morrison, A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, ), , are rather crude redrawings after Fernández-Galiano (and Page). The lines there added to indicate the flight of the arrow are such as to reveal that Odysseus
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Ulysses ()
Figure .
Ulysses. Odysseus and the arrangement of the axes. Screen capture.
scholars have adduced for Odysseus’ shot (Figs. .–.). Its origin is in antiquity. In the words of Denys Page: “Twelve axe-heads, without handles, are to be set up on edge in a line, with their holes facing the archer, who shoots through them as through a discontinuous tunnel.” A bit condescendingly, Page immediately added: “This was the best that the ancient commentators could do.”
could not have succeeded. One additional figure in Morrison will be reproduced and discussed below. Morrison himself has nothing to say on the axes’ set-up. My Fig. . is from Delebecque, “Le jeu de l’arc de l’‘Odyssée’,” (fig. ), reproduced, but in reverse, in Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” . Delebecque credits Jean Bérard, “Le concours de l’arc dans l’‘Odyssée’,” Révue des études grecques, fasc. – (), – (no ills.), with this set-up. Cf. also Page, “Appendix,” –. My Fig. . is from Page, (fig. ). Page, , traces his explanation to the Etymologicum Magnum, the Byzantine encyclopedia of ca. . Page had first proposed it in (Page, note ) and published it as “A Problem in Homer’s Odyssey,” Epistêmonikê Epetêris, nd ser., (–), –. The arrangement was first advanced by Chr. Blinkenberg, Archaeologische Studien (Kopenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Verlag / Leipzig: Harassowitz, ), – (“Das Bogenschiessen im Megaron des Odysseus”). Information about related scholarship is in Joseph Russo, “Books XVII–XX,” in Russo, Fernández-Galiano, and Heubeck, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. , –, at (on lines –). Page, “Appendix,” –.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure . The axes according to Delebecque, “Le jeu de l’arc de l’‘Odyssée.’”
Figure . The axes according to Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey.
The beam is then deposited on a foundation at a height that makes it possible for Odysseus to shoot standing up (Fig. .). His arrow goes through the helve holes (Figs. .–.). The shot itself occurs very quickly, as it must; inattentive viewers easily miss it. But the axes are too
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Ulysses ()
Figure . Ulysses. The axe set-up. Screen capture.
close to each other to account for an arrow’s left and right flexing; they ought to have been set up at least one arrow’s length apart. Camerini carefully prepares his viewers by including an effective camera pan across the axes and their holes. He resorts to rapid editing before Odysseus’ shot to heighten suspense. During the massacre Odysseus, in heroic fury, pulls out a blade to kill one of the suitors. The moment is adapted from the death of Leiodes, whom Odysseus kills with a sword. Camerini’s film delivers romance, spectacle, and action. Looking back over film history from today’s vantage point, we could hardly ask for anything more from a film made when the resurgence of classical antiquity in European and American cinema had not yet begun. Camerini’s film announced the spectacular things to come: ever bigger, ever longer, ever more elaborate epics on ancient myth and history that would dominate the screen for about a decade.
Homer, Odyssey .–.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure . Ulysses. Odysseus’ arrow (top. r.) going through the helve holes. Screen capture.
Figure . Ulysses. The arrow’s progress. Screen capture.
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Odissea ()
Figure .
The axes and the trench according to Stubbings, “Crafts and Industries.”
Odissea () Rossi’s film was produced for public European television and filmed in color on attractive Mediterranean locations. It did not have internationally famous stars but featured a number of accomplished actors and actresses from screen and stage. Despite its running time of over six hours, it was an intimate epic and the better for it. This Odissea is the best and most faithful adaptation of Homer to date and has much to offer classical scholars. The sequence of Odysseus’ shot is highly atmospheric. Two maidservants carry a basket with the axe heads into the hall, and Odysseus himself sets them up, but not in a trench. The trench arrangement in Homer can be in two ways. In one, the earth, heaped up along one side of the trench, serves as foundation for the axe heads (Fig. .). The other requires an elevated floor for the shot to be possible from the archer’s sitting position (Fig. .). The arrow is to
Brief appreciations of this extraordinary film are in Arthur J. Pomeroy, ‘Then It Was Destroyed by the Volcano’: The Ancient World in Film and on Television (London: Duckworth, ), –, and in my “Leaves of Homeric Storytelling: Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and Franco Rossi’s Odissea,” in Eleonora Cavallini (ed.), Omero mediatico: Aspetti della ricezione omerica nella civiltà contemporanea, nd ed. (Bologna: d.u.press, ), –, at –. The film was released theatrically in a greatly condensed version. The illustration is taken from Frank H. Stubbings, “Crafts and Industries,” in Wace and Stubbings (eds.), A Companion to Homer, –, at (fig. ). A version of Stubbings’s illustration, very similar but not identical, is reproduced in Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” (fig. ), and Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, xcii (fig. ). The illustration is from L. G. Pocock, “The Arrow and the Axe-Heads in the Odyssey,” American Journal of Philology, (), –, at (fig. A–C). Pocock’s fig. A is reproduced in Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” (fig. ). For the layout of Odysseus’ hall, see Pocock, (fig. ).
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Figure .
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
The axes and the trench according to Pocock, “The Arrow and the AxeHeads in the Odyssey.”
pass through the holes for the wooden handles, as was the case in Camerini’s film. The axes themselves could be double-headed (pelekyes), with one blade partly embedded in the ground and the other at the top. Ancient commentators on Homer had originally proposed this arrangement. Or they could be single-headed (hêmipelekka), with the blade pointing down, again as in Camerini’s version. Rossi shows us a different set-up with different axes. The hall in Odysseus’ home features a wide and shallow flight of stairs, which leads down from the royal quarters. The higher floor level continues
It was revived by W. B. Stanford, “A Reconsideration of the Problem of the Axes in Odyssey XXI,” The Classical Review, no. (May, ), –, and followed by Stubbings, “Crafts and Industries,” –. Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” (especially–), summarizes this view and rejects it a bit sarcastically. Delebecque, “Le jeu de l’arc de l’‘Odyssée’,” , has a drawing (fig. ) in which Odysseus shoots down from the higher level of his hall (megaron) along the sloping floor (without steps) of the courtyard outside the porch (prodomos) and through the holes of single-bladed axes.
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Odissea ()
Figure .
Odissea (). The hall and the stairs, with maids (l.)., Telemachus (ctr.), and Odysseus and Antinous (both r.). Screen capture.
on the side of the steps. Viewers can clearly discern, screen right, that it has been built with layers of small to medium-sized tree trunks, which are covered by a dirt floor. Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, has been sitting halfway down the steps and immediately to the left (again from the viewer’s perspective) of the elevated part of the floor. Its wooden beams are just a little lower than the top of his head (Fig. .). Telemachus vainly attempts to bend the bow, which was already strung when Penelope fetched it. This unrealistic simplification of Homer is surprising in such a careful adaptation. Telemachus throws Antinous the bow, challenging him to be the first in the contest. While handling it, Antinous hears a sound from off screen and turns around. Odysseus has begun calmly to strike the blades of the axes, hitherto unseen, in a straight line into the ends of the wooden foundation of the higher floor (Fig. .). He does not need a carpenter’s line to do so. These axes, having been stored in their basket, have no helves. For use, they would be stuck on wooden shafts. Odysseus continues to plant the axe blades. Their shape is remarkable. They are almost rectangular, and
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Figure .
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Odissea (). Odysseus setting up the axes, with Eurycleia watching him. Screen capture.
their sharp side, which is a little longer than the opposite side, reveals a slight outward curve. In this way the upper and lower ends of each blade form an edge. It is one of these edges that Odysseus strikes into the wood. The axes are neither pelekyes nor hêmipelekka. Their blades are hollow, and the arrow is to travel through their center. This ingenious design makes the axes easier to use, for such a blade weighs less than a solid one. We can readily believe that two women can lift and carry twelve of them. Still, a blade like this is probably not as effective and powerful as a solid blade and is unlikely to have existed in the Bronze Age: “We do not have enough archaeological information to entertain . . . theories about various different types of perforated axe-blade, which might allow the arrow to pass through a hole of some sort in each blade.” It may be an understatement to call the blades on view in
Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” .
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Odissea ()
Figure .
An “abnormal” axe shape according to Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey.
Rossi’s Odissea perforated, but the point is applicable. If perforation is unlikely, a larger space forming an even bigger hole, as here, is even less likely. In any case, here and in some other set-ups examined later, shooting through large enough openings in axe blades is not a great challenge to an archer. A single-bladed axe with a large hole was proposed long ago and has found supporters (Fig. .), although it has also elicited the sarcastic verdicts “illusion” and “abnormal” from Denys Page. The axes in Rossi’s film are of a different kind, but from a historical or archeological point of view they, too, would have to be judged illusory. Their appearance, however, is in keeping with most of the other weapons that are on display throughout this film. Even Polyphemus’ giant axe, double-bladed but not a labrys, has a circular hole in one blade. Elsewhere, sword blades are wide enough to have elongated rectangular holes, and spears regularly have not one but two long blades. Similar weapons had appeared prominently the year before in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex. In both cases they are intended as a kind of Verfremdungseffekt to remind us that the stories we are watching take place in archaic societies. They also reveal their directors’ will to visual style, which takes precedence over concerns for historical accuracy. The axe design Rossi shows us is a clever, if fanciful, combination of some scholars’ proposals of the axe arrangement, for in this way Odysseus
Page, “Appendix,” – (with fig. , which is my Fig. .) and notes – (references).
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
does what Homer’s Odysseus was said to have done: to shoot, quite literally, through the axes. The chief difference is that scholars – and Camerini – have Odysseus shoot through the holes for the helves, whereas Rossi’s Odysseus shoots through the space inside the blades. After the suitors have failed to bend the bow, Odysseus carefully, almost tenderly, prepares it by warming it over a fire. After all, it has been unused for twenty years. Odysseus then tends to the string and tests its elasticity. In extreme close-up he pulls back the string and lets the arrow fly. It easily passes through the holes inside the blades and comes to a stop when it hits the basket in which the axes had been brought in. Rossi does not show us Odysseus’ posture, but from the set-up of the floor with its two levels we can deduce that Odysseus is kneeling as he shoots. The entire sequence from Penelope’s retrieval of the bow to Odysseus’ shot takes a little over ten minutes and is the most detailed screen version of all. One other notable feature, here and throughout the film, is Rossi’s stylization. At one point in the bow sequence Rossi has some of the faithful maids in Penelope’s household function as a tragic chorus. They are lined up and, in close-up, directly face the camera while reciting a rhythmic prophecy of the suitors’ imminent doom. The effect is striking. Neither choral chants nor tragic choruses existed during Homer’s time, and they certainly had not existed at the time in which the myth is set. But the anachronism works extremely well. Camerini’s -minute film reduced the Odyssey to a standard, if still attractive, adventure tale. Its sequence with the axes and the arrow and the slaughter of the suitors, while vigorous and exciting, are not as atmospheric and carefully developed as Rossi’s. But the latter’s staging of Odysseus’ shot is not as gripping or suspenseful as one that would come almost three decades later. A television production about half as long as Rossi’s significantly changed and abbreviated Homer. But it also shows us the best staging of Odysseus’ shot.
The Odyssey ()
American writer-director Nicholas Meyer had received principal credit for story and screenplay on the film Sommersby (), which had transposed the story of The Return of Martin Guerre (), a French film set in the Middle Ages, to the American South after the Civil War. Unlike the French film, Sommersby contained obvious and intentional overtones of the Odyssey. A few years later Meyer was commissioned to write the screenplay for a television adaptation of the Odyssey. He had been familiar
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The Odyssey ()
with Homer’s epic since childhood and had loved it ever since: “I knew this material inside out, and it [the script] wrote itself.” Looking back on his life, Meyer also saw much of Odysseus and Homer in himself: “I could never write The Odyssey, but I can probably make it into a very good screenplay. That is [one] other thing I am . . .: A storyteller. Not the creator of stories, but rather the re-creator.” He also wrote: “I am extremely proud of the screenplay I wrote of Homer’s ODYSSEY, in which I tried hard to be faithful to the original.” Meyer’s script of the Odyssey was never produced. Instead, expatriate Russian director Andrey Konchalovsky made a version from a different screenplay that premiered in . He had been co-screenwriter on Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic medieval epic Andrei Rublev () and had co-written and directed A Nest of Gentry (, after Turgenyev). He had also directed Siberiade (), an epic about twentieth-century Russian history, and been associated with other historical subjects. Meyer received a screen credit as co-producer of Konchalovsky’s Odyssey film but was rather dissatisfied with the result. He called it a “trashing of Homer.” This verdict is excessively harsh, at least in regard to Odysseus’ shot. In his screenplay Meyer did not specify how the axes should be set up. He merely described the inside of the hall after the axes have been put in place: As the suitors enter [expecting a feast], they are perplexed. All the tables and chairs are gone. The walls are bare. Instead, AXE-HEADS have been aligned down the length of the middle of the room.
The suitors then struggle to bend and string Odysseus’ bow but fail. Now it is his turn: He holds the bow lovingly, strokes it like a faithful pet. [. . .] As Telemachus watches, Odysseus neatly bends the Bow and strings it. [. . .]
Nicholas Meyer, The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood (; rpt. New York: Plume, ), . Meyer, The View from the Bridge, . In Meyer made his entire screenplay (“The Odyssey”), dated February , , available online at http://nmeyer.pxl.net/odyssey_mainpage.html. My quotation is from this source, which directs visitors to the two parts of the script. Meyer, The View from the Bridge, . On the same page he sarcastically calls Konchalovsky’s film The Odyssey According to Danielle Steele. Nicholas Meyer, “The Odyssey,” Part , .
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
The Suitors are transfixed as Odysseus takes up an ARROW and stations himself, aiming at the AXE HEADS. CU [i.e. close-up on] THE AXE HEADS [. . .] Odysseus kneels, aims . . . and SHOOTS . . . The ARROW FLIES, zipping through the AXE HEADS!
The fact that Meyer, an experienced and successful novelist, screenwriter, and director, did not explain how Odysseus managed his shot tells us that the actual staging is best left for last. After a set has been built and dressed and the actors have been assigned their positions, a director can decide on camera placements and on how to shoot and then edit everything together. This very circumstance emphasizes that textual descriptions, whether ancient or modern, can afford, and get away with, a measure of ambiguity or vagueness. Images cannot. So Meyer did not clutter his script with a detailed set-up that a director might have to ignore because it would not suit his set. If he were to direct the film himself, Meyer obviously would have to decide on how the axes and the shot were to be shown. He must have known that he could decide only during filming. The script phase is too early for this. Konchalovsky shows us the most complex and detailed version of Odysseus’ shot. We first observe servants and Eumaeus, not Telemachus, preparing the floor to receive the axes. These have long slim wooden handles. They are arranged in yet another way, one that comes close to what scholars have postulated: The axes, attached to their helves, are put in the ground by their blades and with the helves sticking up vertically. The helve ends have rather narrow metal rings by which the axes can be hung on walls when not in use. These rings are a familiar feature of Minoan axes. Denys Page devoted several pages to explaining and deciding in favor of this set-up (Fig. .). The axes in his reconstruction are double-bladed, as
Meyer, “The Odyssey,” Part , –. The ellipses (except for those in square brackets) are in the original and are meant to indicate suspense or excitement. Page, “Appendix,” – (and figs. –), with mention of earlier scholars who had proposed or considered this set-up. My Fig. . is Page’s fig. . Page, –, examines parallels in ancient Indian epic. Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” – (with notes –), unequivocally rejected this reconstruction. Page’s fig. is reproduced, without attribution, in Hexter, A Guide to the Odyssey, xcii (fig. ); Hexter, , accepts Page’s reconstruction. So does, more recently, Bernard Knox in a note on the passage in the translation by Robert Fagles, Homer: The Odyssey (; rpt. New York: Penguin, ), . Page, , quotes two lines from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey that show the same understanding. (A longer quotation from Pope appears below.) Cf. also the well-known translation by E. V. Rieu, Homer: The Odyssey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ; numerous rpts.), : “Not a single axe did he miss. From the first haft, right through them all and out at the last, the arrow sped with its burden of bronze.” One older bibliographical item, very brief and often overlooked, is Henry W. Haynes, “Odysseus’ Feat of Archery,” American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, (), .
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The Odyssey ()
Figure .
