Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime 9789048550005

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Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective

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Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective Mediations of the Sublime

Nikita Mathias

Amsterdam University Press

The text in this book is in large part consistent with the author’s research and writing for Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

Cover illustration: Film still from Bølgen. 2015. Directed by Roar Uthaug. Written by John Kåre Raake, Harald Rosenløw-Eeg. Cinematography by John Christian Rosenlund. Film editing by Christian Siebenherz. Music by Magnus Beite. Runtime: 105 min. Courtesy Fante Film AS. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 012 0 e-isbn 978 90 4855 000 5 doi 10.5117/9789463720120 nur 670 © N. Mathias / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To Alva and Gro



Table of Contents

1. Introduction Theories of the Sublime: Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant The Archeology and Iconography of the Sublime Analyzing Disaster Movies The Disaster Movie Genre and the Film Selection

9 13 17 23 27

2. Starting Points Dutch Landscapes of the North Transforming the Sublime. From Rhetoric to Experiencing Nature Picturesque Views Lisbon Shock Waves Heroic Geology Commodifying Nature. Earth Economics and Tourism

37 39 42 46 47 49 55

3. The Iconography of the Sublime Virtual Windows. Claude Joseph Vernet at the Academy Salon Remarkable Views. Caspar Wolf in the Alps Volcano Montages: Wright of Derby, Valenciennes, Wutky, Volaire, Briullov

65 65 76

4. Mediating the Sublime Between Art Academy and Entertainment Culture: Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg Apocalypse Here-and-Now. John Martin ‘The Viewer Feels as Though His Eyelids Had Been Cut Off’. Visiting the Panorama Panoramic Landscapes Through the Telescope: The Hudson River School Nature’s Forces in Motion: The Diorama

95

123 129

5. Cinema – A Medium of the Sublime? Photographic Images in Motion Is the Sublime a Somatic Experience? Montage Camera Sound and Multimedia Cinema

141 142 150 154 158 160 162

82

95 104 115

6. Disaster Cinema. A Historical Overview Disaster Films Between Documentary and Special Effects Newsreel Early Epics and Travel Genres Disaster Melodramas Disaster Diversity: the 1950s and 1960s ‘Disaster Movies’ and Nuclear Wastelands Digitally Painted Disasters

173 175 179 184 188 191 196

7. The Sublime in Disaster Cinema Patterns of Violence, or, The Sublime as Somatic Excess 1. Mise en images 2. Montage 3. Camera Movement 4. Sound Points of Disinterest: Subjectivity Beyond Imagination: Transcendence 1. Chasing Phantoms. The Disaster-Time-Image 2. Last Line of Defense. Ethics 3. ‘Hear God Howl’ – Religion and Spirituality Modality, or, The Pleasure of the Sublime Border Conflicts. Presentability ‘It Is Gonna Send Us Back to the Stone Age!’ – The Geological Sublime Neighbor Relations: The Sublime and the Ridiculous What Lies Ahead? Hyperobjects and the Sublime

207 208 209 213 221 225 229 240 242 253 263 268 283

Bibliography

329

Index

353

294 302 311

1. Introduction Abstract The reception of disaster f ilms has been predominantly shaped by ideology-critical, semiotic, psychoanalytical, and eco-critical approaches that prematurely abstract from the films’ imagery in order to foreground capitalist, chauvinist, and racist discourses, narrative patterns, repressed collective anxieties, and states of crisis of the political mind. In my opinion, these approaches fail to grasp the disaster movie at its receptive core. In contrast, I argue that this core is located within the visuality and sensuality of the films, within their visceral images that agitate the spectator in a sensorily and affectively intense manner, within their ethical and spiritual sides which emerge in reaction to the receptive violation of the viewer, and finally within the complex relations between the films’ elements of attraction and their narrative elements. The predestined means of analytically uncovering these various facets of the reception of disaster cinema is, I believe, the aesthetic category of the sublime. Keywords: The Art, Media and Technological History of the Sublime; Oliver Grau; Jonathan Crary; Siegfried Kracauer; Michel Foucault; Erwin Panofsky

[…] and numerous are those films which, like San Francisco, In Old Chicago, Hurricane, Suez, and recently The Rains Came, present natural disasters in a drastic manner. […] Not to mention that only film is able to present complex events like natural disasters or episodes of war which cannot be explored only from one point of view. Therefore, it is film alone which, as the unbiased observer, penetrates deep into the zones of terror, leading to the conclusion that f ilm’s aff inity with terrifying topics is indeed aesthetically justified. By taking its chances, film not only breaks through the boundaries of artistic presentability, but it also visualizes events which do not tolerate any witness where they actually occur, for under their influence every witness must turn into a being filled with fear, anger, desperation. Film illuminates the appearance of the terrible, which we

Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch01

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normally encounter in the dark, and turns the in reality unimaginable into an object of attraction. The fact that the sheer exposure of the terrible primarily appeals as spectacle is inevitable. Now, most f ilms seek to avoid this effect by connecting their objects with ideal purposes. The gruesome undergrounds of human existence are presented in their brutal nakedness in order to derive, even more emphatically, moral or social demands from them: in American films, earthquakes, deluges, blasts of fire, and sand storms are never shown without simultaneously making sure that the raging of the elements serves the ethical purification of the hero. Well-meant sublimations and attempts of refinement, which nonetheless do not manage to sanction the images of terror adequately. These images rather reveal their meaning when they are not immediately associated with conscious life. Which meaning is ascribed to them? Every representation is also a play with the represented object, and perhaps the one with terror serves the purpose of people gaining control over things at whose mercy they utterly are for the time being.1

In his article ‘Das Grauen im Film’ (‘The Horror in Film’) from 1940, Siegfried Kracauer points out some of the key characteristics of disaster cinema’s reception.2 He considers the interrelation between the terrifying effects of the depicted disasters and the physical safety of the spectator sitting in cinema. From this interrelation derives the aesthetic appeal of the disaster film genre, which can be best described as a mixed emotion. Instead of fleeing a real disaster event in naked fear, the spectator experiences an artificial disaster event as a both terrifying and stimulating cinematic spectacle. The disaster object is convincingly made present, and yet, there is no real danger for the audience. Moreover, based on this experience of pleasurable terror, Kracauer identifies a transcendent sphere. He speaks of ‘ideal purposes’ and ‘moral or social demands’, whose functioning is closely related to the sensory and affective agitation of the spectator. This is the attempt to regain control on a metaphysical level over an object that, by its sheer force of appearance, overwhelms and shatters our faculties of perception. As for the receptive inter-functioning of spectacle and narration in disaster films, Kracauer describes this relation as a failing reciprocity: narrative themes, such as the ‘ethical purification of the hero’ and ‘moral 1 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Kracauer, 26f. 2 If not explicitly mentioned otherwise, all subsequent translations from German to English are done by the author.

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or social demands’, do not fully manage to justify the violence of the films’ elements of spectacle. In turn, the disaster spectacles reinforce the rhetorical impact of the narration. But Kracauer also urges his readers to look beyond this interdependence and acknowledge the sensory quality and innovation of the films’ disaster scenes. Accordingly, only the recording technology of the film camera can penetrate and present spaces in destruction from various perspectives and proximities. With its widened means of illusionism and immersion and its dynamic perception and expression of movement, cinema becomes the privileged medium for presenting disaster imagery in a hitherto unparalleled way. At the same time, by visualizing catastrophic events ‘which do not tolerate any witness’, disaster cinema also transgresses the arts’ ethical boundaries, in that it spectacularizes catastrophic events and their terrifying and fatal impact on man. In terms of the reception of cinema’s visualizations of volcano eruptions, deluges, earthquakes, storms, and tornadoes, these are the central issues addressed in Kracauer’s text: first, disaster cinema prompts mixed aesthetic experiences, combining terror and pleasure; second, the pleasurable side of the cinematic experience is based on the physical safety of the spectator; third, the films’ spectacular disaster events are closely related to themes of transcendence and ethics; fourth, in disaster cinema, the unpresentable and unexperienceable is being presented, due to the medium’s specific technological and expressive means; and fifth, the films employ an intertwining of spectacle and narrative, aesthetics and ethics, immanence and transcendence, sensory and affective agitation and reasoning. Without naming the term, Kracauer discusses some of the essential features of an aesthetic experience and category which goes beyond the mere evocation of fear and horror: the sublime. The sublime is an offshoot of a varied theoretical tradition, reaching as far back as late antiquity, which has undergone numerous transformations over time and developed a vast variety of subtraditions and subcategories. Because of the complex character of the sublime, critics have been at loss to find an exhaustive definition. Thus, I can also merely give an approximate definition, describing the sublime as a mixed aesthetic experience triggered by a specific external object which is perceived from a safe distance. In this experience, terror and pleasure become intertwined in a symbiotic relationship. The sublime functions as a counterpoint to beauty, which in this regard is conceived as a source of aesthetic pleasure devoid of any element of terror. This definition certainly applies to the theoretical accounts of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, both of whom are particularly relevant. More precisely, their theories provide the analytical framework to explore

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the receptive functioning of disaster cinema. By employing Burke and Kant’s theoretical accounts of the sublime, I attempt to answer the question: How do disaster films work (in terms of their aesthetic reception)? Despite Kracauer having laid the foundation for this task as early as 1940, such an extensive investigation into the cinematic reception (and historical formation) of disaster movies is still warranted. For in spite of this early trail that Kracauer explores, the critical and academic history of reception of the disaster movie genre has been shaped by other approaches. Most of the film analytical contributions thus far have been dominated by ideology-critical, semiotic, feminist, political, and psychoanalytical readings, which prematurely abstract from the immediate sensory appearance of their objects of study. Not only are these approaches often speculative, they also exclude the films’ phenomenal, affective, and receptive domain, as well as their historical dimension in order to emphasize a further subtext (repressed collective anxieties, states of crisis of the political mind, racist, sexist and capitalist discourses).3 In turn, those who actually analyze disaster movies on the basis of the theorems of the sublime often tend to be imprecise in their theoretical handling or eventually return to the speculative readings mentioned above. 4 Finally, there are several introductory works and attempts of identification and designation which find the essence of the disaster film genre primarily within its narrative structures.5 The same focus on narrativity can be noted in the contributions coming from the field of disaster studies. They discuss cinematic and other fictional disaster narratives alongside real disaster events (as they are televised and discursively represented), thereby failing to consider disaster movie viewing as a specifically aesthetic and cinematic experience.6 In my opinion, these approaches fail to grasp the disaster movie at its receptive core, from which it gains its power and fascination.7 In contrast, I argue that this core is located within the visuality and sensuality of the films, within their visceral images that agitate the spectator in a sensorily and affectively intense manner, within their ethical and spiritual sides which emerge in reaction to the receptive violation of the viewer, and finally within the complex relations between the films’ elements of attraction and 3 Among others: Maruo-Schröder; Grigat; Dixon; Kakoudaki; Ramonet; Sontag. 4 Among others: Hockenhull; Natali; Jeong; Herrmann, 221-230. 5 Among others: Sanders; Mitchell; Roddick; Yacowar. 6 See for example: Webb; Cornea; Meiner. 7 Viewed in a broader f ilm theoretical context, my criticism against these tendentially abstracting and textual approaches also coincides with earlier critical arguments expressed by scholars like Steven Shaviro and Noël Carroll: Shaviro; Carroll.

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their narrative elements. The predestined means of analytically uncovering these various facets of the reception of disaster cinema is, I believe, the aesthetic category of the sublime. Thus, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the effects of the sublime do not only play a role within the elitist art sector but also within the lowbrow and middlebrow fields of popular culture.8 This relevance of the sublime in mass entertainment most notably manifests within disaster cinema.

Theories of the Sublime: Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant Deviating from Pseudo-Longinus’s leading question about the possibility of a sublime rhetoric (c. first century AD), Edmund Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), examines the mixed aesthetic experience of the sublime (‘delightful horror’) in its impact on the physiologic-psychological apparatus of the subject.9 Burke’s treatise contributed significantly to the popularization of the sublime in British culture in the course of the late eighteenth century.10 The dichotomic relation of beauty and sublimity is applied here to a systematic aesthetic framework for the first time. Beautiful objects are small, bright, delicate, clear, and smooth, whereas sublime objects are vast, dark, rough, obscure, and boundless. Burke grounds both main categories in the existential drives of self-preservation (the sublime) and society/love (beauty). The first surpasses the latter by far in terms of their respective agencies. The effects of the sublime are portrayed as an ‘irresistible force’, a pre-cognitive and affective overpowering of the subject.11 Therefore, Burke’s concept is particularly suited to be joined with somatic film theories focusing on the bodily and affective experience of the cinema, which will be introduced in detail at a 8 To be named in this respect are some of the artists of American Abstract Expressionism such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, whose works – especially those of Newman – inspired Jean-François Lyotard in the 1980s to conceive his postmodern theory of the sublime. Even though these artists sought to create art to be experienced by everyone, their works are usually presented within the elite realm of art galleries, museums, and academies. Already in 1948, Barnett Newman, in his essay ‘The Sublime is Now’, established the connection between Abstract Expressionism and the sublime (Newman). Later art historical attempts to substantiate this connection include for instance: Rosenblum; Brandt. 9 Burke, 67. – For a general introduction to the sublime’s history of theory, see: Pries; Shaw; Costelloe. 10 For the popularization of the sublime in the eighteenth century, see: Monk; Ashfield; Wilton, Chap. 1f. 11 Burke, 53.

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later point. A linking between Burke’s psychophysiology of the sublime and the ‘psychophysiology of cinematic experience’ might result in a fruitful model for analyzing disaster films and their effects on the spectator.12 Furthermore, Burke creates a catalogue of numerous characteristics and types – an extensive phenomenology of the sublime. Although his theory occasionally lacks coherence and terminological precision, Burke provides a rich vocabulary to describe sublime phenomena of nature, the same type of phenomena that the recipients of disaster movies are confronted with. Within the context of his critical philosophy, as part of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant relocates the experience of the sublime entirely into the mind of the perceiving subject.13 The participants during the sublime event are sensibility and reason. While sensibility collapses at the sight of the (merely implicit) sublime object, reason uses this breakdown as an opportunity to demonstrate to the mind its superiority over nature. This alternation of pleasure and displeasure can occur in two different ways: in the mathematically sublime and in the dynamically sublime. While the former results from the sensation of a seemingly infinite object, the dynamically sublime arises because of the sensation of overpowering and almighty forces of nature. The two-stage structure of Kant’s model, as it employs a receptive interlocking of sensibility’s crisis and the transcendent moment, provides a productive analytical tool for describing points of contact, intersections, and interrelations between the realms of aesthetics and ethics, disaster imagery and moral narratives, affect and thought, which also represent crucial moments within the reception of disaster cinema. It is furthermore of importance that Kant and Burke primarily apply their theories to natural phenomena, often catastrophic ones. Hence, in terms of their motifs and examples, their models of the sublime are already essentially connected with the subject matter of the disaster film genre. In addition to these preliminary explanations on Burke and Kant’s accounts of the sublime, their theories will be discussed in greater detail and depth on several occasions. On top of that, they will be modified and enriched by bringing them into contact with other theories of the sublime. Generally, the deployment of such additional theoretical positions will help achieving a more precise, productive, and nuanced conjunction between Burke and Kant’s classical theories of the sublime, my historical trajectory, and the analysis of disaster cinema. This demand for precision and nuances 12 Shaviro, 53. 13 The following deliberations are based on Kant’s line of argumentation about the sublime in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant).

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cannot be stressed firmly enough in the face of a flood of publications since the Renaissance des Erhabenen (‘renaissance of the sublime’) in the mid-1980s.14 Numerous enriching contributions to the debate aside, the recent decades’ reception of the sublime shows a tendency toward theoretical dilution and randomness, especially within the disciplines of art history and media studies.15 Then again, this theoretical diversity may also result from the incoherencies and blind spots inherent to the classical theories of the sublime, encouraging further development and adaptations into various directions. However, apart from these ‘attenuating circumstances’, one cannot be surprised when James Elkins positions himself decidedly ‘Against the Sublime’. With his essay, whose title announces his position, Elkins criticizes the transhistorical usage of the concept of the sublime, which eventually leads to arbitrariness in its analytical application.16 Now, one might object that my approach of bringing disaster cinema prolifically in contact with classical theories of the sublime is just the kind of transhistorical approach that Elkins criticizes. In response to this potential objection, I claim that the theoretical concept of the sublime does not only function as a film analytical tool; much more than that, its usage justifies itself with the visual history from which the disaster movie genre and the medium of cinema generally emerged.17 This is where a second question of interest to be answered in this book emerges: Where does disaster cinema come from? I argue that the sublime does not merely represent an aesthetic-theoretical discourse. It is understood as a complex and culturally specific meeting point between philosophical thought, artistic creation, social and technical development, and popular imagination. The characteristics of the sublime are essentially defining for 14 Pries, 1. 15 One might want to merely consider the vast quantity of typological varieties which have come into existence in the last years only within the Anglo-Saxon discussion – a selection: Natural, Gothic, Traumatic, Apocalyptic, Terrible, Ecological, Capitalist, Antipastoral, Commodified, Ironic, Cinematic, Feminine, Chastened, Clumsy, Ethical, American, Rude, Scientific, AfterAuschwitz, Contemporary, Political, Sticky, Biological, Grimy, Arrested, Corporate, Expressionist, Urban, Temporal, Vicious, Technological, Visual-Verbal, Abstract, Romantic Anti-, Material Sublime. 16 Elkins. – This view is also shared by James Kirwan who not only criticizes the sublime’s proliferating typologies but also attempts to view the sublime and its contemporary relevance (such as in disaster cinema) as part of a broader historical trajectory (Kirwan). 17 My use of the term ‘visual history’ focuses on its implied diversity in terms of visual phenomena, artefacts, and related discourses. Thus, my historical trajectory is not exclusively an art history of the sublime or a history of media technologies but an amalgam of various artistic genres and disciplines, pictorial media, as well as aesthetics and other discourses. I will elaborate on this in the upcoming section on the iconography of the sublime.

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one branch of cultural history that is currently most popularly represented by disaster cinema. Essentially, the sublime functions as the connecting methodological and theoretical link between my two questions of interest ‒ how do disaster films work? Where does disaster cinema come from? Crucial for my understanding of the sublime as a major component of the aesthetic reception of natural disaster events in the Western world is its shift from being regarded as a category of classical rhetoric (Pseudo-Longinus) to becoming the primary mode of experiencing nature’s terrifying sides.18 Roughly, this shift took place in the mid-eighteenth century, during the decades around the publication of Burke’s treatise. This transformation of the sublime made itself felt within a wide range of cultural phenomena and discourses such as landscape art and its ascendency as an academic discipline, fictional and non-fictional writing, the natural sciences, garden design, travel culture, tourism, and so on. In addition to this, I argue that the aesthetic and receptive principles of the sublime also prompted new developments in terms of the content matter, the formal pictorial features, and the media technologies associated with visual culture. Paradoxically, the sublime triggered these developments, even though the notion of the unsuitability of visual media as mediators of the experience of the sublime has been a common theme within its theoretical and broader cultural discourses.19 As for Burke and Kant’s theories, only the encounter with real phenomena of nature could provoke the sublime’s crisis of sensibility. Works of visual art, in contrast, were only considered approximations and insufficient imitations of the real object’s sublimity.20 However, the simultaneity of the establishment of the sublime’s iconography and its theoretical dismissal is paradoxical only at first sight. In opposition 18 It should be noted that the concept of the sublime in Antiquity is far more complex than and not limited to questions of rhetoric and the production of speech and text. As demonstrated by James Porter, the sublime governs a whole range of aesthetic disciplines and experiential modes in ancient thought. It even takes on a corporeal and phenomenological quality in the Presocratic concept of what Porter labels sublime matter. However, when it comes to the sublime’s history of reception in post-ancient Europe, it is clearly the notion of a rhetoric of the sublime that dominates (Porter). 19 Brady, 118-129. 20 Burke’s argument is based on the premise of obscurity (of ideas), which cannot be presented in painting, ‘because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature’. A painting ‘can only affect simply by the images it presents’ (Burke, 58). Hence, the pictorial presentation of sublime objects of nature always entails a degeneration of its affective force. There is no genuine contribution by painting to the sublimity of the object. In a comparable manner, Kant claims that the seemingly formlessness and boundlessness of sublime natural objects cannot be reproduced in the visual arts, for artistic production is always spatially limited and clear in its usage of form (Kant, 136).

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to this, I argue that the sublime’s very rejection of visual media, conceived as a productive and challenging problematic, triggered media technological innovations. What these new pictorial technologies had in common was the aim to overcome the limitations of traditional easel painting. The mutual goals of the men responsible for these media technological innovations were the increase of affective intensity and visual dynamic, illusionistic immersion and multimedia technological interplay, violence against the viewer’s faculty of sensibility, the disciplining of the viewer’s body, and the channeling of his/her aesthetic attention and subjectivity.

The Archeology and Iconography of the Sublime My tracing of this historical trajectory corresponds in some crucial points with Michel Foucault’s principles of historical analysis expressed in The Archeology of Knowledge. There is, first, his notion of the history of ideas, which – when viewed through the lens of archeology – is not limited to singular thinkers, books, concepts, and œuvres, but which is mapped out as a network of ‘institutions, social customs or behavior, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices’.21 Foucault conceives his archeology as the description of discursive (and non-discursive) relations and formations, which constitute complex (synchronous and diachronous) networks. As will become clear in short, my take on the sublime’s history will similarly take into view and describe the relations between diverse practices, discourses, actors and institutions, objects and technologies. Second, Foucault sets his historical model in opposition to concepts of historical continuity, causality, influence, teleology, and anthropomorphism. Following his archeological tracing of discontinuities and ruptures, my historical trajectory is not to be thought as one continuous strand but as a more complex fabric involving f issures, gaps, side branches, repetitions, transformations, varying temporalities, and successions. And third, Foucault’s insistence on the positivity of discourse, that is, on its condition of materiality, on the material circumstances of the enunciation of a statement or object promises to be a productive framework for my tracing of natural disaster depictions among a broad variety of media, practices, and social situations. As this historical trajectory centers around pictorial media, it is necessary to consider the sensory, affective, and general aesthetic particularities of pictorial experiences as well as the genuine ways in which images travel, 21 Foucault, 154.

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occur, and transform. For this reason, in order to live up to the complexities that the historical analysis of pictorial media entails, I will not only treat the sublime and its alliance with natural disaster depictions as a network of discursive formations but also as a matter of iconography. In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault himself sketches an archeological investigation of painting, trying to discover whether space, distance, depth, colour, light, proportions, volumes, and contours were not, at the period in question, considered, named, enunciated, and conceptualized in a discursive practice; and whether the knowledge that this discursive practice gives rise to was not embodied perhaps in theories and speculations, in forms of teaching and codes of practice, but also in processes, techniques, and even in the very gesture of the painter.22

In 1967, Foucault also reviewed two texts by Erwin Panofsky, insinuating a connection between his thinking and Panofsky’s iconographic-iconological methodology that has been explored further on several occasions. Michael Ann Holly, for instance, considers Panofsky’s emphasis on the basic principles underlying the representation, production, interpretation, formal arrangements, and techniques of images as a precursor of Foucault’s work; and Joseph J. Tanke demonstrates how Foucault’s thought evolved from Panofsky’s exploration of the complicated relations between the visual and discourse.23 Panofsky’s iconographic-iconological methodology puts together various perspectives and fields of analysis (pre-iconographical description, iconographical analysis, iconological interpretation; history of style, types, and cultural symptoms) into a systematic correlation.24 Although I will not strictly follow the steps of Panofsky’s model of pictorial analysis, his concept is nonetheless prolific for my historical inquiry, first, for it allows for an encompassing tracing of visual and artistic traditions, lines of development, continuities but also ruptures and gaps; second, it allows for a working out of correlations between a work’s content matter, its sensory, formal, and stylistic characteristics (pre-iconography, iconography), its broader signification, and its overarching cultural discourses (iconology); and third, it makes possible a reflection of the media technological dimension of the 22 Foucault, 213f. 23 Holly, 185-187; Tanke, 54-60. – See also: Fornacciari; Merquior, 78f. 24 Panofsky 1955, 26-54.

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sublime’s visual history, taking into account comparative relations between specific technological means of pictorial presentation.25 On the other hand, Panofsky’s concept requires a supplement for my analytical purposes. For good reason, Panofsky has been criticized for regarding the particularities of works of art merely as indices for an underlying broader cultural horizon, that is to say, he has been accused of attaching too much weight to the procedures of iconological interpretation.26 To counteract these tendencies, one must take into account and emphasize the immediate sensuality and the affective dimension of pictorial experiences. In this respect, images cannot be reduced to contextual representations and meanings to be ‘read’; rather, they also must be regarded in their capability to haunt, violate, and affect their viewers. The affective agency and evocation of a blending of pleasure and terror employed by pictorial media of the sublime do not simply derive from the mere representation of sublime subjects (volcano eruptions, thunder storms, shipwrecks, avalanches, earthquakes, etc.); of equal importance are their formal characteristics, receptive tactics, technological particularities, and means of staging. The irreducibility of the iconic experience remains an ineluctable principle of my analysis. In summary, I will make use of the term iconography of the sublime to describe the emergence of certain subject matters, formal features, receptive implications, and media technological innovations, which together brought forth pictorial mediations of the sublime. These mediations are to be located within the tension area of a dynamically changing and complexly intertwined media history. At the same time, it should be clear that natural disasters do not represent the only iconographical strand of the sublime, though it is a decisive one, I would claim. So why did I not choose to explore the sublime’s relations to other film genres such as horror, war, science fiction, or narratives set in urban spaces? Arguably, a case could be made for all four of them.27 But then again, as Jihae Chung’s recently published monograph, Das Erhabene im Kinofilm (‘The Sublime in Film’) shows, applying the sublime to a broad variety of film genres is not helpful either to gain a precise understanding of what this aesthetic theory might mean to 25 In terms of the media technological aspects of cinema’s iconography, it was Panofsky himself who laid the groundwork with his essay ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, in which he compares the moving pictures of cinema with different visual media such as wood engraving, theater, painting, and comic strips (Panofsky 2004). 26 Such criticism has been expressed by Didi-Huberman, Otto Pächt, and Max Imdahl (DidiHuberman; Pächt; Imdahl). 27 In fact, Scott Bukatman has already traced the visual history of the sublime from the eighteenth century to special effects in the science fiction film genre in: Bukatman.

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film culture.28 Even though this book is very thorough in its discussion and application of the Kantian sublime, its reader is not necessarily left with a clear understanding of what the cinematic sublime actually might be, or rather, following her argumentation, it might just as well be anything. Essentially, the question of why I did not investigate the sublime’s relevance in other genres misses the point, for it was not the sublime that led me to disaster cinema by singling out one specific iconographical strand. Quite the opposite, it was the disaster film genre that caught my curiosity in terms of its receptive functioning and its broader historical dimension, thereby leading me to the sublime and its affinity for natural disaster motifs. As for the specific practices and discourses of pictorial production and reception permeating the iconography of the sublime, several historical phenomena need to be addressed. In general, these include artistic considerations concerning matters of representation, ethics, proximity and distance, affect and meaning, immersion and illusion, as well as the framing, disciplining, locating, and moving of the recipient’s body and mind. In turn, the broader reception of sublime disaster depictions involves a diverse range of social, political, cultural, scientific, and economic discourses and phenomena, which will be discussed in detail. One of the essential branches of cultural history coinciding with the sublime’s emergence as the primary mode of presenting nature in its untamed and disastrous states is the aesthetic phenomenon of immersion. According to Oliver Grau’s understanding of the term, immersive techniques are defined by emotional involvement, the diminishing of critical distance, sealing off the observer and rendering a totality of image-space.29 In his book Virtual Art; From Illusion to Immersion, Grau identifies and analyzes several immersive media, ranging from ancient frescoes and Baroque church ceilings to Panoramas and digitally created experiences of virtual reality. Thereby, he demonstrates that the need for an unlimited and sheer frameless illusionism – the need to overcome and transgress the boundaries of traditional easel painting – has prompted media technologies of immersion for a relatively long period, easily exceeding the time frame of the immersive media of the sublime, which evolved in the mid-to-late-eighteenth century. The receptive framework of the sublime, as it is applied to pictorial disaster depictions, is embedded within a broader historical field of immersive technologies. On the one hand, such technologies are used to present natural disaster 28 Chung. 29 Grau, 13-18. – Another historical account of immersion is given by Alison Griff iths in: Griffiths.

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events as sublime spectacles; on the other hand, the sublime’s employment of immersive effects can lead to experiences during which these very effects are transcended and dissolved. In this regard, bear in mind that the sublime is essentially a border phenomenon oscillating between sensibility and reason, affect and intelligibility, immersion and media reflexivity. Thus, as a side effect, my analysis will also problematize all too puristic notions of immersion, which, in fact, can never be encountered in reality (as Grau himself admits).30 Another historical strand closely intertwined with the iconography of the sublime is what Jonathan Crary, in his monograph Techniques of the Observer, describes as the production and establishment of a new type of observer in the nineteenth century. Taking a wide perspective on early-nineteenth-century culture, encompassing scientific and aesthetic discourses, optical technologies, forms of visual entertainment, and social structures of capitalist modernity, Crary defines this observer as no longer being part of a ‘“free”, private, and individualized subject’ (as represented by the paradigm of the camera obscura) but as an embodied, examined, and disciplined subject.31 Within this new aesthetic paradigm, the body of this new observer ‘would be increasingly subjected to forms of investigation, regulation, and discipline throughout the nineteenth century’.32 It is these practices of controlling perception on a physiological level (with the aim to create experiences of illusionistic immersion), arranging bodies in space, managing attention, as well as fixing and isolating the observer that are at work within the developing visual history of the sublime. While my aim is to trace a specific iconographical tradition from its beginnings in the eighteenth century until today, I at the same time will not discuss all elements of the visual history of the sublime in equal parts. Rather, I will combine general media analytical reflections with the investigation of a number of singular works, technologies, and artists.33 Within the field of painting, I will focus on landscape depictions from the eighteenth century 30 Grau, 17. 31 Crary, 137f. 32 Crary, 73. – Further on, this production of a new observer and subject represents the common foundation and initiation for later phenomena and narratives such as impressionism’s overcoming of perspectival space and mimetic codes vs. the continuity of media of realism (photography, cinema), which have falsely become to be regarded as the oppositional founding myths of modernity. 33 Regarding my use of the term ‘artist’, I do not distinguish between the producers of traditional art forms and the producers of works of popular entertainment. It will be equivalently applied to both sectors. However, as for modern mass media, whose production often is a collective effort, I will operate with a broader conception of the term, including various positions of artistic production.

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onward, as an iconography of the sublime was then first established in a comprehensive manner.34 In terms of media technological innovations seeking to enable intensified experiences of sublime disasters, I will focus on the following pictorial devices: Eidophusikon, Panorama, the American Great Picture and Diorama. Continuing to trace this media technological trajectory, I will also discuss cinema’s technological ramifications in relation to their potential to convey aesthetic experiences of the sublime. The central question is: to what extent can cinema function and be regarded as a medium of the sublime? In juxtaposition with the preceding pictorial media, I will address cinema’s technological premises and its repertoire of techniques of perception and expression (movement, montage, focal length, sound and music, visual effects, etc.). Primarily, these various means will be examined in terms of their potential to overpower the spectator’s sensibility and agitate him/ her on a somatic level. Particularly the aspect of cinematic movement will be analyzed in its potential to capture and express the dynamics of sublime events. Panofsky describes this aspect strikingly as a ‘dynamization of space and, accordingly, [a] spatialization of time’.35 In differentiation from other media, one must ask what this spatio-temporal novelty means for the experience of sublime disasters on the cinema screen.36 In a wider sense, cinematic movement does not merely revolve around the ability to produce motion within the pictorial space, it also involves both the restriction of the viewer’s body to move around physically and his/her compulsion or freedom to be moved by cinema’s moving images in a sensory, affective, emotional, ethical, or intellectual manner. Inextricably linked to these various receptive movements is the addressing and localization of the spectator’s body. This concerns, for example, how this body is situated in the viewer-space and related to the screen-space. Moreover, how does it interact with the bodies and objects presented on the screen, and how is it affected by cinematography’s means to capture, illuminate, obscure, dissolve, organize, scale up and down, move and cut through those diegetic bodies and their environment? 34 I am stressing the word ‘comprehensive’ since scattered tendencies toward the formal qualities and content matter of the iconography of the sublime can already be witnessed in the seventeenth century, as will be shown in Chapter 2. 35 Panofsky 2004, 291. 36 As Anne Hollander demonstrates in her much-noticed monograph Moving Pictures, phenomena of static images which approximately contain cinematography’s dynamic potential of movement, although only within the medial boundaries of the single picture, can be found throughout classical art history (Hollander). – See also: Paech, 94f.

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Analyzing Disaster Movies In order to bridge the historical gap between Burke and Kant’s theories of the sublime and the works of disaster cinema, I perform two procedures: the first is to historicize the sublime as a broader cultural phenomenon, which encompasses not only aesthetic discourses but also specific branches of visual history and media technological innovations. This is what I introduced on the previous pages as the iconography of the sublime. The second procedure brings Burke and Kant’s theoretical accounts in contact with current theories of the cinematic experience, film affect, and film ecology. Before these theoretical approximations can be contoured in greater detail, some general principles regarding the film analysis are called for. By using the theories of the sublime, I expect to gain terminological access to the receptive functioning of disaster cinema. Regarding the interdisciplinary interface between aesthetic philosophy and film studies, it must be clear that there can be no question of using the films as an instrument for demonstrating philosophical theorems.37 The aim of my approach is not to use the disaster movies as sheer illustration for theoretical explanations but to analyze these films by means of Kant and Burke’s concepts. As for the reception of disaster cinema, I do not aim to speculate on the recipients’ actual responses or to carry out an empirical survey of any kind. Instead, I will deal with receptive strategies employed by the producers of the films. Following Carl Plantinga, I will treat cinema’s receptive dimension as a set of ‘preferred or intended congruent responses’.38 Essentially, I operate under the assumption that ‘elicited emotions and affects are characterized and differentiated by structural features, such that the film’s intended affective focus can be reasonably well determined in many cases’.39 On the other hand, one ought to keep in mind that cinematic experiences are further shaped by the spectator’s relations to historical contexts and contemporary socio-cultural discourses (even though this contextual dimension of the cinematic experience will only play a minor role in the film analysis). Furthermore, my way to approach and analyze disaster films orients itself with respect to art historical practices and perspectives. This means that my analytical focus lies f irst and foremost on the visuality 37 As it is done for instance in Introducing Philosophy through Film, an essay collection edited by Richard Fumerton and Diane Jeske. These essays demonstrate inter alia how epistemological questions (Descartes, Locke, Hume) can be illuminated by films like The Matrix or Total Recall (Fumerton). 38 Plantinga 2009, 14. 39 Plantinga 2009, 11.

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and sensuality of disaster f ilms. Meticulous attention will be paid to every detail of the moving images of disaster cinema, to their specif ic textures, compositions, patterns, and visual effects, their dialogicity and ambivalences. Based on the comparative practices of art historical research, I will also juxtapose and compare various images of disaster films in order to enable a profound inquiry of their reception. My art historical perspective on cinema and f ilm history is located within art history’s broader involvement with film studies, a rather young development, originating in the Iconic and Pictorial Turns – just to mention the two most influential Turns – which were identified in the early 1990s. 40 With these turns, the academic discipline of art history has been able to expand its competencies and its field of research. The epistemic gain entailed by art history’s renewed interest in film (since Panofsky) is particularly emphasized by Martin Warnke in his essay ‘Kontinuitätslinien von alter Kunst zu den Neuen Medien’ (‘Lines of Continuity Between Old Art and the New Media’). Fundamental to his advocacy for art history’s competence and responsibility regarding the understanding of new media (esp. film, TV, photography) is the idea of existing lines of continuity between traditional pictorial media and modern mass media. Warnke claims ‘that the new media imply the popularization of modes of perception, which, in earlier times, were developed by the arts. Within the field of the visual media, certain techniques, strategies, and functions were preserved which, in the previous centuries, were provided by the fine arts’. 41 Also, Karl Prümm, even though not an art historian himself, acknowledges the surplus of viewing films through the eyes of an art historian. In his essay ‘Von der Mise en scène zur Mise en images’ (‘From the Mise en Scène to the Mise en Images’), he calls for a change of perspective from a primarily narrative conception of film to an accentuation of its visual and pictorial-photographic form. The consequences of this terminological shift are explained by him as follows: The process indicated by this term concentrates on the materiality of the image, on its technicality, on the pictorial forms, structures and segments, on the differentiations of light, as well as on the shades and contrasts of color. With this, another view is established, one which focuses on the 40 See the essay collection Bilderfragen (ed. Hans Belting) which contains the correspondence between the initiators of the two mentioned Turns, Gottfried Boehm (Iconic Turn) and W.J.T. Mitchell (Pictorial Turn). 41 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Warnke, 75.

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dynamic of the image, on the movements and correlations across the medial borders, on the genealogy of pictures, and on the iconographic traditions. 42

More specifically, by analyzing the imagery of disaster cinema both from the perspective of an art historian (who considers the broader scope of the historical formation of the sublime) and by employing classical theories of the sublime, I will also re-interpret various techniques and conventions of cinema such as point of view, shot size, tracking, panning, montage procedures, continuity editing, and so on. As for the current film theoretical contributions to be brought in contact with Burke and Kant’s models of the sublime, I will primarily focus on theories that investigate the affective and somatic sides of the cinematic experience. Particularly, the somatic f ilm theories of Vivian Sobchack and Thomas Morsch will be employed extensively and juxtaposed with the aesthetic and receptive framework of the sublime. In her book The Address of the Eye; A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Sobchack develops an encompassing phenomenological theory of the cinematic experience based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. By constituting the somatic notion of being-in-the-world as the irreducible essence of any cinematic experience, her model transgresses dichotomic relations between subject and object, viewer-space and screen-space, affect and meaning and establishes a complex set of interrelations between the bodies of spectator, film, and filmmaker. While Sobchack’s work rather provides an aisthetical foundation of the cinematic experience, Morsch grounds the bodily as the key concept of a distinctively aesthetic experience of the cinematic. In Medienästhetik des Films; Verkörperte Wahrnehmung und ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino (‘Media Aesthetics of Film; Embodied Perception and Aesthetic Experience in Cinema’), he develops his somatic theory of cinema through critical readings of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack, and Steven Shaviro, applying it to the analysis of several films which represent typical ‘body genres’ like action or horror. In this respect, my film analytical deployment of the sublime is also to be understood as a contribution to the ongoing discussion on film affect and the somatic dimension of film and cinema in general. 43 Regarding my understanding of the notion of affect, I follow Gregory J. Seigworth and 42 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Prümm, 17. 43 See for example: Weik von Mossner; Ivakhiv; Plantinga 2009; Rutherford; Marks; Plantinga 1999; Shaviro.

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Melissa Gregg’s broader definition given in the introductory essay within their Affect Theory Reader: [A]ffect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. 44

Inscribed within the polarity between affects as precognitive, presubjective, and predicative intensities on the one side and conscious rational thought on the other, there is an endless number of hybrid forms and variations, such as emotions in which affective forces surface in combination with cognitive procedures and a heightened degree of consciousness. Accordingly, this permeability corresponds to the sublime’s hybrid character, operating on the thresholds between affect, emotion, and thought. In addition, my film analysis will take a stand on the theoretical strife between two antagonistic historical and ontological concepts of cinema, namely between the cinema of attractions and narrative (or Classical Hollywood) cinema.45 Linked to these oppositional concepts are the overarching notions of cinema as a medium of spectacle, visuality, and presence and as a textual medium. Recent publications show that the opposition between cinematic attraction and narrative – and the question of how to reconcile both sides – has remained a pressing topic among film scholars. 46 With my film analytical employment of the sublime, I will offer an alternative model of mediation between the spectacular and textual dimensions of cinema. However, this model will not attempt to provide a theoretical 44 Gregg, 1. 45 Tom Gunning coined the term cinema of attractions within the context of his revaluation of early (that is pre-classical) cinema (Gunning 1990). – On top of that, the term was also attributed to cinema’s postclassical period from the mid-1970s onward. An overview of the impact of this new understanding of film and cinema history is offered by Gunning himself in: Gunning 2000. 46 Among others: Nessel, Wort und Fleisch; Nessel, Kino und Ereignis; Morsch; Tasker; Wood; King.

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solution for film and cinema in general but only for the disaster genre with its generic features. Viewed through the lens of the sublime, the receptive mechanisms of disaster cinema will be presented as a complex (and often fragile) intertwining of spectacle and narrative, the bodily and the textual, immanence and transcendence, sensibility and reason.

The Disaster Movie Genre and the Film Selection Facing the task of outlining the defining features of the disaster film genre, one inevitably becomes involved with more general problems of film genre theory. Over the years, this theoretical discourse has put forth a wide range of criteria which ought to be decisive in regard to identifying genres.47 In terms of film-immanent criteria, aspects of style, theme, plot, conflict, and character are among the most prominent. As for the production side of film, one can point out the producers’ intentions as well as the historical, economic, and cultural ramifications of the production process, as all being potential criteria for genre definition. Finally, aspects of reception and the broader contextuality of film are of equal importance when it comes to genre defining features. This involves receptive intentions, film historical contexts, the audience’s geo-cultural identity and its social class, the conventional and vernacular usage of genre, social, cultural, and ideological implications, and collective psychological archetypes. At the same time, scholars have become increasingly aware of the general problematic of genre definition and, as a result, have realized the futility of attempting to freeze genre into a fixed structural order with definite types and categories.48 Against film genre theory’s commitment to terminological precision and unambiguousness stands the much older establishment of filmic genres, which was initiated by the film industry as a means of standardization. Before genre became a topic of theoretical interest in the late 1960s, its conventional use in everyday life and in the film industry had been practiced for decades. 49 It is this essentially pragmatic reality of genre, this vibrant Genrebewußtsein (‘genre awareness’) that eludes any final determination.50 Accordingly, typical problems faced by genre theory regard, for example, the dynamic shifting and the blurriness of genre borders as 47 The frequently republished Film Genre Reader (edited by Barry Keith Grant) gives a good overview of this discourse’s development (Grant). 48 Tudor; Schweinitz. 49 For a concise reflection of the beginnings of genre in film, see: Schweinitz. 50 Schweinitz.

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well as the discrepancy between the abstract body of films constituting a specific genre and the individual works that ought to represent it. The latter problem is rooted in the tautological configuration according to which the derivation of a genre from a specific film can only be executed under the premise of a given set of generic genre rules matching this film.51 What has just been summarized is the general theoretical framework that must be taken into consideration when investigating the defining features of the disaster genre. Thus, whenever I speak of the ‘disaster movie (or film) genre’ in this book, bear in mind that it is applied against this backdrop of the inherent ambiguity of film genre and its general theoretical complications. It is worth investigating the origins of the terms ‘disaster movie’ and ‘disaster film’ as specific genre designations. According to Stephen Keane, the use of the term ‘disaster film’ can be traced back to the 1930s, a decade which witnessed the release of a multitude of films with disaster spectacles.52 Yet, he does not substantiate this assertion by naming his sources. The results of my investigation on this matter deviate slightly from Keane. While it is true that the term ‘disaster film’ had been in public use even before the 1930s, it is problematic that those early ‘disaster films’ do not normally designate works of fiction. Instead, the term is used for film footage that captures factual disasters. For instance, the Los Angeles Times calls the cinematographic material of the tragic capsizing of the ship Eastland, which took place in 1915 on the Chicago River, a ‘disaster film’.53 Other early ‘disaster films’ cover the Japanese Kantō earthquake of 1923,54 the crash of the Hindenburg Zeppelin of 1937 in New Jersey,55 the Ohio River Flood (1937),56 the Texas City Disaster of 1947,57 and the Illinois mine blast from the same year.58 The term also referred to films simulating disaster scenarios made by organizations like the Red Cross for educational and training purposes.59 Even though fiction films with disaster spectacles existed alongside the film coverage of factual disaster events, they were usually not explicitly 51 Tudor, 5. 52 Keane, 13. 53 Kingsley; ‘Olympic Will Present Chicago Disaster Film’. 54 ‘Disaster Film Features New Pantages Bill’. 55 The ads of the screenings promoted the footage as ‘disaster f ilms’; see for instance: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 56 ‘To Show Disaster Films’. 57 ‘Disaster Film To Be Shown At Nazarene Church’. 58 ‘New Firm to Make Mine Disaster Film’. – The film addressed in the article was released in 1947 as an episode of the anthropology TV-series The Seven Lively Arts. 59 One of the rare exceptions of this conventional use of the term can be found in an article by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin about the fiction coal mine disaster film Through Fire to Fortune, which was released in 1914 (‘Coal Mine Disaster Films at Ye Liberty Theater’).

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labeled as ‘disaster films’ (at least not within the public discourse). A broader terminological implementation, now mainly based on the term ‘disaster movie’, did not take place before the 1970s under the impression of a wave of films with catastrophic themes hitting the theaters.60 In order to label popular films like Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), or The Towering Inferno (1974), film critics started writing about ‘disaster movies’.61 Occasionally, they also used the term ‘disaster drama’. The terminological shift from ‘film’ to ‘movie’ might not merely represent a case of Americanized English; it could also indicate a semantic change reflecting the rather low artistic value ascribed to these commercially produced Hollywood films. In this book I use both terms, ‘disaster movie’ and ‘disaster film’, with no semantic difference intended. How has the disaster genre been defined by film scholars so far? Frank Eugene Beaver’s Dictionary of Film Terms locates the genre’s essence in its combination of melodramatic elements with ‘extensive action sequences’ exhibiting the ‘efforts of a number of characters to escape a man-made or natural disaster’.62 While John Sanders stresses narrative elements (a scenario disrupted by violent events, a hero f igure, a diverse range of characters, a series of obstacles, etc.) as genre-defining features, Stephen Keane also addresses aspects of spectacle and f ilm historical factors.63 Charles P. Mitchell distinguishes between Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, def ining the f irst as a depiction of ‘a credible threat to the continuing existence of humankind as a species or the existence of Earth as a planet capable of supporting human life’.64 A rather narrow def inition is offered by Nick Roddick, giving some basic requirements: [the presented disaster] must be diegetically central; factually possible; largely indiscriminate (in that it could happen to all sections of the population […]); unexpected […]; all-encompassing, in the sense that potential victims cannot simply opt out of it; and finally, ahistorical, in the sense of not requiring a specific conjuncture of political and economic forces to bring it about.65 60 Feil, 2; Keane, 13; Hobsch, 11; Grigat, 20. – This assertion is also backed by the conclusions I have drawn from my own investigations on this matter. 61 This shift of genre terminology (‘From “Meller” to “Disaster”’) is reflected in: Feil, 5-9. 62 Beaver, 74f. 63 Sanders, 18-20; Keane, 1-6. 64 Mitchell, xi. 65 Roddick, 246.

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Contrary to Roddick, Maurice Yacowar’s broad typological definition of the disaster genre bears the risk of including f ilms that are intuitively ascribed to other genres. He distinguishes the following eight narrative categories: Natural Attack, The Ship of Fools, The City Fails, The Monster, Survival, War, The Historical, The Comic.66 Finally, a more cautious attempt of definition is made by Manfred Hobsch in the introduction of his Lexikon der Katastrophenfilme (‘Encyclopedia of Disaster Films’). By regarding the disaster movie as a subgenre which principally can merge with every other genre, he emphasizes its openness and hybridity.67 I do not intend to contribute another ultimate definition of the disaster movie genre. What I offer instead is a description of what I believe constitutes the receptive core of the films to be analyzed. In all of them, destructive (natural) forces, which are threatening humankind with its far inferior existence, are staged as sublime cinematic attractions. At the same time, I think that this definition would do justice to a lot of films beyond the works in question. However, given the outlined general problematic of film genre, I do not insist too firmly on the disaster movie’s exclusiveness as a distinct and clearly demarcated genre. What is most crucial in this regard is that the selected films draw on and continue the visual history of sublime disasters, as they proceed in employing the receptive and general aesthetic characteristics of the sublime for their depictions of catastrophic events. My selection of films is further confined by two criteria: first, the disasters presented in the films all originate from the phenomenological realm of the natural world. Thus, while all kinds of natural disasters and even giant monsters like Godzilla are included, catastrophic events of alien invasions, war scenarios, and cultural disasters like economic crises will not be dealt with in the analysis. The disasters I am interested in are strictly natural agents. This means that man-made and social disasters, as they are often discussed within the broader conception of disaster studies, will be neglected. The main reason for this first limitation is my historical trajectory itself, which takes it point of departure from a constellation of discourses and phenomena in the eighteenth century. Iconographically speaking, this trajectory is concerned with natural disaster motifs and deeply connected with various discourses, media and, phenomena, negotiating man’s relation to nature. Therefore, while it is not out of the question that the disaster film genre may also include non-natural scenarios, the historical trajectory I am interested in does not. 66 Yacowar, 277-284. 67 Hobsch.