The shape and arrangement of the axes favored by Page.
are Konchalovsky’s. And they are of the familiar Minoan kind: pelekyes. These can have blades that are curved back so far as almost to form a circle open at the top. (More on these below.) Those on view in Konchalovsky’s film are not curved that far. Since Minoan décor can be glimpsed in numerous scenes of this film and the hall of Odysseus’ palace displays wall decorations copied from Knossos, the double axes fit the overall design extremely well. The pelekyes are not set up in a trench. Differently from Page’s reconstruction, they are stuck in the ground by only one blade. A little heap of dirt around each blade is meant to secure it more firmly and perhaps also to hide whatever rigging may have been used to hold the blade in place during filming (Fig. .). The arrangement is a bit unrealistic – Sir Denys would doubtless have disapproved could he have seen it – but it is not impossible. More importantly, the angle at which the axe handles stick up into the air makes for a very dramatic presentation of Odysseus’ shot. A string fed through the circular holes at the top of the helves ensures a straight alignment. Once the suitors have failed to string the bow, we are ready for Odysseus. Standing, he strings the bow carefully and not without effort. Telemachus hands him an arrow. In medium close-up, with two
See Page, “Appendix,” (fig. ), for an illustration. Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” fig. , reproduces it.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure .
The Odyssey. Eumaeus setting up the axes. Screen capture.
helve rings out of focus in the foreground, Odysseus goes down on one knee and into position for his shot. We see him and the axe rings closest to him (Fig. .). He is canting his bow in order better to sight down the length of the arrow’s shaft. As he is aiming, the camera, placed on the right side of the line of axes from our point of view, very slowly begins to move to the left. Eerie string music, barely audible on the soundtrack, heightens our suspense. A brief cut-away reveals Antinous’ incomprehension of it all. Konchalovsky, cutting back and with his camera now a little further away, shows us six of the axes, helves, and rings dominating the screen while Odysseus is aiming in the background, screen right. The camera continues its slow movement to the left as the rings dominate the screen image. The rings closest to Odysseus and furthest away from the camera go out of focus; those close to us come into focus. The largest ring remains out of focus while the camera pans over to the other side of the line of axes. This suspenseful and elegant camera movement was achieved with a telephoto lens and a change of focus. Its climax is the moment when we see straight through the line of rings; the largest, closest to the camera and us, frames Odysseus’ face in the background, out of focus to increase our
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The Odyssey ()
Figure .
The Odyssey. Odysseus aiming, watched by Telemachus. Screen capture.
sense of depth. It is a perfect moment (Fig. .). Camerini’s comparable tracking shot is less impressive or suspenseful than Konchalovsky’s. After another brief cut-away to Antinous and some of the suitors we see, in close-up, Odysseus’ head, his hands holding arrow and bow, and the first of the rings, slightly out of focus. This shot nicely expresses Odysseus’ concentration: The chief difficulty of the test . . . was to shoot through the first hole without touching the sides, since the arrow which successfully did this would be on course for the succeeding targets . . . the feat was an extraordinary one, and the text shows Odysseus taking very careful aim indeed.
Odysseus releases his arrow, and Konchalovsky cuts to a reverse angle from which we see the arrow pass through all the ring holes. Its flight is not from Odysseus’ point of view but from a slight sideways angle. In this way we can follow the arrow traveling along the line of the helves and through the insides of the rings. An appropriate sound effect – whoosh! – enhances the dramatic
Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” . Odysseus’ aim: Odyssey ..
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Figure .
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
The Odyssey. Before Odysseus’ shot: the perfect moment. Screen capture.
nature of the arrow’s flight. While the arrow is still flying, Konchalovsky cuts to a reverse-angle close-up of the other end of the line of axe handles and their rings. The arrow approaches screen left, passes through the rings (Fig. .), and thuds into a wooden pole. The arrow’s flexing is noticeable; it diminishes in the course of the flight. A shot through the circular holes that tip the axe handles was the way Alexander Pope had understood the Homeric passage in his – translation of the Odyssey: Now sitting as he was, the chord he drew, Thro’ ev’ry ringlet levelling his view; Then notch’d the shaft, releast, and gave it wing; The whizzing arrow vanish’d from the string, Sung on direct, and thredded ev’ry ring. The solid gate its fury scarcely bounds; Pierc’d thro’ and thro’, the solid gate resounds.
Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer: Translated from the Greek, vol. (London: Lintot, ), (Odyssey .–).
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The Odyssey ()
Figure .
The Odyssey. The arrow (front l.) flying through the rings. Screen capture.
William Morris, in his version of , followed suit: And he caught up a swift arrow that lay bare upon the board . . . And he laid it on the bow-bridge, and the nock and the string he drew, And thence from his seat on the settle he shot a shaft that flew Straight-aimed, and of all the axes missed not a single head, From the first ring: through and through them, and out at the last it sped The brass-shod shaft.
Konchalovsky and his Odysseus are in excellent company.
William Morris, The Odyssey of Homer Done into English Verse (London: Reeves and Turner, ), (Odyssey . and –). Three years earlier, George Herbert Palmer had done the same in his prose translation: Odysseus “let fly the shaft, with careful aim, and did not miss an axe’s ring from first to last, but clean through all sped the bronze-tipped arrow.” Quoted from George Herbert Palmer, The Odyssey of Homer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin / Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, ), . Palmer’s version was reprinted numerous times; as mentioned, Wyeth’s illustrations were added to its republication. Albert Cook, Homer: The Odyssey: A New Verse Translation (New York: Norton, ), , is a little less clear but appears to adhere to the same understanding: “he did not miss one handle tip / Of all the axes” (Odyssey .–). In Cook’s translation was included in the series of Norton Critical Editions.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
The suitors are dumbfounded. When they and we look at Odysseus again, he is still kneeling and holding his bow. But now he is no longer a wrinkled old beggar but a handsome king and warrior, dressed in a spectacular red robe and ready to unleash his vengeance. This is a departure from the text because Homer’s Odysseus sheds his disguise only in Book : after the massacre of the suitors and after taking a bath that, with Athena’s help, rejuvenates his appearance for his reunion with Penelope. But the change is fully justified since it reinforces the astonishing nature of Odysseus’ feat of archery. A particular technical aspect of the set-up we see in this version is worth our consideration. Burkert emphatically maintained that such a shot would not constitute a shot through iron as stipulated in the text. He then brought up the subject of gravity as the decisive factor against this shot: “Moreover, a shot through twelve small openings, one after the other in the archer’s line of vision, is anyway impossible according to the laws of physics since the flight path of even the fastest arrow is curved.” A quarter-century earlier, historian and archeologist Sir John Myres had addressed this side of the problem: The test was a double one; only an accurate marksman could send his arrow down what was in effect a tunnel, without striking the sides; only a very hard-hitting one could shoot on so flat a trajectory that the arrow grazed neither above nor below.
More than three decades after Burkert, two scholars writing together concurred, although without going so far as to deny the shot’s possibility: As any archer knows, even to hit a single bull’s eye requires calculation of the arrow’s trajectory with precision. To pass an arrow through a dozen small openings set in series one would have to place the axes so as to allow for the parabola an arrow makes over even a short distance.
Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” – (with note ). Burkert’s own view of the Egyptian background and its implications is regarded with skepticism by Russo, “Odysseus’ Trial of the Bow as Symbolic Performance,” (“not fully compelling in all details”). Russo, –, summarizes the standard scholarly disagreements about various possible arrangements of the axes and proposes yet another variant. Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” : “Im u¨brigen ist ein Schuß durch zwölf in Visierlinie hintereinanderliegende kleine Öffnungen sowieso nach physikalischen Gesetzen unmöglich, da die Flugbahn auch des schnellsten Pfeils gekru¨mmt ist.” John L. Myres, “The Axes Yet Again,” The Classical Review, (), . Frederick Ahl and Hanna Roisman, The Odyssey Re-formed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), .
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The Odyssey ()
The same year in which Burkert published his objection, Page was equally emphatic about the very opposite: “The arrow which passes through the handle-holes is indeed passing through the iron.” He continued: And let there be no complaint about impossibility. The Homeric audience will be satisfied with a shot of extreme difficulty and delicacy; it will care nothing for gravitational fall; it will perhaps be offended by a gross and patent impossibility, but there is no such question here. Suppose the twelve axes placed at yard intervals, and suppose the holes to be only a little greater in diameter than the arrow-shaft: the shot is then technically possible.
Konchalovsky’s arrangement of the axes supports Page’s supposition, at least in the distance of the handles from each other and in the diameter of their rings. But is such a shot possible? Or did Konchalovsky have to resort to technical trickery, just as computer-generated special effects occur elsewhere in his film? Is gravity a factor? An experiment conducted a few years after Burkert and Page published their contradictory opinions proved that such a shot can indeed be done. The set-up was this: Page quotes some information from practising archers, but not all of it was very reliable . . . We therefore set out to find how large the rings would have to be, and how close together they must be placed, to make the shot possible . . . [Next] we made the arbitrary assumption that [the expression “far off” in the text] meant as far from the first axe as that axe was from the last; thus, if the axes occupy a length x, the total length of the set-up is x. The next question is that of trajectory. Page says . . . that no one cares about gravitational fall over so short a distance, but in fact this is the heart of the problem.
Various trials with different values for x followed. Here is the conclusion drawn from the experiment: “The Page-shot, given -inch rings a foot apart and a skilled archer, is perfectly practicable.” Konchalovsky’s Odysseus confirms it. Konchalovsky does greater justice to the dramatic visual nature of Odysseus’ decisive shot and its innate (but not textual) enargeia than any
Page, “Appendix,” –. Page mentions “the authority of a champion archer” in support. Peter Brain and D. D. Skinner, “Odysseus and the Axes: Homeric Ballistics Reconstructed,” Greece & Rome, nd ser., no. (April, ), –. Brain and Skinner, “Odysseus and the Axes,” –. They report ( note ) that their archer even learned to shoot while seated. Still, the different constructions of ancient and modern bows may well be decisive; cf. Brain and Skinner, . Modern archers have attempted Odysseus’ shot with setups as in my Fig. .. In a episode of the TV series Mythbusters Jr., for instance, American master archer Byron Ferguson did not succeed (“Great shot, Odysseus!”). But a team of three students and the series’ host, using a programmed kind of machine bow, did. See www.youtube .com/watch?v=iFuSleQkI. Their axe rings were three inches in diameter.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
other director. He draws out the suspense by showing us, with his right-toleft panning shot and change of focus, the extreme difficulty of shooting an arrow through twelve narrow openings. The most impressive moment is the one when the camera, like the arrow but across from it, is fully lined up with the ring holes. The result of the reconstruction just mentioned is revealing in this regard: “the nock of the arrow could be seen protruding from the straw [into which it had been shot] in the middle of the tunnel of rings when looking down it in the shooting position.” Konchalovsky’s camera equally looks down into the tunnel of rings, although in the opposite direction and before the shot. Most of Konchalovsky’s presentation of this scene is admirable, but there are two drawbacks. A small one is the rather unsteady manner in which Armand Assante aims his arrow, in close-up at that. This unfortunate circumstance distracts from the suspense and undermines our willing suspension of disbelief in the success of such a difficult shot. Konchalovsky should have insisted that Assante appear rock-steady. More serious are Konchalovsky’s two cuts away from Odysseus and on to the suitors. They break the spell that the scene, so carefully set up, casts over viewers. The words given to Antinous – “What are you doing?” and “Don’t be foolish!” – and, worst of all, Antinous wagging his forefinger at Odysseus are bathetic. How could a director experienced with epic cinema misjudge the climax of his scene so badly? Or was the footage of his great set-up reedited by others? However this may have been, to sympathetic viewers the panning shot of Odysseus and the axe rings redeems everything. A pale echo of Konchalovsky’s accomplished staging appeared twenty years later in a ninety-minute film by Turkish director Tekin Girgin, partly shot in Thailand. Its title – Troy: The Odyssey – may give us a first clue about its content: a wild mixture of elements from the Trojan War myth, the Odyssey, and earlier films. (Girgin’s God Wars, a film released the same year, is another invention about Odysseus.) Here his Odysseus shoots standing up but gets only five rings to shoot through. Penelope had announced to the suitors when she brought them Odysseus’ bow: “The first to string it and shoot an arrow through five golden rings will win the right to share this kingdom with me.” So there are no axes but thin metal poles, set up vertically and ending in ring holes. Their other ends rest on small wooden blocks on a polished marble floor in the dining hall of Odysseus’ palace (Fig. .). Nothing even vaguely ancient
Quoted from Brain and Skinner, “Odysseus and the Axes,” . Their grammatical solecism does not detract from the appealing nature that this view must have presented.
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The Odyssey ()
Figure .
Figure .
Troy: The Odyssey. A non-Homeric set-up. Screen capture.
Troy: The Odyssey. The arrow in flight (to screen r.). Screen capture.
(or archaic: Bronze Age) is in evidence. Viewers cannot help noticing that the poles are not pointing up exactly straight and that nobody could shoot through all their rings. Odysseus’ arrow nevertheless passes through. Like Konchalovsky, Girgin pulls the focus in such a way that close-ups show one ring in focus, the others out of focus (Fig. .). The projectile looks more like a rod rather than an arrow, and the bow (recurve) looks too modern.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
The whole thing is perfunctory and disappointing: the nadir of how to reimagine Homer’s famous climax.
Animation and CGI As quintessential adventure tale, the Odyssey has frequently been adapted for juvenile audiences. Animated versions were naturals to introduce youngsters to Homer, if not in the way scholars might wish for. A case in point is the Japanese-French animated science-fiction series Ulysses (), which consists of twenty-six roughly half-hour episodes. Here the story is advanced into the century indicated in the title. But episode , titled “Ulysse rencontre Ulysse” or, in the American version, “Strange Encounter,” shows a flashback to the past and the Homeric contest of the bow. Odysseus strings his bow and shoots his arrow from a seated position. Unusually, the axes have been arranged on the large dining table at which the suitors are feasting, presumably to raise them to a suitable level above the floor (Fig. .). Even so, it is disappointing to see Odysseus aiming, in medium close-up, at the top right corner of the screen before releasing his arrow. But the diagonal axe arrangement is fascinating: the helves alternating from left to right of their blades, the blades pointing
Figure .
Ulysses . The axes set up on the suitors’ banquet table. Screen capture.
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
Ulysses . The axe arrangement: frontal view. Screen capture.
up or down accordingly (Fig. .). Such a shot is indeed possible. The arrow passes through the tunnel formed by the spaces between and among the blades (Fig. .). Czech animator Jirí Tyller’s Odissea () is a medium-length feature and a free condensation of Homer. It was made in coproduction with the German Democratic Republic and released there as Die Irrfahrten des Odysseus (“The Wanderings of Odysseus”) in . Here it is Antinous who proposes the test of the bow, which is already strung and will be handled by him and a few other suitors without any problem. The difficulty is in shooting straight: some arrows hit the axes, break apart, and fall to the ground. Odysseus, of course, succeeds. Antinous mentions twelve axes, but we see only seven being struck into a vertical wooden plank at a height that calls for a standing archer. The axes look different: wide blades (in attractive light blue) with large holes (Fig. .). Tyller has Odysseus sight and aim in a tight frontal close-up in which the bow and the hand holding it dominate the foreground. Slight camera pans left
Martin Lindner, “Colourful Heroes: Ancient Greece and the Children’s Animation Film,” in Irene Berti and Marta García Morcillo (eds.), Hellas on Screen: Cinematic Receptions of Ancient History, Literature and Myth (Stuttgart: Steiner, ), –, has some information about this little-known film at –.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure .
Ulysses . The arrow, its fledging visible (extreme l.), flying through the axe arrangement. Screen capture.
Figure .
Odissea (). Side view of some of the axes. Screen capture.
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
Odissea (). Odysseus aiming. Screen capture.
and right express Odysseus’ careful aim. (Konchalovsky, as we saw, would take this much further.) Whether intentionally or not, Tyller also illustrates what is commonly called the “archers’ paradox” (Fig. .): How can an arrow reach its target when, before being released, it points to the side at such an angle that makes it difficult for us to believe in a successful shot? Such a position, although exaggerated here, accounts for the arrow’s sideways flexing (snaking, wobbling) during flight. Wooden arrows in particular flex considerably, as modern slow-motion photography reveals. Even stiffer arrows made from carbon still bend, although not as much. Highly dramatic is Tyller’s reverse angle, also in close-up, through the axe holes (seven again) and with the painting of a nude male torso, center background, on the wall behind them (Fig. .). That is where Odysseus’ arrow will hit, a hint at the death of Antinous soon after. In the Italian feature-length TV film Ulisse, directed by Peter Choi, Odysseus again shoots from a seated position. Inspired by Athena, Penelope carries Odysseus’ bow, already strung, into the hall and announces the contest, in which the arrow is to pass through “twelve
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Figure .
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Odissea (). Reverse angle: view through the axe holes. Screen capture.
rings” of axes. But the most we ever see are eight. Telemachus examines the set-up; soon, a suitor tries to bend the bow. The axes are standard Minoan labryes, set into the floor in one row by their helves and with a ring on each helve’s top (Fig. .). We watch Odysseus’ arrow from a side angle, first whizzing through the air and then through the rings before it hits the back wall, quivering dramatically for a moment. As was the case for Tyller, the level of animation is never more than workman-like and on the whole looks cheap. Neither director appears to have had a large budget. The same may be said for the feature-length Lithuanian-American The Animated Odyssey (or The Destruction of Troy and the Adventures of Odysseus, ), directed for television by Valentas Askinis (or Ashkinis). Here twelve axes have been fastened, blades down, into a long log above an iron support on wooden legs. Odysseus easily strings his bow and shoots through the helve holes in a loose variation on Camerini’s setup. His arrow strikes and topples a brazier standing next to a fancifully decorated door (Fig. .). There is little dramatic buildup or reaction from bystanders.
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
Figure .
Ulisse (). The arrangement of eight axes. Screen capture.
The Animated Odyssey. A familiar axe arrangement. Screen capture.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
By the time Konchalovsky was making his film, computer-generated technology had become frequent, if not ubiquitous, in epic and mythic storytelling. Two presentations of Odysseus’ shot from the early twentyfirst century are revealing in this regard. They feature computerized arrangements of the twelve axes that have not previously been seen. To appreciate these versions, we must return to T. E. Lawrence and his prose translation of the Odyssey. Lawrence was himself a warrior-hero and posthumously the subject of a famous epic film, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (). Lawrence rendered Odysseus’ shot in this way: He notched it to the string and drew; and from his place upon his settle, just as he sat, sent the arrow with so straight an aim that he did not foul one single axe. The bronze-headed shaft threaded them clean, from the leading helve onward till it issued through the portal of the last ones.
The phrase the portal of the last ones indicates that Lawrence imagined the axes set up in parallel pairs with only one trench. The arrangement of the twelve axes in not one but two rows is a striking feature. Lawrence left it to his readers to envision the exact position of the helves and blades, if indeed readers should pause to think about this in the first place. A paired arrangement of the axes has actually been proposed alongside those examined above (Fig. .). The production of Walcott’s Omeros featured one, too, as my earlier quotation about it reveals. Lawrence was aware of the problem posed by the text. A letter to Bruce Rogers, the American bibliophile publisher who had committed his translation, makes this plain. There Lawrence refers to the translation by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang, who had rendered Odysseus’ shot as follows: He took and laid it [the arrow] on the bridge of the bow, and held the notch and drew the string, even from the settle whereon he sat, and with straight aim shot the shaft and missed not one of the axes, beginning from
T. E. Lawrence, The Odyssey of Homer, Newly Translated into English Prose (; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, ), . This edition has an introduction by Bernard Knox. The original edition named T. E. Shaw as its author. My figure is taken from Morrison, A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey, (ill. E). He provides no source reference. This is the letter (February , ) already quoted. The chapter on Lawrence’s translation of Book of the Odyssey in Andrew R. B. Simpson, Another Life: Lawrence after Arabia (; rpt. Stroud: Spellmount, ), –, must be read with caution. Simpson makes a number of elementary mistakes, such as dating Lawrence’s translation to and Butcher and Lang’s (see next note), which Lawrence knew, to , when both had been dead for years. Simpson turns Heinrich Schliemann into “Schleimann,” Fernández-Galiano into “Fernandez-Latiano,” and Heubeck into both “Hanebeck” (twice) and “Havebeck.”
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
Axe arrangement from Morrison, A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey.
the first axe-handle, and the bronze-weighted shaft passed clean through and out at the last.
This leaves the exact arrangement of the axes indeterminate. Lawrence reviews and rejects the view that the axes, single-bladed and with rectangular heads, had two oval openings in the middle, one above the other. Lawrence includes a drawing of this kind of axe in his letter. This is a remote but possible variant on the perforated axe blades already mentioned. Lawrence also rejects his publisher’s view that the axes were pelekyes and that the arrow was to fly between the blades’ tips, curved toward each other – Lawrence calls these “the ears” – above the end of the helve on each axe. Lawrence draws a pelekys as well. About this version he adds the comment quoted above: that only slow-motion cinematography
S. H. Butcher and A. Lang, The Odyssey of Homer Done into English Prose, nd ed. (London: Macmillan, ), –. The first edition had appeared the same year from the same publisher. This theory had previously been advanced by Anton Goebel, “Zu Homeros,” Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r classische Philologie, = Jahnsche Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Philologie und Paedagogik, (), –, at –; it was examined and rejected by Butcher and Lang, The Odyssey of Homer Done into English Prose, –. It is also the way in which Edward McCrorie, Homer: The Odyssey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ; rpt. ), , imagines the shot more than
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
could prove it correct. Indeed, the best film adaptations succeed in making the arrow’s flight visible, even when they do not resort to extreme slow motion. Lawrence then turns to the arrangement he himself prefers: Personally, as archaeologist and archer, I like my own notion of two rows of axes, six-a-side: and nothing else fits all the Greek and yet remains a possible feat . . . Homer can’t have meant only axe-heads – to shoot through the handle-holes: for then he would not have plainly called the bilge-blocks of oak. Besides bilge-blocks are . . . always in pairs . . . I think a -foot axehandle would be ample: and most battle axes are ½ to feet tall.
Lawrence here speaks from experience. What he says elsewhere about Homer, the Odyssey, his own translation, and all translations is instructive and amusing in equal parts. Both Page and Burkert prominently discussed double-bladed Minoan votive axes whose cutting edges are curved all the way back. The axes are set into the ground by their helves, the blades on top (Fig. .). Odysseus then shoots through the top part of the “holes” formed by the nearly circular opening inside the blades. An animated variation appeared in Ulysses , as we have seen. A comparable one, this time computerized, is in an episode of the American television series Clash of the Gods, which was broadcast on the History Channel and dealt mainly with Greek myth. Two of its ten episodes, each forty-five minutes long, were devoted to the Odyssey: “Odysseus: Curse of the Sea” and “Odysseus: Warrior’s Revenge.” The second includes a reenactment of Odysseus’ shot. The omniscient narrator dramatically comments on the great moment:
seventy years after Lawrence: “he nocked the shaft on the bridge, drew back on the bowstring / and took dead aim, all from the chair that he sat in, / and shot it straight. He missed each one of the axes, / all those helves: he’d guided the bronze-weighted arrow / beyond them and out.” McCrorie’s translation has a forty-page introduction and fifty pages of notes, both by classicist Richard Martin. There is no comment on the axes or on the shot. Quoted from Garnett (ed.), The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, –. Lawrence also had this to say (): “I suspect we make too much of the shooting test. Nobody seems to have been struck with astonishment at it. Stringing the bow seems to have been the more difficult job.” On the bilgeblocks (or keel-blocks: dryochoi) see Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” –, with fig. (= Delebecque, “Le jeu de l’arc de l’‘Odyssée’,” [fig. ]). See, in this regard, T. E. Lawrence, The Selected Letters, ed. Malcolm Brown (New York: Norton, ), – (January , ), – (May , ), – (December , ), and – (December , ). These letters are not in Garnett (ed.), The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” (with note for older references); Page, “Appendix,” – (with fig. ). Page’s fig. , which is my Fig. ., reappears in Fernández-Galiano, “Books XXI–XXII,” (fig. ). The Odyssey episodes were directed by Christopher Cassel, who also served as “supervising writer” on both. Cassel had previously co-written and directed the television documentaries Rome: Engineering an Empire (), Egypt: Engineering an Empire (), and other such historical
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
Curved Minoan axe from Page, Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey.
the beggar strings the bow without any hesitation, and the [suitors’] laughing suddenly stops. [Now dramatic music, including drums and a wordlessly warbling voice.] He lines up a shot. It [sic] flies straight through the twelve axe handles. The contest is over.
The axes are single-bladed but extremely curved as if to resemble Minoan votive axes. Viewers may have seen similar, and similarly fanciful, axes in fantasy films and illustrations set after antiquity. (Think Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, et. al.) The lower tip of each blade has been struck sideways into a long wooden pole. But the sequential arrangement of these axes, one side of whose blades faces Odysseus, is extremely unusual, for they alternate in the manner in which they have been set into the wood. Their handles stick out alternatively to the left and to the right at forty-five-degree angles. Each pair of handles thus forms a ninety-degree angle along which Odysseus, standing up, sights first (Fig. .). Although we do not see him do so, he then lowers his aim and presumably himself and sights through the space between the undersides of the handles and the insides of the blades (Fig. .). Then, in a tight close-up that flattens our perspective, we see a symmetrical composition. It evokes the perfect alignment of the rings in Konchalovsky’s film. As it appears in the exact center of the screen, we see films. Before Clash of the Gods he directed and co-wrote something called Scandals of the Ancient World ().
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure .
Figure .
Clash of the Gods. Odysseus aiming. Screen capture.
Clash of the Gods. Odysseus in close-up, with axe blades and handles dramatically out of focus. Screen capture.
that Odysseus’ arrow has a head designed to penetrate armor (a Trocar type; Fig. .). The arrow is at this moment in midflight, approaching the viewer dead on. Cut. We now see the arrow fly, in slow motion, into the distance to screen right (Fig. .). Extremely rapid editing of Odysseus
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
Clash of the Gods. The arrow tip seen head-on. Screen capture.
Figure .
Clash of the Gods. The arrow in flight. Screen capture.
aiming, of the set-up, and of the arrow’s flight makes the shot itself difficult to follow. It is, however, evident that the narrator is not wholly correct when he tells us that the arrow “flies straight through the twelve axe handles.” It flies through the space between parts of the handles and blades.
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
The hyped-up style in which the shot is presented, visually through rapid editing and aurally with music and a warbling voice, could make viewers wonder if the filmmakers did not trust in their own inventiveness. Or this might be a modern analogy to what Irene de Jong has observed about Homer’s text: “Odysseus’ successful shot is described in the emphatic, polar manner found in so many Iliadic battle scenes: he did not miss, but the arrow went through the axes.” If so, the more-thanpolar manner of this film’s style lies in its triple affirmation of what happens: We see it, we are told about it, and the dramatic soundtrack confirms it. It is noteworthy that the statement quoted is all that de Jong has to say about Odysseus’ feat. She is silent about the set-up. Films, we realize yet again, force their makers to be specific. The Odyssey D () is a wholly computerized one-hour retelling of parts of Homer’s epic. Greek computer “geek” Stelios Pefanis made the film entirely at home and virtually by himself. His is also the first Homer adaptation in D since Camerini’s Ulysses. Odysseus’ hall is larger than in any other film. In its center there is a rectangular elevation – a block of marble, to judge by its appearance – into which the axes, familiar Minoan pelekyes, have been set by the ends of their helves. Their arrangement is remarkable. The axes are set up vertically and with their blades sideways: in two rows and not in parallel pairs but shifted. The blades in the row on the right, which is further away from the viewer, are at a higher level than those on the left. Our view of the whole set-up is thus unobstructed. Odysseus shoots from a kneeling position (Fig. .). For a moment the level at which he aims his arrow is lower than the openings between the handles and the blades through which he then shoots. The arrow perceptibly rises in its flight to reach the necessary height as it approaches the axes, illustrating, if at an exaggerated degree, the arc of arrows’ flights. The arrow’s trajectory here is well designed. The arrow travels in between the two rows of helves and below the curvature of the higher sides of the blades and above that of the lower ones (Figs. .–.). Part of a large tree trunk, of all things, ends the arrow’s flight. That same year saw the beginning of Les grands mythes, a long-running series aired on the prestigious French-German culture channel ARTE. In – it was time for L’Odyssée in ten nearly half-hour episodes.
Irene J. F. de Jong, A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , on Odyssey .–. Brief information about Pefanis and his Step Animations films is at http://stepanimations.weebly .com/about.html. His Odyssey can be watched at http://stepanimations.weebly.com/movies.html or at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSRucHuNHP.
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Animation and CGI
Figure .
The Odyssey D. The axe arrangement, with Odysseus preparing his shot. Screen capture.
The final one bore the Wagnerian title “La crépuscule des dieux” and culminated in Odysseus’ shot created, yet again, by CGI. The set-up of the axes in a tree trunk is comparable to Camerini’s, but now everything is larger, heavier, and lower to the ground (Fig. .). A target disc of concentric circles against the hall’s back wall is disappointingly anachronistic (Fig. .). But we get a unique payoff, for the size of the axes makes possible a couple of strikingly attractive views from inside one iron circle ahead to the next axe as the arrow is flying through them (Fig. .). One unexpected appearance of Odysseus’ shot outside any Homeric context is noteworthy, too, for here our master archer conquers, as it were, even part of Hollywood. TSG Entertainment, a US production company associated with epic adventure films, adopted an animated logo in which Odysseus, watched by Penelope, shoots his arrow through axes whose blades resemble those in Rossi’s Odissea (Fig. .). Neither figure is identified, but to anyone who knows the Odyssey it is immediately evident who they are. Odysseus is standing up, and dramatic music as well as a misplaced sound effect – metal scraping against metal, as if the arrow had come into contact with the blades – emphasize the heroic nature of his shot. The entire animation, of which there are some variants, lasts only a few seconds.
Details in Michael Cieply, “Eat Your Heart Out, MGM Kitty: Movie Studios Strive for Ever More Inventive Logos,” The New York Times (July , ), AR . Online at www.nytimes.com//
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Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
Figure .
The Odyssey D. Reverse angle: the arrow beginning its flight. Screen capture.
Figure .
The Odyssey D. The arrow in flight. Screen capture.
//movies/movie-studios-strive-for-ever-more-inventive-logos.html?_r=. The TSG logo can be watched online, e.g. at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYcjhnCrw.
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Homeric Surprises
Figure .
Figure .
L’Odyssée. Another familiar arrangement. Screen capture.
L’Odyssée. The axe set-up before an anachronistic target. Screen capture.
Homeric Surprises Screen presentations of Odysseus’ shot may be quite intricate. The latest versions would have been impossible without digital computers. The different technologies of the moving image can prove useful for anyone
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Figure .
Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey
L’Odyssée. A unique view from inside one of the axe rings. Screen capture.
Figure .
A version of the TSG logo. Screen capture.
who wishes to rethink and reimagine the Homeric passage. Although no single adaptation has done full justice to the original, if such were possible, no scholar has conclusively solved the problem concerning Odysseus’ shot, either. Homer founded the tradition of inherently visual storytelling in
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Homeric Surprises
Western literature, even if his characteristic enargeia leaves us stranded momentarily. Imagination must aid scholars and creative artists alike. In this regard we do well to remember Burkert’s conclusion about our passage: A scene that is incomprehensible in Homer may possibly be explained as a deformation of a Bronze Age tradition in both image and story. Homer may have adopted “a deliberate and clever narrative strategy, designed to play with the audience’s expectations and fulfill them with a surprise . . . we miss the essence of Homer’s artistry as a storyteller if we look too closely for the physical reality he describes.” The verbal, the visual, and the imaginative cannot be separated. Stage and especially screen directors who attempt to explain the scene in a way that makes it comprehensible to their audiences must look closely for the reality and may deform Homer’s text in certain regards, but in presenting their versions they stay well within a long tradition of interpretations and adaptations of Homer. And they do play with our expectations. Occasionally visual artists succeed more than scholars in fulfilling surprises, for they bring dramatic enargeia back into the picture.
Burkert, “Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus,” : “Es bleibt die Feststellung, daß eine bei Homer unverständliche Szene sich als Deformation einer bronzezeitlichen Bild- und Erzähltradition erklären läßt.” Quoted from Russo, “Odysseus’ Trial of the Bow as Symbolic Performance,” .
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle; or, How Well Does The Wild Bunch Fit The Poetics?
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch () was one of the most controversial films of its time. It later became a classic in the Western genre and an acknowledged masterpiece of American cinema. In Jim Kitses’ apt phrase: “The Wild Bunch is America.” In its reconstructed form available today, the film is considered Peckinpah’s most accomplished work, showing us his artistry in its clearest form. But it was initially notorious for its graphic violence, a feature that overshadowed Peckinpah’s entire career. He became known as “bloody Sam,” “artist of death,” and “master of violence.” Even so, in the words of Stephen Prince, a leading scholar of his films, “Peckinpah’s images of violence are remarkably discrete. This discretion follows from his regard for the sensibilities of the viewer that he did not wish to bludgeon and destroy.” This is in marked contrast to screen violence after Peckinpah. As Prince has put it: “The radical thrust of Peckinpah’s experiment with graphic screen violence takes the concept of catharsis as its impetus and justification.” To Peckinpah, this catharsis was Aristotelian.
Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western (London: Thames and Hudson / British Film Institute, ), . The expanded edition – Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, ) – is welcome but marred by academic jargon; my quotation now appears at . Cf. the titles of Marshall Fine, Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah (; rpt. New York: Miramax, ); Terrence Rafferty, “Artist of Death,” The New Yorker (March , ), –; Max Evans, Sam Peckinpah, Master of Violence: Being the Account of the Making of a Movie and Other Sundry Things (Vermillion: Dakota Press / University of South Dakota, ). The film referred to in Evans’s title is The Ballad of Cable Hogue (), Peckinpah’s film after The Wild Bunch. Quoted from Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, ; rpt. ), . Prince, Savage Cinema, –. Scholarship on Peckinpah has frequently engaged with this concept, if often only superficially or in passing. An early example is Doug McKinney, Sam Peckinpah (Boston: Twayne, ), .