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Second, my selection is limited to US-American and European films. While there can be no doubt that also non-Western film industries have produced a variety of arresting disaster movies (one need only think of the Japanese and South Korean contributions to the genre), the fact remains that the sublime, viewed in its specific theoretical, cultural, and historical dimensions, is first and foremost a European and then later on an US-American phenomenon.68 This is why films and other media from non-Western parts of the world are deliberately neglected (although not ignored) in this book. Apart from that, one also has to acknowledge the Hollywood studio system’s role as being the dominant film industry since the early twentieth century. Its means and scales of production, global distribution, and market capitalization are decisive factors in terms of Hollywood’s immense potential to depict spectacular (and costly) disaster scenes. Within the range of these self-given boundaries, the body of films to be analyzed encompasses works from the very beginning of the medium of cinema up until today.

Works Cited Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. Beaver, Frank Eugene. Dictionary of Film Terms; The Aesthetic Companion to Film Art (4th ed.). New York: Peter Lang 2007. Belting, Hans, ed. Bilderfragen; Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2007. Brady, Emily. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press 2013. Brandt, Reinhard. ‘Die Aufhebung des Bildes: Barnett Newman (1905-1970): Vir heroicus sublimis’. In Meisterwerke der Malerei; Von Rogier van der Weyden bis Andy Warhol. Edited by id. Leipzig: Reclam 2001, 206-246. Bukatman, Scott. ‘The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime’. In Matters of gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham: Duke University Press 2003, 81-130. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2008 [1990]. 68 As for example: Haeundae (‘Tidal Wave’), directed by Yoon Je-kyoon, 2009; Tawo (‘The Tower’), directed by Kim Ji-hoon, 2012; the Gojjira franchise with almost 30 Japanese productions to date.

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Carroll, Noël. Mystifying Movies; Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press 1988. Chung, Jihae. Das Erhabene im Kinofilm. Ästhetik eines gemischten Gefühls. Marburg: Schüren Verlag 2016. ‘Coal Mine Disaster Films at Ye Liberty Theater’. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 27 August 1914, 3. Cornea, Christine and Rhys Owain Thomas, eds. Dramatising Disaster: Character, Event, Representation. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars 2013. Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime; From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer; On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press 1991 [1990]. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Confronting Images; Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Translated by John Goodman. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2005. ‘Disaster Film Features New Pantages Bill’. Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1923, II11. ‘Disaster Film To Be Shown At Nazarene Church’. Plattsburgh Press-Republican, 05 March 1955, 12. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Visions of the Apocalypse; Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema. London: Wallflower Press 2003. Elkins, James. ‘Against the Sublime’. In Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science. Edited by Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, 20-42. Feil, Ken. Dying for a Laugh; Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press 2005. Fornacciari, Ilaria. ‘The Complexity and Stark of Pictorial Knowledge: About Foucault Reading Panofsky’. Images. Journal for Visual Studies, vol. 2 (2014). Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge 2002 [1969]. Fumerton, Richard and Diane Jeske, eds. Introducing Philosophy through Film. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2010. Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press 2003 [1986]. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art; From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge: MIT Press 2003 [2001]. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. In The Affect Theory Reader. Edited by id. Durham: Duke University Press 2010, 1-25. Griffiths, Alison. Shivers Down Your Spine; Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press 2008.

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Grigat, Nicoläa Maria. Gender- und Race-Topographien im amerikanischen Disasterfilm zwischen 1970 und 2006. Marburg: Tectum 2009. Gunning, Tom Gunning. ‘Early American Film’. In American Cinema and Hollywood; Critical Approaches. Edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 29-45. Gunning, Tom. ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the AvantGarde’. In Early Cinema; Space ‒ Frame – Narrative. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: BFI Publishing 1990, 56-62 (first published in Wide Angle, vol. 8, no. 3/4 [fall 1986]). Herrmann, Jörg. Sinnmaschine Kino; Sinndeutung und Religion im populären Film. Gütersloh: Kaiser 2001. Hobsch, Manfred. Das grosse Lexikon der Katastrophenfilme; Von ‘Airport’ bis ‘Titanic’, von ‘Erdbeben’ bis ‘Twister’ und von ‘Flammendes Inferno’ bis ‘Outbreak – Lautlose Killer’. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf 2003. Hockenhull, Stella. ‘An Age of Stupid?: Sublime Landscapes and Global Anxiety Post-Millennium’. In Film Landscapes: Cinema, Environment and Visual Culture. Edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars 2013, 106-120. Hollander, Anne. Moving Pictures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991 [1986]. Holly, Michael Ann. Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1985. Imdahl, Max. Giotto: Arenafresken; Ikonographie – Ikonologie – Ikonik. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1980. Ivakhiv, Adrian. Ecologies of the Moving Image; Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2013. Jeong, Seung-Hoon. ‘The Apocalyptic Sublime: Hollywood Disaster Films and Donnie Darko’. In Terror and the Cinematic Sublime; Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films. Edited by Todd A. Comer and Lloyd Isaac Vayo. Jefferson: McFarland 2013, 72-87. Kakoudaki, Despina. ‘Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film’. Camera Obscura, vol. 17, no. 2 (2002), 109-153. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Eric Matthews and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001 [2000]. Keane, Stephen. Disaster Movies; The Cinema of Catastrophe. London: Wallflower 2006 [2001]. King, Geoff. Spectacular Narratives; Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London and New York: I.B. Tauris 2000. Kingsley, Grace. ‘Bright Bill at the Orpheum’. Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1915, II6.

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Kirwan, James. ‘The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime’. In Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime. New York: Routledge 2018. Kracauer, Siegfried. ‘Das Grauen im Film’. In Kino; Essays, Studien, Glossen zum Film. Edited by Karsten Witte. Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp 1974, 25-27. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press 2000. Maruo-Schröder, Nicole. ‘“It’s Theoretically Possible”: Disaster and Risk in Contemporary American Film’. In The Anticipation of Catastrophe; Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Heidelberg: Winter 2014, 181-200. Meiner, Carsten and Kristin Veel, eds. The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises. Berlin: De Gruyter 2012. Merquior, J. G. Foucault. London: Fontana Press 1985. Mitchell, Charles P. A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema. Westport: Greenwood Press 2001. Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime; A Study of the Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks 1960 [1935]. Morsch, Thomas. ‘Corporeal Discourse and Modernist Shock Aesthetics in Takashi Miike’s Film Audition’. Apertúra, vol. 3, no. 4 (summer 2008), accessed 04 January 2020, http://apertura.hu/2008/nyar/morsch. Natali, Maurizia. ‘The Course of the Empire: Sublime Landscapes in the American Cinema’. In Landscape and Film. Edited by Martin Lefebvre. New York: Routledge 2006, 91-123. Nessel, Sabine. Kino und Ereignis: Das Kinematografische zwischen Text und Körper. Berlin: Vorwerk 8 2008. Nessel, Sabine, et al., eds. Wort und Fleisch; Kino zwischen Text und Körper. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer 2008. ‘New Firm to Make Mine Disaster Film’. The New York Times, 21 September 1950, 21. Newman, Barnett. ‘The Sublime is Now’. In Barnett Newman; Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by John P. O’Neill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1990, 170-173. ‘Olympic Will Present Chicago Disaster Film’. Buffalo Courier, 30 July 1915, 3. Pächt, Otto. ‘Kritik der Ikonologie’. In Ikonographie und Ikonologie; Theorien – Entwicklung – Probleme (6th revised. ed.). Edited by Ekkehard Kaemmerling. Cologne: Du Mont 1994 [1979], 353-376. Paech, Joachim. ‘Was ist ein kinematographisches Bewegungsbild?’. In Bildtheorie und Film. Edited by Thomas Koebner and Thomas Meder. Munich: edition text + kritik 2006, 92-107. Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’. In id. Meaning in the Visual Arts; Papers in and on Art History. Garden City: Doubleday 1955, 26-54.

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Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’. In Film Theory and Criticism; Introductory Readings (6th ed.). Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004 [1974], 289-302. Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers; American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 2009. Plantinga, Carl and Greg Smith, eds. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1999. Porter, James I. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010. Pries, Christine. ‘Einleitung’. In Das Erhabene; Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn. Edited by id. Weinheim: VCH 1989, 1-30. Prümm, Karl. ‘Von der Mise en scène zur Mise en images; Plädoyer für einen Perspektivenwechsel in der Filmtheorie und Filmanalyse’. In Bildtheorie und Film. Edited by Thomas Koebner and Thomas Meder. Munich: edition text + kritik 2006, 15-35. Ramonet, Ignacio. ‘Katastrophenfilme als Krisenfantasien’. Translated by Bodo Schulze. In id. Liebesgrüße aus Hollywood; Die versteckten Botschaften der bewegten Bilder. Zürich: Rotpunktverlag 2002 [2000], 87-119. Roddick, Nick. ‘Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies’. In Performance and Politics in Popular Drama; Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television 1800-1976. Edited by David Bradby, Louis James and Bernhard Sharratt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980, 243-269. Rosenblum, Robert. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition; Friedrich to Rothko. New York: Harper & Row 1975. Rutherford, Anne. ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect’. Senses of Cinema, vol. 25 (2003), 1-15. Sanders, John. Studying Disaster Movies. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur 2009. Schweinitz, Jörg. ‘“Genre” und lebendiges Genrebewußtsein; Geschichte eines Begriffs und Probleme seiner Konzeptualisierung in der Filmwissenschaft’. Montage/AV, vol. 3, no. 2 (1994), 99-118. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press 1993. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime; The New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge 2006. Sontag, Susan. ‘The Imagination of Disaster’. In id. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Anchor Books 1990 [1961], 209-225. Tanke, Joseph J. Foucault’s Philosophy of Art. A Genealogy of Modernity. London and New York: Continuum 2009. Tasker, Yvonne, ed. Action and Adventure Cinema. London: Routledge 2004.

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The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 7 May 1937, 23, 9 May 1937, 59. ‘To Show Disaster Films’. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 15 October 1937, 7. Tudor, Andrew. ‘Genre’. In Film Genre Reader III. Edited by Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press 2003 [1986]), 3-11. Warnke, Martin. ‘Kontinuitätslinien von alter Kunst zu den neuen Medien’. In Das bewegte Bild; Film und Kunst. Edited by Thomas Hensel, Klaus Krüger and Tanja Michalsky. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2006, 75-80. Webb, Gary R. ‘The Popular Culture of Disaster: Exploring a New Dimension of Disaster Research’. In Handbook of Disaster Research. Edited by Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli and Russell Dynes. New York: Springer 2007, 430-440. Weik von Mossner, Alexa, ed. Moving Environments; Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2014. Wilton, Andrew. Turner and the Sublime. London: British Museum Publications 1980. Wood, Aylish. ‘Timespaces in Spectacular Cinema: Crossing the Great Divide of Spectacle versus Narrative’. Screen, vol. 43, no. 4 (winter 2002), 370-386. Yacowar, Maurice. ‘The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre’. In Film Genre Reader III. Edited by Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press 2003, 277-295.

2.

Starting Points Abstract The starting point of my historical trajectory (the iconography of the sublime) is the second half of the eighteenth century. This was when the aesthetic appreciation of natural disaster events and the establishment of the sublime as a category of landscape perception became closely intertwined. Mapped out as a dense network of discourses, practices, and cultural phenomena, my analysis of this historical constellation stretches from, among others, seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting and art academic understandings of the sublime to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Picturesque, and natural scientific discourses to Grand Tour travelers and modern mass tourism. Keywords: British Royal Academy of Arts, Pseudo-Longinus, Salvator Rosa, History of Literature, the Picturesque, the Geological Sublime

The aim of this and the next two chapters is to trace and describe the establishment and the aesthetic, cultural, and media technological development of the iconography of the sublime. The artistic genres and media encompassing this trajectory range from different modes of landscape painting up to nineteenth-century entertainment devices such as the Panorama and the Diorama. A crucial period within this historical narrative is the second half of the eighteenth century. During these decades, the concept and aesthetic category of the sublime was widely popularized and became the primary mode of experience of nature’s terrible sites. This was the time when an iconography of the sublimity of landscape and catastrophic events was initially established, parallel to a general aesthetic revaluation of natural disasters and an increased interest in and demand for visualizations of the same. As has been stated in the previous chapter, two crucial historical phenomena coinciding with the iconographical strand of the sublime are the establishment of the modern subject-observer, as described by Jonathan Crary, and the media history of immersion, some of whose most decisive

Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch02

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cases will be discussed in terms of their ability to mediate and stage sublime disaster events. Furthermore, closely related to the media in question, which depict nature in its most dynamic and destructive states, is the intersection of two notions of pictorial experience: on the one hand, an artwork to be consumed and studied by a small elite; and on the other hand, a visual spectacle as middle class leisure activity within the emerging field of popular culture. In relation to this complex intersection, I will attempt to locate the production and reception of various visual artists and producers. I claim that the sublime, with its rather affective and sensory than intelligible agency, represented a substantial factor within the emergence of urban middle class entertainment and, later on, popular culture. In this respect, of significance is also the extent to which, as part of this process, the sublime became associated with a recurrent set of tropes and conventions, which were increasingly commodified and marketed within Europe’s urban public cultures of visual entertainment. A useful paradigm for describing and understanding the popularization of previously elite disciplines in nineteenth-century Europe (particularly Britain) is provided by the literary scholar and cultural historian Ralph O’Connor in his book The Earth on Show, in which he describes how various discourses surrounding the earth sciences were made increasingly available not just to a small, semi-professional elite but also to a wider range of social classes. In this context, the terms popularization and popular are thus to be understood as referring to what O’Connor describes as ‘the presence (real or imagined) of a non-specialist public, whose identity and constitution varied’, that is to say, a public which was interested in and willing to consume in remediated form the findings of semi-professional enquiry or productivity.1 Only at a later point, namely in my discussion of the medium cinema, will the term popular be applied in the common sense of the word, implying the involvement of mass production, consumption and audiences. This and the next two chapters constitute one interconnected historical trajectory. I will begin in this chapter by roughly sketching a network of discourses and cultural phenomena from which the iconography of the sublime emerged. Based on this foundation, I will proceed in Chapter 3 by analyzing several artists and their works through which the iconography of the sublime was established and popularized. These early artistic efforts were widely limited to capturing and presenting sublime objects of nature, which were intensified through formal innovations. Media technologies aiming to increase the sensory and affective impact of the pictorial experience of the 1

O’Connor, 12.

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sublime were not yet considered by the artists. Instead, they predominantly specialized in depicting specific subjects and phenomena of nature, which they presented in their sublime asymmetric relation to man. Finally, Chapter 4 will take into view pictorial media that were to intensify the aesthetic experience of the sublime by means of their technological particularities and innovations. Note in this regard that my use of the term ‘intensification’ is not to be identified with notions of ‘progression’ or ‘perfection’, as if emerging new media finally perfected formerly flawed technologies. Rather, the receptive concept of intensification occurs along cyclic movements from initial experiences of shock and amazement to phenomena of conventionalization and accustoming, which, in turn, create the need to again amplify the sensual and affective agitation of the spectator.

Dutch Landscapes of the North I set the starting point of my historical trajectory in the mid-seventeenth century, where one encounters a specific constellation of cultural phenomena from which the iconography of the sublime ultimately emerged through a series of continuities, transformations, junctions, parallel branches, fissures, and dead ends. More precisely, I want to begin with painted images of uncultivated landscapes displaying stormy skies, bare rocks, ruins, shipwrecks, sea storms, and raw mountain rivers. These types of motifs were already artistically presented around a century before Burke published his famous Enquiry, when the sublime was revitalized as a conventionalized mode of landscape reception. They occur in the works of Dutch landscapists such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Allaert van Everdingen, Willem van de Velde the Younger, and Ludolf Bakhuizen.2 Their northern landscapes relinquished art academic and classical conventions like staffage figures, templates for idealized nature views (the idyllic, the pastoral, the locus amoenus), and allusions to well-known historical and mythological narratives. Their images give realistic accounts of their depicted topographies, with great attention to particularities. Another typical subject of this generation of Dutch painters was seascapes, which also included storms and shipwrecks.3 2 Two examples: Jacob van Ruisdael. Waterfall near a Church. 1667-1670. Wallraf-RichartzMuseum, Cologne. 109 x 131.5 cm. Oil on canvas; Allaert van Everdingen. Stormy Sea. C. 1643/44. Städel Museum, Frankfurt on the Main. 98.6 x 139.4 cm. Oil on canvas. 3 More precisely, this trend had already been initiated one generation earlier by artists like Simon de Vlieger and Jan Porcellis (Slive, 213-224).

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Crucial for these new tendencies in Dutch landscape painting was Van Everdingen’s experience of the Scandinavian countryside, a motif which, soon after, was adapted by other Dutch artists. 4 Ruisdael never saw the wild rivers of Norway and Sweden himself, yet, he sought to reproduce their raw qualities within painted landscapes of his home country. As for the contemporary reception of these new images of the North, their signification predominantly remained within the aesthetic framework of the Baroque. For example, the broken trees in the foreground of many paintings were read as vanitas symbols, as they were embedded within the broader Baroque iconography of vanitas and memento mori themes (e.g. skulls, rotten fruits, hourglasses).5 Moreover, these new landscapes were perceived as loci terribili (‘terrible places’), in opposition to the classical topographical concept of the locus amoenus (‘pleasant place’). The binary relation of locus amoenus and locus terribilis is a traditional literary concept, relevant both in the epics of antiquity and medieval times and in the bucolic poetry of the Baroque. Visual precursors of loci terribili in Dutch painting are Peter Paul Rubens’s Landscape with Stone Carriers and Joos de Momper the Younger’s Large Mountain Landscape, to name but a few.6 Only later, in the second half of the eighteenth century, were the images of the landscape generation of Everdingen and Ruisdael explicitly associated with the sublime (as they seemed to anticipate the Burkean characteristics of the sublime such as terror, darkness, or desertedness). In 1759, Joshua Reynolds, who would later become the first president of the British Royal Academy of Arts, still claimed in an article that the Dutch approach of imitating nature’s ‘petty peculiarities’ was ill-suited to achieving the grand style (the sublime according to Pseudo-Longinus) in painting.7 The reception of Pseudo-Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous) primarily focused on its connectivity to the fields of rhetoric and literature, which is far less than what Pseudo-Longinus and other ancient thinkers had to offer about the sublime (see Chapter 1, Footnote 18). Thus, as an aesthetic category, the sublime was thought to revolve around aspects of narrativity, language, thought, and speech. This tendency was 4 Slive, 193; Stechow, 142-146. 5 Slive, 202f. 6 Peter Paul Rubens. Landscape with Stone Carriers. C. 1620. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 86 x 126.5 cm. Oil on canvas; Joos de Momper the Younger. Large Mountain Landscape. Liechtenstein. The Princely Collections, Vienna. C. 1620. 226 x 327 cm. Oil on canvas. 7 Reynolds, 173. – For Pseudo-Longinus’s impact on British aesthetics and culture, see: Monk, Chap. 1; Ashf ield, Chap. 1. – As for the broader aesthetical origins and predecessors of the Longinian account of the sublime, see: Porter; Heath.

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conditioned by the most influential translation of Pseudo-Longinu’s Peri Hypsous, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s French version.8 Before its release in 1674, Pseudo-Longinus’s text had already been translated into Italian by Giovanni da Falgano (1575) and into English by John Hall (1652).9 However, it was Boileau’s translation that was going to shape the notion of the sublime in European aesthetics for decades. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that Boileau does not show much interest in the passages of Peri Hypsous that describe sublime objects of nature (the Nile, the ocean, ‘the craters of Etna in eruption’).10 Instead, as becomes clear in his ‘Preface’, Boileau foregrounds rhetorical and poetological facets of the sublime.11 Different from Reynolds, who in his article remains faithful to the Longinian tradition of the sublime, the subsequent generations of painters met the landscapes of their Dutch predecessors with greater enthusiasm. Especially in Britain, the formation of a national landscape style had its roots in the reception of the rugged landscapes of the Dutch.12 In the Italian Seicento, it was Salvator Rosa whose landscapes displayed mountain sceneries in a terrifying and eerie manner. His Empedocles throws himself into the terrible abyss of the crater of Etna.13 What distinguishes Rosa from his Dutch colleagues is that he does not portray nature in its superiority toward man, in other words: as a source of terror in itself. Rather, his landscapes often provide the setting for heroic mythological events. The same can be said about the œuvre of Nicolas Poussin, whose dynamic Arcadian landscapes amplify and resonate with dramatic events unfolding between mythological figures.14 Both Poussin and Rosa had a substantial impact on Britain’s cultural scene, where their ‘sublime’ landscapes were contrasted with the ‘beauty’ of Claude Lorrain.15 Rosa and Poussin’s emphasis on narrative events unfolding within dynamic landscape sceneries is one 8 See for example: Zelle 1989; Zelle 1987, 76ff.; Barone, 40-44; Kirwan, vii; Monk, 21; Litman. – The role of Boileau’s translation as a turning point in the modern European discourse of the sublime is critically reflected in: Axelsson, 30-36; Martin; Brady, 13. 9 Barone, 40. 10 Longinus, 277. 11 Boileau-Despréaux, 39-48. 12 Büttner, 239-259. 13 Salvator Rosa. The Death of Empedocles. 1665-1670. Private collection. 135 x 99 cm. Oil on canvas. – For further information on this work and on Rosa’s general relation to the sublime, see: Langdon. 14 One famous exception is Poussin’s painting Deluge from his Four Seasons cycle. Here, within the framework of the biblical narrative, the flood acts as the great antagonist of man: Nicolas Poussin. Winter (The Deluge). 1660-1664. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 118 x 160 cm. Oil on canvas. 15 Wilton, 20; Monk, 194f.

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of the reasons why their works were more easily accepted and labeled as sublime in the eighteenth century.16 The heroic events they presented were preferred by the cultural elite, for they showed greater compatibility with the Longinian tradition of the sublime. After the sublime had been transformed into a mode of landscape perception, it was especially Rosa who maintained his significance.17

Transforming the Sublime. From Rhetoric to Experiencing Nature It can be assumed that the seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes were later experienced as sublime works of art, exactly because they remained outside the academic standards and preconceptions of what a painted landscape should look like. It was not before the second half of the eighteenth century that these proto-sublime landscapes started to become revaluated and finally accepted by the art academic authorities.18 Until then, academy students were supposed to paint landscapes as mere backdrops for historical and mythological events. Pastoral depictions of Arcadian idealized landscapes were favored. Artists like Salvator or Michelangelo, whose comparably drastic and sinister images sparked unsettling and mixed emotions in the viewer, were regarded inferior to the more balanced and harmonious styles of Poussin and Raphael. Sublimity, following the Longinian tradition, was mainly appreciated in literature, and painters felt obliged to approximate this literary quality by illustrating themes from literary works like Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Homer’s Iliad, or the Bible.19 Landscape painting, as an academic genre, was not yet able to stand on its own feet; hence, it employed the giants of literature as vehicles. This notion of the sublime, as it was conventionally shared and practiced among art institutions and academic circles during the eighteenth century, would be fundamentally transformed from a Longinian tradition of textual production into a receptive concept of experiencing natural phenomena. 16 Monk, 164-202. 17 Sunderland, 786. 18 This shift is strongly indicated in Samuel Monk’s analysis of the exhibition catalogues of the British Royal Academy, which reveals that there was an enormous increase of sublime subjects being exhibited between 1769 and1800 (Monk, 198). 19 The great extent to which the reception of biblical texts was informed by Pseudo-Longinus is the topic of Dietmar Till’s lucid essay ‘The Sublime and the Bible: Longinus, Protestant Dogmatics, and the “Sublime Style”’.

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Facing this transformation, a dense web of relations and events opens up before the historian, involving socio-cultural, aesthetic-philosophical, economic, political, and natural scientific aspects. As for the British art scene, which brought forth some of the new imagery of nature’s sublimity, it is interesting to note that the sublime’s rise as a category of experiencing landscape views coincided with significant developments in this sector. According to David Solkin, the eighteenth century saw both the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts and the emergence of an increasingly commercialized art market with independent art galleries and exhibition spaces and an expanded range of customers and visitors.20 With this commodification of art and culture, traditional aristocratic and academic notions of art reception, function, production, criticism, and taste were contested; but also the Royal Academy itself, with its annual exhibitions, opened up for a broader reception of art. As for the theoretical fundament of the sublime’s transformation in the eighteenth century, an initiative step toward the Burkean terror of the sublime was taken by John Dennis as early as 1693. Against the common perception of the ugliness and the aesthetic inferiority of wild, uncultivated, and inhospitable sceneries such as the Alps, Dennis introduced a ‘delightful Horrour [sic]’21 to the experience of Alpine mountains.22 In his later theoretical exploration of this experience, he would also consider catastrophic events like earthquakes, volcanoes, tempests, and raging seas as part of his inventory of sublime objects.23 Clearly, Burke’s famous Enquiry from 1757 did not emerge out of nothing but had a theoretical and cultural prehistory, which spanned across the first half of the eighteenth century. Another important contributor to this changed understanding of the sublime was Joseph Addison, who summed up and rephrased the new aesthetic framework of experiencing nature and its opposition to beauty, as they had been conceived by Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Thomas Burnet, and others.24 Burke’s specific contribution to the sublime’s theoretical discourse, apart from popularizing the sublime among his contemporaries, encompasses his systematic and nuanced distinction 20 Solkin. 21 Dennis 1963, 134. 22 Zelle 1987, 80-97. – See also: Brady, 14f. 23 Dennis 1939, 361. 24 The richness of the discourse of the sublime in eighteenth-century Britain becomes apparent in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla’s reader from 1996, in which they present a broad variety of texts, ranging from Dennis, Addison, and Burke to Frances Reynolds and Adam Smith to David Hume and Helen Maria Williams. – See also: Brady.

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between beauty and sublimity, the hitherto unparalleled descriptive detail in his typology of sublime phenomena, as well as his notion of the sublime as a tendentially subjective, aesthetic, and sensualistic experience. In France, it was especially Denis Diderot who, under the impression of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, emphatically explored the sublimity of painted landscapes. In the face of Joseph Vernet’s pictures of mountain ranges, shipwrecks, and stormy night skies, he could not ‘tear [him]self away from this spectacle and the mixture of pleasure and fear [they] evoked’.25 Two years before Diderot saw Vernet’s paintings at the Paris Salon exhibition of 1767, he had already conceived an understanding of the sublime, which locates its aesthetic experience entirely in the mind of the viewer.26 As for the German language discourse of the sublime, the several theoretical contributions of the eighteenth century were widely informed by British theorems, particularly Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. It is perhaps no coincidence that Swiss intellectuals like Johann Jacob Bodmer, Johann Jacob Breitinger, and Johann Georg Sulzer, who grew up in the shadows of the Alpine mountains, were particularly present in the discourse. Apart from these Swiss voices, Moses Mendelssohn, Kant, and his interpreter Friedrich Schiller are among the most prominent theorists to be named.27 Particularly Kant, with his two-stage structure of the sublime, shaped the theoretical discourse of the sublime for generations of (German) thinkers to come. However, the sublime’s two-stage interplay between sensibility and reason, aesthetics and ethics is not an entirely and genuinely Kantian invention. The twofold structure of the sublime was far from being unknown to Kant’s contemporaries. One already encounters it in the poetic works of Barthold Heinrich Brockes, perhaps most famously in his poem ‘Das Firmament’ (‘The Firmament’, first published in 1721), which Bodmer also employed as an example in his theoretical account of the sublime.28 In ‘Das Firmament’, the lyrical subject is being overwhelmed by the plentitude and sheer infinite dimension of the night sky.29 Confronted with this abyss of time and space, the lyrical subject shrinks to the size of a grain of dust. Yet, 25 Diderot, ‘The Salon of 1767’, 92. 26 Diderot, ‘Notes on Painting’, 238f. – As for the many other French theorists and intellectuals interested in the sublime, such as René Rapin, Jean de La Bruyère, or Antoine Houdar de la Motte, the book Le Sublime en France by Théodore A. Litman still provides one of the most encompassing overviews. – See also: Macsotay, 350-52. 27 For a general overview of the sublime in eighteenth-century German aesthetics, see: Zelle 1987, Barone. 28 Bodmer, 228-230. 29 Brockes.

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before his/her complete annihilation, the subject’s mind is lifted again, as s/he becomes aware of God’s presence, whose agency even reaches the most remote realms of the world.30 In turn, Brockes himself sought inspiration from scientific discoveries and technological inventions, which illuminated the formerly withdrawn natural spheres of macro and microcosm, from the Copernican turn, which facilitated feelings of losing oneself in the infinite spaces of the universe, as well as from physicotheological positions, which travelled from Britain to Germany.31 According to Carsten Zelle, the poem’s physicotheological turn from terror to God is rooted in the writings of British scholars like Thomas Burnet and William Derham, who discover the omnipotence of God even in nature’s most terrible and ugly sites.32 However, even for Burnet the Alps remained ‘ruins of a broken world’, since their erection resulted from the biblical fall of man, inviting associations with the evil, terrible, and sinful.33 What distinguishes Kant’s ‘Analytic’ from the physicotheological tradition of the sublime is that he replaces the subject’s respect for God’s omnipotence with the subject’s respect for his/her own faculty of reason. Within German literature, the Kantian two-stage structure of the sublime is also distinctly represented and reflected by Friedrich Schiller in works like the poem ‘Der Spaziergang’ (‘The Walk’, 1795) or the late tragedy Maria Stuart (1800).34 In Britain, it was James Thomson, with his poem cycle The Seasons (1746), who introduced a new, that is sublime, notion of nature to a broader audience.35 While Thomson’s poem was initially inspired by the painted landscapes of Salvator Rosa, scholars like Samuel Monk and Andrew Wilton also stress its importance for the development of the British landscape school.36 Accordingly, the popularity of The Seasons marks the point of departure for a whole generation of British landscape painters who were soon to take a leading role within the European revitalization and transformation of their genre. 30 A more detailed view on the relation between the Kantian sublime and theological thought and aesthetics is offered in: Hoeps. 31 The following deliberations are based on: Zelle 1990. 32 While the ugliness and aesthetic worthlessness of inhospitable natural spaces like mountain ranges indeed represented a common conviction for centuries, there were exceptions as well. As demonstrated by Ruth and Dieter Groh, the topos of the Alps had already been appreciated by the church fathers as part of the beautiful cosmos. The beauty of mountains was based on their utility and on the general notion of an oeconomica naturae (Groh, 33f.). 33 Burnet, 115; Hentschel, 83f. 34 Braungart 2005. 35 The Winter Chapter, comprising the most terrifying descriptions of snow storms and mountain ranges, was already released in 1726. 36 Monk, 210; Wilton, 22-26.

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Another case of intermedial exchange between the fields of literature and painting were The Works of Ossian. Ossian, an author who in the eighteenth century was often named in the same breath with William Shakespeare and John Milton, became a synonym for sublime landscape visions.37 Despite the skepticism regarding the authenticity of the text – The Works of Ossian were in fact written by their translator, the Scottish poet James Macpherson – Ossianic landscapes were experienced, discussed, praised, and artistically visualized throughout Europe.38

Picturesque Views Besides fictional literary works, a great quantity of non-fictional travel writings laid emphasis on the sublime experience of nature’s spectacular sites. Among the topographies in focus were the Alps, the Italian volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna, as well as Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish island Staffa, a truly Ossianic attraction.39 However, these travel narratives were commonly not explicitly labeled as ‘sublime’ but as ‘picturesque travels’.40 The picturesque, as theoretically coined by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, represents an aesthetic category and a subjective mode of nature perception. 41 Briefly put, the picturesque traveler seeks to re-encounter landscape in its uncultivated, neglected, wild, deserted, abandoned, or just authentic and original state. I say ‘re-encounter’, because the spectator knows what s/he is looking for. S/He has seen these sites before, most notably in the paintings of Claude and Salvator. The picturesque sharpens the eye for the picture-like qualities of landscape: for its compositions, its perspectives, its colors, and its effects of light and darkness. This includes sublime objects of nature but also beautiful and pastoral views. Monk portrays the picturesque travel culture of the late eighteenth century through a substantial number of historical documents. One of his groups of landscape recipients are the ‘learned ladies, who seem to have lived a considerable part of their erudite lives wrought up to the high pitch of the

37 Stafford, 163-180. 38 For the astonishing and diverse history of reception of Macpherson’s Ossian, see: Gaskill. 39 The naming of the cave assumingly was informed by the popularity of Macpherson’s epic poem. Fingal, a mythical Irish warrior, is the father of Ossian and one of the main characters in the text. 40 For a more detailed view of picturesque travel culture, see: Andrews. 41 Townsend; Charlesworth.

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sublime’.42 Mixed with a good share of 1930s sexism, Monk traces their paths from the ‘Salvatorial’ mountains of Switzerland and ‘the sublimity of the sea’ to the ‘awfully sublime’ sensation of a thunder storm and the Scottish countryside which ‘even a Milton’s pen, or a Salvator Rosa’s pencil, would fail to give you a complete idea of it’. 43 The cultural significance of the picturesque was not restricted to the field of literature and the experience of travel. It also played its part in the emergence of the English landscape garden. 44 Accordingly, its architects sought to recreate the topographies depicted in the paintings of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin. Their aim was to provide the viewer with an endless variety of picturesque views. A stroll through an English garden involved a continuous encounter with thoroughly composed and framed, yet seemingly most natural and uncultivated images of nature. 45

Lisbon Shock Waves With the picturesque blending of different aesthetic categories, I diverge slightly from the core of my investigation, namely the tracing of the broader cultural discourses surrounding and permeating the establishment of the sublime as an aesthetic mode of experiencing the terrifying side of nature. Yet indeed, with the major event of the Lisbon earthquake from 1755, my focus is immediately resettled on this initial goal. Not only did this disaster shake Earth’s crust of the Iberian Peninsula, thereby almost destroying the entire city of Lisbon, it also shook the religious, social, cultural, and philosophical coordinates of Europe’s cultural elite to their foundations. Philosophers like Voltaire and Kant felt obliged to take a stand on the event, the first by attacking enlightenment’s best of all possible worlds optimism as represented by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the latter by opposing interpretations of the earthquake as a means of divine punishment. 46 Not God but 42 Monk, 212. 43 Monk, 214; Seward, 277, qtd. in: Monk, 214; Carter, 308, qtd. in: Monk, 217; Chapone, 107, 155, qtd. in: Monk, 215. 44 For the role of the picturesque in English garden design, see: Colvin, 56-73; Pevsner; Watkin; Hunt. 45 When discussing garden architecture, it becomes necessary to mention that the sublime also plays a significant role within architecture in general. Sublimity was experienced, to name one example, in the face of the dark, vertical shapes of Gothic cathedrals. Within the limited scope of this book, neither architecture nor the stage arts can be discussed here in detail. For further investigations into these fields, see: Eck; Jong; Bussels. 46 Most prominently, Voltaire expressed this criticism in his satire Candide from 1759.

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the processes of an entirely indifferent nature were responsible in Kant’s eyes. Even though natural phenomena like ‘the shattering of countries, the fury of the sea shaken to its foundations, the fire spewing mountains’ might cause death and misery, they are also objects for aesthetic admiration and scientific observation. 47 Fundamentally, Kant’s texts on the Lisbon earthquake are ciphers for broader secularization processes taking place in his time. 48 Natural phenomena ceased functioning as expressions of God’s wrath or grace and became neutral and solely natural agents. It is this shift in the nature perception of Europe’s cultural elite that also essentially enabled the aesthetic appreciation and experience of formerly merely ugly and terrible, yet now sublime objects of nature. 49 The Lisbon earthquake was not only followed by a real tsunami but also by a flood of visualizations. These images comprised illustrations for official reports, scientific mappings and mass produced engravings with a rather static and schematic appeal, as well as artistic depictions displaying the earthquake in a more dynamic and drastic manner.50 Thus, visualizations of the Lisbon disaster were not only produced for information purposes; they also nurtured and supplied a demand for aesthetically fascinating visual accounts of the sublime event.51 As for the visual history of natural disasters in general, I claim that the iconography and aesthetic framework of the sublime both raised the interest in visualizations of natural disasters and facilitated formal and media technological innovations that intensified the experience of visualizations as such. More precisely, under the emblem of the sublime, the experience of artificial natural disasters was dynamized and intensified in terms of the sensory and affective addressing of the spectator. Before the eighteenth century, visual presentations of natural disasters which captured their dynamic and terrifying forces were rather exceptional – just like the proto-sublime landscapes of the Dutch and Salvator represented exceptions from the 47 Kant 2012, 340. 48 This trend had already had relevance within the British physicotheological positions discussed earlier in this chapter. Kant’s position means a further radicalization of nature’s emancipation from religious narratives. 49 This aspect is also emphasized by Christian Begemann in his analysis of the processing of fear in the times of German enlightenment (Begemann, 129f.). 50 An excellent overview of this variety is given in the Jan Kozák collection, which can be visited online on the pages of the Earthquake Engineering Research Center of the University of California, Berkeley (‘Jan Kozak Collection’). 51 Scholz, 96-98.

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conventional preference of beautiful and pastoral landscape depictions.52 However, during the eighteenth century, natural disaster events began to be displayed more regularly as sublime phenomena to be aesthetically experienced and enjoyed.

Heroic Geology The emerging natural sciences represented another contributing factor to the increasing number of visualizations of natural disasters. Scientific interests played a significant role in the gradual process of abolishing religious connotations of natural disasters, a process that is reflected and promoted in Kant’s texts on the Lisbon earthquake.53 Also, in his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant makes it very clear that the interpretation of catastrophic events as God’s wrath thwarts the aesthetic appreciation of these events.54 The connections between the aesthetic revaluation of nature’s terrifying phenomena and their rational-scientific understanding have been investigated in several historical publications.55 Accordingly, catastrophic events became symptoms both of the indifferent laws of nature and of God’s divine and encompassing design of the world.56 Legibility, utility, and sensual perceptibility became the principles for the scientific study, economic exploitation, and aesthetic enjoyment of nature’s formerly solely terrible topographies. The scientific understanding and the aesthetic experience of natural disasters were more closely related than one might initially think. This applies especially to the discipline of geology and its various subdisciplines such as volcanology, seismology, or paleontology. More or less parallel to the emergence and establishment of the sublime in the visual arts, the geological sciences went through a series of crucial developments in their so-called heroic age, which roughly lasted from 1750 until 1850.57 One major innovation 52 A browsing through Jan Kozák and Vladimír Čermák’s thoroughly conducted Illustrated History of Natural Disasters reveals the validity of this iconographical caesura very clearly. 53 Of course, this is a rather simplified description of this process and should not imply a clear distinction between scientific and religious discourses. A detailed account of the complexity of the relation between natural science and religion in connection with their dealings with natural disasters is given in: Walter. 54 Kant 2001, 146f. 55 See for example: Busch; Schramm; Böhme, 215-224. 56 The latter explanation represents the physicotheological position. 57 To name the most fundamental steps, geology’s heroic age witnessed the discovery of deep time by James Hutton, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and others, the legendary dispute between the schools of Neptunism (Abraham Gottlob Werner) and Plutonism (Hutton), George

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of this phase was the taking shape of what Martin J.S. Rudwick coined a visual language for geological science in the early nineteenth century.58 While Rudwick primarily grounds this visual language within the vedute pictures of the traveler-naturalists (travelling draftsmen on expedition, amateur scientists, and topographers), Marcia Pointon makes an alternative proposition. She claims that the origin of the visual language of the geological sciences is rather found within artistic visualizations of nature’s sublimity, which were produced on the aesthetic premises of the Burkean sublime.59 Moreover, she points out the common topographical interests shared by geologists and artists and demonstrates the impact of artistic depictions of the sublime on the scientific practices of visualizing geologic phenomena. What reconciles both positions to a certain degree is the fact that Rudwick’s traveler-naturalists also perceived nature through the lens of the sublime. Apart from the works mentioned by Rudwick himself, there is a striking example which illustrates the traveler-naturalists’ interest in the sublime.60 Between 1782 and 1787, the French artist and amateur scientist (geologist, archeologist) Jean Hoüel published his Voyage pittoresque des Isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari. In his descriptions of the Sicilian volcanoes he visited, Hoüel draws on geological theories of his time and gives his own account of the geological history of the Sicilian islands. As argued by Susanne Keller, the 264 aquatints Hoüel produced for his travel writings do not function as mere supplement and ornament to the text; much more than that, they represent a central constituent of the epistemic process itself.61 Text and image complement each other to facilitate both an aesthetic experience and a scientific understanding of the depicted topographies. This double function (epistemic, aesthetic) certainly applies to the picture Vue de la Bouche A. de Stromboli (Fig. 1). Four men and what looks like a dog are placed in front of the erupting crater of the Stromboli volcano. Through these figures, the viewer is presented with a variety of affective Cuvier’s theory of Catastrophism, as well as the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which involved the refinement and popularization of Hutton’s concept of Uniformitarianism. The unfolding of these events is thoroughly described in: Rudwick 2005; Gould. – For a condensed summary of geology’s heroic age, see: Braungart 2008. 58 Rudwick 1976. 59 Pointon, 96. 60 He names works by William Daniell (aquatints of the Isle of Staffa in A Voyage Round Great Britain [1814-1825]), Thomas Webster (illustrations for Sir Henry Charles Englefield’s Principal Picturesque Beauties, Antiquities and Geological Phenomena of the Isle of Wight [1816]), and George Poulett Scrope (Memoir on the geology of central France [1827]) as exemplary predecessors of geology’s visual language. 61 Keller, 188-248.

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Fig. 1: Jean Hoüel. Vue de la Bouche A. de Stromboli. Aquatinta from: Voyage pittoresque des Isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de Monsieur 1782-1787). Courtesy Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Rome.

reactions toward the unfolding disaster, ranging from existential fear to the aesthetic appreciation of the volcano’s sublimity. One of the men needs to be physically supported by his companion. Another one flees the sight of the eruption in sheer terror. Only the dog and the fourth man dare to face the catastrophic event. Yet the dog, perhaps paralyzed by fear, faces the crater with its head bowed to the ground and its tail between its legs. Solely the fourth man by the edge of the cliff faces the crater with his head held high. Spreading out his arms, he embraces the terrifying forces of nature, which manifest in the volcanic explosion in front of him. Through this admirer of the volcano, who mediates between the depicted event and the spectator, the image encourages reflections on its aesthetic appeal. However, there is also the letter ‘A.’ placed on the right-hand side of the explosion, locating the mouth of the crater. As a direct text reference, it directs the attention back to Hoüel’s investigation of the volcano’s geology. The detailed rendering of the surface structures of the crater additionally contributes to this investigation, insofar as these structures invite the trained eye to decipher the geological history of the object. I have discussed this example to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the visual modes of geology and landscape art were in the late eighteenth century; and the sublime was their common foundation. This intersection brought

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forth a type of sublime landscape that was described by Georg Braungart as the Geologisch-Erhabene (‘geological sublime’). Braungart defines the geological sublime as an additional, third type of the Kantian sublime: The immeasurable spaces of time, which do not overwhelm man’s sensibility in a quantitative manner (like Kant’s mathematically sublime) or threaten his self-preservation (like the dynamically sublime) but nearly annihilate him on a temporal dimension, would be the point of departure for the geological sublime.62

In addition, Braungart points out geologic phenomena within the sublime’s theoretical discourse, from Pseudo-Longinus up until Kant and his successors. Hence, due to the sublime’s affinity for geologic phenomena, it is not surprising that their scientific exploration almost naturally narrates itself in the mode of the sublime.63 Viewed as a specifically visual experience, the geological sublime occurs through the receptive deciphering of the outer structures of mountain ranges, gorges, glaciers, and other geologic objects. These surface structures convey their origin and historical transformation to the trained eye. By doing so, they open up the temporal scale of geologic deep time.64 Leaving the temporal borders of cultural history far behind, the eons of natural history unfolding within the landscape shrink the age of man to the size of a grain of sand in an hourglass – that is the violent force that grips the viewing subject in the experience of the geological sublime. As for the artistic discipline of landscape painting and its employment of the geological sublime, the works of the German painter, medical doctor, and theorist Carl Gustav Carus are highly relevant. With his concept of Erdlebenbildkunst (‘earth-life art’), Carus gives a theoretical foundation for the artistic capturing of nature’s deep time strata, blending aestheticphilosophical, geological, and theological thought: With what eloquence and power the history of the mountains speaks to us; how sublimely it makes of a man a thing divine, in direct relation to 62 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Braungart 2005, 166. 63 Braungart 2005, 164-169. 64 The concept of the geologic time scale (deep time) was for the most part shaped by the geologist James Hutton (Gould; Bernoulli). Hutton’s friend John Playfair contributed significantly to its popularization. In Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), he describes the revelation of the geologic time scale strikingly as ‘looking so far into the abyss of time’ (qtd. in: Gould, 62).

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God, by sweeping away all the vanities of his transient, earthly existence; and how clearly that history speaks to us in certain stratified formations and mountain outlines: so clearly as to suggest even to the uninitiated that such a history exists! And is not the artist free to bring out such truths and to show us landscapes that are, in a higher sense, historical?65

One of Carus’s own Erdlebenbilder displays the Scottish island Staffa with Fingal’s cave, a topography which I have already discussed in its relation to Ossian’s writings and the picturesque.66 The picture shows the cave encircled by a rough sea in heavy swell and a cloudy sky. The columnar structure of the basaltic rock is clearly distinguished from a layer of another rock type lying on top. Seagulls are fighting against the forces of wind and waves. The cave itself is obscured by an unfathomable darkness, while the rest of the landscape is illuminated in a ghoulish green color. The low sun is hiding behind clouds. On the one hand, the mood of the painting surely evoked associations with the Ossianic hero Fingal, who the cave was presumably named after. On the other hand, the painting stages the island as a geologically sublime object, as a visual equivalent of Carus’s own experience of Staffa: Closer and closer we got to the magnificent mass of basalt, which once, in inconceivable times, emerged from the bottom of the sea! We passed it on its southern side, soon afterwards the wonders of the basalt colonnades and their two great and, with good reason, world-famous caves revealed themselves. […] Here, where one might have lingered for days to capture every detail, the overwhelming ought to be overwhelmed in such short time!67

The shortness of time lamented by Carus puts emphasis on the extreme temporal discrepancy between the formation of the island, which was likely to have taken millions of years, and its perception through the human eye. Due to the temporal excessiveness of Staffa’s natural history, which exceeds by far any narration of human experience or history, the island is perceived as a terrible abyss. 65 Carus, 115. – For Carus’s concept of Erdlebenbildkunst, see: Kuhlmann-Hodick, Wahrnehmung und Konstruktion; Howoldt; Mitchell, Chap. 6 66 Carl Gustav Carus. Island Staffa. Before 1846. Private collection. 93 x 120 cm. Oil on canvas. 67 Translated from German by the author; orig.: from Carus’s diary entry on his travel to Staffa, 25 July 1844, qtd. in: Kuhlmann-Hodick, Natur und Idee, 182f.

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A similar awe-inspiring history of nature is told in John Brett’s painting The Glacier of Rosenlaui from 1856.68 The Pre-Raphaelite painter captured his subject in meticulous detail. The painting displays the glacier with a washed-out mountain to its left. The foreground is filled with a boulder and some smaller stones. For the painting, Brett drew inspiration from the theoretical writings of his friend, the art critic John Ruskin, with who he also shared his passion for geology.69 Moreover, it is possible that Brett’s Glacier visualizes Louis Agassiz’s theory of glacier movement.70 Agassiz, a well-known geologist, was certainly impressed by the execution of Brett’s painting.71 The riddle that Agassiz helped to solve addressed the origin of erratic boulders. How and from where did such boulders appear in areas with no geological connection to their material? Agassiz’s answer: they were transported there by the movements of glaciers. Hence, in Brett’s painting, the boulders and stones in the foreground invite reflections on their travel through the centuries, as they used the glacier in the background as their vehicle. With the indicated movement of the Rosenlaui glacier, the image alludes to a geologic temporality whose enormous span is itself an inconceivable sublime object. However, this seems to be quite an abstract and rather intellectual than emotional effect of the painting, presupposing certain knowledge about the nature and processuality of glaciers. With Carus and Brett’s paintings, I touch upon a number of general concerns and questions regarding the sublime and the modalities of its achievement. Is the sublime primarily defined by its immediate affecting of the subject? Or does it also involve receptive processes of reflection and understanding? In how far does its execution rely on the knowledge, education and cultivation of the perceiving subject (his or her Bildung)?72 How are affect and reflexivity thought to be related in the experience of the sublime? This further leads to questions about the sublime’s temporality, whether its agency unfolds in an instant of shock, which affectively overwhelms the recipient in less than a second, or as a gradually evolving receptive process. The effect of the geological sublime in painting, namely the dynamization of the static image by means of visualizing geologic deep time in space, 68 John Brett. The Glacier of Rosenlaui. 1856. Tate Gallery, London. 44.5 x 41.9 cm. Oil on canvas. 69 Pointon, 109. 70 Bendiner; Hickox. 71 Hickox. 72 A term coined by German philosophers like Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Accordingly, Bildung not only comprises the acquisition of knowledge and social skills but also self-cultivation and the development of personality and individuality.