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Peckinpah and the Greeks
Peckinpah and the Greeks In , Cordell Strug published an article whose title posed an intriguing question: “The Wild Bunch and the Problem of Idealist Aesthetics, or, How Long Would Peckinpah Last in Plato’s Republic?” Strug presented a passionate defense of the film’s style and content but addressed the question he raised only cursorily near the end of his article. He also followed the general, if erroneous, view that Plato and Platonic philosophy were against poetry. Even so, his article has entered the pantheon, as it were, of Peckinpah criticism. My chapter revisits Strug’s theme from the perspective of Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student. Like Strug and virtually all critics of The Wild Bunch, defenders and detractors alike, I will focus on the explicit violence in the film but will examine it in connection with Aristotle’s conception of the workings of tragedy in The Poetics. Peckinpah had known this work since his days as a drama student. His wife at the time, recalling his obsession with classic American and classical authors, said about the latter: he was also interested in the Greeks, philosophy – he read a lot of Plato and Aristotle too. Aristotle’s Poetics was something that seemed to grab him and he was constantly referring to it . . . it always seemed amazing, because he’d have his Greeks and the others in one hand and his cowboy books and detective stories in the other.
Cordell Strug, “The Wild Bunch and the Problem of Idealist Aesthetics, or, How Long Would Peckinpah Last in Plato’s Republic?” Film Heritage, no. (Winter –), –. That this is far from true has been shown, if not for the first time, by Stephen Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), – (chapter titled “To Banish or Not to Banish? Plato’s Unanswered Question about Poetry”). Halliwell, , observes: “While the [Platonic] dialogues often expose poetry (and its advocates) to probing challenges, they never try to push poetry permanently aside or to claim that philosophy (in the form of Plato’s own writing) can ever afford to stop engaging with it . . . this is even, and most significantly, true of what modern scholarly orthodoxy takes to be the ultimate, definitive statement of Platonic renunciation of poetry: the banishment of the ‘best’ poets (above all, Homer and the tragedians) from the ideal city of the Republic.” Cf. further Halliwell, –. Strug’s term “totalitarianism” for Platonic thought seems indebted to Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. : The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge, ). It was reprinted in Michael Bliss (ed.), Doing It Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, ), –. Since the original place of publication is defunct, my citations below will be according to this reprint. Quoted from Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ; rpt. ), . An earlier edition of the book had appeared in (without the title’s last phrase).
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle
On numerous occasions Peckinpah referred to Aristotle’s Poetics, in particular to the idea of catharsis as a defense of the explicit violence in The Wild Bunch. In a interview he said: I’m a great believer in catharsis . . . the old basis of catharsis was a purging of the emotions through pity and fear. People used to go and see the plays of Euripides and Sophocles and those other Greek cats. The players acted it out and the audience got in there and kind of lived it with them.
This is a general (and all-too-vague) summary of how Greek tragedy affected its audiences, but it is in keeping with the traditional understanding of catharsis as a process of purgation, promulgated in by Jacob Bernays and now largely discarded. A year earlier Peckinpah had said about The Wild Bunch: It’s about the violence within all of us . . . I intended it to have a cathartic effect. Someone may feel a strange, sick exultation at the violence, but he should then ask himself, ‘What is going on in my heart?’ I wanted to achieve a catharsis through pity and fear.
This is significantly closer to the nature of the matter. Peckinpah made comparable statements, e.g. about his film Straw Dogs (), on other occasions. “Peckinpah’s best work produces a crisis of response for the viewer because it pulls the viewer’s emotional and cognitive responses in
William Murray, “Playboy Interview: Sam Peckinpah,” Playboy (August, ), –, , , –, ; rpt. in Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Sam Peckinpah: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –; quotation at (original) and – (rpt.). Jacob Bernays, Grundzu¨ge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles u¨ber Wirkung der Tragödie (Breslau: Trewendt, ), frequently reprinted and translated. On this see, e.g., Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth, –, –, and . Bernays was an uncle of Sigmund Freud’s by marriage and exerted a strong influence on Freud’s psychoanalysis. On Bernays and Freud see Marie-Christin Wilm, “Die Grenzen tragischer Katharsis: Jacob Bernays’ Grundzu¨ge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles () im Kontext zeitgenössischer Tragödientheorie,” and Gu¨nter Gödde, “Therapeutik und Ästhetik – Verbindungen zwischen Breuers und Freuds kathartischer Therapie und der Katharsis-Konzeption von Jacob Bernays,” both in Martin Vöhler and Dirck Linck (eds.), Grenzen der Katharsis in den modernen Ku¨nsten: Transformationen des aristotelischen Modells seit Bernays, Nietzsche und Freud (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), – and –. Gherardo Ugolini (ed.), Catharsis, Ancient and Modern, Skenè [sic], no. , is an up-to-date essay collection. The editor’s “Introduction” (–), with detailed references, summarizes the current state of research. American classicist James I. Porter has recently resurrected Bernays’s perspective; see in particular “Jacob Bernays and the Catharsis of Modernity,” in Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard (eds.), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, and “Nietzsche, Tragedy, and the Theory of Catharsis,” in Ugolini (ed.), Catharsis, Ancient and Modern, –. Since I mentioned Tony Harrison’s Oresteia in Chapter , I additionally refer readers to Paul Bentley, “Political Catharsis? The Example of Harrison,” in Sandie Byrne (ed.), Tony Harrison and the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Quoted from Chris Hodenfield, “Sam Peckinpah Breaks a Bottle,” Rolling Stone (May , ), .
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Peckinpah Scholars on Catharsis
different directions.” The more surprising, then, is Peckinpah’s complete reversal of his position, which had occurred by . In an interview broadcast on BBC television, Peckinpah retracted everything: I made The Wild Bunch because I still believed in the Greek theory of catharsis, that by seeing this we would be purged by pity and fear and get this out of our system. I was wrong . . . Catharsis only works in certain – as Theodor Lipps once said, it depends upon the viewer and his situation and the artist, and I was a total failure.
Peckinpah Scholars on Catharsis
The case for Peckinpah’s reversal and against Aristotelian catharsis in general was argued at some length by Stephen Prince, a specialist on screen violence. Prince fully agrees with Peckinpah’s statement in the BBC interview that I quoted. Several times, Prince contrasts Peckinpah’s often glib and superficial statements, especially to interviewers, about his work with the evidence provided in the films themselves. What Robin Wood observed in regard to Alfred Hitchcock may be applied to Peckinpah and all creative artists: the chief obstacle in the way of a serious appraisal of Hitchcock’s work for many people is Hitchcock’s own apparent attitude to it; and it seems worth insisting . . . on the fundamental irrelevance of this. What an artist says about his own work need not necessarily carry any more weight than what anyone else says about it: value can only be assessed by the test to which one must subject all criticism or elucidation, the test of applying it to the art in question
So Prince, Savage Cinema, . Barry Norman’s interview with Peckinpah was broadcast on BBC One on December , ; it is available online at, e.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=quTSLvqQLY. Peckinpah scholars occasionally misdate it to . German philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps influenced Freud. Prince, Savage Cinema, –. On explicit violence as depicted in ancient texts and images, see, e.g., Susanne Muth, Gewalt im Bild: Das Phänomen der medialen Gewalt im Athen des . und . Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), and Martin Zimmermann (ed.), Extreme Formen von Gewalt in Bild und Text des Altertums (Munich: Utz, ). On violence in classical epic, see now the essays, with extensive references, in Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann (eds.), Structures of Epic Poetry, vol. : Configurations, Part : Battle Scenes (Berlin: De Gruyter, ). Prince, Savage Cinema, , with erroneous date. Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), critically engages with Prince but rejects “Aristotelianism” as one of “five fallacies” (–). His chapter on The Wild Bunch (– and – [notes]) does not mention either Aristotle or catharsis. Prince, Savage Cinema, , even speaks of Peckinpah’s “customary verbal stupidity when granting public interviews.” Peckinpah could be eloquent as well.
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle and asking oneself how much it contributes toward either understanding or evaluating it. The artist’s own utterances are more likely to have an indirect relevance, by telling us something further about his personality and outlook.
It is sensible to agree with Peckinpah’s comments on the films whenever a close analysis of his works bears them out. I will return to this at the end. Prince is likely to agree with Wood’s view, but is he right in rejecting Aristotle and catharsis out of hand? His overall conclusion is this: “A defense of Peckinpah’s work through appeals to catharsis is a dead end.” This seems definitive, but is it? The answer must be No. The most obvious reason is that Prince considers sufficient research and scholarship on modern psychology, social science, screen violence, and related topics, but not a single work of classical scholarship on Aristotle, the Poetics, or ancient views on catharsis. (Aristotle was not the only one to deal with the concept.) This is a significant gap and justifies my addressing the subject once more here – not with the intention of overturning Prince’s or anybody else’s views or serving up the last word on the matter but with the intention of deepening our understanding and evaluating of Peckinpah’s art, specifically regarding The Wild Bunch. If I argue against Prince on catharsis, I completely agree as far as Peckinpah’s artistry is concerned, flawed as it may sometimes be. But I will here approach The Wild Bunch from a different perspective: an overview of a sophisticated understanding of Aristotelian catharsis in the work of Stephen Halliwell. I do so both to provide film scholars ready access to a correct understanding of Aristotelian catharsis and to avoid any suspicion that I might be engaged in subjective pleading. I then apply certain Aristotelian concepts about tragedy to The Wild Bunch. Concerning Peckinpah’s cinema, the concept of catharsis seems to refuse to die. In various, and usually brief and sometimes superficial, ways, scholars still adduce it, often approvingly quoting Peckinpah. Here are a few representative examples. Bernard Dukore refers to Aristotelian hamartia (on this below) in connection with catharsis in regard to Peckinpah’s portrayals of flawed heroes, especially in The Wild Bunch. But he largely vitiates his argument at the outset by a bizarre statement: Like the heroes of Greek tragedy, notably Oedipus (also a murderer) and Antigone, like Hamlet (another murderer, who kills without regret) and
Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Prince, Savage Cinema, .
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Peckinpah Scholars on Catharsis
Lear, the four members of the Bunch . . . do not employ halfway measures [in their final confrontation] but go all the way to accomplish their goals.
John Simons and Robert Merrill refer to Aristotle and catharsis on a few occasions but without any extended analysis, as here: “our critical sympathies [with Peckinpah] are Aristotelian in nature.” In a later article, Cordell Strug was on surer ground but mentioned Aristotle merely in preparation for his subsequent comments, which proceed from Christian ethics. Unintentionally, these instances provide me with sufficient justification to turn to today’s leading scholar of the Poetics as a corrective. In this, we should always keep in mind a fundamental aspect of Aristotle’s work: that “many of its ideas and arguments are hints and pointers, not fully elaborated theses . . . The voice of the Poetics is, for sure, that of someone with a ‘theory’ of poetry, but a theory which does not lay claim to be exhaustive or definitive on every point. All dogmatic readings of the work, whether pro or contra, should be regarded as suspect.” Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, with a few comments added for clarification, is this: the representation [mimêsis] of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude – in language which is garnished [with rhythm, melody] in its various parts – in the mode of dramatic enactment, not narrative [as in epic] and through the arousal of pity [eleos] and fear [phobos] effecting the katharsis of such emotions.
Bernard F. Dukore, Sam Peckinpah’s Feature Films (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), –; quotation at . John L. Simons and Robert Merrill, Peckinpah’s Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study (Jefferson, : McFarland, ), (cf. , where they dismiss Prince’s view). Their first chapter (“Peckinpah’s Tragic Vision,” – and – [notes]) includes discussions of other directors’ works, among them John Ford’s The Searchers () at –. Their points about this film are intended as a rejection of my “Tragic Features in John Ford’s The Searchers” (so Simons and Merrill, note ). They cite its first version (cf. ) and do not know its expanded and revised text: “Tragic Features in John Ford’s The Searchers,” in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Simons and Merrill do not get my name right and are unconcerned about the spelling of Aristotle’s term peripeteia (correct at , incorrect at ), so I see no point in addressing their argument. Cordell Strug, “Human Striving, Human Strife: Sam Peckinpah and the Journey of the Soul,” in Michael Bliss (ed.), Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, ), –, at –. He primarily discusses The Killer Elite () and Cross of Iron (). Strug was a Lutheran pastor at the time. Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth, . From this point on, I provide page references in brackets directly after my quotations from this book. Aristotle, Poetics b–; quoted from Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (London: Duckworth / Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; commentary on this at –. By mimesis, a fundamental term to Plato and Aristotle, we
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle
What this catharsis is, however, remains unclear, at least to a considerable degree: “the most notorious and vexed feature of the Poetics, its unexplained concept of catharsis,” is “arguably now the most famous/notorious, as well as enigmatic, concept in the entire history of Western poetics” (, ). As a result, “a definitive understanding of catharsis will always (in the absence of new evidence) elude us” (). This is in strong contrast to how the term has generally been dealt with: “The catharsis controversy of the past century and a half has been marked by a display of confidence on the part of many interpreters that stands virtually in inverse ratio to the quality of evidence available on the subject” (). What then might catharsis actually be?
Aristotelian Catharsis Concerning spectators’ emotions of pity and fear, Halliwell observes: The emotions in question are the psychological correlate of Aristotle’s belief that certain kinds of events – those involving at least the imminent threat of great suffering, and bringing about major transformations in the lives of those concerned – show important things about the conditions and possibilities of human existence . . . When an audience is drawn into intense fear and pity for the characters of tragedy, Aristotle supposes that it is not simply having its feelings exposed to a kind of nervous excitation. Rather, the emotions – which are a dynamic factor in the mind’s evaluative reactions to life – both reflect and help to shape how spectators grasp and see the underlying patterns of significance in a plot’s structure of action and suffering. (, –)
Pity is felt “for one whose misfortune is undeserved, fear for one who is ‘like (us)’, [Poetics] a–” (), that is to say, someone who is not worse than ourselves but whose misfortunes may remind us of the fragility of our existence. But emotion and intellect are inseparable: “cognition and emotion can function closely together to produce intensely engaged responses to the phenomena mimetically embodied in the form of individual artworks or performances” (). Another proviso is important: Aristotle is far from claiming that tragedy gets close to the texture of life as lived and experienced by individuals. . . Yet Aristotle nonetheless looks to poetry, even to the mythically magnified domain of tragedy and epic, for an
should understand “representation,” not the narrower concept of “imitation” (as the word is traditionally translated). On mimesis see Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), especially Chapters – on Aristotle. Andrew Ford, “The Purpose of Aristotle’s Poetics,” Classical Philology, (), –, is a good introduction, useful to nonspecialists as well. On the latter see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
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Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah
imaginative vividness which can sustain an audience’s cognitive and emotional engagement. (, )
From this twofold engagement there arises the mental process of catharsis in the spectator: tragic catharsis can plausibly be connected to the transformation of normally painful experiences (pity and fear) into a rewarding and gratifying experience (the special pleasure of tragedy [at Poetics b–]) . . . we can enjoy viewing otherwise painful objects when they are effectively depicted in (visual) art, because we are able in this context to understand them and learn from them in ways that (for most people) would not be possible under the exigencies of real-world situations. . . On Aristotle’s model of tragedy. . .spectators of the finest plays are induced, at supreme moments of ekplêxis [stunning emotional impact], to experience strong surges of pity and vicarious or ‘sympathetic’ fear . . . tragedy elicits these emotions through artfully constructed and integrated plots; it focuses them on fictively elaborated characters and situations in a way that allows a contemplative-cum-aesthetic response in which the normal painfulness of pity and fear are (substantially) converted into a special kind of pleasure. (–)
The result: “A feeling of release, of uninhibited psychological flow, both during and after strong surges of emotion, is a suitable adjunct to the type of aesthetic experience that Aristotle takes to generate catharsis in the tragic theatre . . . Catharsis . . . is Aristotle’s description for the benefit that is felt in and through the heightened arousal of the emotions by artistic stimulations of the human world” (). Halliwell also observes: “tragic catharsis is something additional, though no doubt intimately related, to the pleasure of tragedy . . . Catharsis . . . is not just the conversion and integration of otherwise painful emotions into the pleasurable experience of mimetic [i.e. representational] art; it is the psychological benefit accruing from this conversion” (). As shown in Chapter , Rouben Mamoulian approached Queen Christina from just this point of view. Its last shot exemplifies what Aristotle appears to have had in mind about spectators’ emotional and intellectual involvement.
Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah The Wild Bunch has often been regarded as an epic, specifically as close to Homer’s Iliad. So it is, not least in the explicitness of its violence.
Most extensively by Seydor, Peckinpah, –. More generally: Michael Bliss (ed.), A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Violence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle
Peckinpah himself referred to Homer more than once. But the film is at the same time tragic. So is Homer’s Iliad. Virtually by necessity, given its themes of warfare, dangerous quests, and killings of monsters or human opponents, mythic-heroic epic is also violent epic – none more so than the Iliad, whose violence is more explicit than one might wish it to be. French philosopher Simone Weil famously characterized it as “the poem of force.” The myths dealt with in Homeric epic provided tragic playwrights with their greatest source of inspiration. Only one of their surviving plays, Aeschylus’ Persians, is based on history and not myth, even though it includes a supernatural element familiar from mythology. While the violence (and everything else) in epic is verbal, not visual, Homer and later epic poets made sure that listeners or readers get the full impact of everything they describe. Violent acts in Greek tragedy – unlike Roman tragedy later – took place offstage, partly for aesthetic reasons, partly for technical reasons. The playwrights were their own producers and directors. Sophocles, for instance, introduced scenography. Euripides wrote and staged nearly one hundred plays of his own, possibly even more. (Ancient accounts vary.) A Greek playwright-producer had several ways to drive home the impact of violence. One of these were messenger speeches: reports, often in gruesome detail, of what has happened elsewhere. Death screams, as of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia, or of Medea’s children in Euripides’ Medea, powerfully worked on the audience’s imagination as well. This verbal side was reinforced by a visual one. The backdrop of the Greek theater, a building from which actors enter and into which they can exit (skênê, hence our “scene”) allowed for a rolling platform (ekkyklêma, eccyclema) to be wheeled onto the stage in front of it (proskênion, hence “proscenium”). This platform then displayed a violent act or its immediate
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, ). Paul Seydor, “Originality and Convention: The Wild Bunch as a Western,” in Bliss, –, at , adds comments on Homeric anger; cf. note on the Odyssey. By contrast, Michael Sragow, “The Homeric Power of Peckinpah’s Violence,” The Atlantic, no. (), –; rpt. in Bliss, –, has nothing to say on the subject in The Wild Bunch and mentions Homer only in his title. E.g. at Murray, “Playboy Interview: Sam Peckinpah,” (, rpt.): “The facts [sic] about the siege of Troy, of the duel between Hector and Achilles and all the rest of it, are a hell of a lot less interesting to me than what Homer makes of it all.” Classical scholars are fully aware of this. Cf., for just one example, the title of James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, nd ed. (Durham, : Duke University Press, ; rpt. ). Cf. James P. Holoka (ed.), Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition (New York: Lang, ; rpt. ). Weil’s essay first appeared in .
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Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah
aftermath in a kind of tableau vivant. A case in point is, once again, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, in which the spectators saw Clytemnestra, bloodsplattered and with her axe raised, standing above the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra. The latter had uttered a prophetic vision of her own doom in a speech meant to heighten the horror to come. In the trilogy’s second play, The Libation Bearers, the ekkyklêma showed the dead bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, her adulterous lover and accomplice. On Sophocles’ Ajax an ancient commentator reports: “There is an ekkyklema so that Ajax can appear . . . For these things also shock the spectator; spectacle is deeply emotive. He is shown carrying a sword, covered in blood, sitting among the sheep.” A modern scholar comments on this moment: “This gory nature morte captures with shocking, unalleviated directness the extent of Ajax’s disaster.” The shock value of this and comparable scenes conforms to Aristotle’s concept of ekplêxis: “stunning impact.” Despite obvious differences, the emotional function of the ekkyklêma may be considered in analogy to Peckinpah’s use of tableaux. Prince draws appropriate attention to this stylistic feature, especially in his Westerns. He calls them “striking scenes and images presented formalistically so that they are detachable from the immediate narrative context.” This fits the purpose of the ancient ekkyklêma quite closely. Given the nature of cinema as moving images, filmic tableaux are not as static as those on a theater stage. But Peckinpah “incorporated the tableau image or scene as an enduring feature of his own work, most often used as a means for commenting explicitly on the nature and place of violence in human life.” Close again. Such parallels are worth keeping in mind when we examine Peckinpah’s Aristotelianism. I now turn to the verbal explicitness with which Greek tragedians could present the horror of violence. I limit myself to the two messengers’ speeches in one specific play, The Bacchae by Euripides, and then examine their
Eric Csapo and William J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ; rpt. ), – (A–A) and (from Pollux, Onomasticon .–), collect ancient descriptions. See further Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (; rpt. New York: Routledge, ), – and (notes; chapter titled “Tableaux, Noises and Silences”). Quoted from Csapo and Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama, (D, with source reference). Ajax will soon to be dead by his own hand, shamed by his realization that, in a fit of madness, he has killed a flock of sheep rather than his enemies. Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, . Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth, . Cf. Halliwell, : “the piercing psychological ‘shudder’ of ekplêxis (which suggests an acute emotional impact).” Prince, Savage Cinema, –. Prince, Savage Cinema, and .
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle
dramatic purpose in one specific regard in The Wild Bunch. The Bacchae may be the quintessential tragedy on the subject of human violence. Aristotle called Euripides the “most tragic” of playwrights. Aristotle knew a lot more about all those Greek cats than we do. A modern commentator explains: “taken in its context, this famous aphorism must mean that Euripides excels in arousing pity and fear.” The Bacchae demonstrates the two sides of Dionysiac religion, its elevating and calming beauty and its opposite, deadly violence. The cult has frequently been regarded as an illustration of the irrational and destructive nature of man – in Nietzsche’s terminology, the Dionysian opposite of the Apollonian. The titular women are adherents of Bacchus (Dionysus), who possesses their minds; their alternate collective name of Maenads (“Raging Women”) indicates that the god can instill furious madness in them. They engage in peaceful rites, primarily ecstatic singing and dancing in the mountains, and then sleep off their exhaustion. But when they are observed by noninitiates or disturbed by animals, they will set upon these and tear them apart. Dismemberment (sparagmos) of animals and, in extreme cases, even of humans – Orpheus is a famous example – is an integral part of Dionysian frenzy. The Bacchae may even eat parts of animals raw, an indication of their savagery. Peaceful ecstasy and irrational and violent destructiveness are thus the parameters of Dionysian religion. Euripides’ play demonstrates the god’s power by showing Dionysus’ revenge on Pentheus, the young king of Thebes. He is resisting the god, who is bringing his cult to the city, so Dionysus lures Pentheus to his doom. The Bacchae, chief among them Pentheus’ mother Agave, tear him apart. Two messenger speeches tell the audience about the devastating fury of the Maenads when they are disturbed. The first messenger informs Pentheus, who is unfamiliar with the effect Dionysus can have on the human mind. This speech is intended to prepare the audience for Pentheus’ horrific fate, so Euripides has this eyewitness give a matter-offact report. I quote only its essential lines, omitting direct quotations within the speech and specific geographic and supernatural details that do not pertain to my topic. The messenger summarizes the behavior of the Bacchae from quiet to fury:
Aristotle, Poetics a–. D. W. Lucas (ed. and comm.), Aristotle: Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; several rpts.), . Cf. on this the classic work by E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; several rpts.). There has been much later work on the topic, but Dodds’s is still fundamental.
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Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah
There they lay in the deep sleep of exhaustion . . . But your mother heard the lowing of our hornèd herds, and springing to her feet, gave a great cry to waken them from sleep . . . . Unarmed, they swooped down upon the herds of cattle grazing there on the green of the meadow. And then you could have seen a single woman with bare hands tear a fat calf, still bellowing with fright, in two, while others clawed the heifers to pieces. There were ribs and cloven hooves scattered everywhere, and scraps smeared with blood hung from the fir trees. And bulls, their raging fury gathered in their horns, lowered their heads to charge, then fell, stumbling, to the earth, pulled down by hordes of women and stripped off flesh and skin . . . . Everything in sight they pillaged and destroyed.
The gruesome details of the Maenads’ frenzy correspond to what in today’s medium of moving images would receive a series of close-ups in rapid editing. As has been said about Euripidean messenger speeches in general: “The perspective frequently alternates between a wide-angled view of the whole scene and close-ups of particular details.” And: “Pictorial contrast . . . is a means of rendering action exciting.” The messenger’s report heightens our dread of what we know will follow – Euripides could rely on his audiences’ familiarity with the myth. We may compare Anton Chekhov’s dramatic principle that a gun introduced early must in due course go off; its first appearance necessitates a climactic moment later. Aristotle had made a similar point. In The Bacchae, a second messenger reports Pentheus’ death to those on stage and to the audience. Pentheus was perching on the top of a tree in order to watch the Maenads. But Dionysus roused them from their rest and alerted them to Pentheus’ presence:
Euripides, The Bacchae , –, –, and ; quoted from David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (eds.), The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides V: Electra, The Phoenician Women, The Bacchae (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; several rpts.), –. The translator is William Arrowsmith. Quoted, in reverse order, from Shirley A. Barlow, The Imagery of Euripides: A Study in the Dramatic Use of Pictorial Language, rd ed. (London: Bristol Classical Press / Duckworth, ), . Aristotle, Poetics a–.
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle And breaking loose like startled doves, through grove and torrent, over jagged rocks, they flew, their feet maddened by the breath of god.
The Bacchae pelted Pentheus with stones and tree branches, then tore out the tree: down, down from his high perch fell Pentheus, tumbling to the ground, sobbing and screaming as he fell, for he knew his end was near. His own mother . . . fell upon him first . . . . But she was foaming at the mouth, and her crazed eyes rolling with frenzy. She was mad, stark mad, possessed by Bacchus. Ignoring his cries of pity, she seized his left arm at the wrist; then, planting her foot upon his chest, she pulled, wrenching away the arm at the shoulder – not by her own strength, for the god had put inhuman power in her hands. Ino, meanwhile, on the other side, was scratching off his flesh. Then Autonoë and the whole horde of Bacchae swarmed upon him. Shouts everywhere, he screaming with what little breath was left, they shrieking in triumph. One tore off an arm, another a foot still warm in its shoe. His ribs were clawed clean of flesh and every hand was smeared with blood as they played ball with scraps of Pentheus’ body. The pitiful remains lie scattered, one piece among the sharp rocks, others lying lost among the leaves in the depths of the forest. His mother, picking up his head, impaled it on her wand.
How more gruesome could it be? The messenger speeches as dramatic devices – first, an introductory presentation of an awesome force; then, the climactic release of that force – may be compared to the two episodes in The Wild Bunch that involve a machine gun. None of those who first test it knows its lethal potential. Few if any in the theater will have had any practical experience with such a
Euripides, The Bacchae, –, –, and –; Arrowsmith, –. The Maenads Ino and Autonoë are Agave’s sisters and Pentheus’ aunts.
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Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah
Figure . The Wild Bunch. The machine gun: pots and pans. Screen capture.
weapon, either. When it goes off without proper handling, the gun becomes an almost demonic force with a destructive will of its own, spraying bullets randomly all over. Miraculously, no one receives even a scratch; only inanimate objects like flowerpots and clay cooking utensils explode. Slow-motion photography intensifies viewers’ experience of this deadly power (Fig. .). Ingeniously, Peckinpah drives home the point he wants to make by dividing this sequence into two parts, separated by a brief interval during which those on the screen and those in the theater catch their breaths or breathe a sigh of relief that the danger is now over. But it is not. Even more daringly, Peckinpah also injects a humorous note into this sequence when he tops it off with General Mapache’s imperious command: “Put it on a tripod!” We have just seen Mapache, stunned and lying on his back holding the gun, as if wrestled to the ground by the machine monster. Given its complete bloodlessness, the scene is in stark contrast to the bloody deaths of the animals in the first messenger speech of The Bacchae, but Euripides’ audience is unlikely to have considered these deaths with any concern or outrage. They were as indifferent to the fate of the animals, which are unseen and unreal anyway, as we are to the fate of pots and pans. In The Wild Bunch, everything changes when the machine gun goes off in earnest at the climax. Here nothing is even remotely funny; on the contrary (Fig. .). Slow motion interspersed with photography at normal speed and intercut with extremely rapid editing – for which The Wild Bunch is famous – are the modern equivalents of the gruesome details reported by Euripides’ second messenger. Ancient verbal and modern visual vividness ensures maximum impact on audiences’ emotions. From
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle
Figure . The Wild Bunch. The machine gun: death and devastation. Screen capture.
Figure .
The Wild Bunch. The ecstasy of death. Screen capture.
this perspective it hardly matters that in The Bacchae only one man dies while hundreds are killed in The Wild Bunch. How can either sequence not arouse strong pity and fear? The most powerful moment in all this occurs when Lyle Gorch, one of the Bunch, is firing the machine gun. As if possessed by its superhuman power, he screams in agony and ecstasy (Fig. .). His prolonged scream has often been described as an orgiastic (or orgasmic) release – a non-Aristotelian emotional-psychological catharsis. The sight is repellent and beautiful at the same time. And it is mesmerizing even upon repeated viewing. The American cinema has never achieved its equal. We may consider this a variation on a tableau. Prince’s words on tableaux, quoted above, closely fit the messenger speeches in The Bacchae and the ecstatic moment in The Wild Bunch. Prince rightly points out that, to Peckinpah, an “ambivalent
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Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah
response” was “a fundamental characteristic of audiences watching screen violence.” He elaborates: “the tableau announces the mixture of attraction and repulsion that Peckinpah had come to recognize as the essential attribute of the spectator’s response to violence, in life and on screen.” One of the most famous tableaux in The Wild Bunch is that of the children at the beginning. “The children in the film,” it has been said, “embody innocence and evil, beauty and corruption, gentleness and brutality.” These terms are appropriate for our context, especially in regard to the childlike gentleness of the Maenads described by the first messenger before they are aroused. As The Bacchae demonstrates, ambivalence is integral to Greek Maenadism, inherent in its very nature and in the response it calls forth in an audience. The extreme violence of Maenadism is only one side, just as the pleasures of Bacchus when we enjoy wine in moderation are overshadowed by their mind-altering power when we overindulge and fall into a drunken stupor that may lead to abusive or violent behavior. An ideal depiction of Maenadism in classical art is on a famous vase painting that predates The Bacchae. It achieves a summary statement of the duality of Dionysus’ cult in a single image. This is the Brygos Painter’s dancing Maenad, mentioned and illustrated in Chapter (Fig. .). In her ecstasy, the Maenad is moving toward the viewer’s right but looking back to her left. She is holding the thyrsos, the giant fennel stalk tipped with pine cones characteristic of Maenadism, in her right hand; in her left she is holding a young leopard by its left hind leg, head down. This and the leopard skin she is wearing as her cloak indicate a past and a future sparagmos. She also has a live serpent knotted around the locks on her head. The animals point out the destructive side of Dionysus’ cult. But the serene, almost beatific, expression on her face, seen in profile, captures her complete devotion to her god and the elevating feelings that it may evoke. The image is both dark – figuratively: death and dismemberment – and light: literally light in its colors, whose faded state only reinforces the positive side of this Maenad’s ecstasy, and figuratively light in the atmosphere being portrayed. The attractive and elegant swing of her dress further emphasizes the scene’s extraordinary beauty. Bliss and destruction are inseparable. What we today tend to keep apart as incompatible opposites are here two sides of the same phenomenon.
Prince, Savage Cinema, and . Stephen Farber, “Peckinpah’s Return,” Film Quarterly, no. (Fall, ), –; quotation at . This article is reprinted in Bliss (ed.), Doing It Right, –; quotation there at –. Prince, Savage Cinema, –, examines the opening tableau in detail.
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The simultaneous attraction to, and repulsion by, screen violence is comparable to Euripides’ and the Brygos Painter’s portrayals of Maenadism. It is even tempting to juxtapose the ecstasy of the dancing Maenad to that of Lyle Gorch, if in opposite modes of presentation. The serenity of her expression is nothing like the contortion of his features. Violence is only implied in the painting but fully expressed in the film. Still, the underlying emotional and psychological complexities are similar. One other feature of The Bacchae is important here: the moment of calm before the storm. The following lines appear immediately in the second messenger’s speech before those quoted above: The high air hushed, and along the forest glen the leaves hung still; you could hear no cry of beasts. The Bacchae heard that voice but missed its words, and leaping up, they stared, peering everywhere. Again that voice. And now they knew his cry, the clear command of god.