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also illustrates a general characteristic of the sublime. Visualizations of the sublime dynamically set in motion spaces through the intervention of forces, affects, and intensities. Such dynamizations of space and spatializations of time are also at work in motion pictures (though not only in cinema). In moving images, the sublime’s dynamization of space becomes an intrinsic technological feature of the respective medium itself. What this transformation of dynamic movement from representation and imagination toward technology and sensation implies in terms of the experience of the sublime will be explored shortly.

Commodifying Nature. Earth Economics and Tourism The geological sciences did not go through a series of decisive transformations around 1800 just to satisfy geologists’ desire for knowledge. Their progress is also closely linked with the economic exploration, exploitation, and commodification of Earth and its resources. The famous Bergakademie at Freiberg in Saxony (Germany), from where Abraham Gottlob Werner defended his Neptunist views on the geological origin of Earth against the Plutonists (esp. James Hutton), was first and foremost a mining academy. Prince Franz Xaver of Saxony founded the Bergakademie, because he wished to exploit the resources of his kingdom.73 With the beginning of industrialization around 1800, mining efforts were accelerated. This is the moment when man entered the Anthropocene. In this new geological age, ‘the geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities’.74 The earth enterprises of the early Anthropocene involved practices of exploration, measuring, mapping, and visualization. Numerous landscape artists joined geological expeditions setting out to explore new territories and evaluate their commercial potential.75 The images they brought home from these expeditions not only served economic and scientific purposes, they also were viewed for their aesthetic value, as they depict sublime topographies in their unspoiled state, before their taming and commodification. Hence, the increased scientific and economic cultivation of formerly 73 Wagenbreth, 40f. 74 ‘Working Group on the “Anthropocene”’. – The Anthropocene’s status as a formally accepted epoch within the geologic time scale is currently considered by this working group. 75 To name two examples: the German-born American painter Albert Bierstadt accompanied the geologist Clarence King on an expedition to the Sierra Nevada (Ferber, 48ff.). His competitor Thomas Moran explored the Grand Canyon under the lead of John Wesley Powell (Childs).

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hostile areas simultaneously promoted their aesthetic consumption, since cultivation processes as such would fuel a longing for nature in its unspoiled and raw state, for topographies outside the reach of civilization. Commercializing nature does not only entail the exploitation of its resources but also its commodification for touristic purposes. Parallel to the emergence of the landscape iconography of the sublime, the modern tourist industry was established. From the late eighteenth century onward, a democratization of touristic travelling took place. Before that, only the social, cultural, and artistic elite of Europe had been able to travel (for leisure purposes). The Grand Tour travelers, who preceded the modern tourists, were usually aristocratic gentlemen from Northern Europe. Typically, the first main destination of a Grand Tour was Paris. From there, travelers continued to Italy, maybe even Greece, before returning north by passing the Alps. ‘The length of time spent in “making the tour” fell over the course of the century, but even in the early nineteenth century many tours lasted six months at the very least, and the costs could be prohibitive.’76 While the Grand Tour lost its appeal for Europeans in the nineteenth century, it kept its high cultural value among US-American travelers for a longer time.77 I have already mentioned picturesque and popular scientific travel writings, which served as guide books for travelers. These writings contributed to shaping the discourse of what to see and experience on a Grand Tour and how to experience these attractions. The aesthetic category of the sublime, as it appeared in travel writing (under the umbrella term ‘picturesque’), aesthetic theory, fictional literature, and various visual media, represented one of the central concepts in terms of touristic experiences and travelers’ nature perception. Painted, drawn, and printed representations of sublime topographies informed the visual experiences of generations of tourists. In many cases, the artistic producers of such visual material were themselves frequent travelers. There were many artists who specialized in presenting the same type of topography throughout their careers.78 Among the locations that became touristic hotspots, as they offered spectacular views of nature’s sublimity, the Alps held a top position. The touristic commodification of the Alpine mountains is intertwined with their scientific, cultural, and pictorial exploration. Albrecht von Haller’s 76 Sweet, 2. 77 The nineteenth-century Grand Tour as a predominantly American phenomenon is dealt with in: Stowe. 78 This applies, for instance, to the Norwegian landscapes of Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, who lived in Dresden, Germany, as well as to the Munich artist Fritz Bamberger and his depictions of Spain.

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famous poem cycle Die Alpen (‘The Alps’, 1729) triggered touristic interest by praising an idyllic scenery in the presence of sublime mountain ranges, taking the viewer far away from the phoniness and vice of the urban spaces of the lowlands.79 Around a century later, the Alps had become a well-established subject of landscape painting, with a broad variety of artists providing Alpine views (e.g. Joseph Anton Koch, Gabriel Lory [the younger], Ludwig Richter, William Turner, Samuel Birmann, Carl Gustav Carus, Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Rottmann, Alexandre Calame). The ‘Swiss Tours’ of Lord Byron and the Shelleys (Mary and Percy), undertaken in 1816, made the Alps an attractive and compelling travel destination for the British. In the same year, the first mountain hotel was opened in Rigi, Switzerland.80 And when the first Alpine club was founded in 1857 (the British Alpine Club), the Alpine tourist industry had become a widely developed and profitable business.81 Further south, the waterfalls of Tivoli and the volcanoes Etna and Vesuvius were attractive, if not mandatory destinations on the Grand Tour. These sites allowed for a sublime experience of nature as well as for a close scientific study of Earth’s inner processes. At such places, young aristocrats and the social elite mingled with landscape artists, natural scientists, writers, and intellectuals.82 A touristic alternative to the peaks of the Alps were the rough fjord and mountain landscapes of Norway, which the Dutch painters had already made popular in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the Scandinavian nature sites had a worthy promoter in the painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl. British tourists not only reveled in the awe-inspiring views of the Alps, they also discovered the beauty and sublimity of their own country (e.g. the Ossianic island Staffa).83 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, the touristic exploration of the USA’s iconic nature sites became a matter of patriotic duty. Places like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon virtually embodied the idea of the US-American nation, a concept that was nurtured and capitalized upon by an evolving tourist industry.84 *** 79 Haller. 80 Stalla, 37. 81 Stalla, 38. 82 Indeed, many participants embodied several of these roles. 83 For detailed information on the touristic exploration of Scotland as a sublime and picturesque travel destination, see: Schaff. 84 Sears.

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The discursive network mapped out on the previous pages represents the foundation on which the subsequent tracing of the iconography of the sublime rests. While such a description of a historical formation – in the sense of an origin – can never achieve completion, it will nonetheless provide fertile ground for the discussion of a number of artists, whose works have significantly contributed to establishing the iconography of sublime natural disasters.

Works Cited Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque; Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1989. Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. Axelsson, Karl. The Sublime; Precursors and British Eighteenth-Century Conceptions. Bern: Peter Lang 2007. Barone, Paul. Schiller und die Tradition des Erhabenen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2004. Begemann, Christian. Furcht und Angst im Prozess der Aufklärung. Frankfurt on the Main: Athenäum 1987. Bendiner, Kenneth. ‘John Brett’s “The Glacier of Rosenlaui”’. Art Journal, vol. 44, no. 3 (autumn 1984), 241-248. Bernoulli, Daniel. ‘Tiefenzeit; Hutton entdeckt die Geologie’. Du; Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, vol. 57 (1997), no. 10. Bodmer, Johann Jacob. Critische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter. Zürich: Conrad Drell und Comp. 1741. Böhme, Hartmut and Gernot. Das Andere der Vernunft; Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants. Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp 1983. Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas. ‘Traité du Sublime, ou du merveilleux dans le discours, Traduit du grec de Longin’. In Œuvres Complètes de Boileau; Volume 5. Edited by Charles H. Boudhours. Paris: Société des Belles Lettres 1942, 37-124. Brady, Emily. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press 2013. Braungart, Georg. ‘Die Geologie und das Erhabene’. In Schillers Natur; Leben, Denken und literarisches Schaffen. Edited by Bernhard Greiner. Hamburg: Felix Meiner 2005, 157-176. Braungart, Georg. ‘“Katastrophen kennt allein der Mensch”; Die transhumane Perspektive in der Kulturgeschichte der Geologie’. Recherche; Zeitung für Wissenschaft, no. 2 (October/November 2008), 17-19.

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Brockes, Barthold Heinrich. ‘Das Firmament’. In Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, bestehend in physicalisch- und moralischen Gedichten, Erster Theil. Bern: Herbert Lang 1970 [1737], 3. Burnet, Thomas. The Sacred Theory of the Earth. London: Centaur Press 1965. Busch, Werner. ‘Die Naturwissenschaften als Basis des Erhabenen in der Kunst des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts’. Jahrbuch des historischen Kollegs (2004), 83-110. Bussels, Stijn and Bram van Oostveldt. ‘“One Never Sees Monsters without Experiencing Emotion”; Les merveilleux and the Sublime in Theories on French Performing Arts (1650-1750)’. In Translations of the Sublime; The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus‘ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Edited by Caroline van Eck, et al. Leiden: Brill 2012, 139-161. Büttner, Niels. Landscape Painting; A History. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers 2006. Carter, Elizabeth. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770; Volume 2. Edited by Montagu Pennington. London: F.C. and J. Rivington 1808. Carus, Carl Gustav. Nine Letters on Landscape Painting. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Publications 2002. Chapone, Hester. Posthumous Works; Volume 1. London: John Murray, Fleet Street, and A. Constable and Co. 1807. Charlesworth, Michael. ‘Theories of the Picturesque’. In A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present. Edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett. Hoboken: Wiley 2013, 351-372. Childs, Elizabeth C. ‘Time’s Profile: John Wesley Powell, Art, and Geology at the Grand Canyon’. American Art, vol. 10, no. 1 (spring 1996), 6-35. Colvin, Brenda. Land and Landscape; Evolution, Design and Control (2nd ed.). London: John Murray 1970 [1947]. Dennis, John. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose. London: James Knapton 1693. Dennis, John. ‘The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704)’. In The Critical Works of John Dennis; Volume 1. Edited by Edward Niles Hooker. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press 1939, 325-373. Diderot, Denis. ‘Notes on Painting’. In Diderot on Art; Volume 1. Edited and translated by John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995, 189-240. Diderot, Denis. ‘The Salon of 1767’. In Diderot on Art; Volume 2; The Salon of 1967. Edited and translated by John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995, 1-331. Eck, Caroline van. ‘Figuring the Sublime in English Church Architecture 1640-1730’. In Translations of the Sublime; The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of

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Longinus‘ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Edited by id., et al. Leiden: Brill 2012, 221-245. Ferber, Linda S. ‘Albert Bierstadt: The History of a Reputation’. In Albert Bierstadt; Art & Enterprise. Edited by Joanna Ekman. New York: Hudson Hills Press 1990, 21-68. Gaskill, Howard, ed. The Reception of Ossian in Europe. London: Thoemmes 2004. Gould, Stephen Jay. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle; Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987. Groh, Ruth and Dieter. ‘Von den schrecklichen zu den schönen und erhabenen Bergen’. Histoire des Alpes = Storia delle Alpi = Geschichte der Alpen, vol. 9 (2004), 31-43. Haller, Albrecht von. Die Alpen. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1959. Heath, Malcolm. ‘Longinus and the Ancient Sublime’. In The Sublime; From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012, 11-23. Hentschel, Uwe. ‘Der Staubbachfall in den Berner Alpen; Landschaft aus dem Geiste der Literatur und Malerei’. In Landschaft um 1800; Aspekte der Wahrnehmung in Kunst, Literatur, Musik und Naturwissenschaft. Edited by Thomas Noll, Urte Stobbe and Christian Scholl. Göttingen: Wallstein 2012, 83-112. Hickox, Mike. ‘Science and Religion in the Pre-Raphaelite Work of John Brett’. The Victorian Web, accessed 20 December 2019, http://www.victorianweb.org/ painting/brett/paintings/hickox1.html. Hoeps, Reinhard. Das Gefühl des Erhabenen und die Herrlichkeit Gottes; Studien zur Beziehung von philosophischer und theologischer Ästhetik. Würzburg: Echter 1989. Howoldt, Jenns E. ‘Von Caspar David Friedrich zu Carl Gustav Carus; Landschaftsmalerei zwischen ästhetischer Autonomie und wissenschaftlichem Anspruch’. In Expedition Kunst; Die Entdeckung der Natur von C. D. Friedrich bis Humboldt. Edited by id. and Uwe M. Schneede. Hamburg and Munich: Dölling & Galitz 2002, 9-16. Hunt, John Dixon. ‘“Ut Pictura Poesis”: The Garden and the Picturesque in England (1710-1750)’. In The History of Garden Design; The Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day. Edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot. London: Thames and Hudson 1991, 231-241. ‘Jan Kozak Collection: Historical Earthquakes’, accessed 01 January 2020, http:// nisee.berkeley.edu/elibrary/browse/kozak?eq=5234. Jong, Sigrid de. ‘Paradoxical Encounters; Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experiences and the Sublime’. In Translations of the Sublime; The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus‘ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Edited by Caroline van Eck, et al. Leiden: Brill 2012, 247-267.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Eric Matthews and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001 [2000]. Kant, Immanuel. ‘History and Natural Description of the Most Noteworthy Occurrences of the Earthquake that struck a Large Part of the Earth at the End of the Year 1755’. In Immanuel Kant; Natural Science. Edited by Eric Watkins and translated by Olaf Reinhardt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012, 337-364. Keller, Susanne B. Naturgewalt im Bild; Strategien visueller Naturaneignung in Kunst und Wissenschaft 1750-1830. Weimar: VDG 2006. Kirwan, James. Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Rational in the History of Aesthetics. New York: Routledge 2005. Kozák, Jan and Vladimir Čermák. The Illustrated History of Natural Disasters. Heidelberg: Springer 2010. Kuhlmann-Hodick, Petra and Gerd Spitzer, eds. Carl Gustav Carus; Natur und Idee; Katalog. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag 2009. Kuhlmann-Hodick, Petra and Gerd Spitzer, eds. Carl Gustav Carus; Wahrnehmung und Konstruktion; Essays. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag 2009. Langdon, Helen. ‘The Demosthenes of Painting; Salvator Rosa and the 17th Century Sublime’. In Translations of the Sublime; The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus‘ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Edited by Caroline van Eck, et al. Leiden: Brill 2012, 163-185. Litman, Théodore A. Le Sublime en France (1660-1714). Paris: Nizet 1971. Longinus. ‘On the Sublime’. Translated and edited by W. Hamilton Fyfe. In Aristotle XXIII. Edited by G. P. Goold. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1995, 143-307. Macsotay, Thomas. ‘Offering a Hermeneutics for Painted Landscapes: Diderot’s View of Joseph Vernet as a Sublime Painter’. In Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire. Edited by Christian Michel and Carl Magnusson. Paris: Somogy 2013, 347-364. Martin, Éva Madeleine. ‘The “Prehistory” of the Sublime in Early Modern France: An Interdisciplinary Perspective’. In The Sublime; From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012, 77-101. Mitchell, Timothy F. Art and Science in German Landscape Painting; 1770 – 1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993. Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime; A Study of the Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks 1960 [1935]. O’Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show; Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2007.

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Pevsner, Nikolaus, ed. The Picturesque Garden and its Influence outside the British Isles. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University 1974. Pointon, Marcia. ‘Geology and Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century England’. In Images of the Earth; Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences. Edited by Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter. Oxford: The Alden Press 1997 [1978], 93-123. Porter, James I. The Sublime in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016. Reynolds, Joshua. ‘The Grand Style of Painting’. The Idler, no. 79 (1759). In The Complete Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, First President of the Royal Academy, with an Original Memoir, and Anecdotes of the Author; Volume 2. London: Printed for Thomas M’Lean1824, 172-175. Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time; The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005. Rudwick, Martin J. S. ‘The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760-1840’. History of Science, vol. 14, no. 3 (1976), 149-195. Schaff, Barbara. ‘“A Scene So Rude, So Wild as This, Yet So Sublime in Bareness”: Ein neuer Blick auf Schottland in der Reiseliteratur der Romantik’. In Landschaft um 1800; Aspekte der Wahrnehmung in Kunst, Literatur, Musik und Naturwissenschaft. Edited by Thomas Noll, Urte Stobbe and Christian Scholl. Göttingen: Wallstein 2012, 207-226. Scholz, Tobias. Distanziertes Mitleid; Mediale Bilder, Emotionen und Solidarität angesichts von Katastrophen. Frankfurt on the Main: Campus 2012. Schramm, Manuel. ‘Die Entstehung der modernen Landschaftswahrnehmung (1580-1730)’. Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 287 (2008), 37-59. Sears, John F. Sacred Places; American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press 1989. Seward, Anna. Letters Written between the Years 1784-1807; Volume 3. Edinburgh: George Ramsay and Co. 1811. Slive, Seymour. Dutch Painting 1600-1800. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995. Solkin, David H. Painting for Money; The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press 1993. Stafford, Fiona J. The Sublime Savage; A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1988. Stalla, Robert. ‘Steile Höhen, sanfte Hügel; Das Motiv “Berg” in der Landschaftskunst des 14.-20. Jahrhunderts’. In Ansichten vom Berg; Der Wandel eines Motivs in der Druckgrafik von Dürer bis Heckel. Edited by id. Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag 2001, 15-48. Stechow, Wolfgang. Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century. London: Phaidon Press 1966.

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Stowe, William W. Going Abroad; European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994. Sweet, Rosemary. Cities and the Grand Tour; The British in Italy, c. 1690-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012. Sunderland, John. ‘The Legend and Influence of Salvator Rosa in England in the Eighteenth Century’. The Burlington Magazine, vol. 115, no. 849 (Dec. 1973), 785-789. Till, Dietmar. ‘The Sublime and the Bible: Longinus, Protestant Dogmatics, and the “Sublime Style”’. In Translations of the Sublime; The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus‘ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Edited by Caroline van Eck, et al. Leiden: Brill 2012, 55-64. Townsend, Dabney. ‘The Picturesque’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55, no. 4 (autumn 1997), 365-376. Wagenbreth, Otfried, et al. Die technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg und ihre Geschichte. Freiberg: TU Bergakademie Freiberg 2008. Walter, François. Katastrophen; Eine Kulturgeschichte vom 16. bis ins 21. Jahrhundert. Translated by Doris Butz-Striebel. Stuttgart: Reclam 2010 [2008]. Watkin, David. The English Vision; The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design. London: John Murray 1982. Wilton, Andrew. Turner and the Sublime. London: British Museum Publications 1980. ‘Working Group on the “Anthropocene” (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy)’, accessed 21 December 2019, http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/ workinggroups/anthropocene/. Zelle, Carsten. ‘Angenehmes Grauen’; Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Felix Meiner 1987. Zelle, Carsten. ‘Das Erhabene in der deutschen Frühaufklärung; Zum Einfluß der englischen Physikotheologie auf Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ “Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott”’. Arcadia; Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, vol.25, no. 3 (1990), 225-240. Zelle, Carsten. ‘Schönheit und Erhabenheit; Der Anfang doppelter Ästhetik bei Boileau, Dennis, Bodmer und Breitinger’. In Das Erhabene; Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn. Edited by Christine Pries. Weinheim: VCH 1989, 55-73.

3.

The Iconography of the Sublime Abstract This chapter sets out to describe the establishment of the iconography of the sublime by focusing on three central motifs: the shipwreck, the hostility of mountain summits, and the volcano eruption. I first analyze a shipwreck painting by Joseph Vernet in relation to Denis Diderot’s writings and the particularities of the picture’s exhibition at the Paris Academy Salon. Then, the Alpine landscapes of the Swiss painter Caspar Wolf and their oscillation between academic traditions, vedute painting conventions, sublime imagery, and geological accuracy is analyzed by example of the painting Lower Grindelwald Glacier with Lightning. The motif of the volcano eruption is addressed through a group of paintings, whose interplay makes visible a variety of complications inherent to the sublime. The discussed artworks depicting the three motifs feature intrinsic – that is stylistic and formal – innovations that seek to intensify the pictorial experience of their sublime content matters. Keywords: Landscape Painting, Edmund Burke, Media History, History of Natural Disasters, History of Science

Virtual Windows. Claude Joseph Vernet at the Academy Salon Here, a child who’s survived a shipwreck is carried on his father’s shoulders; there, a dead woman stretched out on the shore, with her distraught husband. The sea roars, the wind whistles, the thunder cracks, the pale, somber glow of lightning pierces through the clouds, momentarily revealing the scene. One hears the noise of a ship’s hull being breached, its masts tipped over, its sails ripped. The crew is terrified; some on the bridge lift their arms towards the heavens, others throw themselves into the water, the waves smash them against the neighboring rocks where their blood intermingles with the whitening foam […]. The same variety of character, action and expression prevails among the spectators: some of

Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch03

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them shudder and turn away, others offer help, others still are immobilized by what they’re seeing […].1

Facing Joseph Vernet’s shipwreck paintings, Denis Diderot struggles to find words to describe the discursively unpresentable visual experience that these works offer. It is interesting noting that Diderot adds sensual layers to the protocol of his pictorial perception, which the paintings themselves are unable to present explicitly (by means of their technology). He senses various auditory phenomena (roaring, whistling, cracking, noise) echoing through his mind. Moreover, Diderot impregnates the static picture with narrative succession, as he describes people ‘throw[ing] themselves into the water, the waves smash[ing] them against the neighboring rocks where their blood intermingles with the whitening foam’. One may interpret this multisensual and temporal widening of the narrator’s pictorial experience as an attempt to match or even surpass the sublimity and affective intensity of the paintings. Diderot’s praise of Vernet would thus entail a hidden media comparative dimension, according to which the time art of literature exceeds the space art of painting.2 Another way to understand Diderot’s narrative animation of Vernet’s static images is by reference to Roland Barthes’ opposition of the concepts of stadium and punctum developed in Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. The stadium represents a general interest that commonly occurs in experience of photographic images, an ‘unconcerned desire’, trained and grounded in ‘ethical and political culture’.3 This interest is primarily concerned with deciphering and understanding the image’s functions, figures, faces, gestures, settings, and actions. In terms of the stadium’s temporality, it requires duration, a monotone passing of time. The punctum, on the other hand, happens ‘right here in my eyes’, ‘lightning-like’, like a ‘tiny shock’. 4 It evokes a desire beyond interest, cultural training, and habits. But the punctum’s affective and temporal immediacy also has the potential to expand and animate the image, a more extensive form of temporality that takes place in the imagination of the spectator.5 Is this what triggered Diderot’s multisensual and temporal expansion of Vernet’s picture, 1 Diderot, ‘The Salon of 1765’, 70. 2 In this respect, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous theoretical distinction between literature (time) and the visual arts (space) is relevant (Lessing). 3 Barthes, 26f. 4 Barthes, 43, 45, 49. 5 Interestingly, Barthes states that the successful occurrence of the punctum is dependent on the large enough size of a photograph’s presentation to the spectator. Similar to a whole range

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a punctum in the painting that pierced its literary spectator? The question is important, because it points to an investigation beyond a simplified media ontological distinction between the spatial mode of the pictorial and the temporal mode of the literary. I find it more productive to investigate if Diderot’s emphatic description can be based on certain receptive effects resulting from the specific features of Vernet’s paintings. Is there an intrinsic component to the painter’s shipwrecks that would render the excesses of Diderot’s narrative plausible?6 Taking a closer look at one of Vernet’s shipwreck paintings – certainly the subject he was most famous for – might give an answer to this question. The picture to be analyzed is titled The Shipwreck (Fig. 2). It was commissioned in 1771 and completed the year after.7 Indeed, that means it could not be shown at one of the Paris Academy Salon exhibitions covered by Diderot in his writings. But then again, the image does not significantly deviate from the other shipwrecks painted by Vernet which Diderot was able to see and write about. Based on my comparative viewing of many of Vernet’s shipwreck depictions, I would argue that the artist found a formula that he kept on exploiting throughout the years. While Diderot’s literary account focuses on the figures’ struggle, agony, and spectatorship, one cannot neglect the natural phenomena surrounding them. In the foreground of the painting is a coastal shore. Except for a tree clinging to the edge of a cliff, the shore consists of bare rock. The cliff with the tree frames the image to the left; the right border of the frame remains open toward the sea and the sky. In the lower section of the shore, eighteen human figures and a dog, who made it from the sinking ship to dry land, are displayed. The waves smash against the cliffs. The ship itself is already filled with water; its front mast is broken. Only the main mast stands erected against the storm. Due to its extremely inclined position, the mast provides a way off the ship for the remaining passengers. Two of them are already of media discussed in this book, large pictorial sizes are employed to reduce readability and encourage being pricked by the punctum. 6 I should mention that the following passages differ significantly from the explanations offered by Michael Fried for Diderot’s immersive response to Vernet. In his book Absorption and Theatricality, Fried is less interested in the sublime qualities of the artworks and instead identifies the pictures’ fragmented and multiperspectival structures, their lack of dramatic compositional effects (resulting in more natural and accessible scenes), as well as the presentation of several coequal characters and actions as the means for their capability to teleport the beholder into their worlds. However, while I generally agree with Fried’s subtle remarks on the matter, it should be clear that he engages with Vernet’s landscapes on a more general level, covering a variety of depicted subjects, whereas I exclusively focus on one shipwreck painting by the artist (Fried, 118-132). 7 Conisbee.

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Fig. 2: Claude Joseph Vernet. The Shipwreck. 1772. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 113.5 x 162.9 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

on their way to the shore, holding on to ropes which connect main mast and land. Seven passengers are clinging to the mast, while two other men are still on the ship (slightly above the torn and tangled sails). The escape path over the mast connects the image’s foreground and middle ground that is the ship in the waves. In its background is another part of the shore, consisting of steep cliffs with a castle on top; and even further behind, a town bathed in light is visible. On the right side of the background, there is another ship; this one is fully intact and functional. The sky above, covering almost two thirds of the canvas, is filled with dark clouds, only inhabited by a couple of seagulls. Just a few spots of blue sky are visible in the upper part of the picture. On the right side, a lightning bolt strikes, travelling in a zigzag line until it breaks through the clouds; after that, its course runs in a straight diagonal line and finally impacts right next to the town. Given the complete absence of the sun, the lightning represents the only visible light source in the painting. It dramatically highlights the lower part of the sky on the right side as well as the town on the left. However, the color of the light is not of a blinding whiteness, rather, it resembles the color of the sun, as it bathes the town in a warm orange tone. The ‘variety […] among the spectators’ that Diderot mentions is also given in The Shipwreck. Vernet’s figures on the shore cover a broad range of different motivations and receptive modes: from existential physical

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affection to humanitarian commitment and material interests to pure aesthetic spectatorship. There are four persons actively involved in the saving of their fellow passengers. With all their strength, they try to bend the mast toward the shore. At the left bottom of the image, two men take care of an unconscious woman, while a third man behind them seems to be highly upset about the woman’s state of health. Furthermore, there are two figures that are merely interested and involved in retrieving the ship’s cargo (the man lifting a cage out of the water, the man rolling a barrel). Within the triangle of shoreline, rope, and mast, a man holds on to a woman. She is so terrified by the event or so devastated by her loss that she is not able to face the ship and the sea. Right under the broken front mast on the rocks lies a man who either tries to reach out to somebody or who himself just managed to make it to the land. Five figures remain passive and observant. Three of them show strong emotional involvement in the fates of the last remaining passengers on the ship. Only the two men on the big rock seem to be thrilled and fascinated by the catastrophic event taking place in front of them. Spatially raised above and isolated from the others, they might be the only persons who gain aesthetic pleasure from their perception of the shipwreck. Thus, the staffage f igures in Vernet’s landscape are not passive bystanders, neutral observers, or inhabitants of pastoral idylls; neither do they merely function as indicators for the proportions of the depicted landscape, as it was common in landscape and vedute painting. Quite the opposite, they are all somehow affected by the forces of the storm. Their bodily expressions of affects rather resemble the conventions and techniques of the genres of history and religious painting, with the important difference that it is nature alone that antagonizes man in Vernet’s painting. The image’s human figures do not represent the center of receptive attention. The landscape itself is the main object. Unlike in Poussin’s landscapes, where the staffage f igures are equally affected, Vernet employs his landscape not as a plain setting for human interaction but as a major agent who surrounds, antagonizes, and affects the ship passengers. Then again, in comparison with later depictions of sublime disasters, the figures’ fight against the storm is given a prominent position in Vernet’s painting. This might also explain Diderot’s emphasis on such narrative elements. Based on the foregoing traditional art historical description, distinguishing foreground, middle ground, and background, I identif ied the image’s primary content matter and formal features (even though a detailed description of some of the compositional aspects was spared out). Yet, does

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this approach enable me to fully grasp the intensity of Diderot’s experience of Vernet’s shipwreck images? In search of an alternative descriptive mode which can live up to this goal, I will attempt to direct my attention to the painting’s dynamic interaction of forms, correlations of forces and intensities. Burke’s claim that the ‘ocean is an object of no small terror’ proves to be true in the case of Vernet’s painting.8 The Shipwreck presents the beholder with a sublime object by means of its Burkean interplay of forces, effects of light and darkness, great dimensions, and the implied evocation of pain and terror. There is a presence of the storm’s force to be sensed in the picture. This force seems to bend, push, and drive everything. The direction this force takes is from the right (the sea) to the left (the shore). It builds up the waters to towering waves and makes them crash against the ship and the shore. The man on the rock wearing khaki colors bends under the splashing of the surf; his body is forced to mimic the c-shape of the wave above him. The ship’s mast and its ripped sails, the limbs and leaves of the tree (with one limb already broken), the clouds, even the lightning seem to be blown and driven toward the shore. The spectator witnesses a clash of materials, forces, and forms, a strife between water and wind on the one side and wood, rock, and human bodies on the other. Paradoxically, it is the same diagonal force from the top right to the bottom left that pushes the mast down toward the shore, thereby enabling the rescue of the passengers. The dynamic of this diagonal movement is blocked and repulsed by the shore’s vertical wall of rock. At the same time, this static antagonist of the storm also traps the shipwrecked human figures and keeps them exposed to nature’s realm of agency. The same goes for the picture’s recipient, whose point of view is located on the shore as well. This kind of exposure applies especially to the seven figures on the mast, as they are at the mercy of the winds and the waves. As if in silent agreement with Burke’s selection of sublime colors, Vernet depicts the sea, the rocks, and the sky in a dark and gloomy color range.9 The waters only display lighter colors when they are dynamically accelerated, when they build up to waves and break. Despite their positioning in the background of the image, the stormy sky and the lightning bolt make a strong impression on the viewer, due to Vernet’s dynamic contrasting and arrangement of dark and bright colors (even though the rather harmonious color tone of the lightning bears more potential in this regard). 8 9

Burke, 54. Burke, 75.

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An interesting group of figures is the woman turning away from the shipwreck scene and the man who holds on to her. In their case, the physical relation of force and counterforce seems ambiguous. The man’s tensed muscles, indicating great physical effort, find no equivalent in the static posture of the woman. She is not moving anywhere, for the blowing winds keep her from falling backward. Her gestures seem intense and undirected, implying a degree of pain and terror which goes beyond rational action and thought. Accordingly, one might interpret the man’s role as an intensifier and a bodily extension of the woman’s affective turmoil, which is caused by the catastrophic event. It is perhaps by means of such intensifications and dynamizations of the disaster’s forces that make Diderot hear what he believes to be seeing. The visual expression of the passengers’ affective agitation and physical struggle provokes the recipient and Diderot’s empathy: ‘some have lit a fire at the foot of a boulder; they busy themselves trying to revive a dying woman, and I find myself hoping they’ll succeed’.10 In his text on the Salon exhibition of 1767, Diderot takes his empathy even a step further: first, by narrating his experience of Vernet’s paintings as a subjective exploration of real landscapes, and second, by re-enacting this experience in a dream vision that haunts the narrator the night after.11 Especially through this dream (in which the narrator witnesses a terrible carnage and panic on a burning ship), Diderot reflects and represents the immersive and empathetic transformation of subjectivity that Vernet’s paintings provoke. Note, however, that the narrator merely remains a spectator in this vision. He does not get physically involved in the unfolding of the disaster. He views it from a physically safe position, while his affective involvement and immersive identification with the event are amplified. Diderot’s dream experience of spectatorship coincides with the point of view of the Shipwreck painting: standing on solid ground, with the stormy sea in front of me and the cliffs behind me, I see the disaster unfolding from close up, but I also keep a certain distance between me and the shipwrecked passengers. In terms of Diderot’s application of Burke in his Salon writings, the narrator’s empathetic and immersive engagement with the disaster event can be regarded as an attempt to sidestep Burke’s resentment of the sublime in painting. As Burke claims, ‘painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents’.12 Diderot, 10 Diderot, ‘The Salon of 1765’, 70. 11 Diderot, ‘The Salon of 1767’, 86-119, 123-125. 12 Burke, 57f.

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who adapted some of Burke’s central theses on the sublime in his Salon texts (without naming the source), does not simply ignore this argument, as Thomas Macsotay argues.13 Instead, he seeks to overcome the receptive gap of the paintings’ mediality through his literary exploration of the images as both a real space and a dream space. In consideration of Diderot’s literary skills and powers of persuasion, one must be careful to not blindly apply his receptive visions to Vernet’s picture. It is especially wise to be skeptical toward Diderot’s descriptions of the paintings’ immersive and empathetic effects, which might be conditioned by his general enthusiasm for the artist. In order to ground Diderot’s pictorial perception in the material reality of the painting, it is necessary to take a closer look at its specific media technological features and at the conditions of its exhibition at the Paris Academy Salon exhibition. The Salon exhibitions took place annually and biennially at the Louvre from 1737 onward. The exhibitions were organized by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The Academy also determined which artists were given permission to exhibit their works. In his essay ‘Diderot’s Salons. Public Art and the Mind of the Private Critic’, Thomas Crow gives a fine description of the exhibitions’ role in the Parisian public and cultural life: Over some six weeks in late summer, large audiences – encompassing the nobility, the solid middle classes, the artisans of the city, and many fascinated foreign visitors – crowded in to see the show. Several hundred paintings were stacked frame-to-frame high up the gallery walls, from small landscapes and still lives at eye-level to massive classical and religious narratives adjacent to the ceiling. Wealthy spectators routinely carried binoculars to spy out distant details: it was a feast of gleaming, colorful imagery in a time when compelling visual spectacle on this scale was rare in secular life.14

A watercolor by Gabriel de Saint Aubin displaying the Salon of 1767 visually confirms Crow’s description of the hanging and curating of the paintings.15 Essentially, the question is: what does this specific form of exhibiting pictures do to the experience of a single image (such as Vernet’s The Shipwreck)? The ‘frame-to-frame’ stacking of the exhibited paintings prompts a second 13 Macsotay, 362. – See also: May. 14 Crow 1995, x. 15 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Vue du Salon de 1767. 1767. Private collection, Paris. 24.9 x 46.9 cm. Pen, ink, and watercolors on paper.

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question: what is the function of a picture frame in general? According to the neo-Kantian philosopher Georg Simmel, frames represent a crucial necessity, for they symbolize and strengthen the double function of an artwork’s boundaries. First, frames shut out the world and thereby create required distance for the aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. Second, they demarcate and protect the inner unity and self-enclosedness of an artwork.16 A more recent contribution to aesthetic frame theory is Anne Friedberg’s media historical analysis of the Virtual Window. From Alberti to Microsoft. Following Victor Stoichita, she defines the boundary of the frame as a marking of an ontological cut ‘between the material surface of the wall and the view contained within its aperture’.17 The theoretical and analytical terminology employed by Friedberg revolves around the concepts of the window, the screen, the frame, and the virtual (both in their literal and metaphorical meanings). Applied to the emergence of digital media as a major caesura of media history, digital enables the depiction of multiple virtual windows on one screen as well as multiple perspectives and non-perspectival spaces within a single frame.18 Before the digital revolution, pictorial works and concepts were predominantly located within the paradigmatic boundaries of (linear) perspective and the single image. The few proto-digital and multiperspectival exceptions that Friedberg discusses are taken from cinematic and televisual media technologies and avant-garde artworks (e.g. cubist and surrealist paintings, photographic collages). However, considering the presentation of images at the Paris Salon exhibitions, this rigid historical distinction seems to erode a little. Is not the Salon exhibition space, with its overwhelming density of pictorial works, where frame touches frame and the walls are almost entirely covered, a proto-digital screen space with a multiplicity of virtual windows too?19 In an exhibition space where frames do not mark the border between wall and picture but between picture and picture, the ontological cut between materiality (reality) and window view (virtuality) is suspended. Due to its specific curatorial practices, the Paris Academy Salon can be thought as a virtual screen space, a walkable interface, which presents the viewer with an all-encompassing plenitude of virtual windows. 16 Simmel, 11f. 17 Friedberg, 5. 18 Friedberg, 2f. 19 The term ‘virtual’ is to be understood here in a broader sense, according to Friedberg, as ‘an immaterial proxy for the material’ (Friedberg, 8), which is not limited to electronically or digitally produced images.

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What follows from this is that the pictorial experience at the Paris Salon exhibitions does not prioritize and facilitate the intense experience of single images. Rather, the viewer is immersed by a high density and multiplicity of images which, together, form a virtual and proto-digital space to be explored. The viewer who tries to focus on one picture is likely to be distracted by others, to constantly shift his/her attention from one image to another. Alternatively, s/he might even view the pictures’ totality as one giant ornamental mosaic. This impression of the exhibition as an ornamental field is also nurtured by the symmetrical hanging of the pictures. The symmetry implies relations between the images. To a certain extent, Diderot’s description of Vernet’s works mirrors the receptive strategies of the Salon exhibition space. Both in his wandering exploration of Vernet’s landscapes and in his dream, one image flows into the other. Especially in his wanderings, the narrator creates seamless transitions between landscapes and coherently ties them together through the successive flow of narrative. In turn, in the dream sequence the alternation of landscapes (from one shipwreck to another) works according to a nuanced shifting between sublime and ‘more pathetic’ sceneries.20 The Academy Salon’s mode of pictorial presentation does not represent a unique case but a conventional European practice of hanging, exhibiting, and collecting paintings at that time.21 The contemporary reception of Vernet’s shipwreck paintings must be considered in the light of this set of practices. The moderate size of The Shipwreck (113.5 x 162.9 cm) and its mode of presentation are decisive factors when reflecting on the painting’s employment of the sublime’s receptive potential. In comparison with a real storm at sea, the painting must appear ridiculously small. One way to approach this problem is by the painting’s ability to spark the imagination of the beholder. Accordingly, the visualization of the storm’s extreme dynamic and its impact on man would prompt the narrator in Diderot’s text to dream or imagine himself into Vernet’s painted landscapes. Yet, the picture’s means to convey the enormous power of the depicted event more immediately – that is by the affective and sensual agitation of the viewer – are limited to presenting the storm’s influence on its environment and its human victims. Given the small size of the picture and its exhibition within a whole field of images, this is the only measure to maintain the grandness of its sublime subject matter. Thus, it is not surprising that Vernet 20 Diderot, ‘The Salon of 1767’, 124. 21 See the various essays on art museums and institutions from this period in: Paul – See also: Berger.

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displays the human struggle against the storm in the foreground of basically all his shipwreck paintings. The shipwrecked human figures mediate between sublime object (the storm at sea) and spectator. By means of their inferior relation to nature, the affective potential of the disaster is channeled to the viewer, who, in turn, empathizes with their fate. This might also explain why Diderot’s descriptive account primarily deals with the agony of the ship passengers and less with the storm, for these are the pictorial elements that affect the viewer the most. The storm, as it is presented in The Shipwreck, cannot become an explicit source of the sublime, only an implicit one, both through its relation to its victims and through its potential to set in motion the beholder’s imagination. In his shipwreck paintings, Vernet always focuses on the passengers’ surviving. At the very least, he offers a strip of dry and safe land, thereby avoiding the horrors of the ocean’s ‘boundless watery waste’, from where there is no escape.22 Also, the town and the castle in the background of the painting appear as promising destinations to find refuge. On the other hand, compared with the seventeenth-century shipwreck paintings of the Dutch, Vernet found new pictorial solutions to achieve a more dynamic and intensified visual experience. The diverse reactions to the storm captured in the painting further relate to the contemporary discourse of shipwreck disasters. Not only were shipwrecks feared as a principally possible fate of the traveler, they also represented a traditional topic within aesthetic thought. This discourse essentially revolved around questions of spectatorship and the fascination that comes with witnessing catastrophic events as such. For thousands of years, the sea has been a cipher for the limits of human exploration and the terrifying unpredictability and superiority of nature. The phenomenon of the shipwreck as an object of spectatorial and aesthetic pleasure was most prominently investigated by Lucretius and then further discussed by thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, or Ferdinando Galiani.23 These debates shared some of their central arguments with eighteenth-century theories of the sublime (the physical safety of the subject, the affective source of self-preservation, emotional involvement, and empathy). Also, they were likely to have played a role within the reception of Vernet’s shipwrecks. Given the ‘broad mix of classes and social types’ constituting the spectators at the 22 Kleist. 23 The particularities of these theoretical contributions are presented in a concise manner in: Blumenberg.

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Paris Salon exhibitions, at least a certain group of educated citizens were presumably familiar with the discourse.24 Thus, the reception of Vernet’s shipwreck paintings was not merely based on affective and emotional but also on intellectual experiences. As for the painting The Shipwreck, its commission gives some insight on how the European art market in the second half of the eighteenth century had already adapted the sublime as a conventionalized term applied to the commercial practices of producing, labeling, advertising, distributing, and trading. [The painting] was commissioned, along with a pendant Mediterranean Coast by Moonlight (location unknown since c. 1955), by Lord Arundell [of Wardour] in November 1771. The Shipwreck formed a dramatic contrast with the peaceful, moonlit coast scene, illustrating respectively the “sublime” (eliciting a sensation of horror in the spectator) and the “beautiful” (an agreeable and reposeful sensation).25

Conceived as the ‘sublime’ antithesis of the ‘beautiful’ coast landscape at night, the painting’s commission and production clearly moved within a framework of aesthetic conventions and thematic and formal requirements. Vernet positioned himself and acted within an international art market in which the categories ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’ had already been established as commodified and marketed concepts.

Remarkable Views. Caspar Wolf in the Alps What Vernet achieved for the pictorial reception of the sublime event of the shipwreck, the Swiss landscape painter Caspar Wolf achieved for the pictorial experience of the sublime object of the Alps. Indeed, like Vernet, also Wolf had predecessors and competitors in his field. Especially Swiss artists such as Felix Meyer,26 Jakob Emanuel Handmann,27 Johann Ludwig 24 Crow 1985, 1. 25 Conisbee. 26 Meyer is known to have made the first painting of a glacier in a high mountain region; the production of his Alpine landscapes was partly commissioned and informed (through direct acquaintance) by the natural scientists Johann Jakob Scheuchzer and Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (Wegmann, 324f.). 27 Handmann, usually more known for his portraits, painted the monumentality of a glacier (in juxtaposition with man) as early as c. 1748/49 (Zumbühl, 109).

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Aberli28, and Johann Heinrich Wüest sought to capture the Alps in their grandeur, sublimity, and Arcadian tranquility.29 Most of their Alpine views were vedutes and thus primarily occupied with the Alps’ factual and specific appearance. Wolf’s diverse and vast œuvre of Alpine depictions, on the one hand, followed this tradition of the Swiss Baroque landscape vedute; yet on the other hand, his work also comprised new forms of expression and pictorial solutions which deviated from this tradition. Wolf produced c. 200 paintings of Alpine topographies.30 They were commissioned by the publisher Abraham Wagner and later published and exhibited in various forms, most prominently as illustrations for the book project Merkwürdige Prospekte von den Schweizer-Gebürgen und derselben Beschreibung (‘Remarkable Views of the Swiss Mountains and the Description of the Very Same’; Germ. ed., 1777, 1789), resp. Vues Remarquables des Alpes de la Suisse (Fr. ed., 1780/82, 1785). Also, involved in the project was the poet and natural scientist Albrecht von Haller, who had already achieved international fame with his poem cycle The Alps in 1729, thereby significantly contributing to the aesthetic revaluation of Alpine mountain views. No longer were the Alps perceived as the ‘rubbish of the earth’ but as sources of awe, sublimity, and freedom.31 Haller wrote the foreword of Merkwürdige Prospekte. Topographical descriptions were added by the protestant theologist and natural scientist Jakob Samuel Wyttenbach. The cooperation between Wolf, von Haller, Wagner, and Wyttenbach was not limited to the book’s literary production and publication; it also played a vital role in the production process of the paintings (c. 1774-1778/79). Wolf made oil-on-cardboard sketches of the different Alpine topographies on the spot, which functioned as templates for the paintings. On his trips to the Alps, Wolf was accompanied by Wagner and Wyttenbach. It is widely assumed that Wolf sharpened his eye for the geological structures, processes, and phenomena of the Alpine mountains under the guidance and expertise of Wyttenbach, von Haller, and Wagner. This geological sensitivity and accuracy strongly informed the production of the paintings, as also emphasized by 28 With the serial production of his watercolored etchings, Aberli managed to distribute his images of the Alps to a greater number of national and international customers (Hentschel, 94). 29 Apart from these Swiss artists, there were also the French artists Nicolas Pérignon and Claude-Louis Châtelet, who, among others, provided images for the illustrated book project Tableaux de la Suisse (publ. 1778-1788) (Stalla, 30). 30 The following information on the production of Wolf’s pictorial assignment is well documented and has been subject to numerous art historical (and natural scientific) enquiries, such as: Wescher; Wegmann; Stalla; Zumbühl; Hentschel; Beyer. 31 Evelyn, 231.

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von Haller in his foreword in which he claims that Wolf’s pictures represent most accurate recordings of nature.32 Apart from being topographically and geologically accurate visual accounts, Wolf’s paintings also represent expressions of Alpine sublimity. As stated above, the geological sciences and landscape depictions of the sublime shared a mutual affinity, especially in terms of visualization practices. From this common ground emerged Wolf’s images of the Alps, as they are both geological recordings and visual attractions of the sublime. Wolf’s engagement and familiarity with the sublime was informed by (at least) two separate cultural branches: on the one side, von Haller’s poetic work and guidance as well as earlier visualizations of the Alps by other Swiss artists, and on the other, the training, guidance, and inspiration Wolf received in Paris, where he lived from 1769 until 1771. In Paris, he was trained by the painter and entertainment entrepreneur Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and became acquainted with the work of Joseph Vernet, who later supervised the French publication of Merkwürdige Prospekte.33 During this period, Wolf painted several shipwrecks in the style of Vernet. The sublimity of the Alps had been en vogue in Paris during the 1760s, especially within the salon circle of Marie Thérèse Geoffrin, among whose visitors were Diderot, Vernet, and the landscape and ruin painter Hubert Robert.34 The interesting oscillation of Wolf’s œuvre between Baroque academic traditions, vedute painting conventions, sublime imagery (as often seen in connection with Wolf’s role as an Early Romantic landscape artist), and geological accuracy will be analyzed in the following on the basis of one specific painting. It is titled Lower Grindelwald Glacier with Lightning (Fig. 3). Its subject matter, the lower Grindelwald glacier, was painted by Wolf fourteen times.35 This version, in which Vernet’s influence becomes most apparent, particularly presents the spectator with the sublime hostility of the Alpine glacier, whose outskirts are displayed in the picture. Its major part is obscured by fog and dark storm clouds. The same goes for the mountains in the background. Only at the top left of the canvas, a strip of blue sky illuminating the mountain peaks can be seen. On the top right side, a white 32 Hentschel, 91f. 33 Wegmann, 327f. 34 According to Robert Stalla, the reasons for this trend were the prize competition around the ascent of Mont Blanc (1760), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and the French translation of von Haller’s poem Die Alpen (Stalla, 29). Additional factors to be named are the French translations of Salomon Gessner’s literary works (1761) as well as the publication of Jean-François Marmontel’s novella La Bergères des Alpes (1759) (Wegmann, 327). 35 Zumbühl, 112.