A commentator wrote that the first two of these lines “describe wonderfully the hush of nature at the moment when the pent-up forces of the supernatural break through.” The Wild Bunch contains a comparable moment. Pike Bishop, the Bunch’s leader, has just shot and killed Mapache in almost instinctive retaliation for the latter’s murder of one of their gang. As if in disbelief, the members of the Bunch and Mapache’s army have become immobile, rooted to the ground, in complete silence: “The high air hushed.” Pike and the others then “stared, peering everywhere” (Fig. .). Pike now rises from his crouched position (cf. “leaping up”), takes aim, and precipitates the massacre that will finish all of them and most of the enemy army. “Again that voice” in The Bacchae; here: again that gun. As did the double cry of Dionysus, so do the two shots by Pike tell the followers of either what is to come next: “now they knew . . . the clear command.” As one Peckinpah expert has put it: “They smile knowingly at one another.” Another wrote: “The shock that Peckinpah has been preparing us for is the moment before the killing starts, when, with chilling serenity, a middle-aged man resolves to go to hell and take a
Euripides, The Bacchae –; Arrowsmith, . E. R. Dodds (ed. and comm.), Euripides: Bacchae, nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; several rpts.), . Garner Simmons, Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage, new ed. (New York: Limelight, ), .
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Styles of Violence: Euripides and Peckinpah
Figure .
The Wild Bunch. “The high air hushed” and the Bunch “staring everywhere.” Pike Bishop ctr. l., back to camera. Screen capture.
few people with him.” (Many more than a few, actually.) The moment here described is equivalent to Aristotle’s principle of peripeteia (“reversal”) and connected to that of anagnôrisis (“recognition”), both characteristic of complex tragedies. The moment of anagnôrisis in The Wild Bunch occurs in the scene with Pike, the Gorch brothers, and two prostitutes just before the final shoot-out in Pike’s “Let’s go!” and Lyle’s response “Why not?” The two massacres in The Wild Bunch serve to frame, and to put into greater relief, a heroic tale that is largely nonviolent. So is The Bacchae. And that is why these works have preserved their emotional power. What Strug explains about Peckinpah’s film can be applied to Euripides’ play, again with obvious but not decisive differences: The Wild Bunch achieves its wonder by its form. There is violence that is gripping not because of graphic images but because it touches fear and sacrifice and because it is filmed to show its pain and its amoral beauty. We see its attraction and we see its destruction . . . There is ambiguity that comes from the obvious savagery of the gang and the equally obvious qualities of courage, guilt, and loyalty they possess and are possessed by. The battles are stunning . . . because . . . carefully choreographed and shot, and because each one . . . has internal developments that bring out or resolve tensions in the characters . . . The Wild Bunch [is] an unusually
Rafferty, “Artist of Death,” . Cf. on this my (all too brief ) comments in “Classical Mythology and the Western Film,” Comparative Literature Studies, (), –, at .
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Peckinpah’s Aristotle powerful, unusually complex statement of ambiguity and of honor won in the face of ambiguity.
This is excellently put. As Peckinpah himself once said: “The strange thing is that you feel a strange sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line.” Tellingly, he does not speak of heroes but of killers. The more remarkable is our emotional attachment to them and their eventual fate. Peckinpah has carefully prepared this effect in a crucial earlier scene. The pastoral idyll when the Bunch take their farewell from hospitable Mexican villagers has made our attachment possible. In Peckinpah’s words: “If you can ride out with them there and feel it, you can die with them and feel it.” Evidently, Peckinpah was fully capable of voicing eloquent insights when he wished to. Their ride out is briefly, and appropriately, reprised as the film’s final shot. The two sides of violence in The Wild Bunch, its attraction and beauty on the one hand and its destructive carnage on the other, may be closest to the concept of catharsis that is possible in popular modern art. Here two statements by Peckinpah about The Wild Bunch are revealing. In he referred to what at the time he understood to be Aristotelian catharsis: “a strange, sick exultation,” quoted in context above. In a conversation from , he was not (yet?) thinking about catharsis: Actually, it’s an anti-violence film. I use violence as it is. It’s ugly, brutalizing, and bloody fucking awful . . . And yet there’s a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we’re all violent people; we have violence within us . . . It’s important to understand it and the reason people seem to need violence vicariously . . . It’s a disturbing film; people who’ve seen it call it a shattering film . . . I’m exhausted when I see it, I’m literally exhausted for hours.
Both statements complement each other. Actual violence is indeed ugly and brutal; some of the violence in The Wild Bunch is, too. But the latter is also highly stylized, as with Peckinpah’s slow-motion cinematography, which elevates it above realism. Peckinpah’s words thus come close to reaffirming the beauty and terror that tragedy evokes. So it is surprising
Cordell Strug, Lament of an Audience on the Death of an Artist () (St. Paul: Ytterli Press, ), –. The text of this slim volume was written in the year given in its title. Peckinpah died in . Cf. in this context David Weddle, “If They Move . . . Kill ’Em!” The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah (New York: Grove, ), . Quoted from Farber, “Peckinpah’s Return,” = (rpt.). The statement has been quoted frequently. An early instance is Seydor, Peckinpah, (note); cf. Weddle, “If They Move . . . Kill ’Em!” . Quoted from Farber, “Peckinpah’s Return,” – and = – and (rpt.).
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Peckinpah’s Tragic Protagonist
that the Euripidean dramatic and emotional affinities of The Wild Bunch, especially in regard to The Bacchae, have never, to my knowledge, been noticed in any scholarship on the film. But there is even more. Peckinpah’s expression “sick exultation” is a virtual restatement of Greek sophist Gorgias’ phrase “pleasurable sickness” (nosos hêdeia). It characterizes the feeling we get from looking at works of art in contrast to witnessing actual battlefield carnage. The latter is a “terrible sickness” (deinai nosoi).
Peckinpah’s Tragic Protagonist After Ride the High Country (), Peckinpah’s second film, the protagonists of his films have been called “flawed” or even “crucified heroes” or “martyred slaves of time,” although they may still lead “justified lives.” This last expression alludes to a famous moment in Ride the High Country, when the protagonist states his outlook on life: “All I want is to enter my house justified.” This is a simple but noble distillation of any hero’s code of honor. (It alludes to Luke ..) Peckinpah frequently reported that he imported
An exception is Peter Borden, “A Shared Vision: Euripides’ The Bacchae and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch” (undated, unpublished), a seminar paper written for “Violence and Catharsis: From Greek Epic and Tragedy to Cinema,” a course I began teaching in the mid-s. I am pleased to acknowledge the paper after all the years that have passed. Borden, –, briefly comments on some of the points I here examine at greater length: “techniques of anticipation,” the moment of stillness before final violence, and Euripides’ and Peckinpah’s “intercutting” technique. Earlier, he speaks of “insights into the dark, mystical animalistic side of the human psyche . . . which in Euripides and Peckinpah are uncannily similar” (). It may be amusing in this context to remember what a great British classicist had said in passing about Euripides and the cinema. On parts of The Phoenician Women, one of Euripides’ melodramas, as he termed them, H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study, rd ed. (London: Methuen, ; several rpts.), , commented: “some irreconcilable conservatives may have grumbled that Euripides was turning a church into a cinema. So he was, but it is very good cinema.” The conservatives apparently were among the ancient Athenians. Kitto contrasts Aeschylean and Euripidean tragedy, to the detriment of the latter. What Euripides and the cinema are here said to have in common is romantic melodrama, which is not at all the real thing in or for tragedy. Kitto’s book first appeared in . Gorgias, Encomium of Helen and . Cf. on this Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth, , with note on the textual emendation to nosos. The translations of Gorgias’ terms are Halliwell’s. Gorgias was born almost exactly a century before Aristotle. Gorgias’ adjective hêdys (“pleasurable”) literally means “sweet.” Cf. Sir Philip Sidney’s famous dictum about “the sweet violence of a tragedy” (An Apology for Poetry or The Defense of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd; rd ed. by R. W. Maslen [Manchester: Manchester University Press, ], ). Cf. Terry Eagleton: Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, ; several rpts.). The term “flawed” is ubiquitous and needs no further documentation. With the other expressions I refer to the titles of Terence Butler, Crucified Heroes: The Films of Sam Peckinpah (London: Fraser, ); Michael Bliss, “Martyred Slaves of Time: Age, Regret, and Transcendence in The Wild Bunch,” in Bliss (ed.), Peckinpah Today, -; and Michael Bliss, Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, ).
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this maxim from his father. The other terminology points to a pronounced feature in Peckinpah’s work and links it to Shakespearean and classical tragedy. For this reason it is curious that one central Aristotelian idea about tragic protagonists has rarely if ever been adduced in regard to The Wild Bunch: that of hamartia (“mistake”), which is commonly considered to mean “tragic flaw.” But, as with catharsis, the matter is more complex. Aristotle was again rather slippery. About his ideal tragic protagonist he wrote: “Such a man is one who is not preeminent in virtue and justice, and one who falls into affliction not because of evil and wickedness, but because of a certain fallibility (hamartia).” Thus “there are few, if any, passages [in Aristotle] where ‘flaw’ is a justifiable rendering,” given that hamartia is “a mistake of judgement.” Here is an explanation why “flaw” is the common rendering of hamartia in English: “a flaw or frailty of character [was, and is] a conception which gives scope for developing the always popular notion of poetic justice [as prominently in Shakespeare] . . . so satisfactory a formula clearly deserved to be supported by the authority of Aristotle. Indeed, it might be a more useful critical tool than hamartia in the sense that Aristotle intended.” Tragic hamartia is thus understood as action on insufficient knowledge that leads to inevitable consequences: The essence of hamartia is ignorance combined with the absence of wicked intent . . . hamartia is lack of the knowledge which is needed if right decisions are to be taken . . . Aristotle has required that the logic of cause and effect should be rigidly observed; nothing could be more logical than that decisions made under a misapprehension should lead to disastrous consequences, and the train of events may well come to a climax in a peripeteia.
This is not quite the tragic flaw, either in general or as Peckinpah scholars employ it, but it fits the main character of The Wild Bunch. Pike Bishop’s fallibility can be observed or at least inferred on several crucial occasions: “Over the course of the story, Peckinpah forced Bishop to face his failures.”
Aristotle, Poetics a–; quoted from Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ; rpt. ), . See also Dana L. Munteanu, “Varieties of Character: The Better, the Worse, and the Like,” in Pierre Destrée, Malcolm Heath, and Dana L. Munteanu (eds.), The Poetics in Its Aristotelian Context (London and New York: Routledge, ), –. Quoted from Lucas (ed. and comm.), Aristotle: Poetics, ; cf. for details Lucas, – and especially – (“Appendix IV: Hamartia”). Lucas (ed. and comm.), Aristotle: Poetics, . Lucas (ed. and comm.), Aristotle: Poetics, –. Quoted from Weddle, “If They Move . . . Kill ’Em!” .
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As shown in two crucial flashbacks, Pike’s carelessness had once cost the life of his lover, given him a painful leg wound from which he still suffers, and caused the capture of the gang member who is now leading the railroad men pursuing the Bunch. Pike’s chivalrous gesture of presenting Mapache, a murderous Mexican bandit chief, with a machine gun is, to say the least, ill-advised. Most crucially, Pike should never have arranged the installments paid by the Mexicans to the Bunch in such a way that Angel, the Mexican member of the Bunch, was the last one to collect. Angel had shot and killed his former fiancée, now Mapache’s woman, while she was in the general’s arms. Angel should have come earlier or, better, not at all. The film’s opening credits culminate with Pike’s now famous command: “If they move, kill ’em!” But this is rash and ill-considered as well, although no film scholar seems to have noticed. Had the railroad posse not been lying in wait, the Bunch’s bank robbery might have come off without a hitch, for nobody has suspected that the men wearing US army uniforms are outlaws in disguise. But, if even one shot were heard from inside the bank, the ruse would be up. Pike ought to have thought of such a consequence when he uttered his pithy command. Still, he can be an able leader. He has planned the bank robbery and presumably deserves credit for the Bunch’s disguise. He coolly defuses the volatile situation in Mapache’s camp immediately after Angel kills the young woman. He later plans and carries out the Bunch’s assault on a US Army’s weapons train without any bloodshed. This raid would have been a triumph of cunning had not the Bunch’s pursuers been present yet again. The Bunch escapes by blowing up a bridge and landing their pursuers in the river, a spectacular action sequence in which no one is killed or even wounded. Pike had planned this, too. Halliwell’s words on the essence of tragic hamartia, quoted above, fully fit Pike. His tragic development lies in his growing awareness that he has repeatedly fallen short of his own heroic code: “We’re sticking together, like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him. If you can’t, you’re an animal! You’re finished! We’re finished! All of us!” His intellectual potential as well as its shortcomings can be summarized in the contrast between two other of his utterances: “We gotta start thinking beyond our guns.” And: “Being sure is my business.” The former is poignant; the latter an empty boast. Altogether, “the movie’s emotional impact depends on our ability to understand an aging killer’s melancholy” and “the solitude enforced by his own calamitous mistakes.”
Quoted from Rafferty, “Artist of Death,” . Additional sensitive comments on this in Prince, Savage Cinema, .
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Figure .
The Wild Bunch. “Shepherd of the people”: the dissolve from Pike Bishop to the Bunch riding into the distance. Screen capture.
Pike’s heroic but fallible nature receives a poetic visual tribute immediately after he utters his code. His shortcomings are its immediate cause. Pike is mounting his horse, a stirrup breaks, and he falls, hurting his wounded leg. With quiet dignity he ignores the taunts of the Gorch brothers, remounts, and slowly rides off. We see him receding into the distance from behind. But the shot, taken with a telephoto-plus-zoom lens, keeps Pike’s figure in the same position on screen: he rides away from us, but he remains as tall as when he started. Peckinpah then dissolves to an extreme long shot, in which the small figures of the Bunch are riding into the distance. But the dissolve is so slow that, for a few seconds, Pike, seen from the back, is being superimposed on the others (Fig. .). The implication of this image becomes evident to all who connect Pike’s last name with Homer’s Iliad. Walon Green, who received story and coscreenwriting credits for The Wild Bunch, chose Pike’s first name as an indication of his character: For the leader of the gang, he created the name Pike Bishop. “Pike was a name I always wanted to use,” Green said. “It’s a kind of carnivorous fish, and it suggested someone who is tough and predatory.” His last name, Bishop, carried no special meaning for Green.
Pike, perhaps a nickname rather than a realistic first name, reveals something about its bearer’s nature as an outlaw and predator. Parallel to such a
Seydor, Peckinpah, , offers a subtle descriptive analysis of the moment, calling it “surely the film’s most beautiful single image.” Quoted from W. K. Stratton, The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film (New York: Bloomsbury, ), (from interview with Green).
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Peckinpah’s Tragic Protagonist
speaking name, Homeric heroes carried descriptive epithets. “Swift-footed Achilles” may be the best-known instance. Agamemnon, commander-inchief of the Greek army before Troy, is several times called “the shepherd of the people” (poimên laôn). The expression, also applied to other kings or rulers, means “leader, commander.” They oversee the well-being of their men, just as shepherds look after their flocks. The Greek word for “overseer” (literally) is episkopos, which becomes episcopus in Latin and, via (e)biscopus in vulgar Latin, bishop in English. Pike Bishop is as heroic as a Homeric warrior, as ruthless as Achilles, and sometimes as clever as Odysseus. But he repeatedly exhibits overconfidence and falls victim to hamartia like Homer’s Agamemnon. “Failure of the shepherd is the rule, not the exception” in ancient epic. Now we realize why his last name is appropriate even if its classical overtones were wholly absent from the minds of anyone associated with the film. One other aspect about the tragic side of Peckinpah’s epic deserves at least a brief mention: its extraordinary music score, composed by Jerry Fielding. To Aristotle, music was one of the six constituent parts of tragedy. The earliest origins of tragedy on stage were in choral performances; hence the root -ôd- (or, in different transliteration, -ôid-) meaning “song, chant” in the original Greek noun tragôdia. (Cf. modern Greek tragoudi, which means “song.”) The emotional power of music on its listeners is a universal phenomenon. Fielding’s composition has been described, memorably, as “echoing the film’s refusal to draw conclusions; its tone is alternately brooding, anxious, and frantic . . . A large orchestra . . . mulls . . . over the meaninglessness of it all . . . The overall effect is one of powerful bitterness.” Especially noteworthy is Fielding’s thematically important, indeed decisive, integration of the Mexican song “La Golondrina” (“The Swallow”) into his own music. The Wild Bunch presents a virtually perfect combination of the visual, the verbal, and the aural – a post-Wagnerian example of a Gesamtkunstwerk in a modern
On this see Johannes Haubold, Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – (“‘Shepherd of the People’”) and – (“An Epic Ideal”). OED s.v. “bishop, n.” So Haubold, Homer’s People, ; cf. Haubold, – (“The Failed Ideal”). Aristotle, Poetics b– and – and a–. See Csapo and Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama, – (IVC). Quoted from John Caps, “Soundtracks : Essential Movie Music: A Listener’s Guide,” Film Comment, no. (), –, at . On this see Jerry Holt, “‘La Golondrina’: The Secret Text of The Wild Bunch,” in Bliss (ed.), A Uniquely American Epic, –.