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Fig. 3: Caspar Wolf. Lower Grindelwald Glacier with Lightning. Ca. 1774-1775. Argauer Kunsthaus, Aarau. 54 x 82 cm. Oil on canvas. © akg images.

lightning bolt bathes the clouds in tones of orange and yellow. In reaction to the impact of the lightning, a terrified herd of chamois flees the scene toward the right border of the canvas. Set against the monumental boulders of the glacier, the animals’ bodies appear tiny and fragile. The rocky foreground is almost entirely shrouded in darkness, thereby creating distance between sublime object and spectator. Through the fog and the clouds, one only sees the silhouettes and shadows of the spiky glacier peaks, the mountains, and the forest. The glacier itself is presented in a sinister color range of green, brown, blue, and grey nuances. Besides the lightning bolt and the panicking chamois, there are other dynamics at work in the picture. In the foreground, a river, with its waters splashing, appears to be running from the several caves of the glacier (even though its source is hard to identify). Around the area where the lightning touches down, snow (or water) literally explodes in the direction of the fleeing animals. At the bottom left, one senses the falling and rolling of ice chunks into the river. In the sky, the clouds of the storm stretch out in arcuate shapes, giving the impression of fierce winds at work. As for the ice peaks of the glacier, their curved shapes, as if reaching out to the sides, convey a certain dynamic within the static image of the landscape. In one sense, their rocaille-like c-shapes allude to Wolf’s ongoing affiliation with Rococo aesthetics. Yet, as demonstrated by Heinz Zumbühl, these seemingly fantastic forms are in fact the precisely captured details of the expanding

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glacier.36 In short, Wolf employs traditional techniques of landscape painting to achieve both an accurate account of the presented topography and a visualization of dynamic geological forces (the expansion of the glacier). What distinguishes the painting from Wolf’s other Alpine landscapes and from art academic conventions in general is its lack of human staffage. Unlike in Vernet’s shipwrecks where the presence of human figures conveys the forces of the storm, the absence of any human trace even heightens the degree of hostility, remoteness, and inaccessibility of the glacier. The chamois, as the only living beings in the picture, provide orientation in terms of the proportions of the landscape. Moreover, their instinctive fear of the lightning reinforces the atmosphere of terror that the painting evokes. However, there is a human witness in this landscape after all, but merely an implicit one. In order to accurately capture the lower Grindelwald glacier, the painter himself had to go there and see it for himself. The artistic (and heroic) production of the c. 200 paintings became a part of their reception from early on. One of the contributors to this narrative was the travel writer Karl Gottlob Küttner: Wolf is the painter of the sublime, mellow, and terrible beauties of Switzerland. He went deeper into the ice and the snow of the Alps and ice mountains than any other admirer or artist before him; neither hardship nor danger could keep him from chasing after the sublime and gruesome side of nature out to its most hidden corners; even in winter, he visited the Alps and sketched different scenes.37

Hence, the production of the paintings was viewed as a sublime struggle of man against nature. The pictorial experience of Wolf’s Alpine landscapes was closely tied to his personal experience of these sublime objects (especially since he often included himself in the staffage of his pictures). Primarily, it was the Alpine topographies that were perceived as sublime; pictorial visualizations, such as Wolf’s, would function as illustrations of experiencing these topographies. This is why even Wyttenbach at one point admits to the limitations of his writings and of Wolf’s images as media to capture the Alps in their ‘unspeakable’ sublimity and beauty.38 On the other hand, there is also a side to Wolf’s Grindelwald Glacier painting that goes beyond the purpose of mere illustration. As I mentioned, 36 Zumbühl, 112-114. 37 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Küttner, 179. 38 Hentschel, 99.

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Wolf’s work did not solely build upon the conventions and traditions of Swiss vedute painting and Baroque aesthetics; he also adapted and modified certain pictorial solutions and means of expression from his Parisian teachers de Loutherbourg and Vernet and applied them to the theme of Alpine sublimity. Kant’s famous description of typical sublime objects – ‘shapeless mountain masses towering above one another in wild disorder with their pyramids of ice, […] thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder’ – are not simply reproduced in Wolf’s picture.39 More than that, the painting, in its very own way, approximates Kant’s emphatic and stylized description, as it highlights the overpowering qualities of nature and the physical limits of man.40 The intensity of Wolf’s glacier image makes itself felt in a dynamically sublime way (the explosive force of the lightning bolt, the falling of ice chunks, the splashing of water), in a mathematically sublime way (the vastness conveyed by the interplay of storm clouds, glacier, and mountain), and in a geologically sublime way (the sheer temporal boundlessness of the glacier movement). Another element central to the painting, as well as crucial for Burke’s account of the sublime, is obscurity. Burke writes: ‘To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.’41 However, Burke is skeptical as to whether sublime obscurity can be achieved in the visual arts. He argues that paintings and drawings present terrifying ideas and objects of fear in a too clear and distinct manner, with the result that ‘they might [even] become ridiculous’. 42 Burke’s harsh rejection of the visual arts as media of the sublime surprises, given the fact that he was very interested in art, even owned his own art collection (which he did not build himself though) and occasionally patronized artists. 43 Then again, Burke’s taste in art suggests that he was not particularly eager to discover his notion of the sublime to be achieved in landscape painting. Although Wolf’s use of obscurity might 39 Kant, 139, 144. 40 For example, to be named are Kant’s use of the metaphor ‘pyramids of ice’, the intensifying structural arrangement of objects through the words ‘towering up’ and ‘disorder’, the adjectives ‘wild’ and ‘shapeless’, and the temporal and audiovisual specification of the storm (‘flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder’). 41 Burke, 54. 42 Burke, 59. 43 According to Burke’s biographer Robert Bisset, academy president Joshua Reynolds praised him as ‘the best judge of pictures he ever knew’ (Bisset, 154). See also: Cone.

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not have convinced Burke, it apparently did convince the recipients of Wolf’s Alpine images, who clearly recognized their connection to the sublime. The formats of Wolf’s oil paintings, which were exhibited in Bern and Paris (c. 1780), were widely standardized to c. 54 x 76-82 cm. The printed copies in Merkwürdige Prospekte were even smaller. Thus, the Alpine mountains depicted in the pictures stand in stark contrast to their factual dimensions. Like Vernet’s shipwrecks, Wolf’s Alps functioned as representations (or mediations) of the experience of the sublime, with the intrinsic potential to spark and set in motion the imagination of the beholder. Viewed as tourist souvenirs, Wolf’s images of the Alps bear the receptive potential to intersect with the tourist-recipient’s personal experience and memory of Alpine sublimity. Moreover, through conventional means like staffage figures, the viewer is given cues to orient him/herself in the image and project him/herself into the same. Human staffage figures are present throughout Wolf’s œuvre. Most of them are painted in the tradition of the Baroque vedute. They appear in cheerful groups of visitors, strolling within and dwelling upon the landscape. The only aspect that distinguishes them from their Baroque predecessors is the fact that the landscapes’ dimensions are so excessive in Wolf’s pictures that the staffage is almost about to vanish within the Alpine gorges, glaciers, waterfalls, and mountains.

Volcano Montages: Wright of Derby, Valenciennes, Wutky, Volaire, Briullov To avoid tiring repetitions, I will not describe in detail and analyze another singular work of art in this chapter; neither will contextual aspects of production and reception play a significant role. Instead, I will touch upon a variety of complications inherent to the sublime as they become apparent in a selected group of volcano paintings from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My approach to analyzing these images is based on the cinematic and montage-like character of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne project. In his book on Warburg, Philippe-Alain Michaud convincingly argues that Warburg’s iconographic-iconological methodology (re)creates intellectual, sensual, bodily, and affective movement within and between images. Warburg conceived an art history of and in motion. Michaud puts these art historical operations in relation to the motion pictures of cinema, claiming that both share mutual procedures and interests (the motion picture as a mode of thought). 44 The Mnemosyne project, 44 Michaud, 38-40.

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Warburg’s last publication, shows specific parallels with the cinematic montage.45 The plates of the book present clusters of photographs in shifting arrangements, thereby allowing for the dynamic surfacing of themes, associations, iconographical transfers, similarities, and ruptures, both on a synchronic and diachronic scale. 46 Warburg’s art historical montages connect objects, motifs, affects, cultural contexts, times, spaces, and media (with photography as their substrate). Moreover, they explore the spaces, forms, and materials of singular works through their multiperspectival montage. At the same time, it needs to be clear that my employment of Warburg’s cinematic procedures of iconographic analysis does not include and share the anthropological premises underlying Warburg’s methodology. In a nutshell, Warburg traces affects and passions, as they are universally expressed through art and rituals (as pathos formulas), throughout the epochs of cultural history – a procedure that ultimately transcends any historical and cultural boundaries and differences as well as specific contextual dimensions. 47 In opposition to such a far-reaching (and also questionable) anthropological claim, I will strictly deal with affects and movements conveyed and expressed through the iconography and the aesthetic premises of the sublime in the sense of a primary mode of mobilization. 48 More specifically, my arrangement of volcano images is dynamically set in motion by the analytical procedures put to work, as I will explore and point out a variety of spatio-temporal, compositional, narrative, contextual, and receptive aspects. The artists whose works constitute my montage of volcano paintings are: the English painter Joseph Wright of Derby, the Frenchmen PierreHenri de Valenciennes and Pierre-Jacques Volaire, the Austrian Michael Wutky, and the Russian Karl Briullov. Within the tableau, their montaged images present the phenomenon of the eruption of Vesuvius in a variety of perspectives, times, and affective, narrative, and epistemological modes (Fig. 4). By applying Warburg’s cinematic practices of analysis to the field of volcano painting, I also aim to approximate and foreshadow, to a certain degree, some of the cinematic procedures of disaster movies, as they will resurface in the film analysis. 45 Michaud, 39, 277-291. 46 Warburg 2008. 47 See for instance: Warburg 1906; Warburg 1939. 48 Warburg’s approach and its underlying beliefs were for instance criticized by David Freedberg in: Freedberg.

a

c

e

Fig. 4a: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. The Eruption of Vesuvius, 24 August A.D. 79. 1813. Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. 147.5 x 195.5 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. Photo Daniel Martin. Fig. 4c: Joseph Wright of Derby. Vesuvius from Portici. Ca. 1774-1776. Huntington Library, San Marino. 101.6 x 127 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Huntington Art Museum, San Marino, California. Fig. 4e: Pierre-Jacques Volaire. The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1771; 1771. Art Institute Chicago. 116.8 x 242.9 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

b

d

f Fig. 4b: Karl Briullov. The Last Day of Pompeii. 1830-1833. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 456.5 x 651 cm. Oil on canvas. © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Fig. 4d: Pierre-Jacques Volaire. Vesuvius Erupting at Night. 1770s. Compton Verney Art Gallery. 120 x 73.7 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images. Photo © Compton Verney. Fig. 4f: Michael Wutky. An Eruption of Vesuvius. Ca. 1796. Kunst Museum Basel. 137.1 x 120.5 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo: Martin P. Bühler.

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Taking a first look at the tableau, a few basic observations can be made: on four pictures, the volcano is shown in its entirety, namely in the paintings by Volaire, Valenciennes, and Wright, whereas Wutky’s painting only displays a fragment of Vesuvius (the inside of its crater). Briullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii features the crater inconspicuously in the background. All six pictures show Vesuvius in its state of eruption. Volaire, Wright, and Wutky present their images as contemporary documents, while the two nineteenthcentury paintings by Valenciennes and Briullov depict the famous eruption of 79 AD, which destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and took the life of Pliny the Elder, an event famously documented in the literary account of his nephew Pliny the Younger.49 With the exception of Wright’s painting, all pictures feature human figures, either in the role of helpless victims or in the role of observers who perceive the eruption from a safe enough distance. Instead of presenting the helplessness of singular human figures, Wright sets up a whole village against the monumental eruption of Vesuvius, with all-consuming streams of lava threatening to engulf the tiny houses. What all paintings have in common is the attempt to create a visual link between the erupting volcano and man. This connection can occur, first, as man’s observation of the volcano, second, as the volcano’s threat to annihilate man and his artifacts, and third, as a blending of both types. In most cases, the painters chose to depict the relation between man and nature in a manner that emphasizes man’s smallness and inferiority in the face of the vastness and omnipotence of nature. This visual type renders human figures indistinct and schematic, whereas the monumental volcano is presented in rich detail and through a combination of ‘special effects’ (fire, explosions, smoke, lava, ash, flying rocks). The only clear exception to this is Briullov’s Pompeii painting. Instead of focusing on the volcano, it mirrors the eruption’s force and affective impact in the faces and bodies of his human figures. The positioning of the perceiving subject in the right distance to the sublime object – neither too far away nor too close – represents a crucial component of both Burke and Kant’s theoretical accounts. For Burke, the experience of sublime delight is essentially dependent on ‘certain distances […] and […] certain modifications’, for without them the sublime objects will ‘simply [be] terrible’.50 Also, Kant dedicates longer passages of his ‘Analytic

49 Leonardi, 259f. – See also: Keller, 315. 50 Burke, 36f.

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of the Sublime’ to the discussion of proximity and distance.51 Accordingly, the subject’s positioning toward the sublime object is not only supposed to ensure his/her physical safety; it also serves the purpose of intensifying the visual experience. To illustrate the subjective relativity and dependency of any perceptible object, Kant brings optical instruments into the discussion: Here one readily sees that nothing can be given in nature, however great it may be judged to be by us, which could not, considered in another relation, be diminished down to the infinitely small; and conversely, there is nothing so small which could not, in comparison with even smaller standards, be amplified for our imagination up to the magnitude of a world. The telescope has given us rich material for making the former observation, the microscope rich material for the latter.52

Imagine observing the eruption of Vesuvius from the surface of the moon; only through optical instruments, such as Kant’s telescope, one would approximately be able to experience the event like Volaire’s human figures do in his paintings. Indeed, the case is different with Briullov’s picture, since the spectacle of the volcano eruption is nearly absent there. What Briullov offers to the viewer instead is a spectacle of sublime affects. In his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant distinguishes a variety of affects that can be experienced as sublime: enthusiasm, anger, despair, courage, braveness, astonishment, admiration, nobleness, affectlessness (paradoxically enough, as Kant himself admits), simplicity, (interesting) sadness, sorrow, edification, and misanthropy (both only under certain conditions).53 It is within this array of sublime affects Briullov’s painting operates and appeals to its viewers. The affective force of the (nearly) absent object of nature (Vesuvius) is presented in a mediated fashion through the bodies of the citizens of Pompeii. Generally, it appears that the simultaneous depiction of nature’s spectacular sublimity (in its vast totality) and its impact on man (expressed through sublime affects) represents a complicated task within the media 51 Although these reflections are mainly undertaken in the chapter on the mathematically sublime, what speaks for their general relevance is, first, that the sublime’s affecting through quantity also comprises the greatness (in perception) of nature’s powers, and second, that Kant himself makes no effort to clearly distinguish between mathematically and dynamically sublime objects. 52 Kant, 134. 53 Kant, 154-158. – Kant distinguishes affects from passions by stressing the ‘tumultuous and unpremeditated’ (Kant, 154) character of the former.

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technological boundaries of easel painting. If I was able to perform a linking of both types (sublime disaster and sublime affect), it is only through Warburg’s montage-like art historical procedures, which reveal dynamic connections between the images in my tableau. Of course, it will be cinema, the montage medium par excellence, that will initially achieve this synthesis within one and the same image frame.54 Let me take another look at the tableau, this time from a strictly diachronic perspective. Pierre-Jacques Volaire painted the eruption of Vesuvius of 1771 numerous times with only slight variations.55 The juxtaposition of the tranquil moonlit bay and the dynamic fireworks of the volcano was established and popularized by Volaire and became one of his trademarks. It was adapted by artists such as Pietro Fabris, Valenciennes, and Wright. Volaire began his career as a student and assistant of Vernet, travelling with him for eight years.56 Around 1771, he moved to Naples where he spent the rest of his life, successfully exploiting the touristic, aesthetic, and scientific interest in Vesuvius.57 The same year’s eruption of Vesuvius, which Volaire was lucky enough to witness, provided the fundament for his artistic career. The notion that his paintings not merely satisfied the demand for sublime visual spectacles but also for geological particularities was promoted by Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in the kingdom of Naples, who had enough leisure time and the financial means to pursue his volcanological and archeological interests and who wrote Campi Phlegraei (1776-1779), a richly illustrated treatise on Vesuvius. Hamilton favored Volaire among all volcano painters and even bought one of his eruption paintings for his villa.58 Joseph Wright of Derby, who stayed in Naples for a month in autumn 1774, never witnessed a full eruption of Vesuvius, only bits of smoke and some lava.59 Nonetheless, despite this lack of experience, he managed to adapt and intensify some of Volaire’s pictorial inventions. In the painting Vesuvius from Portici, Wright does not employ Volaire’s contrasting of bay and volcano, as he does in other works. Only the faint glow of the moon is 54 Indeed, proto-cinematic montage procedures can already be found in laterna magica shows of the nineteenth century. However, their montages were usually not applied to the presentation of catastrophic events, at least not in a manner of tying together sublime disaster objects and their affective impact on their victims. Further information on laterna magica devices will be given at a later point in this text. 55 See the catalogue section in: Beck. 56 Walch, 251. 57 Trempler, 98f. – Other sources let Volaire arrive in Naples as early as 1769. See e.g.: Keller, 287. 58 Walch, 251; Hamilton, 75. 59 Keller, 281.

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visible on the left side of the background. Instead, the artist puts emphasis on the spectacular staging of the eruption. The blast of the explosion is extended through the wreath of clouds arranged around it. By means of their staggered, nuanced arrangement and their differentiation of color, the clouds achieve a high degree of plasticity, thereby giving the impression of a three-dimensional space of explosive force. In addition, the colors red and orange dominate nearly the entire pictorial space as a direct effect of the eruption. Parallels between Wright’s volcano pictures and his earlier depictions of firework events have been repeatedly addressed by scholars.60 Also Burke lists fireworks among his sublime phenomena.61 This was certainly one potential mode of perceiving Wright’s volcano paintings: as sublime firework spectacles. While Volaire and Wright emphasize the spectacular appeal of their eruptions, Michael Wutky uses a more balanced approach, providing spectacle and scientific observation in equal parts.62 Wutky owned a mineral collection and climbed the erupting Vesuvius together with William Hamilton.63 Instead of viewing the volcano in its totality from a safe distance, he gives a detailed prospect of the inside of its crater. By employing staffage figures, Wutky not only presents the volcano’s force in its asymmetrical relation to man, the staffage also bears witness to the painter’s exploration of this most dangerous and hostile territory, which is mysteriously concealed by thick walls of smoke. With this, the procedure of visualization becomes itself a sublime act of heroism. As mentioned before, the images of Valenciennes and Briullov deviate from the others in the tableau, in that they present the eruption of Vesuvius as a distinctly historical event. This shift within the volcano’s iconography also coincided with a general transformation of the cultural status of the volcano, which took place during the early nineteenth century. No longer was the volcano depicted as a natural and contemporary object of aesthetic pleasure and scientific observation, as it transformed into a destructive actor in the historical event of Pompeii’s annihilation. This event was repeatedly re-enacted and re-narrated throughout the nineteenth century in a diverse range of media such as novels, theater and opera plays, paintings, pyrotechnical spectacles, Panoramas, and Dioramas.64 Moreover, Monica 60 Andrews, 13; Keller, 299-301; Hammerbacher, 61f. 61 Burke, 72. 62 In spite of Wright’s significant geological knowledge and interests, his paintings appear to offer little geological information (Graciano; Keller, Chap. IV.2). 63 Leonardi, 259. 64 For a concise and comprehensive overview, see: Daly.

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Leonardi grounds this development within the decline of Vesuvius’s elitist status and its simultaneous rise to a spectacularized object of popular culture and modern tourism.65 Valenciennes’ painting attempts to blend together the volcanic phenomenon, its destructive impact (on architecture), and the narrative episode of Pliny’s death. Thus, the image appears as a hybrid form between the observant and distant views by Volaire, Wright, and Wutky and the narrativedriven depiction by Briullov.66 The painter positions the viewer at the shore of the bay, where Pliny died, quite in contrast to the textual account of Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the fate of his uncle from the other side of the bay. With this, Valenciennes’ picture offers a spatial and sensual proximity to the viewer that aims to overcome the distances of its literary source. In his Last Day of Pompeii, Briullov gets even closer to the center of destruction, as he depicts himself standing within the crowd on the painting’s left side (the man with the box of paint utensils on his head). By doing so, Briullov testifies to the historical and archeological accuracy of his work (he read Pliny’s report and visited Pompeii).67 In addition, he reflects on the picture’s mode of perception. Besides the Christian priest, Briullov is the only figure in the image that dares to look straight and fearlessly in the direction of the erupting volcano. Just like the beholder of the painting, the artist can fully face and appreciate the disaster, knowing himself to be in safety, due to the merely mediated presence of the event. Captured in a pregnant moment in time, the image indicates several narrative strands, bundled together by the main event of the eruption. The human actors in these plots are caught in between an intensive dichotomy of aggregates and forms: the left side of the image is matte, dark, solid, cold, and immobile, whereas the right side appears as bright, hot, liquid, blinding, and dynamic. Moreover, there are various relations between the event’s singular narratives. The stark contrast between the greedy pagan priest and his noble Christian counterpart is one of many constellations as such. Briullov used the catastrophic event to put different religious systems and ideologies to the test, just like the disaster movie genre would do in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 65 Leonardi, 259f. 66 Briullov was not the only painter who focused on the agony of Pompeii’s citizens. A quite similar visualization of Pompeii’s destruction is Henri-Frédéric Schopin’s painting Last Days of Pompeii. C. 1834-1850. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. 59 x 91 cm. Oil on canvas. – The same visual type was used for depictions of the biblical Deluge by artists like Anne-Louis Girodet, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, Henry Fuseli, and Mauritius Lowe. 67 Leontyeva, 24, 26, 30.

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While Briullov’s painting turned out to be a sensational success in Italy and Russia, it was less well-received in France, where it was shown at the Paris Academy Salon of 1834.68 To the Parisians, who had already seen Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and the monumental canvases of the Panorama, Briullov’s work felt outdated.69 Indeed, by the 1830s, the subject of the volcano eruption had already begun to transfer from the art gallery to more popular cultural sectors. *** While most of the artists discussed in this chapter positioned their human figures in a physically safe distance to Vesuvius, the distance between picture and beholder is an entirely different matter. Due to the media technological disposition of easel painting, the artists’ volcano images do not facilitate the immediate sensory and affective overwhelming of the recipient by the sublime objects they present. Instead, they mediate this experience through staffage figures or, as in Briullov’s case, through the presentation of affects inscribed into bodies. Altogether, the pictorial works of art I have discussed so far merely sought to convey experiences of the sublime by means of their intra-pictorial features. Aspects regarding their media technological premises and potentials were not taken into account for the most part. Against this, the pictorial artists and producers to be discussed in the following chapter explicitly engaged in media technological considerations as such. Accordingly, the media technological side of their pictorial depictions of sublime disasters becomes a crucial receptive factor.

Works Cited Andrews, Noam. ‘Volcanic Rhythms: Sir William Hamilton’s Love Affair with Vesuvius’. AA Files, vol. 60 (2010), 9-15. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang 1995. Beck, Émilie. Le chevalier Volaire; Un peintre français à Naples au xviiie siècle. Naples: Centre Jean Bérard 2004. Berger, Robert W. Public Access to Art in Paris; A Documentary History from the Middle Ages to 1800. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press 1999. 68 Leontyeva, 7. 69 Leontyeva, 34f.

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Beyer, Andreas. Caspar Wolf und die ästhetische Eroberung der Natur. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2014. Bisset, Robert. The Life of Edmund Burke; Comprehending an Impartial Account of his Literary and Political Efforts, and a Sketch of the Conduct and Character of his Most Eminent Associates, Coadjutors, and Opponents. London: George Cawthorn 1798. Blumenberg, Hans. Shipwreck with Spectator; Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Translated by Steven Rendall. Cambridge: MIT Press 1997. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2008 [1990]. Cone, Carl B. ‘Edmund Burke’s Art Collection’. The Art Bulletin, vol. 29, no. 2 (June 1947), 126-131. Conisbee, Philip. ‘Overview; Claude-Joseph Vernet; The Shipwreck (1772)’, accessed 15 November 2019, http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-objectpage.111194.html. Crow, Thomas. ‘Diderot’s Salons; Public Art and the Mind of the Private Critic’. In Diderot on Art, Volume 1; The Salon of 1765 and Notes on painting. Edited and translated by John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995, ix-xix. Crow, Thomas. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press 1985. Daly, Nicholas. ‘The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage’. Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 2 (winter 2011), 255-285. Diderot, Denis. ‘The Salon of 1765’. In Diderot on Art; Volume 1; The Salon of 1765 and Notes on painting. Edited and translated by John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995, 1-187. Diderot, Denis. ‘The Salon of 1767’. In Diderot on Art; Volume 2; The Salon of 1967. Edited and translated by John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press 1995, 1-331. Evelyn, John and William Bray, eds. Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn; Volume 1. London: Henry Colburn 1850. Freedberg, David. ‘Pathos at Oraibi: What Warburg Did Not See’, accessed 11 December 2019, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Freedberg/ Pathos-at-Oraibi.pdf. Originally published as: ‘Pathos a Oraibi: Ciò che Warburg non vide’. In Lo Sguardo di Giano, Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria. Edited by Claudia Cieri Via and Pietro Montani. Turin: Nino Aragno 2004, 569-611. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1980. Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window; From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT Press 2006.

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Graciano, Andrew. ‘“The Book of Nature is Open to All Men”: Geology, Mining, and History in Joseph Wright’s Derbyshire Landscapes’. Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 4 (December 2005), 583-600. Hamilton, James. Volcano. London: Reaktion Books 2012. Hammerbacher, Valerie. Aufruhr der Elemente: Der Vulkanausbruch; Eine Motivstudie zur englischen Naturästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag 2004. Hentschel, Uwe. ‘Der Staubbachfall in den Berner Alpen; Landschaft aus dem Geiste der Literatur und Malerei’. In Landschaft um 1800; Aspekte der Wahrnehmung in Kunst, Literatur, Musik und Naturwissenschaft. Edited by Thomas Noll, Urte Stobbe and Christian Scholl. Göttingen: Wallstein 2012, 83-112. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Eric Matthews and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001 [2000]. Keller, Susanne B. Naturgewalt im Bild; Strategien visueller Naturaneignung in Kunst und Wissenschaft 1750-1830. Weimar: VDG 2006. Kleist, Heinrich von. ‘Feelings before Friedrich’s Seascape’. Translated by Philip B. Miller. In Philip B. Miller. ‘Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich’. Art Journal, vol. 33, no. 3 (spring 1974), 208 (Kleist), 205-210 (Miller). Küttner, Karl Gottlob. Briefe eines Sachsen aus der Schweiz an Seinen Freund in Leipzig; Teil 2. Leipzig: Im Verlage der Dykischen Buchhandlung 1785. Leonardi, Monica. ‘Der Vesuv und die phlegräischen Felder; Feuer, Wasser, Schwefel und Gestein’. In Kennst du das Land; Italienbilder der Goethezeit. Edited by Frank Büttner and Herbert W. Rott. Munich and Cologne: Pinakothek-Dumont 2005, 255-266. Leontyeva, Galina. Karl Briullov; The Painter of Russian Romanticism. Bournemouth: Parkstone 1996. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. ‘Laocoön; An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)’. In Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, 25-130. Macsotay, Thomas. ‘Offering a Hermeneutics for Painted Landscapes: Diderot’s View of Joseph Vernet as a Sublime Painter’. In Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire. Edited by Christian Michel and Carl Magnusson. Paris: Somogy 2013, 347-364. May, Gita. ‘Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity’. PMLA, vol. 75, no. 5 (Dec. 1960). Michaud, Philippe-Alain. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Translated by Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone Books 2007. Paul, Carole, ed. The First Modern Museums of Art; The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and Early-19th-Century Europe. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum 2012.

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Simmel, Georg. ‘The Picture Frame; An Aesthetic Study’. In Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 11, no. 1 (Feb. 1994), 11-17. Stalla, Robert. ‘Steile Höhen, sanfte Hügel; Das Motiv “Berg” in der Landschaftskunst des 14.-20. Jahrhunderts’. In Ansichten vom Berg; Der Wandel eines Motivs in der Druckgrafik von Dürer bis Heckel. Edited by id. Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag 2001, 15-48. Trempler, Jörg. ‘Inszenierung der Erdgeschichte; Vesuvausbrüche im späten 18. Jahrhundert’. In Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik; Band 2,1: Bildtechniken des Ausnahmezustandes. Edited by Horst Bredekamp and Gabriele Werner. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2004, 93-105. Walch, Peter. ‘Foreign Artists at Naples’. The Burlington Magazine, vol. 121, no. 913 (April 1979), 247-252, 256. Warburg, Aby. ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’. Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. 2, no. 4 (April 1939), 277-292. Warburg, Aby. ‘Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne’. In Aby Warburg; Gesammelte Schriften; Zweite Abteilung, Band II. 1. Edited by Horst Bredekamp, et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2008. Warburg, Aby. ‘Der Tod des Orpheus; Bilder zu dem Vortrag über Dürer und die italienische Antike’. In Verhandlungen der 48. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Hamburg vom 3. bis 6. Oktober 1905. Leipzig: Teubner 1906, 55-60. Wegmann, Peter. ‘Felix Meyer und Caspar Wolf; Anfänge der malerischen Entdeckung der Alpen’. Gesnerus; Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte de Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, vol. 49 (1992), 323-339. Wescher, Paul. ‘Die Romantik in der Schweizer Alpenmalerei und ihr geognostischer Ursprung’. In id. Die Romantik in der Schweizer Malerei. Frauenfeld: Huber & Co. 1947. Zumbühl, Heinz J. ‘“Der Berge wachsend Eis…”; Die Entdeckung der Alpen und ihrer Gletscher durch Albrecht von Haller und Caspar Wolf’. Mitteilungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Bern; Neue Folge, vol. 66 (2009), 105-132.

4. Mediating the Sublime Abstract As if accepting Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s rejection of the visual arts as carriers of the experience of the sublime as a productive challenge, artists and craftsmen already in the eighteenth century started to experiment with media technological innovations that would give more dynamic, greater and overwhelming images of sublime disaster events. More precisely, such innovations sought to overcome the spatial and temporal limitations of easel painting, aiming to provide experiences of illusionistic immersion and of sensory, affective, and emotional intensity. The media discussed in this chapter range from the moving images of the Eidophusikon and the Diorama to the large-scale pictures of the Panorama, John Martin’s disaster motifs, and American landscape painting. Moreover, these various media participated in broader popularization processes, as pictorial experiences shifted from being viewed as elite activities toward phenomena of middle class leisure entertainment. Keywords: Media History, Proto-Cinematic History, Popular Entertainment Culture, German Aesthetics, American Culture

Between Art Academy and Entertainment Culture: Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg Philippe Jacques (later: Philip James) de Loutherbourg was born in Alsace in 1740. The career of the artist is characterized by an astonishing diversity of production, perhaps one of the reasons why his impact on Western art and culture went unrecognized for a long time.1 His œuvre encompasses the whole repertoire of the usual iconography of the sublime (as for example 1 This regards especially the art historical discipline. Theater studies, meanwhile, acknowledged de Loutherbourg’s signif icance for their f ield at an earlier point. However, there was an important single exhibition of de Loutherbourg’s work in 1973, and, more recently, Oliver Lefeuvre published the first major monograph on de Loutherbourg (Lefeuvre).

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sea storms and shipwrecks, Alpine landscapes and avalanches, volcanic eruptions, firestorms, waterfalls, and battles on land or at sea). The reception of these pictorial spectacles was Europeanwide. More importantly, with his contributions to the media technological development of sublime landscape spectacles, de Loutherbourg represents a key figure within my historical trajectory. His work shows a willingness to provide an intersection between the conventions of the art produced in the traditional academy and urban middle class entertainment culture. Here, it was the bankable representation of the sublime landscape which provided the connecting link. Already at a young age, de Loutherbourg made a successful career as a painter in the academic system of Paris. At 22, he was given the opportunity to show some of his paintings at the Academy Salon exhibition of 1763, an event that immediately catapulted the young artist to recognition among the higher echelons of the Parisian art scene. De Loutherbourg became particularly known for his depictions of shipwrecks and storms at sea in the style of his famous fellow painter Joseph Vernet as well as for his landscapes and genre scenes of bucolic life. Three years after his spectacular entry into the art business, de Loutherbourg became an Academy member, even before he had reached the official mandatory age of 30.2 At the peak of his success, he decided to leave behind his wife and children and start a new life in London. The motivation for this decision has been the subject of speculation. It seems likely, however, that de Loutherbourg’s scandalous (and expensive) lifestyle had already begun to affect his reputation as an artist. This made him cross over the English Channel.3 He began working in London around 1773 as a stage designer for David Garrick’s Drury Lane Theater, a tightly run and profit-based institution whose audience ranged from nobility and critics to tradesmen and servants.4 Enjoying a comfortable salary and far-reaching creative freedom, which even encompassed costume design, de Loutherbourg stayed at Drury Lane for almost ten years, turning theater stages into landscape spectacles with remarkable success.5 However, it was the invention of the Eidophusikon which allowed de Loutherbourg to create the most intense simulations of sublime natural objects. Derived from Greek, the neologism Eidophusikon was advertised as 2 McCalman 2013, 78. 3 After praising the bucolic landscapes of de Loutherbourg in highest tones, even Denis Diderot expressed his concerns about the unruly character of the painter (McCalman 2013, 80-82). 4 Burnim, 4; Stone, 82. 5 Baugh, 252f., 258.

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Fig. 5: Edward Francis Burney. Eidophusikon. Ca. 1782. British Museum, London. 21.2 x 29.2 cm. Watercolor on paper. ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

‘various imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by moving pictures’.6 This ostentatious use of the Greek language in designating new media apparatuses was meant to raise, emphasize, and advertise the equipment’s cultural value – a convention which would become the norm in the subsequent history of European urban culture. The only preserved image of the Eidophusikon is a watercolor by Edward Francis Burney (Fig. 5); but since the device drew much public attention, it is possible to rely on numerous contemporary eyewitness accounts in order to get an idea of its appearance and operation. The Eidophusikon was a framed pictorial, yet three-dimensional space that exhibited a variety of natural processes and landscapes during its performance. When it was first advertised, de Loutherbourg did not promise too much, for the Eidophusikon’s pictures were literally moving (how this phenomenon was achieved will be explained further on). In terms of the measurements of the Eidophusikon’s screen-space, the numbers given in its 6 McCalman 2013, 84. – Whether the Eidophusikon’s invention was based on the words ‘eidos’ and ‘physikon’ (as claimed by Raymond Lister), or on the words ‘eidoion’, ‘phusis’, and ‘eikon’ (a position taken by Christopher Baugh), I have not been able to resolve (Lister, Pl. 28; Baugh, 259 [Footnote 14]).

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critical assessments differ. The lack of consensus can perhaps be ascribed to the confused information given in primary sources (press articles, diaries, memoirs, etc.); alternatively, the scale of the screen-space may have varied from location to location (the Eidophusikon was moved a couple of times).7 Based on an overview of the research publications, however, it is possible cautiously to estimate that the apparatus had a width of 1.8 to 2.5 meters, a height of 1 to 1.8 meters, and a depth of 2.5 to 2.7 meters. The size of the audience-space varied from location to location. The auditorium at de Loutherbourg’s home, where the device was shown first, could hold around 130 people. Later locations provided space for an even larger audience.8 The individual spectator was seated in front of the image in a viewer-space darkened for the duration of the show. De Loutherbourg used a range of technologies and media in his shows, including painting and transparent visuals, magic lantern slides and lighting effects in different colors (with the source hidden), other special effects (smoke, lightning, fire, hail, and wind), sounds and music, mobile boards (depicting clouds and other objects), the mechanic imitation of swell and falling water, faux terrain, and mechanical miniature figures. Each performance consisted of usually five, sometimes six landscape spectacles. During the first season of 1781, transparent paintings as well as music performances were employed during the transition between these sceneries.9 One fundamental difference between the various visceral landscapes was that they alternated contemplative and beautiful themes with sublime and terrifying spectacles. In its first season, the Eidophusikon presented a sunrise over London’s Greenwich Park, the port of Tangier with the rock of Gibraltar seen at noon time, a sunset over the bay of Naples, the moonlit Mediterranean set against a campfire and a sea storm with a shipwreck.10 While the sublime event of the shipwreck represented the big climax of the first season, the second season of 1782 featured the alternation of beautiful, sublime, and picturesque landscape types: a sunrise in the fog over an Italian harbor, Niagara Falls, a sunset in the rain with a view of Dover (its castle, town, and cliffs), the moonlit coast of Japan with the 7 This second scenario is rather unlikely though. Since de Loutherbourg was able to spontaneously reincorporate a landscape from the program for the f irst location into the second (on the audience’s demand), so it seems that the scale of the screen-space remained the same (McCalman, ‘Magic, Spectacle’, 192). – In terms of the Eidophusikon’s different locations, see: Joppien, 342-366; Groom, 128; McCalman, ‘Magic, Spectacle’, 191-197. 8 Sybil Rosenfeld estimates 200 people for the last location in the Strand (Rosenfeld, 79). 9 Joppien, 356; McCalman 2013, 85. 10 Joppien, 348.

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phenomenon of a water-spout and the Pandemonium scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost (Satan arraying his Troops on the Banks of the Fiery Lake).11 With his Eidophusikon, de Loutherbourg – as he would explain himself – aimed to overcome one of the most crippling problems of traditional painting: the fact that even ‘the most exquisite painting represented only one moment of time in action’. What traditional painting technology lacks, the Eidophusikon would make up for by ‘adding progressive motion to accurate resemblence [sic]’.12 What de Loutherbourg had in mind was an enhancement of painting’s capacity for illusions. This also shows that his artistic thinking was underpinned by an understanding of pictorial discourses. First and foremost, he was a painter of images rather than a designer of theater stages.13 In addition to this, de Loutherbourg had good reason to want his Eidophusikon to be associated with painting’s age-old endeavor to achieve illusionistic perfection. The opening of the Eidophusikon coincided with de Loutherbourg’s attempt to gain membership at London’s Royal Academy. He depended on the goodwill of influential people such as the artist Thomas Gainsborough and, most crucially, Academy President Joshua Reynolds. Hence, he had to prevent his popular and commercial device from becoming associated with London’s public entertainment culture or his former undertakings in the theater business.14 And he turned out to be very convincing. In addition to the Eidophusikon’s advertising, de Loutherbourg presented his device as part of an art gallery exhibition. He turned his home near Leicester Square into a gallery space with some of his most famous paintings on the walls. Furthermore, the high entrance fee of five shillings ensured that the audience comprised a select elite of nobility and other affluent people. Gainsborough and Reynolds were invited to experience and examine the Eidophusikon, and both artists were left with a feeling of deep fascination. Instead of becoming an obstacle for 11 Joppien, 357. 12 ‘A View of the Eidophusikon’. 13 With this remark, I particularly contradict David Kornhaber’s contextualization of the Eidophusikon within the history of theater and the stage arts, a claim that he bases on de Loutherbourg’s application of faux terrain and miniature figures. According to Kornhaber, the Eidophusikon represents a miniaturized (and therefore domesticated) theater stage, in which the actors are replaced by little automatons (Kornhaber). However, even though de Loutherbourg adapted certain features from his work as a stage designer (e.g. the lighting technology, the miniatures), the Eidophusikon was advertised and received as a contribution to the discipline of landscape painting. Thus, I would suggest regarding de Loutherbourg’s use of miniatures rather within the painterly tradition of staffage figures. 14 The following deliberations are widely based on the information given in: McCalman 2013, 84f.

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gaining an academic title for de Loutherbourg, the Eidophusikon turned out to be quite the opposite. De Loutherbourg became an Academy member just a few months after exhibiting his Eidophusikon for the first time. Furthermore, the press reviewed the apparatus favorably as an exemplary artefact representing a sophisticated cultural taste. The Eidophusikon was celebrated as a ‘new species of painting’ and as ‘one of the most remarkable inventions in the art’.15 Its three-dimensional images were even compared to masterpieces by Vernet, Wright of Derby, and de Loutherbourg himself. In addition to de Loutherbourg’s goal of overcoming the static nature of painting, the technological setup of the Eidophusikon was deliberately aimed at dissolving the perceptual experience of the images’ mediality altogether. How this challenging task was to be achieved becomes clear when paralleled with another of the artist’s projects. For Christmas 1781, de Loutherbourg produced a coming-of-age happening for William Beckford, a young and wealthy bachelor, who shared de Loutherbourg’s interests in mysteries, cabbalistic rituals, and necromancy. For Beckford and his coterie of friends, de Loutherbourg turned Beckford’s mansion into an ensemble of sinister grottoes, oriental temples, and chambers – a space filled with a multitude of sensations and events. The doors and windows were kept shut for three days, during which the guests were to explore and wander de Loutherbourg’s fantastical vision. Historian Iain McCalman and literary scholar Simon During both describe the event as an experience of immersion, virtual reality, and modern enchantment.16 With his Eidophusikon, de Loutherbourg aimed for very similar effects, yet he achieved them in a different manner. Instead of enabling the recipient to freely explore a concealed fantasy world and engage in it with his/her own body, the spectator was placed in front of a screen-space as part of a collective audience.17 Because of the spectator’s immobilized body and the dimmed light in the viewer-space, the awareness of his/her somatic presence in reality’s time and space was significantly undermined. This is quite different from traditional theater performances where the same time and space are shared by actor and audience (even though the play might be set in a different historical period).18 At the Beckford event, the spectator became fully isolated from outside reality and was entirely immersed in a 15 ‘A View of the Eidophusikon’, 180. 16 During; McCalman 2007. 17 Rumor had it that black masses and orgies were performed there (McCalman 2007). 18 De Loutherbourg’s contributions to theater, however, sought to overcome this lack of illusionism by means that ultimately led him to the Eidophusikon.

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virtual timespace, within which s/he was free to physically move around. The Eidophusikon aimed to do the same, yet with the important difference that even the spectator’s physical body, in effect, became restricted. As the frame demarcated the border between the real and the virtual, this border was transgressed during the performance, because the presence of the virtual screen-space significantly surpassed the presence of reality, thereby enabling the spectator to be enchanted (and affected) by the sunrise over Greenwich Park, the sinking of a ship, or the erection of demonic architecture in Milton’s vision of hell. Ideally, the result would be an immediate experience of dynamic landscapes and events, which – instead of inviting receptive procedures of reading and interpreting the image – was made possible through a sensual and bodily connection with the object of art. The writer and artist William Henry Pyne describes his experience of the Eidophusikon’s shipwreck event as follows: The effect of a Storm at Sea, with the loss of the Halsewell Indiaman, was awful and astonishing; for the conflict of the raging elements he [de Loutherbourg] described with all its characteristic horrors of wind, hail, thunder, lightning, and the roaring of the waves, with such marvelous [sic] imitation of nature, that mariners have declared, whilst viewing the scene, that it amounted to reality.19

Pyne proceeds to describe the exhibition of the shipwreck in minute detail, finding all elements to resemble nature closely. He puts particular emphasis on the motion and the temporal quality of the event: the movement of clouds, the flashing of lightning, the sinking of the ship, the waves’ circular movement of rising, breaking, and falling. The cited passage above is just one among several descriptive accounts which show that the experience of the Eidophusikon’s shipwreck was framed in the vocabulary of the sublime, as it had been established and popularized in the eighteenth century. Viewed from this perspective, the Eidophusikon visualizes the Burkean notion of sublime power through movement, thereby challenging the spectator’s physiologic-psychological apparatus of perception.20 Pyne’s mention of the mariners’ approval of the scene’s illusionistic features is a narrative typical for contemporary descriptions of immersive media.

19 Hardcastle [an anonymous used by Pyne], 292. 20 For instance, Burke repeatedly mentions a ‘tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves’ (Burke, 120) resulting from the perception of sublime objects.

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Statements such as Pyne’s can be found throughout the history of immersive media.21 Despite Pyne’s invocation of the mariners’ expertise, there may also be elements inherent in the Eidophusikon’s technological setup that could disturb the immersive and illusionistic experience of the sublime, the picturesque, or the beautiful. This is particularly so in regard to the size of the screen-space. Although Rüdiger Joppien stresses that audience seats were situated at the appropriate distance from the screen to allow the viewer to gain the impression of looking outside a window, the fact is that the Eidophusikon’s images usually did not exceed the size of contemporary landscape paintings.22 Furthermore, if one considers the presentation of towering waves and satanic palaces, an unfortunate discrepancy between these sublime (and terribly vast) objects and their perceived pictorial size might have troubled the spectator. But, apparently, this did not interfere with the spectators’ ability to suspend disbelief – at least contemporaries did not express such criticisms. The effect of motion in pictorial landscape must have been overwhelming. More generally, one also ought to consider that perception is not simply representation but also construction, and eventually the result of conventional viewing habits. The relation between a sublime object represented on a screen and a spectator’s experience is not contained solely in an act of affective immediacy but also in cognitive procedures and conventions of perception, a complexity which in principle renders any claims of pure receptive immediacy (as imagined above) impossible. Another experiential scenario that lingers in the background of illusionistic and immersive media like the Eidophusikon is the possibility that the spell becomes broken. When the effect of illusionistic immersion breaks down – and in the case of the Eidophusikon this effect seems to be built on thin ice – the intense experience of sublime subject matter gives way to the experience of special effects performed by the new medium. Therefore, the success of de Loutherbourg’s device may in part also be explained through the spectator’s astonishment over its innovative technological features and imaging techniques. After the first two seasons, de Loutherbourg sold the Eidophusikon to a Mr. Chapman, who reopened it at Exeter Change in 1786 and toured with it throughout Britain the following years. 23 Under new ownership, its high-culture reputation gradually declined, or rather, the new management 21 Legends as such are documented in: Oettermann, 81; Huhtamo, 16, 150–52. 22 Joppien, 346f. 23 McCalman, ‘Magic, Spectacle’, 195; Groom, 128; Gage, 337.

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did not understand how London’s cultural elite should be wooed. With lower entrance fees, a bigger location, and interludes with comic readings, imitations, and a dog, the Eidophusikon drifted in the direction of the popular, where it would delight middle class audiences.24 As for de Loutherbourg, he continued to pursue his career as a painter of the Royal Academy, who focused on battle scenes, natural disasters, and a variety of other subjects. One of the most remarkable works of these later years is An Avalanche in the Alps, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1804.25 With this picture, de Loutherbourg added the phenomenon of the avalanche to the iconographical repertoire of the sublime (while certainly building upon the depictions of Alpine sublimity by his former student Caspar Wolf). The painting is known to have inspired William Turner – also a frequent visitor of the Eidophusikon – to paint his own Alpine avalanche.26 De Loutherbourg produced one last project for the theatre. This was the play Omai; or, a Trip round the World (1785), a spectacle with a ‘National Geographic-travelogue kind of appeal’, which also encompassed firestorms and volcanic eruptions.27 Also, worth mentioning is the multimedia spectacle The Great Fire of London (1797) at the Historic Gallery, which Gloria Groom presumes to be ‘a modified version of the Eidophusikon’.28 He furthermore illustrated books such as Macklin’s Holy Bible (1800, 1816) and David Hume’s History of England (1806). In addition to these artistic efforts, he also opened a mesmerist healing clinic for the poor in 1789. This was in collaboration with his second wife Lucy, working out of their house in Hammersmith Terrace. Offering their services for free and spurred only by their enthusiasm for cabalistic mysticism, mesmerism, and the occult, the couple purportedly treated their patients by the healing touch of their hands. Although the enterprise attracted thousands of people during its six-month lifespan, it proved to have an adverse effect on de Loutherbourg’s reputation. He was consequently forced to distance himself from the project and finally to shut down the clinic.29 That the Eidophusikon folded in the 1790s presumably had to do with the fact that visual entertainment culture was a fickle and swiftly changing landscape, which produced ever new media technologies with (literally) 24 Gage, 337f.; McCalman, ‘Magic, Spectacle’, 197. 25 Philip Jacques de Loutherbourg. An Avalanche in the Alps. 1803. Tate Gallery, London. 109.9 x 160 cm. Oil on canvas. 26 Groom, 135. 27 Baugh, 264. 28 Groom, 135. 29 For a detailed description of the whole incident, see: Iain McCalman 2006.

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bigger and better attractions. However, these attractions seemed to build on de Loutherbourg’s achievements, as will be discussed in the following chapter.

Apocalypse Here-and-Now. John Martin It will probably come as no surprise to some scholars to have John Martin as a follow-up to de Loutherbourg. In William Feaver’s monograph from 1975, for example, it is presented as a twist of fate that Martin was to produce the painting Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, which gave him his commercial breakthrough, the very month de Loutherbourg passed away in March 1812 – as if Martin, ‘perhaps unconsciously, took up the succession’.30 Barbara C. Morden, Raymond Lister, and Iain McCalman, the leading expert on de Loutherbourg, all point out de Loutherbourg’s influence on Martin’s work, yet without evidence to justify their claims.31 Another more implicit connection regards the potential impact of de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon on London’s visual entertainment scene. It has been claimed that the technology triggered the development and emergence of succeeding multimedia entertainment devices such as the Diorama, different Panorama variations, as well as firework spectacles and landscape designs within the stage arts.32 Martin certainly had the opportunity to familiarize himself with this urban public culture when he moved to London in 1806 and may therefore have picked up inspiration from de Loutherbourg.33 On the other hand, there seems to be no clear evidence for such an influence, only the probability that a device as innovative and celebrated as the Eidophusikon must have left traces in London’s cultural scene and affected subsequent media technologies. As it should be clear, the question of the extent to which de Loutherbourg had any direct or indirect influence on Martin’s art deserves further scrutiny. In my assessment, what primarily links both artists together are their participation as significant agents within the visual history of the sublime and their close association with the media history of immersion, as well as their role in influencing the development of the modern observer, as described by Crary. Just like de Loutherbourg, Martin was looking for means 30 Feaver, 15. – John Martin. Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion. 1812. Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis. 183.2 x 131.1 cm. Oil on canvas. 31 Morden, 11; Lister 1989, Pl. 46; McCalman, ‘Mystagogues of Revolution’. 32 See for instance: Keller, 313. 33 Morden, 11f.

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to radicalize the iconography of the sublime, as it had been established by artists such as Vernet, Wolf, Volaire, and Wright. What de Loutherbourg and Martin further shared was their commitment to bettering the lot of their fellow men. While de Loutherbourg’s occupation as a pro bono faith healer only lasted six months or so, Martin devoted over two decades of his life and a great part of his fortune to a project on improving London’s water supply and sewage system – an enterprise whose several attempts all eventually failed.34 An interesting difference between the two artists can be noted in the way they were received by their contemporaries. Both men attempted to gain recognition in London’s Royal Academy circles and at the same time capitalize on the city’s emerging entertainment scene aimed at the urban middle classes. On the other hand, there was a certain permeability between elite art and popular culture. The annual Academy exhibitions, for instance, already made artists’ works accessible to broader swathes of audiences and received considerable press coverage. In addition to this, London’s society witnessed during the eighteenth century the establishment of a commercial art market with galleries and exhibitions independent of the Royal Academy. Nonetheless, the relation between art and entertainment was often regarded as dichotomous, and it was discursively employed and instrumentalized within the games of power played on London’s cultural scene, as I will show.35 De Loutherbourg succeeded both in the environment of London’s Royal Academy and on the public entertainment scene. He understood that he had to represent his Eidophusikon as an investigation into the progression of landscape painting in order to convince the Academy of his artistic integrity. In comparison, Martin fruitlessly tried to gain recognition from the Academy leaders with a landscape style that drew inspiration from the visual entertainment devices of London’s public culture. In this regard, it is not surprising that Martin’s works were ridiculed and scathingly compared to the entertainment media Panorama, the phantasmagoria, and the theatrical genre of melodrama.36 He was further mocked by the Academy’s established personalities and art critics, who previously had nothing but praise for de Loutherbourg’s dalliances in the popular realm.37 34 Feaver,114-129; Kokkonen. 35 Solkin, 1-3, 247. 36 O’Connor, 273. 37 Myrone, ‘John Martin’, 12f. – John Ruskin neatly summed up Martin’s reputation by regarding him merely as a ‘workman’, not as a ‘painter’ (Feaver, 173), a notion typical for the perception of the popular entertainment sector in the nineteenth century (and one of the main factors for

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They found the extravagance and bombastic visual appeal of Martin’s work both vulgar and tasteless.38 Pigeonholed as a populist, Martin found that his paintings were accused of being merely an amalgamation of cheap effects and lacking both substance and subtlety. Moreover, his painter colleagues, John Constable and Benjamin Robert Haydon, accused Martin of painting from a misunderstood notion of the sublime. For instance, Martin was charged with replacing ‘a “deep” or “profound” sense of grandeur with mere repetitiousness or simple scale’.39 As a result of repeated rejection, Martin built his career mainly outside the academy system, putting all effort into appealing to the market for popular visual entertainment. He also sought (and occasionally received) support from Europe’s aristocratic patrons.40 But his rejection by the Academy also freed him from the usual treadmill of production and exhibition and led him to develop a set of business strategies to promote, distribute, produce, and reproduce his work. On account of these strategies and the international network he built, Martin became, arguably, the best-known painter of his time. A striking example of Martin’s significant role in the emerging practices of the modern culture industry is his illustration of Milton’s Paradise Lost (published between 1825 and 1827) through masterly executed mezzotints. 41 These blockbuster visualizations of Milton’s visions were printed in large numbers and distributed around the world. 42 The downside was that these production and distribution practices also led to cases of piracy and plagiarism, which Martin tried to stop through legal prosecution.43 Martin’s famous and widely circulating image Belshazzar’s Feast was, for instance, turned into a Diorama spectacle in London’s shopping center Queen’s Bazaar – an enterprise that Martin sought to have shut down legally.44 In the particular case of the Milton illustrations, the art of painting and subsequent exhibition were given a minor role, and often Martin’s paintings functioned merely as templates for reproduction. 45 In other cases, his large-scale paintings and the loss of the main bulk of these works, since they slipped through the valuation sensors of museum culture). 38 Paley, 134. 39 Myrone, ‘John Martin’, 13. 40 Paley, 135. 41 Feaver, 72-83. 42 Myrone, ‘Catalogue’, 123-128. – For a more general view on Martin’s commercial practices as a printmaker, see: Campbell. 43 O’Connor, 311-313. 44 Myrone, ‘John Martin’, 18. 45 To name an example, the French writer Théophile Gautier was greatly disappointed when he finally got to see the painted original version of The Deluge in 1835, a work that he formerly

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their particular staging became what made his reputation as a creator of apocalyptic visual spectacles. An important source of inspiration for Martin’s artistic development was the painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, who, in turn, was influenced by de Loutherbourg’s work. 46 Turner, known as the painter of light, smoke, steam, and fire, was also interested in sublime catastrophic events such as avalanches, shipwrecks, storms, deluges, and volcano eruptions. Unlike Martin with his monumental canvases though, he presented these disaster themes in rather small dimensions (as for example in his watercolors). Turner had great theoretical interest in the sublime and aesthetics in general. 47 Although his knowledge of Burke’s account of the sublime remains open to speculation, it appears as if the Burkean features of darkness and obscurity played a significant role in the artist’s disaster images. One work that is repeatedly thought to have influenced Martin is the painting Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps.48 Employing a similar composition as in Turner’s 1805 version of The Deluge, the snow storm appears like a wave flooding over the helpless army which would later put Rome’s power to the test. 49 Instead of being a mere threat on the horizon that is visually linked to the human staffage, Hannibal’s soldiers are about to be entirely engulfed by the overwhelming presence of the storm. The staging of a natural disaster phenomenon as a tidal wave, manifesting in every atmospheric particle – that is perhaps the main pictorial invention that Martin adapted from Turner. Furthermore, like his celebrated colleague Turner, Martin also took advantage of the interplay between image and text.50 For his exhibitions, he deeply admired in the form of a mezzotint reproduction. In opposition to this, John Ruskin criticized Martin’s works for losing their receptive force when reduced in size (Feaver, 86, 139). 46 Groom, 135; Johnstone, 11; Wilton 1980, 37; McCalman, ‘Mystagogues of Revolution’, 195. 47 This interest shows in Turner’s comments on the sublime and its relation to the ridiculous (as presented in the writings of Thomas Paine), in his lecture on the sublimity of Poussin’s painting Deluge, as well as in his categorization of his own works according to aesthetic categories like the sublime, the beautiful, or the pastoral (Wilton 1985, 356f.). – Turner made these attributions in his publication Liber Studiorum (Wilton 1980, 69-72). 48 Joseph Mallord William Turner. Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. Exhibited 1812. Tate Gallery, London. 146 x 237.5 cm. Oil on canvas. – As for the painting’s influence on Martin, see e.g.: Matteson, 226; Feaver, 27. 49 Joseph Mallord William Turner. The Deluge. Exhibited 1805 (?). Tate Gallery, London. 142.9 x 235.6 cm. Oil on canvas. 50 From 1798 onward, ‘Turner began including verse in the exhibition catalogue alongside, or in place of, the titles of his paintings, and of the approximately 200 oil paintings that Turner exhibited in his lifetime, more than 50 had poetic epigraphs, half of which the artist composed himself’ (Wettlaufer, 152).

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Fig. 6: John Martin. The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. 1822. Tate Gallery, London. 161.6 x 253 cm. Oil on canvas. © Tate, London 2019.

produced accompanying pamphlets, which alluded to a variety of textual sources and epistemic fields. For example, for the painting The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Fig. 6) he quoted from literary descriptions of the historical event of 79 AD, as well as providing archeological, philological, and geological information which he used to explain the main narrative elements of the event (for instance the death of Pliny the Elder).51 In order to achieve an even closer intertwining of image and text, he showed a black and white sketch cropped to match the outlines of the painting with reference numbers for identifying and elaborating on singular elements of the picture.52 William Feaver correctly identifies a ‘scholarly aura’ in Martin’s pamphlets.53 Furthermore, Ralph O’Connor points to the fact that accompanying text was not only ‘integral to early-nineteenth-century visual culture’ but also to the mediation and popularization of scientific (esp. geological) phenomena and discourses.54 Martin’s aim was to give his exhibitions the appearance of a serious and distinguished discourse. 51 Keller, 315f. – It is especially in this work in which Martin’s indebtedness to Turner’s meteorological plasticity and visual presence of force becomes notable. Looking at the painting, it seems as if the air itself caught fire. This intense quality of Martin’s coloring might be the reason why Daly falsely assumed that The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum was turned into a Diorama for Martin’s 1822 exhibition (Daly 2011, 263). 52 The sketch is shown in: Myrone, ‘Catalogue’, 111. 53 Feaver, 42. 54 O’Connor, 287.

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He wished to signal that there was more than just spectacle to the visual experience of his work. Another aspect of this text-image interplay is the narrative and temporal depth added by the pamphlets. Through the application of text, the experience of the paintings was meant to go beyond the confines of the pregnant moments depicted. That is to say, the text guided the spectator’s imagination to transcend the visual scene. As a result, Martin created tension between visual spectacle and textual narration: the overwhelming affective impact of the picture transformed into a more comprehensive and cognitively adventurous mode of perception (and vice versa). The spectator’s first encounter with the monumental canvas was of crucial importance to Martin. He was therefore deeply concerned with how his pictures were exhibited and involved himself actively in curatorial decisions.55 The attention to hanging pictures and other exhibition choices were most likely considered closely in connection with Martin’s self-curated retrospective (1822) at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. The location was a commercial exhibition space for art, curiosities, and all manner of entertainments. Its Egyptian temple style of architecture provided the appropriate atmosphere for Martin’s depictions of ancient disasters. Among 24 other paintings, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum was presented as the exhibition’s centerpiece.56 Another work exhibited on this occasion was The Fall of Babylon.57 With its monumental architecture – the infinite rows of columns, long-stretched bridges, and bare wharf facilities – one could almost imagine that Martin followed Burke’s passages on ‘magnitude’, ‘succession, and uniformity in buildings’ in his Philosophical Enquiry.58 This architectural excess was another of Martin’s pictorial inventions which was clearly perceived as a phenomenon of the sublime. Belshazzar’s Feast provided another display of architectural sublimity. It garnered attention for its ‘geometrical properties of space, magnitude and number, in the use of which he [Martin] may be said to be boundless’.59 The critic Edwin Atherstone even stated that ‘No painter has ever, like Martin, represented the immensity of space; none like him made architecture so sublime, merely through its vastness’.60 55 Myrone, ‘John Martin’, 18. 56 Feaver, 55. 57 John Martin. The Fall of Babylon. 1819. Private collection. 155 x 244 cm. Oil on canvas. 58 Burke, 69, 128. 59 Johnstone, 16. 60 Atherstone’s article was published in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 49 (June 1829), 144, and qtd. in: Feaver, 102. – For further information on Martin’s reception as a painter of the sublime, see: Paley, 122-154.

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Fig. 7: John Martin. The Great Day of His Wrath. Ca. 1851-1853. Tate Gallery, London. 196.5 x 303.2 cm. Oil on canvas. © Tate, London 2019.

The focus on large-scale visualizations is indeed one of the most decisive features of Martin’s disaster scenarios. To elucidate this, I am going to take a closer look at his painting The Great Day of His Wrath (Fig. 7). It was one of Martin’s last works, exhibited in 1853, together with The Last Judgment and The Plains of Heaven.61 The three pictures form a triptych depicting the biblical narrative of the Last Judgment. The event is narratively divided in three tableaux: judgment (middle), doom (right), and grace (left). Upon its exhibition in London, the triptych travelled on a nationwide, and subsequently worldwide, tour, which lasted until the late 1870s.62 In the accompanying pamphlet that was issued with the exhibition of the triptych, Martin, rather loosely, cites Revelation 6:12-17, where the opening of the sixth seal is described: Lo, there was a great earthquake; And the Heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places; and the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and every bondsman, and every freeman, hid themselves in 61 John Martin. The Last Judgment. C. 1849-1853. Tate Gallery, London. 196.8 x 325.8 cm. Oil on canvas; John Martin. The Plains of Heaven. C. 1851-1853. Tate Gallery, London. 198.8 x 306.7 cm. Oil on canvas. 62 Myrone, ‘Catalogue’, 173.

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the dens, and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains of rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of His wrath is come: and who shall be able to stand?63

In this description of the biblical event, Martin hints at some of the central aspects in The Great Day of His Wrath. Apparently, it depicts an earthquake that moves otherwise solid and firmly-rooted topographies ‘out of their places’ and even turns them upside-down. Arranged in two c-shapes, the spectator witnesses the rupture of Earth’s crust and a black abyss opening up at the mid-bottom of the canvas. On both sides, steep mountains are piling up, driving what seems to be thousands of doomed people toward the chasm. They seem to appear as if they were breaking waves. On the left-hand side, mountain-sized boulders explode and throw matter toward the center of the picture. On the right, an ancient town rains down on the people. The painting captures precisely the moment before the breaking waves collapse completely and obliterate ‘the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and every bondsman, and every freeman’. The dynamics of the image are created by these violent movements of falling, exploding, bending, piling up, and crashing down. Looking into the distance, the view is restricted by impenetrable smoke and a range of dark mountains with buildings on top, set against the glowing red of volcanic activity. These mountains, blocking the beholder’s view, mark the end of the valley. Thus, there is no way to escape the ongoing destruction, neither visually for the spectator nor existentially for the painting’s human figures. Moreover, the composition’s pictorial movement from the background to the foreground underlines this enclosure, and as the image places the spectator right above the canyon, the waves of the earthquake appear to be coming toward him/her as well as the humans in the picture. The interpretation of this (frozen) motion is further accentuated in the affective expressions of the figures: the depicted bodies bend with the waves, they hide their faces in fear, call for death, or throw themselves into the abyss. With this detailed depiction of a mass panic, Martin also presents an ensemble of bodies about to be annihilated. It is the spectator who engages with his/her bodily self, as a bodily being in the threatening event. Frozen – like the depicted sufferers – in the critical moment before annihilation, the spectacle is set in motion by the viewer’s imagination. In short, Martin makes it possible for the viewer to experience a safe, yet 63 Myrone, ‘Catalogue’, 174.

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sensually and affectively powerful encounter with the Apocalypse, an encounter that is simultaneously shocking and stimulating in that it forces the viewer’s imagination to engage with the sublime spectacle. The moment in time depicted by Martin corresponds to a certain degree to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s concept of the pregnant moment, which he explores in his famous treatise Laocoön; An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Following Lessing, the painting provides a moment of tension and intensity that sparks the spectator’s imagination. However, it is easy to forget that Lessing’s distinction between poetry as a temporal art form and painting (representing the whole range of the visual arts) as a spatial art form is not merely a media technological one, for it is also based on poetry and painting’s relations to the eternal laws of beauty.64 Accordingly, it is more than likely that Lessing would have rejected Martin’s art as distasteful and banal, leaving nothing to the imagination. His ideal of the pregnant moment is never loud and aggressive but always reserved, voluntarily encountered, and within the conf ines of beauty. Kant, on the other hand, conceives sublimity as an expansion of imagination by means of a forced breakdown of sensibility. Thus, while the temporal structure of Martin’s image resembles Lessing’s pregnant moment, it also clearly deviates from it in terms of tone, subject matter, decorum, and affective intensity. To achieve a deeper understanding of the nineteenth-century spectator’s affective participation in the visualized event, one should also take into account the scale of the canvas: 196.5 x 303.2 cm. While part of a travelling exhibition, the painting was shown in numerous locations of various kinds and sizes; thus, I cannot clearly determine how the spectator would encounter this sizeable work (compared with the usual standards of landscape painting). Was it seen from a far distance or up close, with enough room for the spectator to move about and take it in from different angles? Was it lit in a room otherwise darkened or was it bathed in daylight? Was it made visible at once or was it revealed successively? Such essential questions of curatorial staging, which were a primary concern for Martin, were no longer under his control when exhibitions were not overseen by him. It can generally be said about Martin’s use of scale that it functioned, first of all, to approximate the sheer unpresentable scale of the sublime event. In addition to this, it was his aim to expand (or even dissolve) the borders of the canvas for the spectator in his/her act of perception. These strategic considerations were implemented in the production of the paintings to

64 Lessing.

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immerse the viewer into their worlds (that is into their spatio-temporal, historical, narrative, and bodily realities). On the other hand, the factual immobility of the painting – even though set in motion by the viewer – allows for singular elements and details to be read and understood (despite or perhaps precisely because of its overwhelming size). A follower of the highly popular discipline of geology could identify details like the fossil of a fish and the fine textures of the depicted boulders.65 Based on the geological clues, the spectator might interpret the narrative of the image as pointing to a reemerging antediluvian and primordial past, with Earth returned to a state of chaos – the volcanic and tectonic activities ravaging the surface of Earth. Another detail guiding a scientific reading is the alliance of sun, moon, and a comet, which Martin had already presented in his Deluge trilogy.66 It is interesting to note here that the contemporary geologist Georges Cuvier believed the movements of such celestial objects to be responsible for catastrophes on Earth.67 By contrasting these two modes of perception – the painting’s sensual, affective, and immersive side and the receptive practices of reading, understanding, and reflecting on the image – one could imagine their relation as a linear shift from the first to the last. However, in my opinion, this strictly linear model neither does justice to the reception of Martin’s painting nor to pictorial experiences in general. Instead, I suggest regarding this receptive process according to Max Imdahl’s theory of the Ikonik (‘Iconic’), which he established in the 1980s as a theoretical-methodological modification of Panofsky’s Iconology.68 Criticizing logocentric tendencies in Panofsky’s model, which threaten to overshadow the sensuality of its objects (artworks), Imdahl makes a claim for the irreducibility of the pictorial experience. He distinguishes two modes of viewing: the sehendes Sehen (‘seeing view’) and the wiedererkennendes Sehen (‘recognizing view’). While the seeing view signifies a pre-representational and pre-semantic sensory experience, the recognizing view regards the identification of content matter (persons, items, 65 The popularity of the geological sciences in Victorian Britain is documented and described in: Freeman. 66 John Martin. The Deluge. 1834. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. 168.3 x 258.4 cm. Oil on canvas. – The Assuaging of the Waters. 1840. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. 143.5 x 219.1 cm. Oil on canvas. – The Eve of the Deluge. 1840. The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, Windsor. 142.9 x 218.4 cm. Oil on canvas. 67 It is documented that Cuvier visited Martin, who was quite interested in geology, in his atelier. Cuvier turned out to be very pleased with the artist’s depiction of the biblical Deluge, particularly with his staging of sun, moon, and comet (Matteson, 222f.). 68 The following exposition is based on: Imdahl, in particular on the two Chapters ‘Ikonographie – Ikonologie – Ikonik’ and ‘Ikonik oder Strukturanalyse’.

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locations, attributes, themes, symbols, etc.) and the receptive processes of interpretation and making sense. Both views constitute the irreducible pictorial experience, the ikonische Sinnstruktur (‘iconic structure of meaning’), during which the pregnant moment visualized in a pictorial work is made present as an impression of totality, transcending all semantic and contextual content.69 The inextricable connectedness of both views cannot be stressed enough, for both the notion of an entirely pre-semantic sensation and the concept of pure acts of pictorial reflexivity are indeed utopian. As Wolfgang Ullrich points out, Imdahl’s seeing view is premised on art theoretical concepts of the nineteenth century, claiming a purely sensual innocence of the eye.70 Taking this problem of conditionality into consideration, one must insist on the nonexistence of pure acts of seeing and recognizing within pictorial experiences. Thus, Imdahl’s seeing view is to be understood as perception operating in a mode of sensory spectacle, yet without ever being entirely purified from the recognition of objects and general receptive processes of making sense. Applied to Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath, one must understand its pictorial experience as a reciprocal back and forth movement between seeing view (that is the picture’s spectacular and affective agency) and recognizing view (its reading, identification, and interpretation). Given the picture’s reception and staging as an artwork of the sublime, it is further interesting to note the resemblance between the back and forth movement of its experience and Kant’s description of the sublime’s receptive unfolding: The mind feels itself moved in the representation of the sublime in nature […]. This movement […] may be compared to a vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. What is excessive for the imagination […] is as it were an abyss, in which it fears to lose itself, yet for reason’s idea of the supersensible to produce such an effort of the imagination is not excessive but lawful, hence it is precisely as attractive as it was repulsive for mere sensibility.71

The two stages between which the mind oscillates are sensibility’s crisis and reason’s interference. This is what I identified in the analysis of The Great Day of His Wrath as the affective agitation of the sublime (the seeing view 69 Imdahl, 92. 70 Ullrich. 71 Kant, 141f.

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mode) and the reading of singular elements and narratives (the recognizing view mode). To reach a conclusion, I will give two specific examples of this alternating receptive movement that the painting invites. The first example concerns the painting’s geological elements. Through the recognition of geologic traces, the geologic time scale represented itself to the Victorian viewer, who was likely to be familiar with or even fascinated by the concept of geology’s temporal abyss, which itself belongs to the repertoire of the sublime (see pp. 49-55). This idea of geological sublimity embodied in the painting’s detailed rendering of geologic phenomena is, in turn, channeled back to the sensual and affective experience of the work (and vice versa). Thus, the painted abyss does not only have immediate affective appeal to the irrational senses but also identifies an abyss discussed in the scientific discourses of natural history. Regarding the second example, I depart from the seeing view side of the painting’s experience, whose affective and sensual immediacy both informs and transforms the understanding of the painting’s biblical narrative. While the accompanying pamphlet underlines certain topics within the biblical event – the decadence of man, moral corruption, punishment through God – it is the painting’s seeing view qualities that make this familiar plot (re-)emerge as a sublime performance; the Apocalypse takes place in the here-and-now. The picture does not merely offer a re-reading of the biblical text; the text itself is being incarnated and transformed, conveying a somatic connection between the embodied experience of the here-and-now and the immaterial and timeless sphere of John’s Book of Revelation.

‘The Viewer Feels as Though His Eyelids Had Been Cut Off’. Visiting the Panorama The Panorama was perhaps invented, and definitely patented, by Robert Barker in 1787.72 It was, arguably, the most popular medium of visual spectacle in the nineteenth century, until Panorama rotunda buildings were replaced by cinemas. In its most common and best-known form, a Panorama represents a monumental, frameless, and fully circular painting providing a view of 360° (Fig. 8).73 The curved canvas ensures the integrity of the illusion 72 Hyde, 17. 73 There was in fact an entire range of media named or associated with Panoramas, as for instance various types of moving and miniature Panoramas, the Myriorama, the Diorama, the

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Fig. 8: Robert Barker’s panorama at Leicester Square, London. Ca. 1798. From: Robert Mitchell, Plans and Views in Perspective, with Descriptions of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland (London: Wilson & Co. 1801). © British Library Board 56.i.12 plate 14.

from any possible viewpoint. Accordingly, Barker advertised his invention as the next evolutionary step within the traditional discipline of landscape painting, as it overcomes the pictorial paradigm of linear perspective.74 At the same time, the device’s production and reception were based on elaborate scientific and technological measures. The spectator views it from a central platform, which is reached through a darkened staircase. The only source of light is installed in the ceiling close to the bordering canvas and hidden from the audience. This creates the effect that the topography in the picture appears to be glowing by itself, thereby increasing the impression of looking at a landscape from a balcony. Many of the production practices connected with Panorama enterprises would later become typical for modernity’s cultural industry and the film industry in particular.75 Panoramas were collectively conceptualized, produced, advertised, and exhibited. Their production companies were hierarchically organized, with a clear regulation and division of labor. The Stereopticon, and the Cyclorama; however, some of these devices differed significantly from the pictorial technology that is described above. 74 Hyde, 21, 24f. 75 A concise account of the production framework of the Panorama is offered in: Grau, 65-71.

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respective steps of production, distribution, compiling, and exhibition of Panoramas were widely standardized.76 The high costs resulting from this production model were often borne by international corporations, who considered Panoramas a promising opportunity for investment. It was partly due to such capitalist and industrial practices that Panorama images were usually denied the status of being art.77 Only few Panorama producers were accepted as artists, such as the landscape painter Anton von Werner who supervised the production of the extremely successful and prestigious Sedan Panorama.78 In accordance with the Panorama’s exclusion from artistic circles and discourses, its audiences represented all social classes, even though its major part consisted of visitors from the middle class. While Barker initially considered a rather high entrance fee, the prizes were soon dropped to a level that allowed broader parts of society to visit his visual spectacles.79 Among the various subjects presented in Panoramas were topographies of all kinds, historical and catastrophic events, and battles of war which successfully nurtured nationalistic tendencies in society. Sublime subjects, such as Alpine landscapes, shipwrecks, storms, or volcanic eruptions, represented merely one thematic group within this variety.80 However, in terms of its general receptive framework, I argue that the Panorama (its most common circular type) employs a sublime mode of pictorial viewing, whose aesthetic appeal is best described as an oscillating tension between the receptive concepts of immersion and media reflexivity. In his highly influential book Virtual Art; From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau also discusses the Sedan Panorama, building a strong case for the medium’s immersive qualities.81 However, as Grau conceives the 76 The obvious kinship between the Panorama and cinema in terms of production, distribution, and spectatorship has been recognized by Jacques Aumont in ‘The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze’. 77 Hence, there were no efforts made to collect and preserve Panorama images, which is why only very few of them can still be seen today. A map with surviving Panoramas is provided in: Plessen, 368. 78 While being exhibited in Berlin and depicting the Prussian army fighting back the French troops on 1 September 1870, the Sedan Panorama was an enterprise commissioned and financed by Belgian investors (Grau, 91-93). 79 Comment, 115f.; Hyde, 39f. 80 For example, documented Panorama depictions employing themes of the sublime included: Vesuvius and Pompeii (Keller, 326), storms (Comment, 106f.), the Deluge (Oettermann, 75), Mont Blanc (Oettermann, 88), Mont St.Gotthard (Oettermann, 123f.), Niagara Falls (Oettermann, 112), the fire of Moscow (Oettermann, 128), Etna (Oettermann, 163f.), the fire of Hamburg (Oettermann, 173), and the destruction of Babylon (Oettermann, 274). 81 Grau, 90-139. – For the Panorama as a medium of immersion, see also: Uricchio.

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Panorama’s experience as a form of virtual reality avant la lettre, he fails to take into consideration the potential aesthetic values of the medium’s non-immersive features, which, as flaws, glitches, or defects, threaten to disturb the immersive experience. Thus, as an attempt to offer a more nuanced account of Grau’s analysis of the Panorama, I will investigate the medium’s sublime viewing mode and see if those non-immersive flaws perhaps involve a genuine aesthetic surplus. The Panorama’s sublime viewing mode was implicitly conceptualized by Heinrich von Kleist and Clemens Brentano in an article on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea.82 The article, titled ‘Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape’, was published in the newspaper Berliner Abendblätter on 13 October 1810. Officially, Kleist was named as the sole author of the article, although in fact he incorporated and rephrased parts of a handwritten version by Brentano. The occasion of the article was the 1810 Berlin Academy exhibition where Friedrich’s painting was shown in public for the first time. The text consists of two connected segments: the first is based on Brentano’s handwritten manuscript, the second was almost entirely written by Kleist.83 Brentano’s segment opens with a description of the experience of the picture’s dune landscape, as if the painted coastal scenery were real. The narrator’s impression of the landscape is highly ambivalent and is further characterized by mixed emotions in the tradition of the receptive functioning of the sublime.84 He finds himself facing the ‘watery waste […], yearning to cross over, finding one cannot’. The terrible visual perception of the ocean’s deadly emptiness is mysteriously accompanied and enchanted by the acoustic perception of the ‘voice of life in the roar of the surf, the rush of the wind, the drift of the clouds, the lonely crying of birds’. This mixed emotion is further described as a rupture between ‘an appeal from the heart and a rejection […] from nature’. Translated into Kantian terms, this rupture occurs between reason’s demand for totality and sensibility’s inability to comprehend it. However, the sublime experience of the boundless ocean is impossible ‘in front of the picture’. This is where the mediality of the painting is brought into focus. Brentano replaces the ambivalent experience of nature with the ambivalent and mediated experience of the picture. A 82 Caspar David Friedrich. Monk by the Sea. 1808-1810. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 110 x 171.5 cm. Oil on canvas. 83 The following deliberations are based on the German original text as well as on its English translation: Schultz; Kleist. 84 Kleist and Brentano’s text has been contextualized within the aesthetic tradition of the sublime by Christian Pöpperl in: Pöpperl, 144-148.

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shifting of perspectives takes place: ‘and that which I should have found within the picture I found instead between the picture and myself’. How this discovery is to be imagined is explained immediately after: ‘and so I myself became the Capuchin monk, the picture became the dune, but that across which I should have looked with longing, the sea, was absent completely’. What at first appears to be a miraculous act of immersion, the narrator’s teleportation into the picture, is in fact an unfulfilled expectation, since the object of the narrator’s longing, that is the sea, is lacking. And yet, this is generally not an unsatisfying experience; it is the absence of landscape and the spectator’s increasing awareness of the picture’s mediality which nurture the fascination for the painting. The second text segment moves on to rephrase the spectator’s immersive identification with the picture’s monk figure, as he becomes ‘the single spark of life in the vast realms of death, the lonely center in the lonely circle’. With this, Kleist gives a first hint of what kind of view he will establish next, namely a panoramic and terribly boundless view. Associations of pain, violence, and terror are provoked by the famous description: ‘the viewer feels as though his eyelids had been cut off’. This drastic metaphor for the spectator’s immediate experience of the painting is derived from the picture’s sublime uniformity and boundlessness. The image of the cut-off eyelids implies a completely limitless view, which Christian Begemann strikingly identifies as panoramic.85 On the one hand, this is not a divine panoramic vision, for the subject is violently forced to see everything at the same time (similar to the effects of Kant’s mathematically sublime where sensibility is forced to attempt comprehending the sublime object in its entire scale).86 On the other hand, Kleist’s description also refers to the immersive lure of the work. As if under hypnosis, it is impossible for the spectator to close his eyes or look the other way.87 After this graphic description of the picture’s receptive aspects, Kleist concludes the article by evoking the art’s ancient dream of creating immaculate experiences of illusion and immersion in the tradition of mythological figures such as Pygmalion, Zeuxis, or Orpheus.88 He speculates, ‘[y]es, were such a painting made with its own chalk and water, the foxes and wolves, I believe, would be set howling by it’. In this scenario, the painting’s mediality 85 Begemann, 89f. 86 Kant, 135, 138. 87 Begemann, 98f. 88 Pygmalion sculpts a statue so true to nature that he falls in love with it, a love that ultimately animates the sculptor’s work. Zeuxis paints wine drapes that trick birds into attempting to eat them. Orpheus’s singing mesmerizes animals, trees, and rocks, and even conquers death.

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is suspended in the matching of material conditions (the chalk and the water), yet at the same time, Kleist reveals the futility of this dream by locating it in the utopian sphere of the imaginary. As for the outcome of my analysis of Kleist and Brentano’s text, I can point out three central receptive aspects: first, the painted dune landscape is experienced through mixed emotions, blending together pleasure and terror, fascination and melancholy, as well as the experience of presence and absence. Second, these mixed emotions result from the ambivalent perception of immersive and non-immersive, illusionistic and media reflexive features. Third, the narrator’s experience of Friedrich’s work oscillates between a variety of times, spaces, states of minds, and identities. In the following, I will apply these three key themes to the analysis of the Panorama medium.89 In terms of the Panorama’s contemporary reception and advertising, the effect of immersion achieved through the medium’s enhanced illusionistic means does indeed seem to be its signature feature. The report of the first Panoramas in Paris, commissioned by the Institut de France, praises their ‘perfect deception’ of the eye.90 Throughout Europe, both spectators and press applauded the hitherto unparalleled illusionism. Rumor has it that Queen Charlotte even became seasick when the British Royal court visited Barker’s navy Panorama of Spithead in 1794.91 Worth mentioning in this context are also the several legends about dogs and other animals trying to take a bath in the waters of the paintings, as if the Panorama artists (or craftsmen) had finally managed to paint Friedrich’s dune in its own chalk and water.92 To a certain degree, this type of material matching was realized, since the Panorama producers made use of faux terrain in order to smooth out the transition between viewer-space and screen-space and make their landscapes appear even more natural. They installed bushes and other plants, rocks, dirt, soil, fences, and furniture in front of the canvas. Even Kleist and Brentano’s imagined acoustic sensations of ‘the roar of the surf, the rush of the wind, the drift of the clouds, the lonely crying of birds’ were included in some of the Panorama rotundas. The aim was to enable a multi-sensory experience of immersion, which is why the viewing platforms 89 To also draw a biographical connection between Caspar David Friedrich and the Panorama: it is known that Friedrich was an admirer of the Panorama and its visual effects. Rumor has it that he even might have tried to paint one himself (Grundmann 1959; Grundmann 1974). – However, this hypothesis was harshly dismissed by Helmut Börsch-Supan, who, at the same time, notices the Panorama’s influence on Friedrich’s landscapes (Börsch-Supan, 200). 90 Oettermann, 114-116. 91 Oettermann, 81. 92 Huhtamo, 16.

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of seascape Panoramas were occasionally made to look like a ship’s deck and even set in motion to create the illusion of heavy swell.93 To complete the illusion, the assistants employed on deck were dressed in the costumes of navy officers. At first glance, it thus appears that the Panorama achieved for its spectators what Kleist and Brentano could only long for: to take over the position of Friedrich’s monk figure and transcend the boundaries of the painted landscape. This first impression does not, however, provide a complete account of the Panorama’s receptive appeal. Contemporary critics, for instance, were not entirely convinced by the medium’s immersive lure. They often noted and occasionally mocked and criticized its immobility.94 The French Panorama artist Pierre Prévost was criticized for the lack of motion in his cityscapes.95 But there are also textual accounts in which the flaw of immobility is considered to provide an aesthetic surplus, as for instance within Alfred Polgar’s description of the Panorama The Battle at the Isel Mountain in 1809. The Austrian author claims that, there is a certain appeal to Panoramas. It is rooted in the mixture of stillness and indicated movement, of illusionistic vastness and actual narrowness. The silent noise of battle Panoramas in particular has something fairytale-like about it. People talk in hushed voices, as if they are afraid to wake a life which has been paralyzed by a magic spell.96

Similarly, in his Handbuch der Aesthetik (‘Compendium of Aesthetics’), Johann August Eberhard describes the Panorama’s aesthetic appeal as a reciprocal movement between illusionism and media reflexive distance: The exactitude of perspective, the accuracy of outline, the truth of chiaroscuro and posture take me into true nature by means of their unif ied enchantment. Yet, the desolate deathly silence and the dead motionlessness push me out of it again. I sway between reality and unreality, between nature and non-nature, between truth and appearance. My thoughts and my spirits are set in motion, forced to swing from side to side, like going round in circles or being rocked in a boat.97 93 Oettermann, 81f., 125, 168-170, 213f. 94 Oettermann, 57. 95 Oettermann, 122. 96 Translated from German by the author; orig.: qtd. in: Oettermann, 239. 97 This section is partly translated from the German original text by the author, and other parts of it quote Grau, 63f. The German original is to be found in: Eberhard, 168f. – Indeed, it

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This oscillation between illusionistic immersion and media reflexive ‘truth’ perhaps explains why so many Panorama rotundas showed the towns in which they were built. How can Paris’s Paris Panorama attract an audience if it merely simulates the city’s everyday life experience?98 Kleist’s metaphor of the cut-off eyelids suggests a sublime panoramic view that confronts the spectator with everything at the same time. Not being able to close the eyes means not being able to edit and, thus, organize perceived scenery. While a person’s visual perception organizes topography by focusing on single parts and by decreasing color and acuity toward distant elements, Panorama images present topographies in their visual totality.99 Every individual element is presented with equal attention to detail and distinctness. This boundless view would certainly cause the overpowering of the beholder’s sensory faculties if the depicted scenery was not frozen in a specific moment. The frozen moment is the cut through time and space that compensates for that which was initially taken from the beholder by dissolving the boundaries of his/her view (by cutting off his/her eyelids). The result, as described by Polgar and Eberhard, is a strange, affective and aestheticized encounter with the presented topography, perhaps even more so if the viewer’s own town is represented. In addition, the Panorama’s lighting system fosters experiences of spatiotemporal ambiguity. As noted, Panoramas use natural light to illuminate their painted canvases. The threshold where the light enters the rotunda is hidden from the audience. Since Panorama pictures often presented distinct meteorological conditions and phenomena, their producers sought to achieve a preferably neutral impact from the outside world. That means that the location of a rotunda and the alignment of a painting were factors of crucial importance; however, as the course of the sun and the general weather conditions vary with the seasons, it was not possible to gain control over the elements entirely. The sunlight that illuminated the virtual Egyptian pyramids also shone on the real boulevards of Europe’s capitals. Even though the producers had the intention of transforming real light into virtual light, should be mentioned that Eberhard was a firm opponent of the Panorama. On the other hand, his description seems to reveal a subliminal pleasure, which he would never explicitly verbalize. 98 An alternative response to this question is offered by Bernard Comment and Heinz Buddemeier. Accordingly, the aesthetic surplus of Paris’s Paris Panorama would be based on the commanding vantage point that the medium provides. The spectator is given an overview of the city and visual access to every little detail of its appearance (Comment, 136f.; Buddemeier, 15-24). 99 Indeed, these are effects that painters have sought to imitate since the Renaissance; one only need to think of Leonardo’s use of sfumato and aerial perspective.

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the success of this plan depended on nature’s will. One dark cloud could make the fires of Vesuvius in eruption and the light reflections on the snowy peaks of the Alps faint. Hence, the Panorama’s dynamic intertwining of different spatio-temporal dimensions was not just a rare technological dysfunction but a potential scenario within every act of reception, for this spatio-temporal ambiguity is inscribed in the Panorama’s aesthetic repertoire and the organization of the media technology. I conclude that the Panorama was not simply a virtual travel apparatus that teleported the viewer to distant times and places. By employing a terribly boundless sublime mode of viewing, it enabled ambiguous experiences of intersecting times, spaces, and states of minds. But experiences as such are not limited to the Panorama alone; they also represent an integral part of the reception of immersive media in general. On the one hand, this can be described as an immersion that becomes unstable, starts flickering, that is weakened or even suspended. On the other hand, such flaws and glitches also facilitate more nuanced and complex experiences with an aesthetic surplus attached to them. As one encounters these receptive moments in connection with the sublime, the productive strife between immersion and media reflexivity correlates with the sublime’s irresolvable tension between sensual collapse and reason’s intervention, affect and understanding, violence and freedom.

Panoramic Landscapes Through the Telescope: The Hudson River School The so-called Hudson River School represented a loose collective of landscape painters based in New York City around the mid-decades of the nineteenth century. The term ‘Hudson River School’ was coined by a critic in the late 1870s, when the landscape style associated with these painters was already in decline in public opinion and European influences from Barbizon, Munich, and London increasingly shaped American landscape art. Thus, the term was meant to mock the provincial and outdated landscape style of the School.100 The most celebrated and successful Hudson River School artists were (among a few others) Thomas Cole – a British immigrant who was idealized as the father and founding figure of the School – his student Frederic Edwin Church, as well as Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Asher Brown Durand. These artists were also key figures in forming and establishing 100 Miller, 76.

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the notion of the new world’s untouched nature sites as embodiments of the American nation and culture. Set against Europe’s domesticated and culturally refined landscapes, the American wilderness and the prospect of its civilization (the project of the American Frontier) became an emblem of American nationhood and cultural self-understanding.101 The refreshing and exotic topographies depicted in the paintings of the Hudson River artists contrasted the worn-out and commercialized volcanoes, glaciers, and mountain summits of Europe. This notion of newness and difference also found resonance with art consumers in the old world, where artists like Church or Bierstadt were appreciated for their revitalization of landscape iconography. As the term ‘wilderness’ might already indicate, the sublime represented an essential component of the American national landscape project. While this relevance of the sublime is generally accepted in the art historical discourse, its particular role within the School’s imagery has been assessed divergently. What complicates the matter is the fact that pure representations of the sublime rarely seem to occur in the artists’ pictures. This is why Andrew Wilton, in his Tate exhibition catalogue American Sublime, detects a transformation of the imagery of the sublime in American landscape art: given the meager opportunities for American artists to study European paintings first-hand (instead of colorless reproductions in the form of mezzotints or engravings), they simply had to learn their trade based on the topographies in front of them.102 This rather experimental method, combined with the artists’ scrappy art historical background, led to a fuzzier version of American sublimity, which also included Claudean beauty, the British picturesque, and American concepts of Christian spirituality. Angela Miller interprets the American painters’ interplay of the landscape modes picturesque, sublime, and beautiful as an embodiment of ‘a form of concordia discors, or harmony of opposing elements, which was the aesthetic correlative of social dynamics in a healthy republic’.103 Against this, Winfried Fluck foregrounds the commercial aspects underlying the eclectic landscapes of the Hudson River School. In order to present and capitalize upon the American nation’s intertwined representation of sublime wilderness and pastoral civilization, the painters dramatically staged this theme through the combination of aesthetic categories. While sublime subjects such as storms, volcano eruptions, water rapids, the raging sea, 101 Miller, 218; Lawson-Peebles, 11. 102 Wilton 2002, 18. 103 Miller, 14.

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cliffs, mountain ranges, and ice-covered peaks are present throughout the works of the Hudson River School, these phenomena are at the same time tamed through their combination with pastoral themes.104 A case in point in this regard is Albert Bierstadt’s famous painting The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, in which the terrible summits of the mountain range are pushed to the background to make space for the evanescent idyll of a Native American settlement.105 Both Wilton, Miller, and Fluck share the idea that the landscapes of the Hudson River School employ an impure, tamed, and watered-down version of the sublime, due to the interplay with other aesthetic categories. In opposition to this, I argue that aspects of domestication, taming, and civilization represent permanent possibilities, potentials, and nuances of the sublime itself. Principally, the sublime holds close relations to neighboring aesthetic categories (the beautiful, pastoral, picturesque, ridiculous, etc.) and is therefore capable of incorporating nuances or even larger parts of these neighbors. Viewed in this light, the images of the Hudson River School present the iconography of the sublime in different aggregates and states, ranging from depictions with a strong affective potential to depictions where the sublime almost becomes invisible, merely leaving traces of its terrifying presence. This hybrid approach further coincides with the implicit pictorial program of the School, which encompassed the American nation manifesting in its awe-inspiring natural sites and the project of civilizing this new Garden of Eden. Indeed, strictly terrifying landscape representations would have undermined these ideological intentions, for such imagery would make visible the limitations of human agency and civilization moving forward. This might also explain why so few pictures of the American landscapists represent catastrophic events (with human casualties). Interestingly, the School’s ‘founding father’, Thomas Cole, did not adhere to this ideological framework. In his picture cycle The Course of Empire, he expressed his political skepticism and his fatalistic view of history.106 Consisting of five parts, the cycle narrates the rise and fall of an ancient empire: a Salvatoresque wilderness transforms into a Claudean pastoral landscape, which then rises to a state of splendor and decadence, until it gets destroyed in the style of Martin, leaving behind a Romanticist ruin landscape. Given 104 Fluck, 95-98. 105 Albert Bierstadt. The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. 1863. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 186.7 x 306.7 cm. Oil on canvas. 106 Thomas Cole. The Course of Empire. 1833-1836. New-York Historical Society, New York. Five pictures with different dimensions. Oil on canvas.

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its devastating end, Cole’s cycle appears to be far from being well-suited to nurturing nationalistic tendencies among its viewers. Strangely enough though, it is documented that the American public understood the work as a warning example of Europe’s destructive history, whose mistakes should not and will not be repeated by the young nation of the USA.107 Mainly, it was the artist generation after Cole that worked to popularize and economically exploit a less problematic type of national landscape.108 However, if the sublime and other traditional aesthetic categories played such a crucial part in the production and reception of American landscape painting in the mid-nineteenth century, how was this academic knowledge initially conceived by the artists? There was a wide range of connections for cultural exchange between the New York landscape school and the European art world. American artists received training in European art academies (some for instance in Düsseldorf, Germany); they travelled the Grand Tour; they saw Martin’s triptych of the Apocalypse in New York; they read John Ruskin, Alexander von Humboldt, and other theorists, and studied the pictures of a wide range of European artists. The result was an eclectic set of influences, as described by Miller in the following: This New York-centered landscape style fused topographical, German and English romantic, and seventeenth-century French and Italo-Dutch influences into an American idiom characterized by its linkage of naturalism, nationalism, and Protestant piety toward nature as the revelation of deity.109

It was this amalgam of various landscape styles in combination with a set of religious, political, cultural, and natural scientific discourses that constituted and visualized the notion of the American national land. These national landscape visualizations were increasingly spectacularized, as stated by Alan Wallach, who describes the artists’ conventional use of panoramic formats for their paintings. He argues that the American landscapists sought to imitate the visual effects of the Panorama medium. Thereby, they also adapted the Panorama’s underlying ideological configurations (its scopic regime).110 But the panoramic represents only one side of the School’s landscape imagery. Its 107 Miller, 33f. 108 For example, the practices and means by which Albert Bierstadt turned his artistic production into a commercially successful enterprise is described in: Ferber. 109 Miller, 65f. 110 Wallach, 79f. – A scopic regime, as Wallach understands Christian Metz’s term, signifies visual techniques that create an essential vision and a hierarchy of viewing by repressing other perspectives.

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reciprocal counterpart is the telescopic, meaning the depiction of astonishing detail within the dimensions of the panoramic. Together, both visual regimes deploy a dialectics of viewing, which enables the experience of visual domination over overwhelmingly vast spaces.111 Most distinctly, the interplay between the panoramic and the telescopic can be viewed within the so-called Great Pictures of Frederic Edwin Church. Great Pictures were large landscape paintings that were exhibited alone. As they toured through the country, they were made accessible to larger and broader audiences, also due to low entrance fees. In terms of the curatorial staging of these pictures, it is known that Church’s Heart of the Andes was shown in a darkened exhibition space.112 Only gas lights illuminated the canvas. The painting itself was hidden behind a curtain until it was abruptly revealed to the viewer.113 The panoramic size and format of the painting both contrasts and corresponds to its detailed telescopic representation of the topography’s flora. To study these detailed particularities, some visitors brought opera glasses to the exhibition.114 In accordance with the natural scientific discourses that informed the production of the work, the opera glasses were employed as scientific instruments to scrutinize the natural specimens in the painting.115 Church’s second famous Great Picture is Niagara (Fig. 9). The Niagara Falls represented the most popular and a frequently depicted natural site around the mid-nineteenth century, as the place had become a national symbol of America’s power and cultural authority.116 Church’s painted version of this landscape icon tapped into and nurtured this ideological signification. The picture received immense public attention both in the USA, where it was exhibited in numerous cities, and in England, where it was shown in a darkened room with spot lights.117 Like The Heart of the Andes, Niagara is 111 Wallach, 81. 112 Frederic Edwin Church. Heart of the Andes. 1859. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 168 x 302.9 cm. Oil on canvas. 113 Westheider, 67. 114 Westheider, 68. 115 With his travel to South America, Church was not only geographically but also methodologically following the footprints of the German natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who he was fascinated with (Novak; Westheider). – In general, there were strong natural scientific impulses giving shape to the landscape art of the Hudson River School, as for instance in the case of Thomas Moran’s images of Colorado and the Grand Canyon, which give detailed geological information on the structures inscribed to these sites. 116 Kornhauser, 15; Miller, 217. 117 Wilton 2002, 29. – As for the exhibition of the painting in England, see Kevin J. Avery’s various texts on this matter mentioned in: Wallach, 89 (Footnote 1).

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Fig. 9: Frederic Edwin Church. Niagara. 1857. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 101.6 x 229.9 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

set in the panoramic format of 2:1. The painting captures the semicircular shape of the Niagara Falls from slightly above. However, this commanding position becomes destabilized by placing the viewer right above the water rapids, with no solid ground to stand on or framing repoussoirs to hold on to. The tension between these two contrasting effects – commanding control and vertiginous instability – correlates with Wallach’s receptive binary model of the panoramic and the telescopic. Niagara sets in motion an interplay of chaos and control, affect and examination, wilderness and civilization. Indeed, as I have repeatedly noted, these dichotomic pairings are also constitutive for experiences of the sublime. Similar to the reception of other immersive media, such as the Eidophusikon or the Panorama, the experience of the American Great Pictures was accompanied by circulating anecdotes, legends, and textual accounts which testified to the illusionistic and immersive qualities of the images. In the case of Niagara, it might be true that even the celebrated art critic and writer John Ruskin felt compelled to check if the light reflections on the painting were an intrinsic (that is painted) feature or the result of exterior influences.118 The broadly shared impression of Niagara’s ‘illusion of an unmediated relationship of nature to art’ did, however, not take into account certain discrepancies between Church’s pictorial representation and the factual appearance of the Niagara Falls.119 As demonstrated by Winfried Fluck, the painting did not give a faithful representation of the original topography. Quite the opposite, the picture’s landscape is strongly 118 Tuckerman, 371. 119 Miller, 98.