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technological medium. So do many other noteworthy films, and not only musicals or versions of opera, operetta, or ballet.
Summation: Visual Poetry As just indicated, The Wild Bunch is both epic and tragic. Aristotle himself turned to epic for his analyses of tragedy. As Kitses said, the film is primarily American, but its dramatic structure, its emotional power, and the characterization of its hero relate it to classical literature and culture. Any analysis of the film from the perspective of Greek epic and tragedy can only deepen our understanding and appreciation. We can now also answer the question I posed in this chapter’s title with a mere two words: Very well. What Aristotle says in his Poetics is applicable far more widely than is often recognized: to the fine arts at large. Teachers of screenwriting routinely refer to it. Peckinpah was right to say about The Wild Bunch that he had been wrong about catharsis. He was wrong because the prevailing views of the concept at that time were wrong or at least questionable for their psychological or sociological dogmatism. Peckinpah is likely to have been taught or otherwise to have absorbed that wrong understanding. But Peckinpah was right to say that he intended to achieve a catharsis through pity and fear in an Aristotelian sense of which he was probably unaware. If this is (or can be) so, then Peckinpah evinced an instinctive dramatic and poetic grasp of the creative process to express an ancient aesthetic-and-emotional concept in a modern medium. On this view, Peckinpah and his artistic and technical collaborators, chiefly his co-writer, cinematographer, editor, and
Cf., e.g., Aristotle, Poetics b–. He states here, at the conclusion of our surviving text, that he has been dealing with fundamental features of both genres. The second book of the Poetics (on comedy) is lost. Cf. the title of S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, with a Critical Text of The Poetics, th ed. (; rpt. New York: Dover, ; several rpts.). Specifically against Butcher’s view of catharsis: Bernd Seidensticker, “Die Grenzen der Katharsis,” in Vöhler and Linck (eds.), Grenzen der Katharsis in den modernen Ku¨nsten, –, at –. Seidensticker, , concludes that Aristotelian catharsis applies only to tragedy and does so only in specific ways. This is unnecessarily reductive. So do Pedro L. Cano, De Aristóteles a Woody Allen: Poética y retórica para cine y televisión (Barcelona: Gedisa, ); Michael Tierno, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization (New York: Hyperion, ). Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (; rpt. London: Methuen, ), refers to Aristotle and the Poetics throughout. Most often Aristotle is cited as ultimate authority on plot construction (the three unities, generally misunderstood) and progression, as by Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, ), and The Screenwriter’s Workbook, th ed. (New York: Delta, ), passim.
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Summation: Visual Poetry
principal actors, built a tragic-epic story in such a way that parallels to Greek tragedy with its moments of ekplêxis, peripeteia, and (self-)anagnorisis evoke strong emotional reactions of eleos and phobos in viewers. All this is possible because of the film’s structure, which switches from moments of calm to shocking action. Contrast the virtually nonstop violence and lack of structure in Zack Snyder’s (), another work about the last stand of a killer elite faced with overwhelming odds. It is doubtful that can elicit even a fraction of the emotions that The Wild Bunch has always elicited. After all, “Peckinpah’s savage poetry was informed by an abiding moral perspective on its violence.” Peckinpah was astonishingly Aristotelian, regardless of his own or his critics’ understanding of catharsis. I give the last word to Peckinpah himself. My final quotation is intended to provide a kind of synthesis to Peckinpah’s own thesis (catharsis) and antithesis (no cartharsis). Before he said in his BBC interview that he had been wrong about catharsis, he stated, matter-of-factly, something with which every viewer and critic can agree: “I deal in violence as . . . very sad poetry.”
I analyzed in my Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ; rpt. ), – (chapter titled “Fascinating Ur-Fascism: The Case of ”), with brief mention of The Wild Bunch at –. Quoted from Prince, Savage Cinema, .
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Epilegomena
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Neither Aristotle nor Lucretius ever used a camera obscura. Still, its earliest models and assumed classical ancestry were so influential that German polymath Johann Zahn – like Kircher, a monk – included an alluring tribute to it in his influential and weighty Latin tome Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium of . An engraving shows a large portable camera obscura (Fig. .). A banner hovering in the air above it displays this distich: Cedit Naturae Ars pictrix, dum pulchrius Arte Hic Natura suis ludit imaginibus
In literal prose: “Painterly art yields to Nature, while Nature is here playing with her images more beautifully than Art.” Here refers to the images created with the camera obscura. The illustration accompanies detailed instructions on how to build one. Modern art scholars regularly reproduce or quote Zahn’s illustration and even more frequently its Latin text when they examine the use of a camera obscura in the history of painting. But they tend to mis-transcribe the Latin, especially printing an impossible pulcherius for pulchrius and thereby revealing their ignorance of Latin morphology and metrics. An egregious case is that of American art historian Charles Seymour, who once argued that by Zahn’s time “the novelty [of the camera obscura] had worn off” and Zahn’s text revealed that “Nature herself was now praised as a higher artist.” Such a conclusion makes nonsense of the Latin and contradicts Zahn’s purpose with his book
Joannes Zahn, Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium (Wu¨rzburg, ), , Fig. XX. The full title of Zahn’s book is considerably longer. Later volumes and editions followed. Charles Seymour, Jr., “Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura,” The Art Bulletin, (), –-; quotation at . For a much better understanding, see, e.g., Dario Camuffo, “La Camera Oscura: Il nostro occhio nel passato,” in Il vedutismo veneziano: Una nuova visione (Milan: Fondazione Bracco, ), –, at (fig. from Zahn) and . Camuffo’s article is on Canaletto.
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Fade-Out
Figure .
A camera obscura with its Latin distich in Zahn, Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium.
and the content and context of this very page. Seymour overlooked the crucial word hic (“here”). Zahn’s point is that Nature, in a playful mood (ludit), herself employs the new tool, the camera obscura, and produces images that exceed the accomplishments of painters in verisimilitude. It is true that Nature is the greatest artist of all because humans can only strive to imitate her but rarely if ever equal her. This had been the standard perspective on art and nature in and after antiquity. Now Nature can avail herself of a new tool, which only increases her triumph over painting. The imitation of nature by technical means has begun; it was far from outdated. Friends of classical literature may be reminded of what Ovid said about Daedalus, the great mythical inventor mentioned at the beginning of this book. When Daedalus was about to design and construct wings for himself and his son Icarus, an authorial comment informs us: “he makes nature new.” Daedalus discovered something new about nature, even gave her new laws as if he had been a classical precursor of Newton. Similarly, the camera obscura made possible a new understanding of nature and the
Ovid, Metamorphoses .: naturamque novat. On various interpretations of this expression, with references to related lines in Ovid, see A. S. Hollis (ed. and comm.), Ovid: Metamorphoses Book VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; several rpts.), ad loc. Cf. Horace, Odes ...
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Cleopatra’s Zoetrope
creation of natural-looking images. For this reason Zahn’s engraving has been adduced in various accounts of film history and pre-cinema. At the end of my book, it is appropriate for me to let the cinema itself, here represented by Hollywood, pay homage to the ancient Greeks, who have received the lion’s share of attention in its pages. For this purpose I turn to two films and then mention brief moments in three others. My first is a lavish spectacle set in Greco-Roman antiquity. The second is a melodrama in a twentieth-century setting. The third is romantic fluff, the fourth an animated classic. My fifth and final one is a stupendous quasidocumentary. Together, they provide me with a suitable fade-out.
Cleopatra’s Zoetrope The cinema itself once credited Alexandrian science with the invention of its own ancestor, purely fictional though it is. Regrettably, this invention never made it to the screen but is worth bringing to light. Alexandria, Egypt; . Julius Caesar has defeated his rival Pompey the Great at the Battle of Pharsalus and pursued his fugitive enemy to Egypt. King Ptolemy presents Caesar with Pompey’s severed head. The Egyptian court is attempting to ingratiate itself with the invincible Roman, who will soon reach for absolute power. Ptolemy is a weak and young ruler dependent on his advisors; he is also embroiled in a struggle for the throne of Egypt with his older sister and co-regent Cleopatra. Caesar takes charge of the siblings’ power play. He falls for Cleopatra’s infinite variety, gives her the throne, has a son with her, and only leaves Egypt the following year. His learned lover, a woman of great intelligence and sophistication, is likely to have deepened Caesar’s interest in the history and culture of Egypt and in the world of Hellenistic arts and sciences, exemplified by the famous library and museum of Alexandria. Alexandria, Egypt; as recreated in the twentieth century. Since , writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has been filming his gigantic epic Cleopatra, one of the biggest and worst-fated of all productions. Before it was released in , Cleopatra had almost bankrupted Twentieth Century-Fox. Cleopatra was taken away from Mankiewicz by new (and former) studio boss Darryl Zanuck, who vanquished his enemies at Fox
So, e.g., by Friedrich von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films: Die Geschichte der Kinematographie und ihrer Vorläufer (Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, n.d. []), (ctr.), with an incorrect rendition of, and speculation about, pulchrius and an entirely wrong translation. Zglinicki, and –, reports that Zahn built a large number of camerae obscurae and refined their technique and that he developed sophisticated magic lanterns, the other chief topic of his Oculus artificialis.
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Fade-Out
and returned to power like a modern Caesar of the cinema. Zanuck ordered a radical re-editing and shortening of Cleopatra for a rather hasty release, leaving a huge amount of footage on the cutting-room floor. Mankiewicz had envisioned and written a film in two parts (“Caesar and Cleopatra,” “Antony and Cleopatra”), which he intended to be somewhere between six and almost eight hours long. The original release was a few minutes over four hours; this version was further reduced to three hours and fifteen minutes. Only very little continuity, characterization, and various details that would have brought modern audiences closer to Cleopatra and her world survived the scissors. In the words of Elizabeth Taylor, Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra: “They had cut out the heart, the essence, the motivations, the very core.” Mankiewicz had aimed for what he called “an intimate epic,” and for once the expression is not a contradiction in terms, despite the sequences of massive spectacle that are the surviving film’s main attractions. Caesar’s time with Cleopatra in Alexandria is a case in point. Parts of the ancient city were recreated on Italian locations, with interior sets in the Cinecittà studios outside Rome. Mankiewicz had taken pains to impress on Caesar, and thus on his audiences who were even less familiar with anything Caesar saw, the advanced culture and sciences of ancient Egypt and their continuation by the Hellenistic Greeks who built on their predecessors’ achievements, not least in areas of technology. Mankiewicz’s script included a sequence that perfectly illustrates his approach. It became known only when a researcher published an article on his archival findings. This sequence contained a sly in-joke by a cinema professional to his medium, set more than nineteen hundred years before it would come into existence: Caesar soon believes he shares a destiny with Cleopatra. She has seduced him with the wealth of Egyptian invention and science. In an early sequence that was edited out, Caesar is shown a zoetrope and marvels at moving pictures. An astrolabe that will aid in navigating his galleys is demonstrated. Finally, a telescope that will enable him to identify his enemies at a great distance is shown to him. It is during these scenes that Mankiewicz makes it clear there is an emotional bond forming between Caesar and Cleopatra. Caesar takes the scientific devices that are of use to him back to Rome. The zoetrope, a toy of no military value, is left behind.
Heron, had he lived early enough and had this charming scene been real, is likely to have felt at least some chagrin at Caesar’s disdain. Fortunately, a
Quoted from Jerry Vermilye and Mark Ricci, The Films of Elizabeth Taylor (Secaucus, : Citadel Press, ), . Taylor’s overall verdict on Cleopatra was unqualifiedly negative. James Beuselink, “Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra,” Films in Review, (), –; quotation at –.
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The Cinema’s Paths to the Greeks
famous milestone in cinema history pays tribute, if indirectly, to the zoetrope as its medium’s ancestor. At one point in The Blows, which I adduced in Chapter , Antoine Doinel takes a ride on the Rotor, a centrifuge in an amusement park. Truffaut filmed the beginning, the increasingly and then decreasingly rapid movement, and the standstill of the Rotor from inside and from above as if it were a giant zoetrope – which here it is. His homage to the moving image becomes more poignant to viewers who notice that Truffaut himself is in on the ride, standing near Antoine, his alter ego. My next farewell film, as it might be called, is little known today but worth our attention because it tells us something fundamental and obvious about antiquity well beyond the subject of this book. And it does so in an utterly disarming manner.
The Cinema’s Paths to the Greeks The melodrama Primrose Path is based on a Broadway play that was in turn based on a notorious novel. Ellie Mae Adams, played by Ginger Rogers, whom we met in Chapter , is a young girl who lives in the ironically named slum that gives the film its title. She has a prostitute for a mother and a hopeless alcoholic for a father. She also has to deal with an anything-butgrandmotherly grandmother and a bratty kid sister. The film was directed and co-written by Gregory LaCava, best known for his sophisticated comedies. Verbal humor accordingly permeates even the squalid settings. The grandmother, for instance, has a wittily stinging tongue. Ellie Mae’s father is the only member of this low-class family to have received a classical education in college. His first name is Homer. He may well be the most pitiful Homer in all of film history. He has long been engaged in writing a book of translations of Greek literature, but his alcoholism has thwarted all his endeavors. His book comes to nothing, and he accidentally shoots and fatally wounds his wife. Nevertheless, he remembers at least some of his learning. At one point he quotes to Ellie Mae a maxim by Menander, with which he intends to excuse his failures and to elicit his daughter’s sympathy. Viewers have already encountered it after the opening credits as the film’s epigraph: “We live, not as we wish to – but as we can.” Classical culture permeates much of the film’s story and atmosphere.
Menander, Sententiae (Gnômai monostikhoi) ; see Siegfried Jaekel (ed.), Menandri sententiae / Comparatio Menandri et Philistionis (Leipzig: Teubner, ), .
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Fade-Out
Early on, Ellie Mae is walking through her California town to the beach, and a kindly old gentleman who is never called anything but Gramp gives her a lift in his jalopy. Their conversation includes the very insight into Greek culture for which I have included this film and written this book. It appears in the last line here quoted: : Why ain’t you at school? : Don’t have to be. : Why not? : I get my learnin’ from my pa. : Oh. Is he a schoolteacher or something? : No. He went to college. He’s learning me all about them old Greeks. : I wouldn’t know about them. : They was mighty smart.
Evidently, knowing Greek and the Greeks is good for you. It can even lead to romance, as it does in Henry Koster’s musical comedy Two Sisters from Boston (), set in the early years of the twentieth century. When a young man quotes, in passable Greek, “the great Greek dramatist Euripides” to one of the titular siblings, she interrupts his translation by translating the words herself (“I was hoping some day to be a Greek teacher”). She later tells her sister: “He’s really very nice. He knows Greek.” The young man, who had earlier quoted, in English only, a “word of wisdom by the Greek poet Sophocles” to his mother, is, inevitably, smitten. The two final films I adduce visually complement Ella Mae’s verbal tribute. That she was perfectly right was borne out ten years later in rather a surprising manner. The animated Disney feature Cinderella contains a medium close-up of three books on the table of the king, who is about to set the story’s romance in motion. Their authors’ names appear in large letters: Homer
Plato
Rabelais
Rabelais next to two towering Greeks in a film intended for the whole family? Trust the cinema to come up with this surprising and amusing combination, one that ancient rhetoricians might have appreciated as a callida iunctura (“clever juxtaposition”). The adults among viewers who
A comparable iunctura that is less callida but still amusing occurs in Brian Henson’s The Muppet Christmas Carol (). In Scrooge’s boyhood school, busts of Aristotle, Dante, Molière, and Shakespeare are lined up on a shelf. The shelf, of course, gets toppled over.
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The Cinema’s Paths to the Greeks
had at least a measure of familiarity with these names may have doubted that His Befuddled Majesty ever opened his books. Such filmgoers were in for a spectacular treat about them old Greeks when the Cinerama extravaganza Seven Wonders of the World () took them to Athens. The Acropolis never looked more majestic than it did on such a gigantic screen (Fig. .). Well over eighty years ago, Ella Mae put the case for the Greeks and the cinema most concisely and therefore best. Yes, they was mighty smart! In fact, they was even smarter than is commonly believed today. This is one reason why what Horace called “the Greek models” in his Ars poetica are of importance in our age of mass media. J. B. Hainsworth, co-author of major commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, once observed in a book entitled The Idea of Epic: “At the beginning of literature, when heroic poetry reached society as a whole . . . society listened; in the twentieth century society views.” Hainsworth concluded: “the modern heroic medium is film, and not necessarily the productions that are held in highest critical regard.” This is still the case in the twenty-first century and unlikely to change. But Hainsworth’s point applies beyond epic. Horace, too, observed that watching a story (on the stage) makes for stronger impressions than listening to one (in oral performance). He calls our eyes “faithful, reliable” and adds a comment on the spectators’ emotional involvement (“what the viewer delivers to himself”). We may be justified therefore to expand Horace’s ut pictura poesis, his restatement of Simonides, for our age. To describe all storytelling in word and image, we could say, if at the cost of Horatian scansion: MOVENS VT PICTVRA POESIS HODIERNA
Horace, The Art of Poetry : exemplaria Graeca. Both quotations are from J. B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; rpt. ), . Hainsworth wrote the commentary on Books – of the Odyssey in Alfred Heubeck, Stephanie West, and Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. : Introduction and Books I–VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; rpt. ). He is the author of The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. : Books – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), among other publications on Homer. Horace, The Art of Poetry –: segnius inritant animos demissa per aurem / quam quae sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus et quae / ipse sibi tradit spectator. Cf. the passage from Horace adduced in Chapter .