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idealized and altered, for it does not show the touristic infrastructure that had already been built when the artist visited the Falls.120 Moreover, Church and his colleagues did not merely employ a topographical realism but relied heavily on European academic conventions and concepts which guided their pictorial perception of American nature. Within the context of my historical trajectory, tracing the iconography of sublime landscapes toward the emergence of disaster cinema, the works of the Hudson River School are highly relevant, for they introduced an eclectic mixture of nuances and aggregates of the sublime. It is this visual morphing between different landscape modes that cinema would learn to adapt for the successive arrangement of multiple images. In addition, the commercial strategies of the American landscapists already anticipated some of the later practices of the American cultural industry. This particularly applies to the Moving Panoramas that toured the US-American land. By means of long canvas rolls, which were successively exhibited during the performance, Moving Panoramas presented the viewer with the dynamic of travel through landscape.121 Unlike static Panoramas, they could be easily transported and exhibited, even in far remote places. Thereby, these ‘motion picture’ shows, to a certain extent, anticipated the distribution and exhibition practices of early cinematographic showmanship in the USA.122 Finally, the American Frontier’s dynamic oscillation between wilderness and civilization, as it was embodied in the pictures of the Hudson River artists, would later resonate within the iconography of American cinema.

Nature’s Forces in Motion: The Diorama The Diorama was invented by Louis Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton.123 Daguerre, far more known for his contribution to the invention of photography (the Daguerreotype), worked as a painter and stage designer before he started collaborating with Bouton. Unlike Daguerre, who never 120 Fluck, 92. 121 Extensive research on the Moving Panoramas has been carried out by Erkki Huhtamo. See: Huhtamo. 122 See the first chapters in: Hall. 123 As was the case with the Eidophusikon and the Panorama, the Diorama’s name was derived from Ancient Greek. Accordingly, the term was composited of the Greek words ‘dia’ (through) and ‘horama’ (view) (Huhtamo, 139). – The following descriptions of the medium as well as biographical information, if not stated otherwise, will be based on Huhtamo’s discussion of the Diorama (Huhtamo, 139-167).

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Fig. 10: Diorama et Wauxhall, Paris. From: Alexis Donnet and Jacques-Auguste Kaufmann, Architectonographie des théâtres, ou parallèle historique et critique de ces édifices, considérés sous le rapport de l’architecture et de la décorationis (Paris: Orgiazzi 1837). Author’s collection.

achieved significant recognition as a painter, Bouton was a well-known and successful artist with regular participation in the Paris Salon exhibitions.124 Both Daguerre and Bouton received training at the production company of the Panorama painter Pierre Prévost. In 1822, the Diorama was presented to the Parisian public for the first time.125 Essentially, the Diorama was a pictorial device specialized in depicting dynamic transitions and movements both in exterior landscapes and interior spaces (Fig. 10). The Paris Diorama consisted of an image plane of 22 by fourteen meters. The thirteen meters distance between the screenspace and the darkened viewer-space was confined by a tunnel.126 The amphitheater auditorium held seats and standing room for around 350 persons (the later London version provided seats for c. 200). The effects of changing weather conditions, the movements of sun and moon, as well as 124 Buddemeier, 25. 125 My analysis of the Diorama is restricted to the device patented by Daguerre. Thus, I will not include the medium’s later transformation into theatrical installations of ecological habitats to be exhibited in natural history museums. A detailed account of the latter is given in: Wonders. 126 Buddemeier, 26.

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the dynamics of natural disasters (fires, volcanic eruptions, floods) were primarily achieved through the Diorama’s elaborated and hidden lighting system, which revealed, obscured, emphasized, and animated specific parts of the transparent canvas in a wide range of colors. Music and sound effects were only employed in later adaptations of the device. Faux terrain, as it transitioned the border between viewing platform and image-space in the Panoramas, was only tried out once by Daguerre, yet so unsuccessfully that he never repeated the attempt. In terms of the technological development of the medium, the most crucial advancement was the double-effect Diorama. When it was initially presented to an enthusiastic audience in 1834, this enhanced version struck the viewer with animated pictorial objects such as a procession during midnight mass, a landslide in the Swiss Alps, and the biblical Deluge. The increased dynamic of the double-effect Diorama was achieved through the superimposition of canvases ‘painted from both sides with partly different elements, and illuminated both by natural light and by hidden lamps’.127 The painted elements on the canvases were illuminated and obscured according to an elaborate choreography, which gave the impression of successive movement. Daguerre and Bouton usually showed two images during a performance, each for around fifteen minutes.128 Instead of switching the canvases, it was the auditorium that rotated from one view to the next. In addition, even though it appears that the viewer-space was almost entirely shrouded in darkness, paper brochures with information on the presented subjects were handed out.129 At two to three Francs, the ticket prizes for the Paris Diorama were relatively high – perhaps an attempt to appeal to a more distinguished audience from the art sector and from the higher social ranks. However, in their advertisement text, Daguerre and Bouton praised their device primarily as an improvement of the Panorama, instead of locating it within the tradition of easel painting. An article published in the Journal des Artistes states that the Diorama attracted a broader audience (‘la multitude’) than traditional art exhibitions, which were visited by a more exclusive elite.130 One critic even categorically expelled the device from the realm of art by stressing its proximity to industrial production conditions.131 At the same time, other 127 Huhtamo, 146. 128 Huhtamo, 146. 129 Buddemeier, 41. 130 Buddemeier, 31. 131 Buddemeier, 29.

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voices in the public discourse celebrated the Diorama’s ‘absolutely perfect’ illusionistic qualities. ‘A lady was said to have been “so fully convinced that the church represented was real, that she asked to be conducted down the steps to walk in the building.”’132 Once again, as in the previous chapters on the Eidophusikon, the Panorama, and the American Great Pictures, one encounters the circulation of myths and legends, typical for the emergence of new pictorial media of illusionism and immersion. Only one year after the Paris Diorama had opened its doors in 1822, Daguerre’s brother-in-law launched a second Diorama in London which went bankrupt within just a few years. It was re-opened by Bouton, who moved to London in 1830. Except for the years around the July Revolution of 1830, Daguerre’s Paris Diorama operated successfully, until it burned down in 1839.133 After that, it was mainly Bouton who ran Dioramas in the French capital. Since Daguerre owned the patent on the pictures’ production process (until he sold it to the French state for a high pension), his exclusive canvases toured through Europe and were even exhibited in the USA. The subjects painted by Daguerre, Bouton, and their assistant Hippolyte Sébron were either interior or exterior views. The latter encompassed mountain disasters and Alpine sceneries (Landslide in the Valley of Goldau, Switzerland; View of Mont Blanc taken from the Valley of Chamonix; Valley of Sarnen [incl. a thunder storm]), biblical episodes and catastrophic events (The Deluge, The Departure of the Israelites out of Egypt), burning cities and historical spectacles (The Edinburgh Fire of 1824, The Battle for the Hotel de Ville in Paris during the July Revolution), as well as adaptations of John Martin paintings (Belshazzar’s Feast).134 Additionally, foreign productions by other showmen included a Crucifixion, with the City of Jerusalem; The Great Fire in New York (both in New York), as well as volcano eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna (both in Vienna). Among the interior subjects, church views were the most popular and most often produced motifs.135 Catastrophic events were presented on a regular basis. Unfortunately, since none of them were preserved, I can only speculate on their actual appearance based on historical documents and testimonies of contemporary witnesses.136 132 Huhtamo, 151. 133 Buddemeier, 32ff. 134 Buddemeier, 26. 135 The Diorama of The Church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mond was the most successful Diorama picture Daguerre ever exhibited. It was shown without intermission for three full years (Buddemeier, 38). 136 The only preserved (and restored) Diorama canvas by Daguerre is Gothic Church Interior, to be seen in Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais de Bry-sur-Marne, France. Information on the restoration

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As has been stated, Daguerre and Bouton advertised their Diorama as an enhancement of the Panorama medium. More precisely, they claimed to have overcome the Panorama’s immobility, which remained its main target for criticism. The Diorama’s innovation of perceptible motion within the image field provided ‘a complete means of illusion’.137 Indeed, the enthusiastic responses of critics and paying customers to the illusionistic effects of the Diorama appear to confirm the claims made by its inventors. However, as Heinz Buddemeier points out, there were also elements inherent to the Diorama that undermined its immersive and illusionistic appeal. For example, what might have confused the viewer were the medium’s temporal discrepancies, as it presented durations of twelve hours (from sunrise to sunset) within fifteen minutes.138 Moreover, unlike the Panorama, the Diorama’s screen did not surround the spectator entirely. Hence, it was possible for him/her to not face the picture (even though s/he would merely view the darkness of the negated off-screen-space). Finally, the shifting of images during the performance might have been perceived as a spatiotemporal rupture between the depicted topographies. When the Valley of Sarnen turned into the Cathedral of Canterbury during the very first performance of the Diorama, there was no recognizable coherence between these exterior and interior views. Such fissures within the continuous timespaces of the presented events were shared with the Diorama’s implicit predecessor, the Eidophusikon. In many ways, Daguerre and Bouton’s medium resembled de Loutherbourg’s device. Most essentially, both enabled pictorial experiences of movement, both employed a darkened viewer-space in which the spectator was immobilized, and both shared a similar iconographical repertoire. One crucial difference, however, was the Diorama’s abandonment of theatrical miniature figures in favor of a strictly pictorial technology of creating motion. While the distinction between miniature model and painted background remained visible in the Eidophusikon, the Diorama presented movement within one homogenous pictorial space. With its far bigger screen, the Diorama also leaned toward the overwhelming pictorial effects of the Panorama. Yet, unlike Barker’s Panorama rotundas where the viewers could move around freely, the Diorama’s auditorium immobilized the body of the spectator. project is given in: Leininger-Miller. – Besides this lone survivor, there are a few traditional easel paintings by Daguerre which also existed as Diorama pictures; however, none of them represent exterior views. 137 Daguerre 1821, qtd. in: Huhtamo, 141. 138 Buddemeier, 27.

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Indeed, the Diorama represents a case in point for the disciplined, affected, measured, and immobilized modern observer that Crary describes. In this regard, the Diorama developed a form of spectatorship that also cinema will eventually gravitate toward. As shown by Jacques Aumont, the durable, variable, and isolatable gaze of the cinema is not merely the result of technological innovation; instead, it must be regarded as part of a much larger visual regime ranging from photography and the train traveler to different types of Panoramas and the modern sciences.139 The essential novelty introduced by the double-effect Diorama, as noted by Buddemeier, is the loss of the picture’s material unity and identity, that is to say, it involved a discrepancy between the materiality of the picture(s) and the perception of the image. The Diorama’s pictures are no longer exhibited but being performed.140 At this point, one might also refer to Daguerre’s own observations on his use of lighting techniques. Daguerre argues that for an artist of traditional easel painting, the changing light conditions of reality represent an enemy, which constantly threatens to jeopardize his/her attempt to achieve an inherently consistent set of color relations. Against this, the Diorama artist considers real light as an ally for the creation of light effects, meteorological phenomena, and succession on the screen.141 In order to acknowledge the innovative capacity of the Diorama, let me recall Burke and Kant’s arguments for their rejection of pictorial artworks as media of the sublime. Burke’s argument is based on the premise of obscurity (of ideas), which cannot be presented in painting, ‘because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature’. A painting ‘can only affect simply by the images it presents’.142 Hence, the pictorial presentation of sublime objects of nature generally entails a degeneration of their affective force. There is no genuine aesthetic surplus to pictorial representations of sublime objects. In a comparable manner, Kant claims that the seeming formlessness and boundlessness of sublime natural objects cannot be 139 Aumont 1997. 140 Buddemeier, 38. – Indeed, what Buddemeier neglects in this regard are laterna magica devices, which, since the seventeenth century, managed to create movement in their projected images. However, it was the Diorama that initially achieved this phenomenon far more convincingly on a monumental scale and within a pictorial exhibition space that facilitated experiencing its images as immersive illusions, whereas the laterna magica – until it adapted some of the Diorama’s features – presented its movements either as astonishing special effect gimmicks or as supernatural appearances of demonic spirits (Hick, 115-215). 141 Daguerre 1839, 85f. 142 Burke, 58.

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reproduced in the visual arts, for artistic production is always spatially limited and clear in its usage of form.143 Both Burke and Kant stress the unpresentability of the formlessness of sublime natural objects. However, as Kant repeatedly underscores, formlessness is just a subjective quality attributed to an object. Thus, why should it not be possible to artificially simulate this subjective formlessness (which can be described as a phenomenal structure of excessiveness)? One must also consider that Burke and Kant argue from within a specific historical context of visual artistry. They simply did not foresee the emergence of enhanced media technologies such as the Eidophusikon, the Diorama, and cinema, which raised the bar for illusionistic and immersive experiences and promised the fulfillment of the art’s ancient dream of overcoming the receptive awareness of its mediality. In terms of the Diorama, it was the presentation of motion on a homogenous image plane that led to a further intensification of the experience of sublime disaster events within visual media. According to Kant’s typology, sublime formlessness can appear in a quantitative mode (the mathematically sublime) and in a qualitative mode (the dynamically sublime). As for the latter, it is nature’s violent forces in motion that burst the perception of aesthetic form. Burke also considers power a ‘capital source of the sublime’.144 Nature’s dynamic forces being expressed through motion – this is what the Diorama initially made presentable within its illusionistic screen-space.

Works Cited ‘A View of the Eidophusikon, with Anecdotes of Mr. Loutherbourg’. The European Magazine, and London Review, vol. 1 (March 1782), 180–82. Aumont, Jacques. ‘The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze’. In The Image in Dispute. Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography. Austin: University of Texas Press 1997, 231-258. Baugh, Christopher. ‘Philippe de Loutherbourg: Technology-Driven Entertainment and Spectacle in the Late Eighteenth Century’. Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 2007), 251-268. Begemann, Christian. ‘Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs “Mönch am Meer”; Aspekte eines Umbruchs in der Geschichte der Wahrnehmung’. Deutsche 143 Kant, 136. – However, Kant himself is not very consequent in regard to obeying this rule, for he names numerous artworks as examples of sublime objects. 144 Burke, 65.

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Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 64 (1990), 54-95. Börsch-Supan, Helmut and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig. Caspar David Friedrich; Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmäßige Zeichnungen. Munich: Prestel 1973. Buddemeier, Heinz. Panorama; Diorama; Photographie; Entstehung und Wirkung neuer Medien im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1970. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2008 [1990]. Burnim, Kalman A. David Garrick; Director. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1973. Campbell, Michael J. ‘John Martin as a Commercial Printmaker’. In John Martin; Apocalypse. Edited by Martin Myrone. London: Tate Publishing 2011, 23-33. Comment, Bernard. The Panorama. London: Reaktion Books 1999. Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé. ‘A M; Le directeur des Annales Françaises’. Annales françaises des arts, des sciences et des lettres, vol. 8 (1821), 93. Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, et al. An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerréotype and the Diorama. London: Mc Lean 1839. During, Simon. ‘Beckford in Hell: An Episode in the History of Secular Enchantment’. Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 2007), 269-288. Eberhard, Johann August. Handbuch der Aesthetik für gebildete Leser aus allen Ständen; Erster Theil. Halle: Hemmerde & Schwetschke 1803. Feaver, William. The Art of John Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975. Fluck, Winfried. ‘Theatralität und Exzess; Ein europäischer Blick auf die Hudson River School’. In Neue Welt; Die Erfindung der amerikanischen Malerei. Edited by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Ortrud Westheider. Munich: Hirmer 2007, 90-102. Freeman, Michael. Victorians and the Prehistoric; Tracks to a Lost World. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004. Gage, John. ‘Loutherbourg: Mystagogue of the Sublime’. History Today, vol. 13, no. 5 (May 1963), 332-339. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art; From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge: MIT Press 2003 [2001]. Groom, Gloria. ‘Art, Illustration, and Enterprise in Late Eighteenth-Century English Art: A Painting by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 18, no. 2 (1992), 124-135. Grundmann, Günther. ‘Caspar David Friedrich: Topographische Treue und künstlerische Freiheit, dargestellt an drei Motiven des Riesengebirgspanoramas von Bad Warmbrunn aus’. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, vol. 19 (1974), 89-105. Grundmann, Günther. ‘Fragmente zu einem Riesengebirgspanorama Caspar David Friedrichs’. Schlesien, vol. 4 (1959), 148-152.

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Hall, Sheldon and Steve Neale. Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2010. Hardcastle, Ephraim. Wine and Walnuts; or, After Dinner Chit-Chat; Volume 1. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown 1823. Hick, Ulrike. Geschichte der optischen Medien. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1999. Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion; Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge: MIT Press 2013. Hyde, Ralph and Scott B. Wilcox. Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All-Embracing’ View. London: Trefoil Publications 1988. Imdahl, Max. Giotto: Arenafresken; Ikonographie – Ikonologie – Ikonik. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1980. Johnstone, Christopher. John Martin. London: Academy Editions 1974. Joppien, Rüdiger. Die Szenenbilder Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourgs; Eine Untersuchung zu ihrer Stellung zwischen Malerei und Theater. PhD diss., Cologne University 1972. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Eric Matthews and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001 [2000]. Keller, Susanne B. Naturgewalt im Bild; Strategien visueller Naturaneignung in Kunst und Wissenschaft 1750-1830. Weimar: VDG 2006. Kleist, Heinrich von. ‘Feelings before Friedrich’s Seascape’. Translated by Philip B. Miller. In Philip B. Miller. ‘Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich’. Art Journal, vol. 33, no. 3 (pring 1974), 208 (Kleist), 205-210 (Miller). Kokkonen, Lars. ‘The Prophet Motive? John Martin as a Civil Engineer’. In John Martin; Apocalypse. Edited by Martin Myrone. London: Tate Publishing 2011, 35-41. Kornhaber, David. ‘Regarding the Eidophusikon: Spectacle, Scenography, and Culture in Eighteenth Century England’. Theatre Arts Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (fall 2009), 45-59. Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin. ‘“All Nature Here Is New to Art”; Die amerikanische Landschaftsmalerei im 19. Jahrhundert’. In Neue Welt; Die Erfindung der amerikanischen Malerei. Edited by id. and Ortrud Westheider. Munich: Hirmer 2007, 15-25. Lawson-Peebles, Robert. Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988. Lefeuvre, Oliver. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg; 1740-1812. Paris: Arthena 2012. Leininger-Miller, Theresa. ‘Leininger-Miller Reviews Daguerre’s Sole Extant Diorama, Recently Restored’. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 13, no. 1 (spring 2014), accessed 04 January 2020, http://www.19thc- https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring14/ leininger-miller-reviews-daguerre-s-sole-extant-diorama-recently-restored. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. ‘Laocoön; An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)’. In Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, 25-130.

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Lister, Raymond. British Romantic Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Matteson, Lynn R. ‘John Martin’s “The Deluge”; A Study in Romantic Catastrophe’. Pantheon, vol. 39 (1981), 220-228. McCalman, Iain. ‘Conquering Academy and Marketplace: Philippe de Loutherbourg’s Channel Crossing’. In Living with the Royal Academy; Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768 – 1848. Edited by Sarah Monks, John Barrell and Mark Hallett. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing 2013, 75-88. McCalman, Iain. ‘Magic, Spectacle, and the Art of de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon’. In Sensation and Sensibility; Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door. Edited by Ann Bermingham. London: Yale University Press 2005, 181-211. McCalman, Iain. ‘Mystagogues of Revolution: Cagliostro, Loutherbourg and Romantic London’. In Romantic Metropolis; The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840. Edited by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, 177-203. McCalman, Iain. ‘Spectres of Quackery: The Fragile Career of Philippe de Loutherbourg’. Cultural and Social History, vol. 3, no. 3 (2006), 341–54. McCalman, Iain. ‘The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime’. Romanticism on the Net, vol. 46 (May 2007, Romantic Spectacle), accessed 23 November 2019, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ ron/2007/v/n46/016129ar.html. Miller, Angela. The Empire of the Eye; Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993. Morden, Barbara. John Martin; Apocalypse Now!. Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria Press 2010. Myrone, Martin. ‘John Martin: Art, Taste, and the Spectacle of Culture’. In John Martin; Apocalypse. Edited by id. London: Tate Publishing 2011, 11-21. Myrone, Martin and Anna Austen. ‘Catalogue’. In John Martin; Apocalypse. Edited by Martin Myrone. London: Tate Publishing 2011, 61-213. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture; American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875. London: Thames and Hudson 1980. O’Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show; Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2007. Oettermann, Stephan. Das Panorama; Die Geschichte eines Massenmediums. Frankfurt on the Main: Syndikat 1980. Paley, Morton D. The Apocalyptic Sublime. New Haven: Yale University Press 1986. Plessen, Marie-Louise von and Ulrich Giersch, eds. Sehsucht; Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19. Jahrhunderts. Basel and Frankfurt on the Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern 1993.

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Pöpperl, Christian. Auf der Schwelle; Ästhetik des Erhabenen und negative Theologie: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, Immanuel Kant und Jean-François Lyotard. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2007. Rosenfeld, Sybil. ‘The Eidophusikon Illustrated’. In A History of Pre-Cinema; Volume 2. Edited by Stephen Herbert. London: Routledge 2000, 79-81. Schultz, Hartwig.‘“Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft”; Kritische Edition der Texte von Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano und Heinrich von Kleist im Paralleldruck’. In Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft; Caspar David Friedrichs Gemälde ‘Der Mönch am Meer’ betrachtet von Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim und Heinrich von Kleist. Edited by id. and Lothar Jordan. Frankfurt on the Oder: Kleist-Museum 2005, 38-47. Solkin, David H. Painting for Money; The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press 1993. Stone, George Winchester and George M. Kahrl. David Garrick; A Critical Biography. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1979. Tuckerman, Henry T. Book of the Artists; American Artist Life, Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists: Preceded by an Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of Art in America. New York: G. P. Putnam & Son 1867. Ullrich, Wolfgang. ‘Das unschuldige Auge (the innocence of the eye). Reinheitsgebote künstlerischer Wahrnehmung’. In Was war Kunst? Biographien eines Begriffs. Edited by id. Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2006, 144-164. Uricchio, William. ‘A “Proper Point of View”: The Panorama and Some of its Early Media Iterations’. Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 9, no. 3 (August 2011), 225-238. Wallach, Alan. ‘Die Künstler der Hudson River School und das Panorama’. In Neue Welt; Die Erfindung der amerikanischen Malerei. Edited by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Ortrud Westheider. Munich: Hirmer 2007, 78-89. Westheider, Ortrud. ‘Kunst und Wissenschaft; Die Hudson River School und die deutsche Romantik’. In Neue Welt; Die Erfindung der amerikanischen Malerei. Edited by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and id. Munich: Hirmer 2007, 67-77. Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. ‘The Sublime Rivalry of Word and Image: Turner and Ruskin Revisited’. Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 28, no. 1 (2000), 149-169. Wilton, Andrew. American Sublime; Landscape Painting in the United States; 18201880. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002. Wilton, Andrew. ‘Sublime or Ridiculous? Turner and the Problem of the Historical Figure’. New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 2 (winter 1985), 343-376. Wilton, Andrew. Turner and the Sublime. London: British Museum Publications 1980. Wonders, Karen. Habitat Dioramas; Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell 1993.

5.

Cinema – A Medium of the Sublime? Abstract I set out to explore cinema in terms of its potential function as a medium of the sublime. Burke and Kant’s accounts of the sublime are employed to examine their correlation with cinema’s technological, formal, and receptive repertoire. This encompasses intrinsic features such as cinematography’s innovation of putting in motion photographic images, aspects of the montage, the aesthetic potential of the camera as cinema’s central organ of expression and perception, sound effects, and multimedia interplay as well as external features of cinema which constitute the medium as a concrete space for cinematic experiences. To what extent do these various features provoke, facilitate, mediate, or participate in a sensory and affective overpowering of the viewer? Keywords: Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Morsch, Somatic Film Theory, Technological History of Cinema, Immersion, Media History

After having traced the sublime’s iconography up until the decline of the Panorama and the Diorama, I will investigate in this chapter the medium of cinema, particularly in terms of its potential function as a medium of the sublime. The chapter represents a connecting link between the previous historical enquiry and the subsequent film analysis of the disaster genre. An analysis of the technological and receptive fundament of the medium of cinema allows for comparative references to earlier visual media of the sublime. Note, however, that this enquiry will be limited to cinema’s technological and general receptive dimensions; thematic aspects and experiences of specific films will be dealt with later in the film analysis. As for the description of cinema’s technological features, one must consider the transformations that cinema has been going through over the years. There is not just one cinematic medium to be described but a variety of devices and modes of presentation and performance. Thus, it is crucial to reflect on the technological history of cinema and discuss different concepts associated with

Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch05

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its historical stages, such as the distinction between the cinema of attractions and narrative cinema. To a certain degree, a historical investigation of cinema must further include social and economic factors as well as public discourses which have informed contemporary practices of cinematic production and reception. The goal is to outline the most essential stages and models of the cinematic experience in order to provide contextual orientation for the subsequent discussion of disaster films from all ages of cinema. Once again, I will employ the aesthetic framework of the sublime (according to Burke and Kant), this time, as a means to examine its correlation with cinema’s technological, formal, and receptive repertoire. This encompasses: first, intrinsic features such as cinematography’s putting in motion of photographic images, aspects of the montage, the aesthetic potential of the camera as cinema’s central organ of expression and perception, as well as sound effects and multimedia interplay; second, external features of cinema which constitute the medium as a concrete space for cinematic experiences, including relations of screen-space and viewer-space, the location of the viewer’s body, and different modes of reception as part of the cinematic performance. To what extent do these various features provoke, facilitate, mediate, or participate in a sensory and affective overpowering of the viewer, as described by the Burkean and Kantian accounts of the sublime? In addition, emphasis will be laid on somatic facets of the cinematic experience, as they are theoretically explored by Vivian Sobchack and Thomas Morsch (see also p. 25). Extending their somatic models of the cinematic experience, I will also attempt to establish intersections and points of contact between these models and Burke and Kant’s theoretical accounts of the sublime. The aim is to show that compatibility between both theoretical branches can be reached in preparation for the film analysis, in which cinematic experiences of the sublime will be considered as predominantly somatic phenomena. Moreover, Sobchack’s model is valuable because it involves a nuanced phenomenological investigation of the relations between cinema’s technological apparatus and the particularities of human perception – a topic that relates to and, at the same time, problematizes my previous discussion of the pictorial receptive effects of illusionistic immersion and media reflexivity.

Photographic Images in Motion First and foremost, the technology of cinematography must be discussed as well as the novelties it comprised. What cinematography achieved in the

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most striking manner was to transform photographic images into a seamless and continuous motion. As noted in the case of Daguerre and Bouton’s Diorama, the realization of movement appearing on one homogenous screen plane had not been new to the viewers of visual spectacles when cinematography was invented in the late nineteenth century.1 Also, the dissolving views of the laterna magica provided effects of motion and blending (see also Footnote 36). The medium of photography, as it was invented and developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, promised an immaculate pictorial recording of reality. Despite its potential to stage, fake, or to be manipulated, photography’s immediate realistic appeal, its recording function, and its resemblance to human perception have been established as widely-acknowledged topoi from the medium’s invention up until today.2 Yet, like traditional easel paintings and Panoramas, photographs merely present immobile and frozen moments of reality. Therefore, they deviate from the human experience of reality as a constant stream of events – a problem (insofar as it was perceived as one) that was most successfully solved by cinematography. As it allied with the photographic image and set it in motion, cinematography, from early on, gained the status as a recording device of life itself. For example, the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis) invented their Cinematograph initially as a machine for the scientific analysis of real movement.3 On the one hand, this claimed realism seems to limit the medium’s range of expression to the given objects, events, and physical laws of the real world, making it far more dependent on things and actions that factually exist or took place – a set of restrictions that hardly concerned visual artists in pre-cinematic times. On the other hand, one does not even need to jump as far ahead as to the digital visual effects of 1990s-blockbuster cinema to find a high degree of imaginative manipulation of reality’s recordings. Already in cinema’s early years, the filmmaker Georges Méliès realized cinematic visions of fantasy and magic through special effects, forming an antithesis and parallel strand to the realism of the Lumières. More generally, the fantastical 1 It is impossible to pinpoint cinematography’s invention to one single individual, event, or place, hence the rather indistinct date given above. For the complex and diverse history of cinematography’s emergence, see: Wyver; Elsaesser 2002, 47-68. – Moreover, Thomas Elsaesser names a number of additional inventors which quickly were forgotten (Elsaesser 2002, 36f.). 2 This topical branch ranges from André Bazin’s realist ontology of the photographic image to Roland Barthes’ Reflections on Photography as a mechanical repetition of passed moments to Klaus Sachs-Hombach’s characterization of photography as a both indexical and iconic medium (Bazin; Barthes; Sachs-Hombach, 217-222). 3 Elsaesser 2002, 47-68.

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and imaginary side of cinema also shows in the entire genre of animated film. Thus, the repeatedly expressed criticism against digital cinema and its abandonment of the medium’s indexicality (resulting from its photographic essence) is built on thin ice, for cinema – as demonstrated by Stephen Prince and Noëll Carroll – never was an exclusively photographic medium in the first place but has always been an amalgam of various media and production practices such as painting, animation, or sculpting.4 Moreover, the cinematic experience is almost never fully realistic and indexical, since its ‘various physical continuities’ are synthetically arranged and composited.5 In turn, the perception of cinema’s indexicality based on photographic images in motion prevails even in the case of highly manipulated or entirely artificial presentations of digital film production. This is because indexicality is also an aesthetic and social value and, therefore, not exclusively dependent on the factual existence of an object. Prince speaks in this regard of ‘indexical properties’ and ‘indexical claims’, which not only have significance for the reception of digital cinema but for cinematic reception in general.6 As for the origins of cinema’s close association with realism and indexicality (as a primarily social, not technological conditioned occurrence), James Lastra locates this phenomenon in broader (and much older) discourses concerning norms of picturing and aesthetics; especially significant in this regard is the distinction between image (a recording of a contingent fragment of the world executed by an amateur) and picture/art (purposeful and creative representation).7 How exactly does cinematography achieve the perceived effect of movement? The photographic images captured on film, as they are projected in a frequency of at least sixteen frames per second, are experienced as motion, because of the viewer’s physiological and cognitive response to them. One condition is the high enough frequency of the sequential images (triggering the physiological response). Electric velocity accelerates film sequences from the perception of their mechanical succession to the perceived simultaneity of the moving picture. The second condition – the cognitive one – is the interplay of similarity and difference in terms of the sequenced images, prompting the spectator’s cognition to dissolve them into one continuous flow of motion.8 4 Prince, 155; Carroll, 6f., 261-263. – An overview of the leading voices in the discussion of cinema’s loss of indexicality (Barbara Savedoff, Steven Shaviro, Keith Griff iths, Berys Gaut, Philip Rosen, Lev Manovich) is given in: Prince, 149. 5 Prince, 53. 6 Prince, 150. 7 Lastra. 8 Paech, 98f.

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Only when these two conditions are met is film no longer perceived as images in motion, but rather as one cinematographic moving picture. As for the current phase of digitally produced film, cinematography’s effect of movement has gained independence from its mechanical performance, in that it has become a fully electronic phenomenon. At the same time, the receptive dimension of digital cinema still operates on the realistic premise of cinema’s dynamization of (what appears to be) photographic images. To gain a clearer understanding of cinematographic movement, let me bring in some of the older moving picture devices that were discussed earlier. De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon employed various technologies and media (painting, miniature figures, faux terrain, card boards, etc.) to construct a unified and illusionistic image-space presenting different phenomena in motion. The interplay of these components facilitated their synthesis in the experience of the viewer. The Eidophusikon’s (implicit) successor, the Diorama, presented movement on a seemingly unified and homogenous image plane; yet, it remained limited to the movements of a few objects within the otherwise immobile image. In opposition to immobile pictorial media like the Panorama, Martin’s monumental disaster paintings and the American Great Pictures, whose images were put in motion by the viewer’s imagination, both the Eidophusikon and the Diorama relocated larger elements of these subjective movements into the technological performance of their devices. This is also what Jonathan Crary describes as being part of the development of the modern subject-observer, whose body and perception become disciplined and agitated on a physiological level (see also p. 21). In continuation of this development, cinematography achieved the ability to present movements that resembled and latched on to subjective processes of perception and imagination. With this ‘outsourcing’ of subjective motion into the cinematographic (and cinematic) apparatus, the sublime’s tension field of freedom and violence is brought into focus once again. According to Kant, the experience of the sublime presupposes the absence of existential affects triggered by real physical danger, but he also states that the sublime unfolds its strongest aesthetic impact when severe violence is let loose upon the subject’s sensibility.9 As Jean-François Lyotard correctly points out, the Kantian sublime is an economic venture in which the experience of sensory violence is invested for the gain of a surplus of freedom.10 Hence, when cinematography – instead of setting the viewer’s imagination in 9 Kant, 144, 148. – Unlike in the German original though, the word ‘violence’ (Gewalt) is not to be found within the English translations of the passages in question. 10 Lyotard, 129f.

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motion – presents movement as a physiologically forced and cognitively trained phenomenon, and, further, when this media technological force is applied to the depiction of the iconography of the sublime (as it occurs within the disaster genre), it is indeed the Kantian exchange of violence (pain) for freedom (pleasure) that organizes the film experience from the ground up. Let me briefly recall what Burke and Kant had to say about the importance of movement within their models of the sublime: Burke conceives (natural) power to be expressed through movement, which in turn causes tension within and sets in motion the physiologic-psychological apparatus of the spectator. Kant regards movement as the essential phenomenal structure for the manifestation of dynamically sublime forces of nature such as thunderstorms, volcano eruptions, waterfalls, storms at sea, and hurricanes. In juxtaposition with these two notions of sublime movement, I will now present Vivian Sobchack’s position on the matter from a somatic f ilm theoretical perspective. In her phenomenology of the cinematic experience, movement plays a crucial role. Film, due to its ontology that is its ability to perceive and express ‘the very movement of [embodied] existence’, is a truly ‘privileged form of communication’.11 ‘Unlike the still photograph, the film exists for us as always in the act of becoming’.12 The moments captured in photographic images become ‘original and real movement’ in the act of cinematic reception.13 Film’s movements present and represent all facets of subjectivity and embodied existence (such as seeing, hearing, feeling, physical and reflective movement).14 Thus, there is more to cinematographic movement than the illusionistic representation of the dynamics and fluctuations of reality, as claimed by Rudolf Arnheim; for cinema also makes sensible the inner motions of subjectivity such as dreaming, fantasizing, fighting, running, dying, contemplating, reflecting, desiring, evaluating, being shocked, surprised, exhausted, angry, or in love.15 According to Sobchack, viewers can relate to cinema’s movements because their bodies resemble the bodies of film and filmmaker.16 All three bodily entities share the same general structures of embodied existence. All of 11 Sobchack, 12. 12 Sobchack, 60. 13 Sobchack, 208. 14 Sobchack, 3f. 15 With the film technological enhancements of color and sound, Arnheim sees man’s ancient dream of a perfect illusionistic representation in the arts finally fulfilled (Arnheim, 154-160). 16 For Sobchack, the body of the filmmaker does not refer to one specific individual (e.g. the auteur director) but to a multiplicity of individuals in their ‘concrete, situated, and synoptic presence’ (Sobchack, 9, Footnote 11), which are involved in the process of film production.

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them are both perceiving and expressing subjects as well as perceived and expressed objects. Always already situated in and intertwined with the world as bodily beings, the bodies of spectator, film, and filmmaker are constantly in a dynamic dialogue with each other. This is the somatic foundation from which each and every cinematic experience must emerge. By emphasizing the resemblance between cinema’s three embodied subject-objects, Sobchack carefully distinguishes her model from apparatus theories that focus either on cinema’s readability and allowance of media reflexivity or on its ability to completely take over and control the viewer’s subjective perception. Throughout her book, she reminds the reader that while the bodies of film, filmmaker, and spectator share the same perception, they never become identical. ‘The viewer is always at some level aware of the double and reversible nature of cinematic perception’.17 Due to this recognition of bodily difference, there is a certain degree of media awareness inscribed to the cinematic experience. While I generally agree with this notion, I would argue that cinema is also able to confront the spectator with sensations of such affective intensity that even the last residue of media awareness can be temporarily suspended. These intense moments of affective immersion are merely framed by the experience of difference of embodied vision, as described by Sobchack. Based on the interplay between immersion and media reflexivity as well as cinema’s general ability to present and represent the dynamic procedures of subjectivity, the medium cinema can swiftly shift between facilitating intense experiences of the sublime and enabling reflections on these experiences. Cinema both presents the sublime and represents it as an act of experience. However, these two sides are hardly ever clearly distinguished; rather, one should envision their shared border areas as generally permeable and malleable, with a sheer endless range of possible nuances. The subjectivity machine cinema can make sensible the two sides of the sublime – sensual crisis and reason’s interference – as a dynamic process of mediation between different aggregates. With its key feature of presenting (and representing) processuality and succession, cinema also brings into focus questions of the sublime’s temporality, whether it unfolds gradually, appears instantly, or dialectically builds up in a back and forth structure. Quite literally, cinema creates time to make sensible, present and represent the temporalities of the sublime event for the viewer. Before investigating specific accounts of cinematic movement in their relation to the receptive functioning of the sublime, cinema’s temporality 17 Sobchack, 10.

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needs to be addressed more broadly. It was Walter Benjamin who famously attributed the experience of shock to cinema. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, he explores shock experiences – in the sense of impulses, energies, affects, and stimuli – as a distinctly modern that is urban, industrial, and technologically accelerated occurrence. Set in contrast to Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, which Benjamin associates with experiences that are meaningful, lasting, and enriched by memory and tradition, the shock experience, just like modern labor, transportation, media, and leisure, turns out to be fragmented, sensational, and mechanically trained. As for cinema, Benjamin argues that in ‘a film, perception conditioned by shock was established as a formal principle’.18 Accordingly, experiences of a work’s aura, successively embracing the viewer and allowing for the (involuntary) involvement of distant memories, associations, and the imagination, are restricted in the cinema space. The two-fold and border structure of the sublime, when applied to cinematic experiences, potentially arrives at a different verdict than Benjamin. Whereas Benjamin’s shocks always entail a foreshortening and depletion of experience and a loss of aura, the sublime’s shocks, affects, and overpowering of the senses can be seen as a leap toward imagination. The sublime’s sensory crisis is nothing but a potential opening toward durable and profound experiences of spirituality, moral insight and reflection. As the cinematic sublime seems to eclipse the gap between the visual regimes of the eighteenth century and the experiential scope of the industrial age, it establishes a much more fluid and continuous relation between the two sides of modernity’s borderline than Benjamin, who argues for a fundamental historical caesura. However, as promising as the sublime’s revaluation of modern aesthetic experiences may sound, if its promise of meaningful experiences within the regime of cinematic shocks and affects really holds up remains to be seen in the film analysis. With his concepts of somatische Empathie (‘somatic empathy’) and Ästhetik der Geschwindigkeit (‘aesthetics of speed’), Thomas Morsch views cinematography’s movements from a particularly aesthetic perspective and thoroughly explores cinema’s somatic potential. Generally, the ‘presentation of object worlds being drawn on the screen in expressive gestures and mediated through a camera, which itself is carried by a movement impulse, makes film a medium that continuously demands a motoric resonance’.19 He then describes somatic empathy ‘as a bodily-mimetic relation to the filmic 18 Benjamin, 175. 19 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 203.

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object worlds and to the filmic movement to which it clings in a re-enacting manner. Somatic empathy represents a continuous but widely latent layer of filmic reception, which, in particular moments, moves to the foreground and unfolds as a rich bodily experience’.20 Unlike former concepts of somatic empathy, which Morsch seeks to expand, his concept is not limited to filmic depictions of human bodies, with which the spectator engages; moreover, it also encompasses filmic movements, forces, and phenomena of all kinds. As for his aesthetics of speed, Morsch primarily employs filmic examples and conventions of the action genre, thereby addressing some of the most essential somatic features that cinematographic movement potentially has to offer: The kinetic spectacle leads the spectator beyond the borders of common perception. Through swift shot changes, light and flicker effects, oblique and tilted framing and swish pans, rapid tracking shots and accelerated diegetic movements, through time manipulations and transformations of images into energetic impulses, the identifying view of the spectator is undermined. The cognitive perception of objects and the possibility of sensing a visual and spatial order are suspended in the most intense moments of action cinema. In these moments, the film becomes a vertiginous rush of images, which is far more somatic-mimetically felt than visual-cognitively comprehended.21

How is all this relevant for the investigation of the receptive characteristics of the cinematic sublime? Morsch describes cinema’s use of dynamic movement as a receptive means to overwhelm the sensual capacity of the viewer, right in coherence with the sublime’s crisis of sensibility (as described by Burke and Kant). Cinematography’s ‘dynamization of space and […] spatialization of time’ (see Chapter 1, Footnote 35) is intensified to such a high degree in the action and disaster genres that an aesthetics of speed, shock, thrill, and terror gets to dominate the cinematic experience. Intensifications as such are accomplished, first, by the delicately orchestrated intertwining of filmed dynamic objects and the dynamic movements of the camera, second, by dynamic montage patterns, and third, by overwhelming visual effects. The precondition for why these movements trigger such extensive affects is the spectator’s embodied existence. Through his/her somatic perception, the spectator empathetically engages with other phenomena. 20 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 204. 21 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 211.

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Only because the spectator knows what it means to occupy a lived-body, which is always already entangled with the world, s/he can mimetically engage with cinema’s movements and its dynamic expressions of bodies, objects, and forces. In terms of the aesthetic category of the sublime, I have not yet systematically explored its somatic dimensions. Thus, before I proceed to investigate other cinematic features, a clarification of the role of the bodily within the aesthetic framework of the sublime is called for. More specifically, the question is: how does the sublime relate to Sobchack and Morsch’s somatic theories of the cinematic experience?

Is the Sublime a Somatic Experience? Given Burke’s role as a British sensualist of the eighteenth century, his theoretical model of the sublime is likely to offer intersections with somatic theories of cinema. He describes in detail the impact of sublime objects on the physiologic-psychological apparatus of the perceiving subject. His mechanistic image of the human body and its connectivity with the mind widely coincides with what was believed to be common sense among other British sensualist and empiricist thinkers. At the beginning of his Philosophical Enquiry, Burke bases his aesthetic model of the sublime on a couple of central physiological premises: due to the universality and identity of the human organs, external objects are perceived in the same manner by everybody. Since ‘bodies present similar images to the whole species, it must necessarily be allowed, that the pleasures and the pains which every object excites in one man, it must raise in all mankind’.22 Further, Burke assumes a broad variety of direct causal relationships between body and mind. Without being able to determine the ‘ultimate cause’ in the ‘great chain of causes’, he investigates the sublime’s reception as ‘certain affections of the mind, that cause certain changes in the body’.23 The three most essential passions in Burke’s Enquiry are pain, pleasure, and terror. As for the sublime, he understands its receptive impact in close 22 Burke, 13. 23 Burke, 118. – It should be added that Burke’s detailed descriptions of sublime objects as they are perceived seem to reverse this causality. Accordingly, sublime objects primarily affect the organs of perception (esp. the eyes). However, this reversal makes more sense if one considers that for Burke perception is not merely a physical process but also a cognitive procedure of the mind. Since both mind and body are the location of constant reciprocal interactions and exchanges, it apparently becomes difficult maintaining a clear structure of causality.

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relation to the experience of physical pain. Objects of terror (perceived under specific receptive circumstances) are per definition sublime objects, while terror itself is described as an ‘apprehension of pain or death’.24 This connectedness between sublimity, terror, and pain is also rooted in a concrete physical resemblance: The only difference between pain and terror, is, that things which cause pain operate on the mind, by the intervention of the body; whereas things that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the operation of the mind suggesting the danger; but both agreeing, either primarily, or secondarily, in producing a tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves, they agree likewise in every thing [sic] else.25

However, terror alone is hardly going to cause the sublime, for pleasure is also needed here as a necessary ingredient. Again, Burke draws a comparison with a physical sensation to describe the mixed emotion of the sublime. The sublime’s interplay of terror and pleasure is comprehended as an analogue to the experience of delight, which is ‘the removal or moderation of pain’ (resp. positive pain or negative pleasure).26 Finally, how does Burke describe the perception of sublime objects? He creates a strong somatic bond between the body and mind of the perceiving subject and the particularities of the perceived object. Some of these objective features are: scale, surface, structure, force, brightness, darkness, loudness, and silence. They all trigger equivalent reactions in the subject’s body, that is to say, the sensory appearance of the object is translated into the tension of nerves and the motion of organs. Particularly illustrative in this respect is Burke’s section on ‘visual objects of great dimensions’. He describes how an overpowering visual sensation (caused by the vastness of an object) affects the retina and forces ‘the whole capacity of the eye’ to vibrate ‘near to the nature of what causes pain’.27 Ultimately, it is this bodily tension resulting from the object’s sensory agitation of the subject that prompts the ‘idea of the sublime’. In summary, Burke bases the experience and the aesthetic value of the sublime on the physical existence of the recipient. The heightened status of the bodily in Burke’s account, which is not limited to physical agency 24 25 26 27

Burke, 119. Burke, 120. Burke, 33. Burke, 124.

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but also involves the body’s interwovenness with the procedures of the mind, shows some similarities with Sobchack’s somatic constitution of the cinematic experience. Additionally, there is a distinct resemblance between Burke’s experience of the sublime, which – by means of its excessive appearance – overwhelms the recipient’s physical organs of perception, and Morsch’s aesthetics of speed. In turn, Morsch’s concept of somatic empathy approximates Burke’s somatic foundation of his aesthetics, according to which body and mind are connected through numerous causal relations: the sensation of objective features is translated into physical (and ultimately into psychological) motion. The same kind of transfer, even though described in less mechanistic terms, takes place in cases of cinematic somatic empathy, which Morsch conceives of as a mimetic re-enacting of a cinematic object, performed by the embodied perception of the viewer. In comparison with Burke’s account of the sublime, which clearly rests on a somatic fundament, Kant’s project of a critical re-localization of the sublime appears to deny the involvement of the subject’s bodily existence at first sight. Even though Kant locates the sublime entirely in the perceiving subject, it is not exactly his/her body where one expects to find this experience. Rather, Kant makes clear that the sublime is very much a matter of the mind (with sensibility, reason, and imagination involved) and not of the body. In the following, I will put Kant’s model of the sublime under scrutiny, with the goal to uncover intersections with the somatic side of aesthetic and cinematic experiences. The biggest obstacle when searching for points of contact between the Kantian sublime and somatic film theory is Kant’s neglect of the body, which mediates between subject and world. In the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, the body of the subject is nonetheless present, although one must take a closer look to locate it. Most obviously, a somatic notion of the sublime is put forth in Kant’s description of different affects which are suited to be perceived as sublime objects (see p. 87). However, these affects do not constitute the experience of the sublime itself. As sublime objects, they merely represent external sources of this experience. On the last pages of his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant evaluates Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. It is in this peripheral juxtaposition with Burke’s sensualist notion of the sublime that Kant explicitly concedes the somatic and affective involvement in every aesthetic sensation: [I]t cannot be denied that all representations in us, whether they are objectively merely sensible or else entirely intellectual, can nevertheless subjectively be associated with gratification or pain, however unnoticeable

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either might be (because they all affect the feeling of life, and none of them, insofar as it is a modification of the subject, can be indifferent), or even that, as Epicurus maintained, gratification and pain are always ultimately corporeal, whether they originate from the imagination or even from representations of the understanding: because life without the feeling of the corporeal organ is merely consciousness of one’s existence, but not a feeling of well- or ill-being, i.e., the promotion or inhibition of the powers of life; because the mind for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself), and hindrances or promotions must be sought outside it, though in the human being himself, hence in combination with his body.28

Later, in his ‘Deduction of pure aesthetic judgements’, Kant continues to explore the link between aesthetic judgement and ‘corporeal organ’ (in relation to the ‘feeling of life’). Since he does not seem to trust the uncanny drives and primordial intelligence of a lived-body, he makes the attempt to exclude it from higher aesthetic judgements, or at least to contain it, an undertaking which does not succeed completely. This becomes obvious when Kant draws a distinction between ‘that which pleases merely in the judging and that which gratifies’.29 Gratification, as the result of bodily sensation, is involved in lower activities such as different games (play of chance, play of tones, play of thought) or laughter.30 But even here, he feels obliged to admit that all of our thoughts are at the same time harmoniously combined with some kind of movement in the organs of the body […]. One can thus […] grant to Epicurus that all gratification, even if it is caused by concepts that arouse aesthetic ideas, is animal, i.e., bodily sensation, without thereby doing the least damage to the spiritual feeling of respect for moral ideas, which is not gratification but self-esteem (of the humanity within us) that elevates us above the need for gratification, without indeed any damage even to the less noble feeling of taste.31

In this passage, Kant reveals the resemblance and permeability between gratification and higher aesthetic judgments (the beautiful and the sublime), for he states that bodily sensation and the agency of reason (involved in the 28 29 30 31

Kant, 158f. Kant, 207. Kant, 207-212. Kant, 210f.