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Figure .
Seven Wonders of the World. The Acropolis on the mighty Cinerama screen. Screen capture.
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Index
Achilles , , , , , , see also shield of Achilles Acropolis , , Act of Killing, The () Actor’s Revenge, An () Adventures of Prince Achmed, The () Aeneid , , , , , , , aeolipile Aeschylus , , –, – Affair, The (TV series) Agamemnon , , –, , , –, Agamemnon (Aeschylus) – Agel, Henri Agnes Here and There Varda () Ajax (Sophocles) Ajax (the Locrian) – Ajax (the Telamonian) , Alberti, Leon Battista –, , Alexander () Alexander mosaic , Alexander the Great () Alien () All about My Mother () Allen, Woody , Almodóvar, Pedro Altman, Robert , Amasis Painter American Beauty () Andrei Rublev () Angelidi, Antoinetta , –, Angelopoulos, Theodoros , Animated Odyssey, The () animation , , –, Annie Hall () Antichrist () Antonioni, Michelangelo , – Apollo, sculpture of Apollodorus Apollonius of Rhodes , –, , , –, , , , ,
Apuleius – Archimedes Argonautica (Apollonius) , , Ariadne – Aristotle , –, –, , –, , –, –, –, , –, , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , –, Arnheim, Rudolf , , Aronofsky, Darren , Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, The () arrow, Zeno’s , – Astaire, Fred , Astruc, Alexandre At the Stroke of Twelve () Athena –, –, , , , –, –, , , , Atlantis () Au hazard Balthazar () Auden, W. H. – Aumont, Jacques –, , –, – Bacchae (Euripides) –, Bacchanalian Revel Before a Herm (Poussin) Bad and the Beautiful, The () Badiou, Alain , Barthes, Roland –, Battleship Potemkin, The () , –, – Baudrillard, Jean , Baudry, Jean-Louis Bazin, André , –, , , , , , , Beau Geste () Beauty and the Beast () Beauty of the Devil () Being There (novel, film), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ () Benny’s Video () Berger, John , –
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Index
Bergman, Ingmar , , – Bergson, Henri , , , , , , , , , – Bertolucci, Bernardo –, Big Clock, The () Big Little Lies (TV series) Birds, The () Bisbee’ () Black Widow () Blade Runner () Blonde Venus () Bloodstained Butterfly, The () Blow Out () Blow-Up () Bogdanovich, Peter Bonnard, Pierre Boogie Nights () Brave () Brazil () Bresson, Robert , , , , , , Brief Encounter () Brooks, Louise Brown, Clarence Brownlow, Kevin Brygos Painter –, – bullet time –, – bull jumpers (Minoan fresco) , Buñuel, Lúis Burgess, Anthony , Burkert, Walter , , , –, , Burns, Ken Burstyn, Ellen Butades – Butler, Samuel –
Cesariano, Cesare CGI see images, digital Chabrol, Claude , –, , Chaffey, Don , –, , –, Chapayev () Chaplin, Charles Character () Chaudet, Jeanne-Elisabeth Chronicles of San Francisco, The () , – chronophotography , , see also Muybridge, Eardweard Cicero, M. Tullius –, , , , , –, Cinderella () cinematism , –, – Cinerama –, –, Citizen Kane () , City Lights () Civil War, The () Clair, René Clash of the Gods () – Cleopatra () – Clockwork Orange, A ( film) , , Clockwork Orange, A (novel) , Cocteau, Jean , , , , Conformist, The () – Contempt () Conversation, The () Cookie () Coppola, Francis Ford Cottafavi, Vittorio , Crimson Pirate, The () Crossfire () Cukor, George
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The () Cacoyannis, Michael –, , –, , Calvino, Italo , –, camera obscura –, , , – Camerini, Mario , , , , , , Canudo, Riciotto Carnaval Atlântida () Cartier-Bresson, Henri –, , , Casablanca () Casino () – catharsis , –, , , , Catullus, C. Valerius – cave allegory, in Plato , –, Cave of Forgotten Dreams () cave paintings –, Céline and Julie Go Boating ()
da Vinci, Leonardo Daedaleum daguerrotype Damascius – dance , –, Daphnis and Chloe De rerum natura see On the Nature of Things Death Watch () Debt, The () Deleuze, Gilles , della Porta, Giambattista , de Palam, Brian Design for Living () – Destiny () Dial M for Murder () , Dibutade Coming to Visit Her Lover’s Portrait (Chaudet) Dio Chrysostom –
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Index
Discus Thrower, Diskobolos , , –, , Disney Studios , , Dogtooth () Double Life of Véronique, The () Douris –, –, , , –, –, , , Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb () Dreyer, Carl Theodor , – Duluth (novel) Dwan, Allan –, eccyclema, ekkyklêma – ecphrasis , , –, EDtv () education, films in –, , Egypt, art of – Eisenstein, Sergei , –, –, , , , –, , –, , , –, –, Electra () –, Electra (Sophocles) , Elephant Man, The () enargeia , , –, , , –, , , Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The () EO () Epicureanism, Epicurus , , –, –, , Epstein, Jean , Ethiopian Story, An , –, Euclid , Euripides –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , –, , –, –, , Face Behind the Mask, The () Fairbanks, Douglas Fake It So Real () Fanciulli, Giuseppe , Farnese Bull Favreau, Jon – Fellini, Federico , Fielding, Jerry Fiennes, Martha Film Parade, The () flashback , –, , Fleece, Golden see Golden Fleece Flower of Evil, The () Forbidden Planet () Ford, John , , –, , Blows, The ()
Francastel, Pierre –, –, Francisci, Pietro –, Frantz () Freda, Riccardo , –, , , Freud () Freud, Sigmund – Friese-Greene, William Gance, Abel –, – Garbo, Greta , –, , Gerhard, Eduard –, , –, , Giangrande, Giuseppe –, , Giants of Thessaly, The () – Gibson, William Gilliam, Terry Gladiator () Godard, Jean-Luc , , , , Golden Ass, The Golden Fleece –, , , , –, , , , , – Golden Thing, The () – Gorky, Maxim –, , , , , , Grandma’s Boy () Gray, Hugh Great Train Robbery, The () Great Trajanic Frieze (on Arch of Constantine) Griffith, D. W. , –, , –, Groundhog Day () Gunning, Tom –, , Guthrie, Tyrone – Halliwell, Stephen , –, Hamlet () Haneke, Michael Harris, James Harrison, Tony Harry Potter (film series) Harryhausen, Ray , , , – Hathaway, Henry Hawks, Howard Helen of Troy () Heliodorus , –, , , , Hepworth, Cecil Heracles, Hercules –, –, –, , –, , , , , , Hercules () – Hero () Heron of Alexandria –, Herzog, Werner –, Hidden () Hiroshima mon amour ()
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Index Hitchcock, Alfred , , , , , , , –, –, , , –, , –, , – Homer , –, , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , –, – Homer’s Odyssey (film) Hopwood, Henry – Horace –, , House of Games () House of Gucci () Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (, ) Huston, John Hypsipyle (Euripides) , , –, Idea, The () île de Calypso: Ulysse et le géant Polyphème, L’ () Iliad –, , , , , , , , , , , Illusionist, The () Images () images, digital , , , –, , , –, Immemory Immortals () Inception () , Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) Intolerance () Invasion of the Body Snatchers (, ) Iphigenia () , , – Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides) , , Jackie Brown () Jason –, , –, , , , , , –, –, –, –, – Jason and the Argonauts () , –, Jason and the Argonauts () – Jetée, La () , –, , –, Joan of Arc () Jonah Who Will Be in the Year () JR (artist) – Juliet of the Spirits () Jurassic Park, Jurassic World (film series) Juvenal Kahn, Fritz kairos , , , see also Cartier-Bresson, Henri and moment, fruitful Kazan, Elia ,
Keaton, Buster –, Kermode, Frank – Kieślowski, Krzysztof – Killing, The () King Lear () Kircher, Athanasius , , , Kiss, The () Kluge, Alexander – Knights of the Teutonic Order () Knorr, Karen Konchalovsky, Andrey –, –, , , , Kozintsev, Grigori – Kubrick, Stanley , –, , Kuleshov, Lev , –, , Kurosawa, Akira La Llorona () La Strada () LaCava, Gregory Lady Windermere’s Fan () Lang, Fritz , , Lanthimos, Yorgos Laocoon –, Laocoon (Lessing) , –, –, Last Picture Show, The () Last Year at Marienbad () Lawrence. T. E. , – Legend of Lylah Clare, The () Léglise, Paul Leisen, Mitchell Leone, Sergio , Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim , –, –, –, –, Letter, The () Letter from an Unknown Woman () Lévi-Strauss, Claude L’Herbier, Marcel Libation Bearers (Aeschylus) Lion King, The () Locket, The () Logue, Christopher Longus Look of Silence, The () Lubitsch, Ernst –, , Lucian of Samosata Lucretius Carus, T. –, Lumet, Sidney , Lumière, Louis and Auguste , , , , , , Lycophron , Maenad, Maenadism see Bacchae and Brygos Painter Magic Box, The ()
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Index
Maigret at Bay () Mamoulian, Rouben –, –, Man Who Loved Women, The () Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The () Manilius, Marcus Mankiewicz, Joseph L. – Marcus Aurelius, column of statue of Marey, Etienne-Jules , Marker, Chris , –, , , , Marriage Circle, The () Matrix, The (film trilogy) , , – Maximus of Tyre Mclaren, Norman Medea , , , , –, , , –, , –, , –, , Medea () , – Medea (Euripides) , Medea (Seneca) Méliès, Georges Memory of Justice, The () – Menander Metamorphoses (Ovid) , –, Metropolis () Metz, Christian Meyer, Hugo Meyer, Nicholas – Michael Clayton () Middle of the World, The () Minerva see Athena Moigno, François –, moment, fruitful (Lessing) –, –, , Mon Oncle d’Amérique () Morin, Edgar Morris, Earl Mulvey, Laura , Murder on the Orient Express () Muybridge, Eadweard , , –, Myron , , –, , Napoleon () Nativity () Nest of Gentry, A () Nightcap () Nike (relief sculpture) Nile mosaic Ninotchka () Nolan, Christopher , Notorious () Nude in an Interior (Bonnard) Nymphomaniac () , Odissea () – Odissea () , –, , –,
Odissea () Odyssée, L’ (-) Odysseus , , , , –, –, – Odyssey (Homer) , , , , –, , Odyssey, The () – Odyssey D, The () Oedipus Oedipus Rex () – Oedipus Rex () , , , Oliveira, Manoel de Olympia () – Omeros (Walcott) , On the Life and Poetry of Homer On the Nature of Things – Once Upon a Time in America Ondaatje, Michael One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich () Ophu¨ls, Max Ophuls, Marcel – Oresteia (Aeschylus) , Original Movie, The () Orphée () Out of Sight () Ovid , , –, , , , , Owl’s Legacy, The () , Page, Denys , , , –, , paintings –, , –, , , , , , , , , , Panofsky, Erwin , , , Panoply Vase Animation Project paradoxes of Zeno see Zeno Parrhasius Parthenon Frieze Pasolini, Pier Paolo , , –, Passage to Marseille () Passion of Joan of Arc, The () Peckinpah, Sam –, , , – People on the Terrace, The () Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters () Pergamon Altar Persians (Aeschylus) Persona () Petersen, Wolfgang , petit soldat, Le () Phantom of the Opera, The () phenakistiscope , – Phidias – Philo of Byzantium – Philostratus the Elder , Phone Call from a Stranger ()
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Index photography , –, , , , –, , , , –, , , – Pindar , , , , , , Pirandello, Luigi Planet of the Apes (film series) Plateau, Joseph –, –, Plato , –, , , Player, The () Pleasantville () Pliny the Elder –, Poetics (Aristotle) – Polanski, Roman –, Polygnotus Pompeii () Porky’s Hero Agency () – Poussin, Nicholas pre-cinema , – Prestige, The () Primrose Path () – Prince, Stephen , –, , Procession () Psycho () , , –, , , Ptolemy, Claudius Pudovkin, Vsevolod Pulp Fiction () puppets, puppet theater –, – Purple Rose of Cairo, The () Pygmalion Quadrille () Queen Christina () –, , , Quintilian , , Rambaldi, Carlo –, – Rashomon () , Reagan, Ronald Rear Window () Rebecca () Régiment, Le () Reiniger, Lotte Reitz, Edgar Renoir, Jean – Repeat Performance () Repulsion () Resnais, Alain , , , retour d’Ulysse, Le () Return of Martin Guerre, The () Ride the High Country () Riefenstahl, Leni –, Robbe-Grillet, Alain , Robert, Carl –, , –, , Robin Hood () – Rogers, Ginger , , Rohmer, Eric , –,
Rosemary’s Baby () – Rossellini, Roberto Rossi, Franco , –, –, roue, La () Run Lola Run () Runner, The (sculpture) , Salamander, The () Saragossa Manuscript, The () sarcophagi, images on , Sartre, Jean-Paul Schmidt, Margot Scott, Ridley , , Searchers, The () , Secret in Their Eyes, The () Seneca, L. Annaeus (the Younger) Seventh Continent, The () Seventh Seal, The () – Fragments of a Chronology of Chance () Seven Wonders of the World () shadow plays Shaftesbury, Earl of Shall We Dance () shield of Achilles, in Iliad –, , , shield of Aeneas, in Aeneid , , , Shirley: Visions of Reality () Siberiade () Simon, Erika –, , Simonides of Keos , –, –, , , Sinsteden, Wilhelm Josef –, , Sirk, Douglas , , , , Sixth Sense, The () Sleeping Beauty () Socrates , –, , , –, , – Solaris () –, Sommersby () Sontag, Susan , Sophocles –, , , , , , –, Sound of the Mountain () Spellbound () St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, The () Stage Fright () –, Stampfer, Simon (von) , Standing March, The () Stansbury-O’Donnell, Mark , – Star Wars (film series) , Statius, P. Papinius Sternberg, Josef von Stiller, Mauritz Stöckl, Ula –
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009396691.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Index
Storaro, Vittorio – Straw Dogs () Street Without End () stroboscope Stroheim, Erich von Sturges, John Summer With Monika () Sweet Hereafter, The () Swing Time () Synchronicity () Synecdoche, New York () Talbot, Henry Fox Tanner, Alain Tarantino, Quentin Tarkovsky, Andrei –, , , –, Taylor, Elizabeth Terminator, The (film series) Thank Your Lucky Stars () That Cold Day in the Park () thaumatrope , Theseus – This Is Cinerama () Thomas, Lowell –, , () , Women () Timanthes , –, Titanic () To the Lighthouse (novel) Tolstoy, Lev Top Hat () Touch of Evil () , –, – Tower of Silence, The () Trajan, column of Trial of Joan of Arc, The () Trial of the Bow, The (Wyeth) Trojan Women, The () Troy () , Troy: The Odyssey () True Detective (TV series) Truffaut, François , , , –, Trump, Donald TSG (production company) Monkeys () Hour Psycho () Two Sisters from Boston () : A Space Odyssey () , – Ulisse () Ulysse () Ulysses () –, Ulysses ()
Under Capricorn () Upturned Glass, The () Usual Suspects, The () Valerius Flaccus, C. , , Varda, Agnès , , , Varda by Agnes () Vertigo () , Vidal, Gore Villa of the Mysteries, frescoes of Virgil , , , , –, , , –, , –, , –, – Vitruvius Pollio, M. , – vividness see enargeia von Trier, Lars Walcott, Derek , Walsh, Raoul Watts, Emily Diana – Wayne, John , Weil, Simone –, , Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb –, –, , , , – Welles, Orson , –, –, , , Wellman, William , – Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von –, , Wild Bunch, The () –, , – Wild Child, The () Wild Things () Wilder, Billy Willing, Nick –, – Woman Next Door, The () Woman’s Face, A () Woman’s Secret, A () Wonder Woman () Wood, Robin , , , – Woolf, Virginia Written on the Wind () , Wyeth, N. C. – Wyler, William , Z () Zahn, Johann – Zeno of Elea –, Zeuxis zoetrope , , , zoopraxinoscope Zotz! ()
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