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experience of the sublime) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is particularly interesting, because the bodily agitation of the subject generally threatens to destabilize the foundation of Kant’s aesthetics, which is built upon the disinterestedness of the subject.32 Kant’s inability to contain the body of the subject also shows in the more central parts of the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, particularly in his descriptions and numerous examples of sublime objects and their experience, which highlight the essentially violent character of the sublime. The perceiving subject is violently pressured from two directions: by the inconceivable scale or force of the sublime object and by the faculty of reason, which welcomes and exploits sensibility’s breakdown.33 With this, Kant establishes a subject that itself becomes an object affected by inner and outer sources. The violent overpowering of the faculties of sensibility caused by the perception of an object with excessive features, makes me feel my bodily existence, my bodily connectedness with the world and my mortality. Even the intervention of reason is not able to fully and permanently transcend the crisis of sensibility, since the experience of the sublime, as described by Kant, unfolds as an alternation of being attracted to and repelled by the object.34 Considering the outcome of my analysis, I would now generally disagree with Thomas Morsch, who criticizes the Kantian sublime for constituting reason’s primacy over sensual and bodily experiences.35 Indeed, there are somatic elements and traces of embodied aesthetic experiences to be found in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, even though its author had good reasons to hide, downplay and contain them.

Montage Whenever Daguerre and Bouton’s Diorama switched from the first to the second picture during a show, this did not imply any structural, causal, or narrative relation between the two images (apart from alternating between interior and exterior views). The dissolving views of the laterna magica already employed a simple montage-like organization of time, space, and 32 The term disinterestedness signif ies the absence of epistemic and/or physical interests in the act of aesthetic contemplation. Then again, this disinterestedness is already heavily contested by reason’s involvement in the sublime; and it takes a major effort for Kant to defend his foundation by introducing the paradox of a disinterested interestedness. 33 For further information on the sublime’s twofold violence, see: Till. 34 Kant, 141. 35 Morsch, 104f.

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narrative – a set of conventions that cinema slowly re-discovered and elaborated further in its early years.36 The process of establishing and standardizing montage techniques – to become the so-called continuity system – began in c. 1902 (when films started to feature more than one shot) and ended roughly around 1917, after the filmmaker David Wark Griffith had produced and released his first major works.37 According to Tom Gunning, in cinema’s early years the editing technique of cutting was not dominantly employed to create patterns of temporal succession and narrative flow.38 Instead, cutting was used to create discontinuous sequences of tableaux, which were presented to the spectator as visual attractions.39 This is the historical period of cinema designated by Gunning as the cinema of attractions. The subsequent shift from the cinema of attractions to narrative cinema (or Classical Hollywood cinema) also implies a transformation of montage techniques: from a discontinuous sequencing of cinematic attractions to a systematized mediation of narrative and spatio-temporal coherence. On the other hand, Gunning’s cinema of attractions model does not represent a singular and enclosed chapter of film history but a specific constellation of cinematic production 36 The dissolving view technology of laterna magica devices enabled the presentation of smooth blendings and transitions between images. While the medium’s presentation of movement within one and the same image plane was perceived as less convincing than the double-effect Diorama, its attraction of dissolving its views led to far more sophisticated practices of image sequencing. This also concerned the depiction of sublime subjects. For example, Ulrike Hick mentions a show where the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon was narrated in three lantern slides, representing three successive stages: the first image displayed the city in its intact state; the second one showed Lisbon’s destruction (accompanied by effects of darkness and lightning); and the third revealed what is left of the city, a field of ruins (Hick, 167). As for the relation between the laterna magica and cinema, Hick notes that both media were occasionally presented together. Due to this proximity, cinema adapted certain conventions regarding subject matter, pictorial programs, and presentation patterns. Even cases of magic lantern artists changing profession and becoming filmmakers are documented (Hick, 212-214). However, the laterna magica’s overall influence on the cinematographic montage was rather little. Thomas Elsaesser demonstrates that other factors (esp. economic ones) had a far greater impact on the emergence of what is called classical cinema today. Also, Kristin Thompson explains the formation of cinematic montage techniques with the plain phenomenon that longer films were getting more profitable during the nickelodeon boom; in turn, the longer formats challenged filmmakers to organize time, space, and narrative in more elaborate ways (Elsaesser 2002, 69-93; Thompson 162). 37 Elsaesser 2002, 190-223; Thompson; Berliner. – However, this is not to say that this development was based on the efforts of one individual filmmaker, even though Griffith surely represents one of the key figures of this formative period (Salt). 38 Gunning repeatedly uses the term dominance to dismiss any puristic reading of his film historical distinction. 39 Gunning 1990.

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and reception that can potentially resurface. Gunning himself proposed the consideration of the ‘Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’ as well as certain branches of avant-garde film as revivals of the cinema of attractions. 40 Moreover, the post-classical period of action and blockbuster cinema, whose spectacular events push narrative elements to the periphery of receptive attention, have repeatedly been associated and labeled with Gunning’s term by film scholars. Apart from Gunning’s dichotomy of attraction and narration, the establishment of the American montage also plays an important role within the concepts of suture and Gilles Deleuze’s movement image, as well as within the textual notion of cinema’s development of a lexical order. 41 What these concepts share is the idea that the cut, which otherwise would disturb experiences of illusion, immersion, and narrative continuity (as seen most clearly in the Diorama), is turned into a productive agent for establishing continuity. Within the context of suture theory, the montage becomes a tool for stitching together the disparate elements of a film and its narrative. Ideally, these elaborate procedures convince the spectator to perceive a film as an organic and self-contained world, or, more in accordance with the ideology-critical undertones of suture theory: the spectator is deceived by a film’s suture, which seeks to constantly re-establish symbolic orders, subjectivity, and otherness. 42 In terms of relating to the concept of cinematic suture, Sobchack’s phenomenology of cinema shows some inconsistencies. On the one hand, Sobchack agrees with Kaja Silverman and other theorists on the suture’s function ‘to appropriate the representational function of the film’s perceptive body for the narrative and thus to deny the narrative its dependent status as the expression of perception by a perceptual embodied authority outside the narrative’. 43 On the other hand, the same invisibility of the film’s ‘visual body’ (its apparatus) is described by Sobchack in resemblance to human perception as part of ‘ordinary experience’. 44 It is clear that this second, naturalized view of continuity editing is far less problematic from an ethical point of view than the first one. If one chooses to follow this less conflict-burdened notion of cinema’s performance of continuities, the montage becomes a set of means to present and represent certain subjective 40 Gunning 1990, 61; Gunning 1983. – See also the sections on avant-garde film in: Strauven. 41 Deleuze. 42 Silverman, 194-236; Heath, 76-112. 43 Sobchack, 228. 44 Sobchack, 138.

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procedures of the embodied mind, such as associating, imagining, narrating, or making sense. Furthermore, it enables the exploration, experience, and reflection of physical and psychological proximity and distance, empathy and difference. Let me return for a moment to Gunning’s binary distinction between the cinema of attractions and narrative cinema. Where within this polarity is the aesthetic concept of the sublime to be located? Generally, the sublime causes a disruption of the flow of narrative. Narration, as a receptive phenomenon of making sense, is suspended in the overwhelming moment of viewing the sublime object. Hence, due to its affective and disruptive agency, one would intuitively tend to associate the sublime with the aesthetic framework and montage principles of the cinema of attractions. However, since sensibility’s crisis represents only one side of the (esp. Kantian) sublime, it would be premature to regard the cinematic sublime as a merely spectacular and attraction-based experience. This would mean to neglect the sublime’s receptive intertwining of sensibility and reason, attraction and narration, affect and making sense. Regarding the aesthetic effects of the cinematic montage, one immediately realizes their potential to present Burke’s phenomenology of the sublime to the spectator. Viewed in this light, the montage becomes more than a narrative tool for creating epic continuity; far beyond that, it can be employed to overwhelm the sensory faculties of the viewer. This is achieved through fast frequencies of cutting (which dynamize or confuse the spatio-temporal coordinates of a film), quick alternations of light and darkness, stark contrasts of color, rhythmic arrangements of fragmented views of an object, montaged impressions of visual multitude and disorder, as well as through unsettling temporalities such as simultaneities, anachronisms, or ellipses. The montage shockingly synthesizes incommensurable elements, suddenly reveals something unseen and throws together disparate objects, times, and spaces, thereby creating a vertiginous maelstrom for the senses. In terms of the disaster movie genre, the montage organizes the moving tableaux of the catastrophic event. Its structural control over cinematic timespaces is employed for the staging of cinematic attractions, which can bring a halt to the flow of narration. Looking back at my Warburgian montage of volcano paintings, it is clear now that the cinematic montage offers solutions to a number of pictorial problems, most of all, to the problem of how to relate the destructive totality of the sublime object to detailed and intimate views of its affective impact on individual human beings. Between Kant’s ‘magnitude of a world’ and ‘the infinitely small’, the montage can

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go through an infinite range of nuances, perspectives, and proximities and mediates between them by bringing them into a successive and spatiotemporal order. 45

Camera The technological component of the camera represents a crucial element of the cinematic experience. The camera is the visual organ of film (even though less so in today’s age of digital postproduction). Essentially, the film camera has the ability to not only record moving phenomena but also to put itself and its images into motion, thereby giving a most dynamic expression of the world. Interestingly, during the early years of cinema this potential (manifesting itself as panning or tracking shots) was mostly applied to and associated with scenics and topicals, in other words, non-fictional genres that displayed landscapes, topographies, and events of public interest. According to Kristin Thompson, early cinema also made use of camera movements to distinguish itself from the (partly) moving images of the laterna magica.46 If the implementation of panning and tracking shots was motivated by the prospect of economic profit, the aesthetic potential of this dynamization of time and space was likely to be regarded as a profitable visual attraction for the viewers. Imagine a vast object being successively visualized in a procedure of camera movement. Both Burke and Kant reckoned with this type of visual perception in their theories of the sublime: while the spectator’s vision attempts to capture the sublime object in a procedure of movement along its visual parts, s/he reaches a point where – in Kant’s terminology – the mechanism of apprehension and comprehension finally breaks down, leading to the impression of infinity. 47 Thus, in the early landscape genres of film history, this distinct feature of the sublime was potentially applied for the first time. Later, as lengthier films with more elaborate narratives and larger set designs were produced, camera movements became more conventional, also within fictional works. As for the cinematic presentation of sublime objects, the camera controls and frames the viewer’s subjective encounter of these objects, whether they 45 Kant, 134. 46 Thompson, 227. 47 Kant, 135. – Burke describes the idea of infinity as an outcome of successively perceiving the singular parts of an object, which are ‘continued [in the mind] to any indefinite number’ (Burke, 67).

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are viewed from a distance or in close proximity, in an act of reflexivity or affective immediacy. More specifically, the camera’s ability to adjust its focal length can be used as a tool to mediate between foreground and background, to emphasize specific objects of interest, and to obscure the spectator’s vision altogether. Its framing function decides what is important and establishes visual hierarchies. Thereby, the camera channels and draws attention toward elements inside or outside the frame. But it can also become an immediate cause for experiences of the sublime by overpowering the spectator’s sensibility through (and through the combination of) swish pans, swift tracking shots, and obscuring focal length effects. The fact that the camera can achieve such moments of sensory crisis sheds light on a question of importance: whether the camera essentially resembles human perception or differs from it. For Sobchack, the camera and the projector constitute the film’s body.48 Since the bodies of spectator and film share the same embodied view, there must be a fundamental resemblance regarding their bodily existence and their ability to perceive, express, and interact with the world. On the other hand, she persists on the non-identity of both bodies, thereby upholding a certain degree of media awareness and distance (a ‘perception of perception’) as part of the cinematic experience.49 When cinema fully reveals itself as the machine that it is, this generally entails a distinct experience of media reflexivity.50 Sobchack’s model does not consider cinematic experiences in which the body of the film appears entirely alien to human perception, yet without diminishing its somatic connection to the spectator’s body. In opposition to Sobchack, Morsch sees this combination of cinematic estrangement and somatic bond very clearly. He acknowledges experiences of affective intensity caused by a cinematic body that appears entirely ahuman and mechanical.51 Perhaps, the receptive force of such shatterings of the spectator’s identification with the film’s embodied perception derives precisely from the fact that this bond, at any other time, forms the aisthetic fundament of the cinematic experience. Within the current age of digital cinema, in which digital effects, animation, and editing have become ubiquitous, the film’s body – consisting of perceiving camera and expressing projector – has lost its central status 48 Sobchack, 164-259. 49 Consequently, she rejects the term ‘point-of-view shot’ and, instead, speaks of shots in which bodily perception is shared. 50 Sobchack, 288f. 51 Morsch, 128f.

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and validity. ‘In this aesthetic, the significance of the original recording vanishes in favor of the manipulative postproduction of the image, which is not rooted in any implicit body anymore but solely in the material manipulation of the image’.52 The aesthetic, techniques and practices of digital, which Morsch refers to, have indeed become a decisive factor in the production and reception of disaster movies and blockbuster films in general.53 Except for cases of fully animated films, digital provides the means to manipulate what still appears to be filmed photographic images in a hitherto unparalleled degree. Digital technologies, such as CGI (Computer Generated Imagery), DI (Digital Intermediate), digital animation, motion capturing, digital compositing, virtual camera, and blue and greenscreen technologies, essentially contribute now to a film’s final appeal. These new tools for the creation of cinematic images led Lev Manovich to compare the digital age of cinema with certain proto-cinematic devices (the laterna magica, the Phenakistiscope, the Zootrope), whose moving images were still handcrafted and not photographically recorded.54 On the other hand, cinema had never been a purely photographic recording medium, for it has always involved practices of crafting, painting, and sculpting in its various sectors of production. Especially in terms of genres such as action and disaster movie, crafted and edited visual effects have always played a key role, even in the pre-digital age of cinema. The special effects of disaster films encompass explosions, light effects, time manipulations (time lapse, slow motion), optical compositing (using optical printers), stunts, miniature models, dummies, robotic machines, matte paintings, and photographs for background illusions.

Sound and Multimedia ‘Excessive loudness’, the powerful sounds of ‘raging storms, thunder, or artillery’, total silence, unexpected and intermitting sounds as signs of danger (the striking of a clock, a drum stroke, cannon fire), ‘angry tones of wild beasts’, the succession and repetition of similar sounds echoing in the mind until their tension reaches a climax – this is the greater part of the auditory phenomena that Burke considers as causes for the experience 52 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 181. 53 For an overview of digital entering film production and the most common techniques, see: McClean. – More detailed information is given in: Prince. 54 Manovich.

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of the sublime.55 Cinema, which incorporated acoustic sensations from early on, is basically able to present all of them. More generally, cinematic sound creates atmospheres, channels emotions, and raises expectations. Applied to the cinematic encounter of a natural disaster, the soundscape of a film crucially shapes the spectator’s experience in that it sets the tone for this encounter. Even though sounds, music, and voices were not an intrinsic part of the filmic material during the silent film era, cinematic performances were hardly ever completely silent. Quite the opposite, silent films featured a broad diversity of sounds, which were produced externally during their performance. They employed: barkers and ballyphoos, pianists and “traps” or “effect” players, effects machines and sync-sound apparatuses, lecturers and actors speaking beside or behind the screen, illustrated song performers, and small or large orchestras. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound ranged from the improvised to the preplanned – as in scripts, scores, and cue sheets. And the practice of combining sounds with images differed widely depending on the exhibition venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago versus the summer Chautauqua in rural Iowa, the music hall in London or Paris versus the newest cinema “palace” in New York City) as well as the historical moment (a single venue might change radically from, say, 1906 to 1910.56

With the establishment of sound film during the second half of the 1920s, sound was relocated from its external performance into the film medium itself.57 The broad application of this technological innovation meant a significant step within the film industry’s efforts to standardize and monopolize their business and gain control over their products. But it also increased filmmakers’ artistic agency and control in terms of the aesthetic coordination of sound and the visual. With this, the aspect of multimedia interplay gained an even bigger importance for the cinema medium. Once established, cinema sound technologies were further improved over the years: from single-channel optical soundtracks, which ‘produced very poor sound, with a limited frequency response that turned loud effects, like gunshots or high-volume passages in a film score, into noise’, to the 55 Burke, 65, 75-78, 126f. 56 Abel, xiii. 57 This development is described in detail in: Bordwell 1999.

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‘introduction of Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s[, which] brought four-channel sound to the movies’, and Dolby SR (1986) to the arrival of digital sound in 1991, whose enhanced performance (multiple channels, noise reduction, complex sound mixes, improved frequency response, plasticity) allows for more realistic and immersive experiences of cinematic worlds.58 In Sobchack’s opinion, cinema’s multimediality almost naturally harmonizes with human perception. Cinematic experiences are, therefore, ‘always synaesthetic and synoptic. That is, perception is not constituted as a sum of discrete senses (sight, touch, etc.), nor is it experienced as fragmented and decentered.’ This ‘cooperation among and commutation of our senses’ is the reason why our bodily perception responds so well to the expressions and perceptions of the body of the film, whose sensual organs are widely compatible to ours.59 However, with Morsch, I once again call into question the human-like character of cinema’s multimedia agitations. The possibility of intense cinematic moments of multimedia interplay that seem to entirely break with the conventions of everyday perception is worth at least noting here.

Cinema To reach a conclusion of this chapter, I will now turn toward cinema as a concrete space for cinematic experiences. The most decisive transformation that cinema has undergone occurred in its early decades. As a device for commercial entertainment, early cinema often presented its films in combination with other media such as the laterna magica, Vaudeville, and other forms of theatrical entertainment like Music Hall or Varieté.60 During the so-called nickelodeon boom (c. 1905/6-1907), cinema emancipated itself from other forms of entertainment and underwent first processes of standardization by introducing a darkened and clearly structured viewer-space, which was directed and aligned toward the screen.61 This was followed by the widespread application of sound film in the second half of the 1920s, making any external source of auditory sensation redundant.62 Then, the next step would be the 58 Prince, 191. 59 Sobchack, 76. 60 Elsaesser, 94-124. 61 The term ‘nickelodeon’ referred to the cinemas’ low entrance fee of one nickel, which also lower social classes could afford. For a more detailed view of the nickelodeon boom, see: Musser, 325-329, 372-376. 62 For the technological development and aesthetics of sound in film history, see the first part of: Chion.

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standardized implementation of bigscreen and widescreen technologies, a process that lasted nearly a decade, from around the mid-1920s to 1932.63 Yet, even after that, it was not ‘until the 1950s, with the introduction of […] CinemaScope, VistaVision, and other widescreen formats that wide f ilm emerged as a commercially viable solution to technical problems introduced by the new popular demand for large-screen motion picture entertainment’.64 Others experimented with multiprojection technologies to achieve overwhelming screen scales (Cinéorama, Vitarama, Cinerama, et al.), yet without lasting success.65 Colors could be seen in cinemas long before the Technicolor three-color system provided the technology for the spectacular presentation of some major color films in the late 1930s.66 There was a diversity of manual, additive, and subtractive coloring technologies such as hand coloring, tinting, toning, stenciling, Kinemacolor, and Prizmacolor.67 However, color film did not become the widely adapted standard for film productions before the 1960s.68 Since then, the essential components of cinematic spaces and experiences have remained relatively stable. Further technological developments to be mentioned are enhanced sound technologies which were applied from the 1970s onward, further enlarged screen sizes (as in multiplex and IMAX cinemas), digital projection, and, most recently, digital 3D (or stereoscopic) cinema. The fact that these new technologies were often not widely adapted right after their invention but years or even decades later calls into question certain accounts of cinema history as a telos-driven and organic development toward classical cinema, illusionistic perfection, the cinematic apparatus (with its effects of subjectivity and ideological manipulation), or the refinement of cinema’s narrative and linguistic repertoire. Stereoscopic cinema, for example, has existed since the 1910s and has seen various heydays before its new recent breakthrough in the new millennium. Thus, cinema’s history 63 The experimenting with bigger and wider screens resulted from the construction of larger cinemas with big auditoriums. One of the most tenacious problems in this development process was to fit the enlarged images and the soundtrack onto film without any reductions (Hall, 69-76, 145-150). 64 Belton, 159. 65 Uroskie, 19-26. – On the other hand, it was Cinerama’s impressive success and profit that triggered the technological development and application of more practical widescreen technologies such as CinemaScope and Panavision (Hall, 144f.). 66 Films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), A Star is Born (1937), or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) presented their loud colors as attractions in themselves and thereby emphasized their value as cinematic spectacles. 67 Hall, 62-68. 68 Wyver, 75f.; Hall, 140.

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also presents itself through its gaps, repetitions, dead ends, and forgotten heroes. Its technological development cannot be reduced to any notion of the medium’s drive for aesthetic self-fulfillment and maturing. Instead, one must consider a wide range of economic, political, juridical, and cultural factors in order to make sense of cinema’s technological and aesthetic transformations. Cinema’s development from its so-called primitive state (the cinema of attractions) to its classical state (narrative cinema) is revisited by Kristin Thompson, as she addresses the sociocultural and economic complexities of this history. In terms of exchange processes between cinema and other media, she stresses the relevance of literary forms like novel, short story, and drama, which she finds have had a strong impact on cinema’s development of more elaborate fictional plots.69 While I generally do not disagree with this assessment, I would like to extend Thompson’s historical account by paying closer attention to the technological transformation that occurred during the first couple of decades of cinema (from the late nineteenth century to c. 1917). Accordingly, the shift from attraction cinema to narrative cinema can also be described as a shifting from being a performative medium to becoming a pictorial medium. Underlining this transformation are two trade press responses to letters sent by cinema owners, both asking about the correct size of the screen plane: The first, from 1908, says the screen and lenses should be such as to ensure that the characters are life size on the screen; the second, from 1915, says that the size of the screen should vary in proportion to the size of the auditorium. Thus the earlier position has a literal, theatrical conception of the represented space, where the screen is a window immediately behind which the principal characters stand a measurable distance away from the spectators; while for the later one, the film image is treated as scalarly relative, so the distance of spectators from characters is entirely imaginary.70

With this indicated shift, cinema is no longer perceived as a performative space, in which the screen functions as a life size actor; instead, it begins to tap into its illusionistic and immersive potential by relocating itself within the tradition of certain pictorial media, such as the ones discussed in the previous main chapter. Thus, cinema not only moves 69 Thompson, 163-173. 70 Elsaesser 1990, 28 (Endnote 24). – This aspect is investigated more extensively in: Brewster.

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toward narrative complexity but also toward pictorial visuality, thereby attracting a full set of aesthetic discourses and receptive concepts grouped around visual phenomena of illusionistic immersion. Paradoxically, cinema, as it moves away from its state of attraction and toward its narrative state, inscribes itself into the media technological history of the sublime, which I earlier associated with receptive phenomena of spectacle and attraction. What does this say about the historical period of the cinema of attractions? If I juxtapose the pre-cinematic visual history of the sublime with the two historical models of cinema – attraction and narrative – where do I find greater kinship? In a bar-like environment in which film presentations alternate with theatrical performances, loosely accompanied by a pianist, watched by viewers sitting in chairs around tables? Or rather within cinema’s classical technological setup, which is still in use today? Consider earlier pictorial media’s efforts to create illusionistic, immersive, multisensory, and affectively intense experiences, to suspend the spectator’s awareness of his/her mediated perception, and to discipline and immobilize his/her body. Taking these efforts into account, one realizes that it is primarily cinema’s narrative (or classical) model where the receptive framework of the sublime is re-encountered. When cinema adapted a monumental screen, a darkened viewer-space, an immobilized spectator seated in close range to the screen, the medium reconnected most distinctly with the visual history of the sublime and its technological efforts to overwhelm, agitate, discipline, enchant, and transform its spectators. To make out how the cinema of attractions appealed to its audience, I will briefly discuss cinema’s most renowned founding myth: the screenings of the Lumière brothers’ film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in c. 1896-1897.71 According to this myth, the film caused a panic among the spectators, because they mistook the approaching train on the screen for a real one. There have been several attempts since the 1990s to deconstruct this event and reveal its fictional status. As film scholars like Tom Gunning, Martin Loiperdinger, or Stephen Bottomore convincingly demonstrate, a real panic at one of the film screenings seems rather unlikely; but if it was not sheer fear that made people flee the scene, how can the audience’s cinematic experience of this early film be described?72 Loiperdinger argues against the 71 As Martin Loiperdinger’s research on this issue reveals, the film of which three versions existed was not shown at the first commercial screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895 but in the following year (Loiperdinger, 102f.). 72 Loiperdinger; Gunning 1999; Bottomore, 177-216.

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panic legend by pointing out the anti-illusionistic features of the Lumière screenings.73 He notes that the film was shown on a rather small screen in black and white with flickering images and without sound. On top of that, the train does not rush straight toward the camera but passes it sideways. The camera captures the event from the place where passengers are waiting, and thus, the audience was most likely familiar with this perspective.74 What speaks against Loiperdinger’s plausible argument is the fact that there are documented voices that describe the screening of the film as thrilling and exciting. But what caused this excitement if it was not the fear of being hit by a real train? A hint is given by Maxim Gorky when he describes his experience of the Lumière film in an article: [A] train appears on the screen. It speeds right 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, so full of women, wine, music and vice. But this, too, is but a train of shadows. Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen. The train comes to a stop, and grey figures silently emerge from the cars, soundlessly greet their friends, laugh, walk, run, bustle, and … are gone.75

The first affective reaction of the narrator is gradually undermined by his increasing awareness of the film’s mediality. Existential fear is turned into a media reflexive encounter with an estranged ‘kingdom of shadows’, whose inhabitants appear and disappear in silence.76 An English critic cited by Loiperdinger finds similar words for his cinematic experience: It is the frightening impact of life ‒ but of a very different life. This life is deprived of sound and colors. Although you can notice the sunlight, the image is dominated by a drab and unfathomable gray. And although the waves, as one may assume, crash against the coast, they do so in a silence that makes you shiver all the more.77

73 Loiperdinger. 74 A nuanced analysis of various accounts of early cinematic realism, not understood as an actual pattern of cinematic reception but as a visual regime with broader social implications, is given in: Lastra. 75 Gorky, 408. 76 Gorky, 407. 77 Loiperdinger, 100.

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In this case, the aesthetic appeal of the viewed film is increased due to the partial loss of the illusion. In terms of the Lumière film, one can also reverse the perspective and ask how viewing an everyday life situation like a train arrival can be exciting in the first place. It is exciting precisely because the film and its cinematic performance do not simulate this experience in a purely illusionistic manner. Rather, as the cinematic experience oscillates between immersive appeal and media reflexivity, the spectator re-encounters a technologically enchanted world, a world which reveals itself as an estranged shadow of reality. Apart from this aesthetic surplus derived from the cinematic experience of difference, early cinematography also enchanted the spectator by staging its technology as a magical device to set lifeless photographic imagery in motion. It is known that the screenings of the Lumière films began with the presentation of a static photograph, and only after a short while, the image, as if under a magic spell, started to move.78 Generally, it turned out that Gunning’s conception of the shift from attraction to narrative cinema as a shift from presentation to representation is not entirely correct. Even though in early cinemas screen-space and viewer-space were shared as one theatrical performance space, the artificiality of the projected images was much more obvious than in later cinematic devices which aimed at overcoming the recognition of representation by negating their viewer-spaces and by making the spectators immerse into their screen-spaces. Technological particularities as such, together with their receptive implications, must be considered when dealing with early disaster films. Also, in terms of a premature linking between the cinema of attractions and its postclassical or postnarrative descendants (roughly the action and adventure cinema from the 1970s onward), these crucial media technological deviations ought to be kept in mind.79 Technologically and aesthetically speaking, the disaster movies from the 1970s onward are not just resurrections of cinema’s lost period of attraction but also cinematic spectacles in continuation of the classical or narrative model of cinema.80 A teleologic history of cinema’s technological development is offered by Sobchack in The Address of the Eye. She describes the transformations of the 78 Elsaesser 2002, 56. 79 Two representative texts proclaiming such a resurrection of the cinema of attractions are: Hansen; Ndalianis. – As for the disaster film genre, Jihae Chung locates the film 2012 (2009) within the tradition of Gunning’s cinema of attractions (Chung, 305f.). 80 A resolute stand against the proponents of cinema’s postnarrative age and its reuniting with its early years of attraction is taken by David Bordwell in: Bordwell 2002.

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medium by analogy with the maturing of the human body: from ‘consciously recognizing the possibilities of its “body” for action […to] refining its initially crude and clumsy activities, adapting its “body” to contingent situations and broadening its repertoire of possible responses to the world that it inhabits and expresses’.81 Cinema’s technological development is presented as a gradual self-discovery of its body and its potential to perceive and express in interaction with the world. With what appears to be quite an old-fashioned perspective on the history of cinema, Sobchack positions her model of cinema against certain theoretical and historical accounts which portray cinema’s development as heading toward the establishment of its dispositif. According to these apparatus theories and psychoanalytical and semiotic models, the cinematic dispositif is a machine that deceives the viewer by gaining control over his/her subjective agency and symbolic recognition. Thus, it is against this strong paradigm of the cinematic apparatus that Sobchack places her counter-narrative of cinema moving toward greater freedom of perception and expression. On the other hand, Sobchack does not notice that cinema, as it radically changed its technological and receptive premises during its first decades, not only widened its repertoire of expression and perception but also increased its potential to trigger forceful, affectively intense, and even violent experiences. Apparatus theory’s common claim, namely that the cinematic dispositif tranquilizes the spectator and his/her entanglement with the world, putting him/her into a state of half-sleep, might miss the point; but then again, the ways in which cinema is able to frame and control the viewer’s body and his/her sensory faculties does not lead to the assumption of a surplus of receptive freedom either. Instead, it seems more plausible assuming that the body of the cinematic spectator can principally (in particular moments) become a target, not for capitalist and reactionary discourses but for affective and sensorily excessive agitations – the Kantian trade of freedom for freedom (perceived as aesthetic pleasure). As the film ends and the lights in the cinema go back on, the medium’s receptive forces lose their grip on its spectators, and people realize again who they shared their cinematic experience with. Let me use this moment of social awareness to briefly reflect on cinema’s factual audiences. The previously discussed pictorial devices of the nineteenth century turned visual experiences of sublime events into leisure activities for middle class audiences. Such tendencies of popularization were further reinforced by the producers of cinema. From early on, cinema attracted and aimed at broad 81 Sobchack, 251.

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parts of society. The nickelodeon boom made cinematic entertainments affordable for the working classes. At the same time, these early years also witnessed the erection of cinema palaces in better neighborhoods, which were particularly aiming at middle or even upper class customers.82 As will be shown in the next chapter, the film industry’s practices of advertisement, distribution, production, and exhibition have often been coordinated with the aim to appeal to specif ic groups or to raise the cultural status of a product. However, with its continuous inclusion of mass audiences, Western cinema has become a conventional emblem of popular entertainment and mass consumption. Sublime disaster events, with their primarily affective, emotional, and sensory aesthetic of reception, are to be regarded as important participants in cinema’s project of providing universal aesthetic experiences, which – for the goal of maximum profit – ideally ought to transcend aspects of class, education, age, or gender.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Eric Matthews and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001 [2000]. Lastra, James. ‘From the Captured Moment to the Cinematic Image: A Transformation in Pictorial Order’. In The Image in Dispute. Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography. Austin: University of Texas Press 1997, 263-292. Loiperdinger, Martin. ‘Lumière’s “Arrival of the Train”; Cinema’s Founding Myth’. The Moving Image; The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, vol. 4, no. 1 (spring 2004), 89-118. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘The Interest of the Sublime’. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. In Of the Sublime; Presence in Question. Albany: State University of New York Press 1993 [1988], 109-132. Manovich, Lev. ‘Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image’. In Film Theory; Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies; Volume I. Edited by Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson and K. J. Shepherdson. London: Routledge 2004, 285-297. McClean, Shilo T. ‘I’m Sorry Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That: The Technology of Digital Visual Effects’. In id. Digital Storytelling; The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film. Cambridge: MIT Press 2007, 41-68. Morsch, Thomas. Medienästhetik des Films; Verkörperte Wahrnehmung und ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2011. Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon; Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press 1991. Paech, Joachim. ‘Was ist ein kinematographisches Bewegungsbild?’. In Bildtheorie und Film. Edited by Thomas Koebner and Thomas Meder. Munich: edition text + kritik 2006, 92-107. Prince, Stephen. Digital Visual Effects in Cinema; The Seduction of Reality. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2012. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium; Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft. Cologne: Herbert von Halem 2013. Salt, Barry. ‘The Early Development of Film Form’. In Film Before Griffith. Edited by John L. Fell. Berkeley: University of California Press 1983, 284-298. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press 1983. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye; A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992. Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2006. Thompson, Kristin. ‘Part Three; The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909-28’. In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and id. The Classical Hollywood Cinema; Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge 1999 [1985], 155-240.

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Till, Dietmar. Das doppelte Erhabene; Eine Argumentationsfigur von der Antike bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Niemeyer 2006. Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube; Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2014. Wyver, John. The Moving Image; An International History of Film, Television and Video. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989.

6.

Disaster Cinema. A Historical Overview Abstract The aim is to give a historical account of the disaster movie genre in chronological order, in continuation of the cultural and technological history of sublime disasters. The films in question employ the receptive and general aesthetic characteristics of the sublime for their depictions of catastrophic events. My discussion also includes the specific media technological environments in which the films were performed, insofar as cinema’s potential to function as a medium of the sublime represents the receptive foundation of the films. What is excluded from this historical account is the interpretations of the films’ disasters as allegories of specific contemporary political and socio-cultural events. In opposition to these (often premature) readings, one must take the immediate sensuality and the receptive tactics of disaster films seriously and elucidate the genre’s transformations by reference to the mechanisms of economic profit and technological innovation and application. Keywords: Cultural History of Natural Disasters, Film History, Film Genre, Media History, Aesthetics

Let me revisit the most defining feature of disaster cinema, as outlined above: in opposition to attempts that focus on the films’ narrative structures and hidden ideological messages, I claim that disaster films, first and foremost, present destructive (natural) forces, which are threatening humankind with its far inferior existence, as sublime cinematic attractions. Following this attempt of a definition, I will give a historical account of the disaster movie genre in chronological order, a task that, so far, has been addressed rather superficially within film studies.1 However, it is understood that even the most thorough and encompassing account can never claim to provide a definite and fully complete trajectory. 1

See the attempts of giving a historical overview by: Sanders; Keane; Kay; Hobsch.

Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch06

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The majority of films to be named on the following pages were decisive contributors to the development of the genre and its changing sensory, thematic, and general aesthetic appearance. They were also significant blockbusters in the sense that were ‘designed to make a big impact on the box office […and] capable of generating exceptionally large revenues partly by virtue of exceptional production values’.2 In addition, looking at the bigger picture of my investigation, this chapter will continue to trace the visual history of sublime disasters. Thus, the films in question employ the receptive and general aesthetic characteristics of the sublime for their depictions of catastrophic events. And, in accordance with cinema’s technological and aesthetic potential to function as a medium of the sublime (as explored in the previous chapter), the specific media technological environments in which the films were performed ought to be taken into account as well. Note also that one should not insist too firmly on the disaster movie’s exclusiveness as a distinct and clearly demarcated genre. Problems of genre definition, particularly the clash between the academic habit to strive for clear definitions and the ‘lived genre awareness’ of film’s popular and industrial discourses, were already discussed at length in the Introduction Chapter. This, together with the fact that the genre label ‘disaster movie’ did not exist before the 1970s, allows me to include films that are intuitively ascribed to other genres, yet which nonetheless feature prominent presentations of sublime disasters at some point within their unfolding narratives.3 The primary aim must be to trace the film history of sublime disasters in continuation of my historical narrative. Thus, my efforts cannot be limited to simply pinpointing a number of films from the 1970s onward, which were explicitly perceived as ‘disaster movies’, for even in these cases, the particular genre association was often far from clear. Viewed from the broader historical perspective of what I described as the iconography of the sublime, the phenomenon of embedding sublime catastrophic events in narratives informed by other aesthetic categories and genres is not at all unusual. Vernet’s shipwrecks at the Academy Salon were surrounded by numerous images applying other aesthetic modes and categories. The Eidophusikon’s tableaux of shipwrecks and water-spouts were part of a bigger pictorial program which also included a variety of beautiful and picturesque events. The same goes for the Diorama, which shifted from sublime sceneries to atmospheric interior views. In the early 2 Hall, 139. – The term ‘blockbuster’ was adapted in the 1950s from the military vocabulary of WWII and applied to films that met the description quoted above. 3 Even filmic works that feature disasters not as sensually attractive events but as general themes, potential threats, or plot settings will be at least mentioned to some extent.

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years of cinema, films of sublime objects were framed by Vaudeville sketches, musical performances, and other stage forms. The disaster films of cinema’s early decades appear as filmic episodes framed by and imbedded in other genres such as the melodrama or the epic. But I will also demonstrate how attraction elements of sublime disasters received increasingly more timespace within their films, up to the point where the disaster movie starts to be regarded as a genre on its own. In turn, this can also mean that some films that are usually considered to be disaster movies through and through will receive less attention, because their receptive framework foregrounds other elements, such as narrative conflicts or character interaction, while disregarding spectacular presentations of sublime disaster events. What my history of cinematic disasters certainly excludes – in contrast to many others – are interpretations of the films’ disasters as allegories of specific contemporary political and socio-cultural events, which often are carried out in a speculative manner (see Chapter 1, Footnote 3). According to such readings, the films – and their cyclical production patterns – represent symptoms of collective crises, traumata, or sublimation processes. To give a few examples, one could claim that the disaster cycle of the 1970s deals with the American trauma of the Vietnam war, the 1950s-cycle with the collective scar left by the Second World War, the 1990s-cycle with racial problematics in American urban spaces in the aftermath of the Cold War, and so forth. In opposition to these (often premature) readings, one must take the immediate sensuality and the receptive tactics of disaster films seriously and consider their performance in their respective technological framework of the cinema space. Rather than with the grand narratives of world politics, the genre’s transformations will be elucidated by reference to the mechanisms of economic profit and technological innovation and application. Additionally, instead of automatically assuming an allegorical content behind cinema’s spectacular stagings of catastrophic events, I will take into view the more expansive historical narrative of which the history of the disaster movie is part. This concerns for instance the role of the sublime within the aesthetic revaluation of natural disasters in the eighteenth century, which, in large part, still represents the foundation for the appreciation of cinematic disasters today.

Disaster Films Between Documentary and Special Effects Newsreel The history of cinema almost began with a disaster. This is at least how the founding myth of cinema – the screenings of the Lumière film L’arrivée

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d’un train en gare de La Ciotat – has been told. As known today, the legend of a panicking audience does not coincide with the historical facts of these events. Even if some of the viewers actually feared being run over by the f ilmic train, the fact remains that this disaster merely existed in their imagination. Neither was it part of the film’s narrative nor was it likely that the Lumières deliberately aimed at prompting such an audience response. Hence, since cinema’s founding myth turns out to be less promising than one may initially assume, the search for the beginnings of the disaster movie genre must start somewhere else. Like I said above, the term ‘disaster movie’ as a designation for a specific film genre was not introduced before the 1970s. However, this does not mean that disaster movies did not exist in earlier decades. ‘Disaster films’ were commonly known as footage of factual disasters that were presented as newsworthy events to the viewer (see pp. 28f.); also, artificially created disaster depictions were created long before the 1970s-cycle gave birth to a first genre attribution. From cinema’s earliest years until the second half of the 1900s decade, depictions of natural disasters and catastrophic events were usually either documentary footage or special effects recreations of real events.4 Through the examples of two of this period’s most influential filmmakers – the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis) and Georges Méliès – I will give a detailed picture of these two early modes of disaster cinema. In 1902, Méliès’ Star Film Company produced a film presenting the eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique, which took place on 8 May 1902.5 Since the f ilmmaker was not able to be present during the eruption, the only way to document the event was to show an after-image of the devastated land, which would give an implicit impression of the volcano’s spectacular force. Yet instead, he created and filmed a dynamic miniature model of Mount Pelée and the town of Saint-Pierre, set against a painted background, thereby restaging the event as footage for a newsreel format. Some of the prints of the film were hand-colored frame by frame. During its length of approximately one and a half minutes, the single-shot film displays a gradual increase in the volcano’s activity, from a thin column of smoke to splashing rivers of lava to massive explosions that cover the entire landscape. With its static camera image, its lack of montage patterns, its use of miniature models, its painted background, and its pyrotechnical effects, the visual appearance of Éruption volcanique à la Martinique remained close 4 The popularity of disaster subjects during this period of cinema is pointed out by Robert C. Allen in: Allen, 112. 5 Frazer.

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to the moving images Daguerre and Bouton’s Diorama and similar devices presented in the nineteenth century. The composition and pictorial strategies that the film employs further coincide with the conventions established in the volcano paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The film’s light effects, which illuminate the whole scenery in strong tones of yellow, red, and orange, are typical both for devices like the Eidophusikon and the Diorama and for easel paintings such as Joseph Wright of Derby’s Vesuvius from Portici (Fig. 4) and John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Fig. 6). The contrasting of the dark night sky, the cold water of the bay, and the hot tones of the erupting volcano, which the film presents to the viewer as a dynamic shifting of aggregates, was initially established by Pierre-Jacques Volaire in the 1770s. The film’s composition, with the curved shape of the bay functioning as a visual transition between the houses in the foreground, the city in the middle ground, and the volcano in the background, resembles Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’ The Eruption of Vesuvius, 24 August A.D. 79 from 1813. The film’s circular arrangement of its painted clouds around the exploding crater, adding plasticity and extension to the eruption, is also a typical feature of Wright’s images of Vesuvius. Another parallel to Wright’s work Vesuvius from Portici is the juxtaposition of the vulnerable and defenseless town and the overwhelming destructive forces of the volcano. Unlike Wright’s painting though, the film’s temporal element of succession allows for the presentation of distinct phases. In one of them, the entire town is covered in smoke, ash, and fire, thereby becoming invisible. Hence, Méliès’ work employs an alternating movement between Saint-Pierre’s presence and absence, between its shifting moments of existence, destruction, and being literally ruined. Méliès was not the only filmmaker who presented the newsreel event of Mount Pelée’s eruption by means of a special effects reconstruction. Ferdinand Zecca (for Pathé) and Thomas Edison (for his Edison Manufacturing Company) created their own versions of the disaster.6 The newsreel feature of the latter consists of three f ilms, showing Mount Pelée and Saint-Pierre before, during, and after the eruption. In addition, Edison combined the films of the artificial eruption with original footage of the town ruins.7 Another potential reason for the filmmakers’ decision to use miniature models and special effects was the inhospitality and hostility 6 Generally, the reconstruction of newsworthy events for newsreel productions was a widespread practice in this period of filmmaking. 7 Musser 1991, 208.

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of the real eruption’s environment. If the dimensions of Méliès’ f ilmic reconstruction come in any way close to the forces of the factual event, it would certainly not have allowed any witnesses nearby. The necessity to place the camera in front of the disaster in the moment of its most destructive state rendered any filmic representation of the sublime event in this specific case impossible. However, there were other catastrophic subjects to be filmed which tolerated the presence of filmmakers under less deadly circumstances. A popular subject during cinema’s pioneering years was views of burning oil wells.8 Already in the early nineteenth century, as for instance in de Loutherbourg’s painting Coalbrookdale by Night,9 phenomena of industrialization were perceived as sublime attractions and closely associated with the more traditional subject of the volcano eruption.10 This association also applied to the reception of the film Puits de pétrole à Bakou; Vue de près (1896/97?), which was shot by Kamill Serf for the production company of the Lumière brothers.11 The one-reeler lasts for 36 seconds and presents the spectator with an extreme long shot of an oil field at Baku, Azerbaijan. Two drill derricks are visible in the foreground and middle ground of the shot. Behind them, on the left side, a fountain of fire shoots vertically into the air, while, further back on the right side, clouds of thick black smoke rise and drift toward the left. At the foot of the central derrick, hardly visible, the attentive viewer may identify a tiny human figure who first stands in front of the central derrick and then walks out of the frame. This person is the only moving element of the film that executes a successive movement in the space of the f ilmic image. The movements of the other objects – the columns of f ire and smoke – appear as cyclical phenomena, as if they could be presented as an endless loop without causing 8 Murray, 47. 9 Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. Coalbrookdale by Night. Exhibited 1801. Science Museum, London. 68 x 106.7 cm. Oil on canvas. – Two other works from this period that stage industrial phenomena as sublime objects are William Turner’s Limekiln at Coalbrookdale (c. 1797. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. 29 x 40.3 cm. Oil on canvas) and Paul Sandby Munn’s Bedlam Furnace, Madeley Dale, Shropshire (1803. Tate Gallery, London. 32.5 x 54.8 cm. Watercolor on paper). 10 Hammerbacher, 73-77; Keller, 312f. – At the same time, the motif of the volcano was perceived as a visual metaphor for the overwhelming forces of industrialization and the French Revolution (Daly, 260). 11 Murray, 44. – However, according to the Catalogue Lumière, the camera operator of the film is unknown (and the film is dated 1897, one year later than the date given by Murray and Heumann). – In addition, there exists a second Lumière film presenting Baku’s oil fields: Puits de pétrole à Bakou; Vue d’ensemble.

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fissures in the film’s timespace continuity. Hence, in comparison with Méliès’ newsreel reconstruction of Mount Pelée, this Lumière production presents far less processuality. Just like staffage figures in easel paintings, the human figure functions as a measure to convey the dimensions of the sublime phenomenon, which was projected by the Cinématographe on a screen plane of approximately 2.5 (width) by 1.5 (height) meters in size (according to the device’s optimal projection distance).12 The fact that the motif of the burning oil field was perceived according to the aesthetic and receptive principles of the sublime is demonstrated by Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann in their article ‘The First Eco-Disaster Film?’, in which they reconstruct the contemporary receptive context of the film. Accordingly, the phenomenon of the burning oil field was primarily experienced as an aesthetically thrilling and sublime spectacle, rather than as an ecological catastrophe.13 Equivalent to the technologically enchanted and artificial depictions of the subject of the volcano, the Lumières’ burning oil wells represented an equally terrifying and fascinating image of elemental force. Moreover, they moved within an established iconographical tradition which blends the volcano and other iconographical elements of the sublime with dynamic phenomena of industrialization.14 As my analysis of Méliès and the Lumières’ one-reel films has shown, the earliest disaster films were deeply informed by pictorial traditions, conventions, and effects of older media that presented sublime disasters.15 As for the films’ specific reception in cinema, the technological particularities of the cinema of attractions provided the framework for their experience. In comparison with the monumental canvases of the Panorama and the Diorama, the films were exhibited on rather small screens.

Early Epics and Travel Genres As films became longer and their narratives more elaborate during the first decade of the twentieth century (primarily because it turned out to be a more profitable production model), depictions of disasters – while still 12 Loiperdinger, 96. 13 Murray, 45-47. 14 The aesthetic spectacle of burning oil derricks and oil fields has also been actualized in more recent films such as Lessons of Darkness (1992) and There Will Be Blood (2007). 15 Admittedly, since so much f ilmic material of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been lost, I cannot claim to have drawn a fully complete and truly representative picture here.

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represented in non-fictional material – were now also given in fictional films.16 These cinematic disasters could be experienced in adaptations of biblical and ancient classical narratives, canonical literary texts, as well as stage dramas and novels of the nineteenth century. This was also the film industry’s attempt to raise the cultural status of cinema in order to attract middle class audiences and explore alternatives to Vaudeville and nickelodeon’s lowbrow forms of entertainment, which relied on sketches, magic tricks, special effects, chases, and sensational newsreels. Film adaptations as such have become known under the genre term epic. An epic is ‘as indicative of size and expense as it [is] of particular kinds of historical setting, of protagonists who are caught up in large-scale events as it [is] of those who sway the course of history or the fate of nations’.17 While the great bulk of the most renowned and successful epics are American productions, the initial impulses for the establishment of the genre came largely from Europe, and especially from Italy.18 Italian big-budget and feature-length films, such as Cabiria (1914), Quo Vadis (1913), and several works about the destruction of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii [1908], Martire pompeiana [1909], Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii [1913], Jone o Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei [1913]) not only ‘broke new ground in terms of length, lavishness, cost, prestige, and box-office earnings’, they are also known to have decisively influenced American filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.19 To adapt their classical subjects for the screen, the Italian filmmakers employed some of the conventions, tropes, and motifs of traditional easel painting (just like Méliès did in his volcano newsreel). This regards aspects of composition and framing as well as the 16 Thompson, 162; Elsaesser, 104-107. – But there were also hybrid forms in which f ictional narratives and recent factual events were blended together. Such hybrids were the first fictional films about the sinking of the RMS Titanic such as the German production In Nacht und Eis (1912) and the Danish f ilm Atlantic (1913). Both were released in temporal proximity to the actual tragedy (April 1912). Therefore, they maintained a semi-documentary character and an atmosphere of newsworthiness. For a detailed analysis of In Nacht und Eis, see: Wedel. 17 Hall, 5. 18 An encompassing overview of the epic genre, up until the early 1980s, is given in: Elley; Solomon. – One of the few American multireel productions of a historical epic (incl. disaster scenarios) from this early period is Vitagraph’s Bible f ilm The Life of Moses (1910), which has been lost to date. Apart from that, Vitagraph also released the one reel-film The Deluge in 1911. Possibly, this work is identical with the preserved film The Deluge from the same year, at whose beginning ‘Exclusive Movie Studios Inc.’ is stated as the production company. Perhaps, Exclusive Movie Studios Inc. merely served as a distributor here, as it did with other films produced by different companies. For a detailed analysis of the production and reception of Vitagraph’s The Life of Moses and the studio’s other Bible films, see: Uricchio, Chap. 5. 19 Hall, 3. – See also: Keane, 6; Hall, 34.

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appearance of visual elements like costumes, landscapes, and architecture. The catastrophic events depicted in early Italian epics represent intense scenes (or even sequences) of attraction, which are placed among scenes of narrative interest and other attraction elements like lavish costumes, huge crowds, and monumental temple architecture. The disaster subjects to be found in early epic films are, among others, the eruption of the volcanoes Etna (in Cabiria) and Vesuvius (in the adaptations of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii) and the burning of Rome (in Quo Vadis).20 While these epics feature shots in which the totality of their disasters is set against inferior human agents in the tradition of staffage figures, they also make increasing use of montage techniques to mediate between the sublime object, the characters, and the spectator. Singular phenomena and fragmentary components of disaster events are composed into additive sequences of (mostly) static shots, displaying the fates of individual characters and groups of people, bursting architecture, spaces of impenetrable smoke, walls of fire, flowing lava, and rolling lava clumps. The narrative function of these disaster scenes is either to introduce a state of imbalance which sends the protagonist on his/her journey (Cabiria), or to spectacularly mark and visualize the reaching of a narrative climax (the Pompeii films, Quo Vadis). On the other hand, silent films’ dependency on intertitles with textual information already comprises a divide between the narrative and the predominantly sensory dimensions of a work. Thus, narrative and spectacle are more juxtaposed than inextricably intertwined, more loosely connected than evidently coherent. Therefore, the reception of early silent epics naturally involved cinematic experiences in which narrative functionality and sensory attraction could be perceived as separated from each other. Apart from their montages of immobile shots, early epics also made use of camera movements such as panning and tracking shots. It appears as if these movements, which were closely studied by American filmmakers, became necessary to fully capture the films’ monumental settings and objects.21 When watching these panning shots, one gets the impression that the dimensions of the filmed objects simply go beyond the scope of the image frame, forcing the camera to move. In this regard, it is not surprising that Griffith drew direct inspiration from John Martin’s visualizations of 20 Bulwer-Lytton’s text was already visualized for the cinema screen in 1900 in a short film of the British filmmaker Walther R. Booth. – For the several Italian one-reel films presenting these subjects, see the filmography in: Elley. 21 Thompson, 228; Hall, 33f.

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architectural sublimity for the set design of the Babylonian episode in Intolerance (1916).22 The Italian epics of the early twentieth century were ‘the first films to be roadshown in the United States on a national rather than a regional, states right basis’.23 They were shown in some of the country’s biggest cinema venues and circulated in different versions with varying numbers of reels and diverse applications of coloring.24 Their screenings were accompanied either by a real orchestra or by a mechanical recording. After these early success stories from abroad, epic films were frequently produced in the following years. The ones that include depictions of disaster events are (among others): Sodom and Gomorrah (1922), La Bibbia (also known as After Six Days, 1920/1922), The Ten Commandments (1923), Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (1926), and Noah’s Ark (1928). The increased budgets of these large-scale productions were invested in even more extravagant settings and even bigger numbers of extras, which formed collective bodies in states of panic, rage, or rapture. Also, the expressive range and quality of visual effects was improved, as they now included miniature models, trick editing, pyrotechniques, and matte paintings. Hollywood’s increased productional potency shows itself quite clearly in the spectacular Deluge sequence of Noah’s Ark.25 Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale describe the film as the ‘last “silent” epic’.26 Already on the brink of sound film, Noah’s Ark was released with Vitaphone music, an effects track, and talking sequences. Afterward, the genre went into a crisis with failing films like The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), causing the production of historical epic films to be ‘put on hold until the 1950s’.27 Less influential on an international scale than the Italian epics was the German Bergfilm (‘mountain film’) genre of the 1920s and 1930s, which made extensive use of the sublime’s iconography.28 In works like Im Kampf mit 22 Feaver, 211-213. 23 Hall, 29. – The term ‘roadshowing’, in this context, signifies a mode of cinematic distribution and exhibition for large-scale and feature-length productions, which (can) include booked seats, a viewing schedule, longer runtimes, exclusive venues, bigger screens, and a score that is played by an orchestra (Hall, 3). 24 Hall, 28-31, 62f. 25 The production value (and potency) of epic films is subliminally always implied and represents a significant part of their cinematic experience. This becomes obvious when looking at the advertisements, trailers, and critical discourses of epic films. This aspect is repeatedly addressed in: Hall. 26 Hall, 98. 27 Hall, 100. 28 A discussion of the Bergfilm genre’s art historical context, its critical and academic reception, as well as its aesthetic appeal is offered in: Giesen. – For more detailed information on this matter, see: Aspetsberger; Horak.

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dem Berge (‘In Fight with the Mountain’, 1921), Mountain of Destiny (1924), The Holy Mountain (1926) The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930), or The Mountain Calls (1937) – most of them directed by Arnold Fanck – the Alpine mountains are depicted both as dynamically hostile and majestically static phenomena, against which man’s efforts to survive are set. The genre’s protagonists are faced with storms, avalanches, freezing temperatures, and the unpredictability of glaciers. During the first decade of the twentieth century, subjects of the sublime could also be viewed within travel genres. Although catastrophic events did not play a role in travel films, they nonetheless presented topographies that had traditionally been perceived as sublime: storms at sea, waterfalls, volcanoes, rocky cliffs, and mountain ranges. Thus, early travel film continued to capitalize upon people’s interest in topographies of touristic and aesthetic value, just like previous pictorial media like the Diorama, different Panorama devices, laterna magicas, and the Great Pictures of the Hudson River School had done in the nineteenth century. According to Charles Musser, the ‘travel genre was one of the most popular and developed forms of film practice in the pre-nickelodeon era’.29 Similar to the early epics from Italy, travel films were pioneers in terms of camera movement. As noted by Kristin Thompson, the possibility of moving the camera was well-known almost from the beginning of cinema. But in the primitive period, the moving camera was associated more with scenics and topicals. These would often consist of shots in which the camera surveyed a location by panning in a circle or by moving while mounted on a vehicle.30

A quite elaborate device for cinematic travelling was invented and commercially run by George C. Hale. In his Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, he exhibited topographies like Tokyo, the Swiss Alps, Ceylon, Hanoi, Lourdes, Mount Cerrat, Vesuvius, Agra, Frankfurt, and a broad variety of American locations like Niagara Falls, Red Rock Canyon, Chicago, or the Ute Pass.31 During the show, the spectator was seated inside a train wagon with an open front through which s/he perceived the projected motion pictures of a train ride. By simulating the movement of travel itself, Hale’s cinemas provided a continuous flow of views – a visual movement that can be associated 29 Musser 1990, 123. 30 Thompson, 227. 31 Fielding, 125-128.

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both with the dynamics of modernity (with the train ride as its ultimate cipher) and with the winding paths and picturesque views of the English landscape garden.

Disaster Melodramas In the 1930s, a number of f ilms with natural disasters as their central element of attraction were released, leading to the widespread notion of a clearly recognizable cycle of disaster films.32 In the films La fin du monde (1931), Deluge (1933), San Francisco (1936), The Hurricane (1937), In Old Chicago (1938), Suez (1938), Spawn of the North (1938), and The Rains Came (1939), catastrophic events like floods and landslides, earthquakes, fires, thunderstorms, tornadoes and hurricanes, colliding comets, and avalanches are put on display. However, technically speaking, these films were not perceived as ‘disaster movies’ or ‘disaster films’ but as ‘melodramas’. Compared to what the term ‘melodrama’ came to signify from the 1970s onward within the film critical discourse, namely a body of films dealing with generational family and gender conflicts and emphasizing ‘a register of heightened emotionalism and sentimentality’, the ‘melodramas’ (or ‘mellers’) of the 1930s were something different.33 ‘[F]rom c. 1910 to 1970 the term “melodrama” meant action thrillers with fast-paces narratives, episodic story-lines featuring violence, suspense and death-defying stunts’.34 Giving a more nuanced account of early melodrama, which also offers compatibility with the term’s current meaning, Ben Singer defines some characteristics of early melodrama such as emotional excess and duress, the arousing of strong emotional responses in the audience (often through the presentation of extreme injustice), pathos, overwrought emotion, moral polarization, nonclassical narrative structures (with greater tolerance for coincidences, implausibilities, convoluted plotting, or deus ex machina resolutions), and sensationalism (with the ‘emphasis on action, violence, thrills, awesome sights, and spectacles of physical peril’).35 All these elements certainly apply to the disaster melodramas of the 1930s. Their emphasis on catastrophic action sequences was explicitly recognized 32 See for example: Keane, 6f.; Hobsch, 8; Sanders, 9. 33 Singer, 37. 34 Mercer, 6. 35 Singer, 48. – The complexity and media diversity of the melodrama genre (the melodramas of the cinema had predecessors within the stage arts and the visual arts, drama, and other literary forms) are addressed in: Bratton.

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within the press and the public discourse at that time.36 Central aspects regarding their narrative and receptive functioning can be elucidated by the example of the press coverage on the earthquake melodrama San Francisco. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke and starring Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald, the film retells the story of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It became one of the decade’s biggest hits at the box office.37 With its release in 1936, the producers capitalized on the thirtieth anniversary of the event. Revisiting the film’s contemporary reception in the press, it becomes apparent that the depiction of the earthquake through visual and sound effects attracted the most attention. In Variety, the ‘quite lengthy’ sequence of the ‘noisy’, ‘terrifying’, and ‘so realistic’ disaster is described at the very beginning of the film review.38 Only later, the author also mentions that ‘the picture has other assets and exhibs’ such as its main characters (and the actors who portray them) and its music numbers (whose specific song titles are provided in the article).39 The storyline, to the author, is merely of secondary importance, for it just seems to reproduce the plots of other recent film productions about San Francisco. As opposed to the randomness of the story, ‘all comparisons are lost by and will be forgotten in the pictorial catastrophe which breaks in just as the story reaches the peak of its emotional pitch, to set a new high in theatrical violence’. 40 According to a critic of Time Magazine, the sequence of San Francisco’s destruction ‘in all respects except casualties no doubt betters its original of 30 years ago’.41 This is how The New York Times described the sequence: And “San Francisco’s” earthquake comes. It is a shattering spectacle, one of the truly great cinematic illusions; a monstrous, hideous, thrilling débâcle with great fissures opening in the earth, buildings crumbling, men and women apparently being buried beneath showers of stone and plaster, gargoyles lurching from rooftops, watermains bursting, live wires flaring, flame, panic and terror. Out of it, inevitably, comes the regeneration of Blackie Norton, the happy ending of the love story and a new San Francisco. 42 36 See for instance: ‘Seismic Note’. – Also, Siegfried Kracauer’s article ‘Das Grauen im Film’, which I cited in the beginning of Chapter 1, takes notice of this film trend. 37 Hall, 94. 38 ‘San Francisco (with Songs)’. 39 ‘San Francisco (with Songs)’. 40 ‘San Francisco (with Songs)’. 41 ‘Cinema’. 42 Nugent.

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Moreover, the article makes the interesting observation that ‘“San Francisco” is less a single motion picture than an anthology. During its two-hour course on the Capitol’s screen it manages to encompass most of the virtues of the operatic film, the romantic, the biographical, the dramatic and the documentary’.43 What does this press material reveal in terms of the film’s immediate reception? First, the critics all agree that the action sequence of the earthquake represents San Francisco’s main attraction. This attraction is perceived in accordance with the receptive principles of the sublime, that is to say, it affectively agitates the spectator and provokes mixed emotions of terror and pleasure. Second, the disaster is perceived as a highly realistic, illusionistic, and immersive phenomenon, qualities closely connected with cinema’s technological capabilities. By the 1930s, cinema had already transformed into a darkened space in which the seated viewer was positioned toward the screen. Its moving images were already presented on far bigger screens than before. The broad implementation of sound film technology allowed for a closer intertwining of camera image and narrative information as well as for intense multimedia experiences of filmed phenomena. Third, the cinematic experience of the earthquake also involves – yet, perhaps only retrospectively – admiring the potency of the filmic representation and production. Fourth, the film’s narrative merely plays a minor role. Its attraction elements, such as the disaster sequence, the actors’ performances, and the musical numbers, receive a lot more attention. These attractions are arranged among the plotlines of the film. On the other hand, the Variety article also notes that the earthquake occurs exactly when the narrative’s main conflict – the love story between Blackie Norton and Mary Blake – has reached its climax. The catastrophic event demarcates a turning point that ultimately leads to ‘the regeneration of Blackie Norton, the happy ending of the love story and a new San Francisco’. Hence, the earthquake functions as a deus ex machina which imposes its judgement over the protagonists and the society of San Francisco and resolves their various conflicts. This narrative function of the disaster event is a general characteristic of the disaster cycle of the 1930s. One finds catastrophic events acting as dei ex machina also in In Old Chicago, The Hurricane, Suez, Spawn of the North, as well as in the slightly later released films Flame of Barbary Coast (1945) and Tulsa (1949). In other cases, such as in The Rains Came, the disaster takes place in the middle of the plot. Rather than bringing the narrative to an end, it crucially changes the protagonists’ environment and, thereby, their premises for interaction. The pouring rains that plague the Indian 43 Nugent.

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kingdom Ranchipur force the characters (the philanthropist, doctor, and major Safti, the spoiled Lady Esketh, the lethargic Tom Ransome, and the young and naive Fern Simon) to reconsider their primary goals and make incisive decisions. The disaster melodramas of the 1930s are thus deeply concerned with ethics and moral issues. In most cases, the catastrophic event interferes as an agent to restore social balance and cleanse individual persons and whole communities from moral ills. The entertainment milieus of San Francisco and Chicago are portrayed as decadent, godless, and morally degenerated; so, when they are burned to the ground, the chance for ethical reform and redefinition is given (and taken). The disaster presented in Deluge is crucial for the subsequent development of the plot and the actions of the characters. The destruction of modern civilization, which takes place right at the beginning of the film, creates a primitive world centered on survival and the conflict between different archetypes. The worldwide collapse is visualized through the destruction of New York City, which unfolds as a complex interplay of interior and exterior views, varying degrees of distance and proximity, human bodies, and materials such as stone, glass, and metal. The global scale of the disaster is what Deluge shares with Abel Gance’s La fin du monde. In contrast to the historical epic genre, disaster melodramas feature predominantly contemporary scenarios, which are more directly related to the social conditions of their cinematic viewers. Particularly, the destruction and rebirth of the cities of San Francisco and Chicago illustrate the American nation’s transformation from moral decay to a state of grace and moral integrity, a process that the domestic spectator could directly relate to. Apart from these depictions of modern urban societies, some melodramas of the 1930s are set in exotic locations and cultural spaces whose otherness is distinctly emphasized (for example, the South Pacific tribal community in The Hurricane, the Indian setting in The Rains Came, and the ‘Arabic’ desert world in Suez). The impressiveness of the films’ visual effects also had a concrete economic background. After going through a phase of recession in the first half of the 1930s, the economic situation of the film industry improved during the decade’s second half, leading to increased production budgets.44 Thus, from a financial point of view, it was an appropriate time for producing costly sequences of monumental conflagrations, floods, landslides, and earthquakes. The visualization of the latter, the earthquake, had been limited in pre-cinematic media to sequential presentations of before-and-after images. In the disaster films of 44 Hall, 88f.

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the 1930s, its spatio-temporal dimensions – most importantly its processuality – could be translated into cinematic sensations. While the 1930s saw the big-scale production of several disaster melodramas, the cycle lost momentum in the 1940s. With Flame of Barbary Coast, Tulsa, and – later in the ‘50s – The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), only a few films of this specific genre and production type were made. As will be shown in the following, the trend shifted back toward monumental epics as well as toward less prestigious production models.

Disaster Diversity: the 1950s and 1960s Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, disaster themes were omnipresent in cinema. Yet, only a minor part of these films depicted disaster events as cinematic attractions. Despite the fact that a few scholars recognize a 1950s-cycle of disaster films, there is no coherent body of films substantiating this claim.45 Instead, cinematic disasters can be found among a variety of genres. Often, disaster themes and narratives are employed without ever visualizing actual disaster events. Accordingly, disasters are either threatening future scenarios which never come true (and thus never manifest), or they are already located in the past, merely providing the setting for the unfolding of a post-disaster narrative. The films featuring such disaster threats include the science fiction thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) as well as the airplane dramas No Highway in the Sky (1951), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Zero Hour! (1957). Works that employ post-disaster scenarios are the science fiction drama Five (1951), the monster horror film Day the World Ended (1956), the all-star cast drama On the Beach (1959), and the survivor film The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959). These films appeal to the viewer less through spectacular presentations of catastrophic events and more through involving his/her imagination and empathy as well as through the general immersive allure of their narratives. The communal theme of many movies from the 1950s and 1960s is the threat of nuclear annihilation. Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964), for example, narrates an accidental American first strike and the Russian retaliation. All this is shown from the perspective of a military situation room. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb from the same year employs original footage of nuclear blasts for its catastrophic ending. In Crack in the World (1965), the impact of a nuclear bomb fatally destabilizes the structure of Earth’s crust. The event is displayed through various disaster phenomena like volcano eruptions, earthquakes, and the crashing of a train. 45 See for example: Hobsch; Keane.

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Furthermore, the nuclear threat of the Cold War led to gigantic cinematic monsters which terrorize modern civilization. Easily surmounting the scale of 1933’s King Kong, The Beast of 20,000 Fathoms (1953) is a monumental prehistoric dinosaur that is awoken from its eon-long sleep in the Arctic ice by a nuclear bomb test. One year later, the Japanese icon Godzilla (Jap. orig.: Gojira) made its first appearance on the screen. An Americanized version of the film was released in 1956. Another giant monster summoned by nuclear technology is The Giant Behemoth (1959). These prehistoric creatures of cinema can be said to affect as geologically sublime phenomena, just like dinosaur visualizations did in the nineteenth century (see pp. 299-301). But not all the monsters that terrorize modern man in the ‘50s and ‘60s were connected to nuclear scenarios. Both the giant ants in Them! (1954) and the dinosaur Gorgo (1961) had nothing to do with the Cold War (at least not explicitly). In many cases, these films were B-films (or what is called B-movies today). That means they were produced on lower budgets, advertised in an aggressive and flashy manner, not shown at prestigious cinema palaces, and aiming at a younger audience. 46 The various films mentioned so far illustrate the fuzziness of the disaster genre’s distinctive borders. While Dr. Strangelove is sometimes regarded as a disaster movie, it was not advertised and perceived as one when it was released in 1964. 47 Quite often, disasters are used as future threats, narrative settings, or multisensory attractions in films that are commonly associated with other genres such as science fiction, melodrama, thriller, or war film. On the one hand, the film The War of the Worlds (1953) confronts mankind with a global alien invasion, which is why it is often labeled as an end-of-the-word disaster f ilm; yet on the other hand, its overall appearance rather recalls the conventions of the genres of war film and science fiction. As for the high-budget end of the production spectrum, the historical epic genre made its re-appearance on the screens of the most prestigious movie theaters. The contrast between the popular character of the B-films in terms of their production, distribution, exhibition, and reception and the more exclusive and prestigious nature of the historical epics demonstrates how oppositions between art and entertainment, between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow fields of leisure have still been discursively employed and instrumentalized, even in the mass medium cinema. 46 How the A and B-film system emerged from the production, distribution, and exhibition of double feature programs is explained in: Hall, 94-96, 171. 47 See for instance: Hobsch; Keane; Dixon; Roddick.

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Epics featuring spectacular depictions of disasters included both American and European productions as well as international cooperations. Pompeii’s destruction by Vesuvius was once again visualized in films like Les derniers jours de Pompéi (1950), Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (1959), and Anno 79: La distruzione di Ercolano (1962). Quo Vadis (1951) – among other epics displaying the burning of Rome – was adapted for the screen one more time; and the narratives of the Old Testament were visualized and retold in films like The Ten Commandments (1956), Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), and The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966).48 The latter presents the destruction of Sodom as a nuclear mushroom cloud. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments is a remake of the director’s own eponymous silent film from 1923. In many shots, it remains surprisingly close to the old version. Generally, though, it is obvious that the film’s scale of production and reception surpassed its predecessor by far, featuring monumental architecture, armies of extras representing the Hebrews and Pharaoh’s army, visual effects depicting the Egyptian plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, as well as enhanced cinematic technologies of color, sound, and widescreen (VistaVision) film. 49 With its outstanding success at the box office, The Ten Commandments ‘dislodged Gone With the Wind from the number one position on Variety’s list of All-Time Rentals Champs’.50 DeMille’s film was nominated for seven Oscar Academy Awards, yet only won the trophy for Best Special Effects, a category that had existed since 1939. Another winner within the same category – while operating on a much smaller budget – was When Worlds Collide from 1951. In the film, Earth is completely destroyed through the collision with a young planet. Only a small group of chosen individuals gets to flee in an arc spaceship in search for a new home. The approaching collision of the two planets is presented by means of various catastrophic phenomena such as floods and tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic activities, bursting icebergs, and burning oil derricks. Burning oil wells also represent the main attraction in the fire disaster film Hellfighters (1968). In addition, a remake was made of the 1930s-melodrama The Rains Came, now titled The Rains of Ranchipur. The RMS Titanic was sunk three more times in cinemas: in Titanic (1953), in A Night to Remember (1958), and in The Last Voyage (1960). In terms of its setting, plot, and character interaction, The Last Voyage already anticipated 48 See the chart listing all epics made on this subject in: Solomon, 329. 49 For a detailed discussion of the film’s production, reception, and intrinsic features, see: Solomon, 142-158. 50 Hall, 161.

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some of the key features of the 1970s-disaster cycle, namely the gathering of a diverse group of people, their involvement in a catastrophic event leading to their entrapment in a hostile space in which they are forced to act and interact. A different (and far more literal) approach of presenting disasters in cinema was attempted by Roberto Rossellini with Stromboli (1950). Set on the volcanic island Stromboli, the film tells the story of the immigrant Karin, who marries the Italian fisherman Antonio. More and more, one sees her at odds with the conservative village life on the island. For the film’s final sequence, Rossellini used real footage of the volcano’s eruption and of the evacuation of the village via boat. A film on the brink of the disaster cycle of the 1970s is Krakatoa, East of Java from 1969. Its two extensive disaster scenes include volcano eruptions, burning landscapes, tsunamis, and shipwrecks. After performing poorly at the box office in 1969, the film was re-released under the title Volcano in the mid-1970s. With this, its producers meant to capitalize on the promising commercial climate of the decade’s disaster cycle.51 Even though Krakatoa was initially produced in Super Panavision 70, it was also shown at Cinerama theaters. This was at a time when Cinerama’s curved widescreens had already been made obsolete due to other widescreen technologies.52 Before its inglorious ending, however, Cinerama’s multiprojection technology had had a leading role in the exhibition and production of widescreen films since the early 1950s.53 The films produced for Cinerama focused predominantly on travelogues, topographical views, and landscapes. They showed Niagara Falls and other American sites as well as various exotic locations. In alliance with its monumental and overwhelming projection technology, Cinerama also put on display typical landscape subjects of the sublime, an interesting phenomenon worth noting before proceeding to the final birth of the ‘disaster movie’ in the following part.

‘Disaster Movies’ and Nuclear Wastelands Since the disaster cycle of the 1970s has already been written on extensively, I will focus on aspects that deviate from the mainstream of its assessment.54 This particularly regards the often one-sided accentuation of the films’ 51 Carr, 249f. 52 Belton, 110f. 53 Cinerama’s commercial enterprise began in 1952 with the exhibition of This Is Cinerama (Belton, 103-105). 54 As for instance: Wasser; Feil; Grigat; Ramonet; Sanders; King, Chap. 6; Hobsch; Kay; Keane; Roddick; Yacowar.

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narrative dimensions. As I will show by reference to the films’ contemporary critical reception, such narrative aspects were only of secondary concern. As documented by Hall and Neale, the films The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) were the biggest box office hits in their years of release. Another disaster production from 1974, Earthquake, became a major success as well.55 In the following, I will take a closer look at several reviews of the three films published close to their respective opening in newspapers and journals like The New York Times, Boxoffice, Variety, or New Musical Express. Especially in the reviews of The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, the films’ plots and characters are criticized, while their special effects and action sequences are praised. According to New Musical Express, Earthquake is ‘one of those movies where the actors take second-place’.56 Variety finds the special effects ‘terrific’ and the story ‘surprisingly good’.57 Boxoffice notes that the ‘real stars of this blockbuster (literally) are the 141 stunt people, the mechanical-effects wizards, “miniature” magicians, cinematographers, scene designers and, of course, Universal’s unique Sensosurround system’.58 Even though Vincent Canby, in his The New York Times article, mocks the story and the protagonists of The Towering Inferno, he at the same time recognizes its ability to have the spectator ‘fooled by the talents of the stuntmen, the production designers and especially by the editors, the men who f it all the pieces together without the seams showing’.59 The craftsmanship behind the f ilms’ visual qualities and their convincing special effects are repeatedly emphasized and appreciated by critics. In his review of The Poseidon Adventure, A.H. Weiler generally speaks of a ‘workmanlike direction, which accents the script’s physical aspects’.60 A crucial part of this crafted physicality is the films’ affective appeal to the spectator. Nora Sayre describes Earthquake’s visceral impact on the viewer’s body as a tingling in the spine and in the throat. Moreover, she catches herself wanting to shout at and warn the characters in situations of imminent danger.61 Similarly, Canby predicts that The Poseidon Adventure will not give the spectator ‘any important ideas’ but will provide a ‘vivid, completely safe nightmare’.62 55 Hall, 197, 205. 56 Salewicz. 57 ‘Film review: Earthquake’. 58 ‘Feature Review: Earthquake’. 59 Canby. 60 Weiler. 61 Sayre. 62 Canby.

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In contrast to the disaster melodramas of the 1930s, the 1970s-disaster f ilms strongly focus on their catastrophic events. That means that the strands of their plots and the actions and dialogues of their characters are all attuned to their disaster events. The narrative announces, hints at, anticipates, and reflects the disaster spectacle. Often, the disaster creates hostile spaces in which the protagonists are forced to act and interact. This applies particularly to the ‘frighteningly claustrophobic, burning or flooded interiors’ of the ship in The Poseidon Adventure as well as to the devastated floors of the skyscraper in The Towering Inferno.63 A concise description of such disaster parkour scenarios is offered by the actor Charlton Heston, who appeared both in historical epics and in disaster movies: The basic situation always involves a disparate group of people, most of them strangers to each other, thrown suddenly into a life-threatening situation, usually (not invariably) a natural disaster. The movie explores the disaster as spectacularly as possible, and traces the reaction of the various characters to the common danger.64

Then again, Heston’s definition does not quite account for the broad diversity of the 1970s-disaster cycle. This is significant, since this cycle was not only already recognized during its course, it also brought forth the genre designation ‘disaster movie’.65 Hence, one could assume that the cycle’s individual films share distinct features which led to their recognition as one cohesive group. However, besides the fact that most of the films’ plots are set in contemporary environments, any other – though often assumed – cohesion is simply not given. Note for instance the variety of disaster victims appearing in the films, ranging from the passengers of an airplane or a ship to the citizens of a town to the population of Earth as a whole. Thus, there must have been other factors that led to the notion of a disaster movie cycle. Some of these factors may have included the sheer quantity of films produced in the decade, the repeated (and therefore recognizable) involvement of specific actors, directors, and producers, as well as standardized formulas of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. As could be seen in the cases of Deluge (1933) and The Last Voyage (1960), the disaster movie recipe as described by Heston was far from being new; yet, it reached new heights of commercial profit and production value during the birth years of the ‘disaster movie’ genre. 63 Weiler. 64 Heston, qtd. in: Hall, 205. 65 See for example: Sayre; Weiler. See also: Chapter 1, Footnote 60.

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Other types of disaster movies that deviated from the disaster parkour formula included scenarios in which the disaster represents a potential threat (Airport [1970], Airport 1975 [1974], Juggernaut [1974], The Concorde… Airport ’79 [1979]), post-disaster scenarios with an emphasis on man’s struggle for survival (Survive! [1976], Airport ’77 [1977], Beyond the Poseidon Adventure [1979]), and films that exhibit their disaster events as intense cinematic attractions (Tidal Wave [1973], Earthquake, The Hindenburg [1975], Avalanche [1978], Meteor [1979], City on Fire [1979], Hurricane [1979], When Time Ran Out [1980], St. Helens [1981]). Obviously, it is not always possible to clearly distinguish these types. The film Survive! features a spectacular avalanche on top of its plot following the survivors of an airplane crash; and the disaster parkour of The Poseidon Adventure is initially created by the forces of an ostentatiously displayed tidal wave. According to Ken Feil, the disaster movies of the 1970s became targets for ridicule and camp humor, due to their stereotypical plots and characters and their predictable narrative techniques.66 Indeed, this tendency already crops up in the cycle’s critical reception.67 The critics’ mockery of the films’ narrative elements is often set against their affective engagement with the films’ spectacular disaster sequences. But even this type of affective response is retrospectively ridiculed. As if secretly ashamed of her somatic bond with the film, Nora Sayre ends her review of Earthquake with the sarcastic remark that the film ‘for some reason, […] also made [her] hungry’.68 Vincent Canby smears a thick layer of irony between his cinematic experience and the movie’s ‘smashing’ and ‘first rate’ ‘visual spectacle’, its ‘crematory horror’ and ‘second-hand thrills of a visceral sort’.69 This apparently unsettling somatic engagement with the disaster films of the 1970s also had a vital technological cause. By then, bigscreen and widescreen technologies like CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Todd-AO had become the industry standard. New surround sound systems were put to work to fully immerse the spectator and to enable soundscapes that were sensually overwhelming. During the screenings of Earthquake, the application of Sensosurround sound systems prompted particularly visceral 66 Feil, 3-5. 67 And not only there. In 1976, the disaster movie parody The Big Bus also attempted to mock the conventions of the decade’s disaster cycle, so did the film Airplane! (1980) four years later. However, only Airplane! became a hit at the box office. According to Thomas Schatz, the commercial failure of The Big Bus was based on its too-early release, at a time when the cycle’s conventions had not yet become widely assimilated (Schatz, 40, qtd. in: Feil, 3). 68 Sayre. 69 Canby.

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cinematic experiences. ‘[T]he system used “special audible and sub-audible effects, below the human hearing range,” to create air movements “which vibrate against a person’s body and ears with a sound pressure waveform comparable to that of an actual earthquake […]”’.70 However, due to the high rental costs for the equipment of Sensosurround, only a small number of cinemas actually used it. Most audiences experienced Earthquake with more conventional sound technologies.71 Even though the disaster movies of the 1970s were exhibited under enhanced technological standards, the visual effects that they employed for their disaster presentations were rather conventional and long-approved, using miniature models, matte paintings, stuntmen, optical compositing, as well as explosions and smoke effects. After reaching its peak of popularity in 1974, the years after brought a period of steady decline for the disaster genre. With the production of several box off ice flops (The Cassandra Crossing [1977], Avalanche, The Concorde… Airport ’79, City on Fire, Hurricane, Meteor, The Swarm [1978], Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out…), the cycle f inally ran out of steam in the early 1980s.72 Accordingly, the decade of the 1980s is often regarded as a fallow period for disaster films. As such, it was not before the 1990s that the disaster genre would return to the big screen. Indeed, in the light of the dense and dynamic production and reception processes of disaster films in the 1970s and 1990s, this assessment is certainly correct. However, to be precise, I ought to mention the several works dealing with nuclear disasters and post-catastrophic wastelands which were produced during the 1980s. After it had played a prominent role in many films of the 1950s and 1960s, the subject of the nuclear disaster made a comeback in the 1980s. It re-occurs in films such as Malevil (1981), Testament (1983), Le Dernier Combat (1983), The Day After (1983), and Pisma myortvogo cheloveka (1986). Admittedly though, these works are usually less interested in provoking sensorily and somatically stimulating experiences of the disaster itself; rather, they stage devastated wastelands which refer indexically to their already bygone disaster events. A heightened degree of affective intensity in terms of encountering cinematic disasters did not return before the 1990s. 70 Hall, 207. – Hall and Neale quote from an issue of American Cinematographer which was entirely about the production of Earthquake. After I had the opportunity to watch Earthquake at a cinema with original Sensosurround in 2015, I can confirm that the quoted article does not simply advertise the device. Based on my own experience, I would claim that the somatic agency of Earthquake’s Sensosurround soundscape is relevant for the film’s reception. 71 Hall, 207. 72 Hall, 207f.

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Digitally Painted Disasters Even though the disaster films of the 1990s are often thought of as one enclosed cycle, this notion does not fully apply.73 After making their appearance in the middle of the decade – with some of its biggest box office hits – the production of disaster films did not abruptly end or gradually fade out as it was the case with the cycles of the 1930s and 1970s. Quite the opposite, disaster films have remained a reliable warrant for commercial turnover at the box office and have thus been produced on a regular basis up until today. While the films Jurassic Park (1993) and Outbreak (1995) already dealt with catastrophic scenarios (out-of-control dinosaurs, a pandemic virus), they still held closer ties to other genre categories such as action-adventure or thriller. It was in the following years that films were made that could be identified more clearly as disaster movies. The most renowned films in these years are Independence Day (1996), Twister (1996), Dante’s Peak (1997), Volcano (1997), Godzilla (1998), Armageddon (1998), and Deep Impact (1998). However, some of these works (esp. Armageddon and Deep Impact) were also perceived as science fiction films. The same genre ambiguity applied to motion pictures like the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and James Cameron’s 1997 version of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. After the turn of the millennium, films dealing with catastrophic events in various topics and degrees of intensity are The Perfect Storm (2000), The Core (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), Poseidon (2006), Cloverfield (2008), The Happening (2008), The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), 2012 (2009), Knowing (2009), and, in the following decade, Melancholia (2011), Take Shelter (2011), The Impossible (2012), Pompeii (2014), Godzilla (2014), Noah (2014), Into the Storm (2014), Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), San Andreas (2015), Bølgen (2015), Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), Deepwater Horizon (2016), Geostorm (2017), and Skjelvet (2018). Additionally, the mountain film genre has been represented in previous years and decades more conspicuously again, with works like Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Vertical Limit (2000), Touching the Void (2003), Nordwand (2008), Nanga Parbat (2010), and Everest (2015).74 Thus, given the high density and the continuity of disaster film productions, the concept of a 1990s-disaster cycle is difficult to uphold. Rather than considering the disaster movies of the 1990s as a concluded chapter of film 73 See for instance: Sanders; Feil; Keane; Hobsch; Grigat; Ramonet; Jeong; Kay. 74 In the USA, Bølgen was released as The Wave in 2016, Skjelvet was released as The Quake in 2018, and Nordwand was released as North Face in 2009.

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history, I suggest one should focus instead on the incisive caesura which occurred in these years, namely the application of digital visual effects for the presentation of disaster events. A concise definition of this technological novelty is offered by Hall and Neale: ‘Digital technology works by sampling and/or assembling audio or visual fields in the form of mathematically coded units or “bits” of information’.75 At the same time, the implementation of digital technology as an important tool for cinematic production comprises more than ‘the shift to electronics from celluloid’.76 In his book on Digital Visual Effects in Cinema, Stephen Prince systematically elaborates what this ‘more’ of the digital era means for cinema. His main argument is that digital visual effects do not lead to less realism and experiences of illusion and immersion, as claimed by several scholars; quite the opposite, digital leads to cinematic images that have never been more persuasive and more convincing for the viewer. This is because digital images are ‘indefinitely adjustable’ and can be seamlessly combined with filmed live action footage and traditional (that is pre-digital) special effects.77 Moreover, they facilitate new possibilities of expression, which were unattainable in earlier decades. Lev Manovich’s criticism of digital cinema is inverted here: the digital painter/filmmaker does not destroy the medium’s indexical realism (which never fully existed in the first place), but s/he enhances it and widens cinema’s repertoire of expressive and immersive means. In this regard, Prince introduces his concept of perceptual realism, which he defines as the replication via digital means of contextual cues designating a threedimensional world. These cues include information sources about the size and positioning of objects in space, their texturing and apparent density of detail, the behavior of light as it interacts with the physical world, principles of motion and anatomy, and the physics involved in dynamic systems such as water, clouds, and fire. Digital tools give filmmakers an unprecedented ability to replicate and emphasize these cues as a means for anchoring the scene in a perceptual reality that the viewer will find credible because it follows the same observable laws of physics as the world s/he inhabits.78

In the following, I will briefly apply Prince’s notion of digital cinematic effects to the disaster movie genre, with the aim to distinguish its digital 75 76 77 78

Hall, 253. Prince, 11. Prince, 5. Prince, 32.

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creations from its pre-digital predecessors. Before digital visual effects were put to use to depict sublime catastrophic events, they were developed among and introduced through a number of films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Tron (1982), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump (1994), and Toy Story (1995). In terms of the presentation of sublime cinematic disasters, the expressive and immersive potential of digital imaging tools becomes apparent when comparing the depictions of tidal waves and floods in the f ilms Earthquake (1974) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004, from here on: TDAT). In the last sequence of Earthquake, the Mulholland Dam finally bursts and releases innumerable tons of water rushing toward the city of Los Angeles. In TDAT, the flooding of New York City takes place after about 45 minutes. A distinct difference between the two sequences regards their respective attempts to relate the natural disaster to its human victims and environments (the urban spaces of Los Angeles and Manhattan). In Earthquake, such connections are limited to either extreme long shots in which miniature models of houses and bridges are destroyed or medium long shots displaying human individuals as they are caught by the rushing water. Only in one long shot does one see three fleeing persons in the foreground and the breaking of the dam in the background of the image. This shot, which lasts for four seconds, was achieved through optical compositing. By contrast, in TDAT the two domains of humanity and nature are seamlessly and closely intertwined. This also allows for a lengthier contemplation of the displayed disaster, whereas in Earthquake shots must be much shorter, for otherwise the seams and other kinds of glitches visible in the images could be easily discovered. As the deluge reaches the inner city of Manhattan, hundreds of people, cars, streets, and buildings are washed away. Not only manage these shots to present the disaster’s immediate impact on man from close proximities, they are also so impeccably crafted that it becomes almost impossible to tell where the filmed live action ends and the digitally created animations and environments begin. Even though one knows that this event did not take place in reality, one perceives its artificial imagery as highly realistic, for it is so convincingly anchored in the spectator’s perceptible reality, as Prince would say. While the various shots of the flood in Earthquake represent indexes of the whole event, the deluge of TDAT is repeatedly captured in extreme long shots as it invades New York City. Furthermore, the camera’s points of view in Earthquake are always located on firm ground, in safe distance to the disaster. In turn, TDAT locates its shots in spaces that would be nearly

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impossible to occupy in real life. This is most apparent in the shots in which the wave moves right toward the camera as well as in the virtual camera shot circling around the statue of liberty as it is flooded. In juxtaposition with the filmed destruction of Earthquake’s miniature models, the digital images of TDAT take the spectator deeper into and closer to the sublime phenomenon and its violent forces. In this regard, it is also significant that the waters freed by the eroded dam only hit suburban spaces with one-story buildings. Los Angeles’ central urban area with its skyscraper architecture, which is seen earlier in the film, is merely reached underground through the city’s canal system. Due to the expanded repertoire of expressive means facilitated by digital imaging technology, TDAT convincingly presents the flooding of Manhattan’s iconic skyscraper landscape. Thus, digital provides visual tools to translate a widened range of fantastical ideas (such as extreme disaster scenarios) into cinematic phenomena that are perceived as realistic. With this, the catastrophic events of digital cinema can become even stronger agents within the plot, for their imagery seamlessly interacts with the protagonists as a powerful actor itself.79 The reception of digital effects as such is further conditioned by the changing landscape of cinema architecture and exhibition technology in the Western world. In the 1980s and 1990s, many cinemas were built or upgraded.80 Particularly the 1990s witnessed a wave of multiplex theaters being built, featuring multiple big and widescreens and state-of-the-art surround sound systems. Another digital novelty, which demanded a technological upgrade from theater owners, is the renewed application of stereoscopic (‘3D’) cinema. According to Prince, digital 3D solved several receptive problems inherent to older stereoscopic technologies of cinema.81 While the perception of pre-digital stereoscopic cinema involved irritations and glitches, digital technologies enable a less disturbed and smoother experience of 3D. Moreover, with digital 3D, the aesthetics of stereoscopic cinema shifted from the employment of visual gimmicks to a more general depth and plasticity of its screen elements.82 In addition to the depth cues of 2D cinema (overlap, relative size, height in the visual field, aerial perspective, motion parallax, convergence, accommodation, binocular disparity), digital stereoscopic cinema ‘works by incorporating all the[se] monocular cues 79 This thesis is presented and convincingly discussed by Aylish Wood in her analysis of the digital special effects in The Perfect Storm, a disaster film from the year 2000 (Wood, 380f.). 80 Hall, 246. 81 Prince, 202-205. 82 Hall, 259.

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and adding to them those that are involved with stereopsis – specifically binocular (retinal) disparity – and convergence’.83 Hence, digital stereoscopic cinema offers ‘a more complete set of perceptual depth cues’ to the viewer.84 On the other hand, Prince stresses the distinct difference between everyday life perception and the experience of stereoscopic cinema. Even though ‘3D cinema is a stylistic mode of viewing that approximates our real-life use of stereo depth cues […, it] invokes them at spatial distances under which we do not encounter them in the world’.85 ‘Stereopsis in 3D cinema is more insistent and emphatic than our encounter with it in real life’.86 The result is an exaggerated, heightened, and stylized experience of spatial depth and plasticity. As applied to the disaster genre – in films like Exodus: Gods and Kings, Pompeii, Godzilla, Everest, San Andreas, and Independence Day: Resurgence – this aesthetic potential of digital 3D does not simply reinforce the immersive pull of a presented film, it also offers expanded means to shock and affect the viewer, precisely by going beyond the conventions of everyday life perception. Let me elucidate this potential by briefly discussing the extreme long shots in Exodus: Gods and Kings that present tiny horses in front of a towering tidal wave (Fig. 11). While the asymmetric proportion between the horses and the wave already seems extreme in the planar 2D version, its 3D equivalent grotesquely reinforces this impression. In addition, 3D cinema’s receptive tendency to extend or dissolve the borders of the screen frame is also displayed in these extreme long shots, in that the horizontal excessiveness of the sandy shore and the wave are stretched out toward the infinite in the viewer’s perception.87 Apart from digital and 3D technologies, another central characteristic of the disaster films from the 1990s to the present needs to be addressed. Ken Feil claims that the disaster movies of the 1990s include campy and humorous elements of self-parody and self-reflexivity. Accordingly, the disaster films of the 1990s are quite aware of their famous predecessors from the 1970s, which unintentionally had become the target for camp humor and ridicule. In response to this receptive tradition, the 1990s-cycle engages in a playful and ironic dialogue with its heritage. However, Feil claims that this phase of ironic reflexivity came to an end in 2001 with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which reshaped the genre’s conventions toward a pathos-laden seriousness.88 83 84 85 86 87 88

Prince, 205, 199. Prince, 216. Prince, 218. Prince, 217. Prince, 208. Feil, xxii-xxix.

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Figs. 11a-d: Film stills from Exodus: Gods and Kings. 2014. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine, Steven Zaillian. Cinematography by Dariusz Wolski. Film editing by Billy Rich. Music by Alberto Iglesias. Runtime: 150 min.

I would like to discuss this interesting thesis within the wider context of my investigation. Although Feil’s observation of a heightened degree of self-reflexivity regarding the disaster films of the 1990s is accurate, it should be noted that humorous and self-ironic elements can be found throughout the history of cinematic disasters. In a wider sense, these elements are constituents within the sublime’s calculation and balancing of empathy and (ironic) distance, identification, and sensational curiosity, which frame the extinction of, sometimes, millions of people in a partly pleasurable manner for the viewer. In extension of Feil’s idea, I further claim that the principles of reflexivity and self-awareness apply in a far wider sense to the disaster movies made from the mid-1990s onward. As will be shown in the film analysis, these phenomena of reflexivity are not limited to elements of irony and parody; they also concern the films’ receptive and aesthetic fundament (the sublime), their atmospheres and auras, their cinematic heritage and iconographical origins. The film Twister, as a case in point of this heightened reflexivity, complexly considers its own presentability, its subjective framing procedures, its potential for ethical insight, its film and art historical predecessors, as well as its celebration and domestication of the sublimity of the American land. Finally, it is worth discussing Feil’s claim of 9/11’s influence on the conventions of the disaster genre. Unlike him, I do not think that a ban of irony and camp humor was the main effect of the event. Rather, the socio-cultural influence of the terror attack manifested as a temporary iconographical shift regarding the presentation of cinematic disasters and their impact on urban spaces in particular. Films like The Core, TDAT, Poseidon, and The Happening – while not bare of humorous, playful, and ironic elements

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– explicitly avoid the destruction of urban environments and highrise buildings. This is demonstrated most clearly in Roland Emmerich’s TDAT where the skyscrapers of New York City are not destroyed or torn apart, as in Emmerich’s 1990s production Independence Day, but merely flooded and covered under a thick layer of ice and snow. However, Emmerich’s subsequent disaster movie project, 2012, from the year 2009 visualizes once again the destruction of various major cities. Even one year earlier, in the low budget box office hit Cloverfield, the torn-off head of the statue of liberty was rolling through the devastated streets of Manhattan, thereby demonstrating that the self-imposed imaging prohibition in the wake of 9/11 was only short-lived.

Works Cited Allen, Robert C. ‘Contra the Chaser Theory’. In Film Before Griffith. Edited by John L. Fell. Berkeley: University of California Press 1983, 105-115. Aspetsberger, Friedbert, ed. Der BergFilm 1920-1940. Innsbruck, Vienna, Munich and Bozen: StudienVerlag 2002. Belton, John. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992. Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama; Stage, Picture, Screen. London: BFI Publishing 1994. Canby, Vincent. ‘“The Towering Inferno” First-Rate Visual Spectacle’. The New York Times, 20 December 1974. Carr, Robert E. and R. M. Hayes. Wide Screen Movies; A History and Filmography of Wide Gauge Filmmaking. Jefferson: McFarland & Company 1988. Catalogue Lumière. ‘Puits de pétrole à Bakou. Vue de près’, accessed 23 December 2019, https://catalogue-lumiere.com/puits-de-petrole-a-bakou-vue-de-pres/. ‘Cinema’. Time, 06 July 1936, 48. Daly, Nicholas. ‘The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage’. Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 2 (winter 2011), 255-285. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Visions of the Apocalypse; Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema. London: Wallflower Press 2003. Elley, Derek. The Epic Film; Myth and History. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1985 [1984]. Elsaesser, Thomas. Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino; Archäologie eines Medienwandels. Munich: edition text + kritik 2002. ‘Feature Review: Earthquake’. Boxoffice, 18 November 1974. Feaver, William. The Art of John Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975. Feil, Ken. Dying for a Laugh; Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press 2005.

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Fielding, Raymond. ‘Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture’. In Film Before Griffith. Edited by John L. Fell. Berkeley: University of California Press 1983, 116-130. ‘Film review: Earthquake’. Variety, 13 November 1974. Frazer, John. Artificially Arranged Scenes; The Films of George Méliès. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. 1979. Giesen, Roman. ‘Der Bergfilm der 20er und 30er Jahre’. Medienobservationen (2008), accessed 30 November 2019, http://www.medienobservationen.lmu.de/artikel/ kino/kino_pdf/giesen_bergfilm.pdf. Grigat, Nicoläa Maria. Gender- und Race-Topographien im amerikanischen Disasterfilm zwischen 1970 und 2006. Marburg: Tectum 2009. Hall, Sheldon and Steve Neale. Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2010. Hammerbacher, Valerie. Aufruhr der Elemente: Der Vulkanausbruch; Eine Motivstudie zur englischen Naturästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag 2004. Heston, Charlton. In the Arena; The Autobiography. London: HarperCollins 1995. Hobsch, Manfred. Das grosse Lexikon der Katastrophenfilme; Von ‘Airport’ bis ‘Titanic’, von ‘Erdbeben’ bis ‘Twister’ und von ‘Flammendes Inferno’ bis ‘Outbreak – Lautlose Killer’. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf 2003. Horak, Jan-Christopher, ed. Berge, Licht und Traum; Dr. Arnold Fanck und der deutsche Bergfilm. Munich: Bruckmann 1997. Jeong, Seung-Hoon. ‘The Apocalyptic Sublime: Hollywood Disaster Films and Donnie Darko’. In Terror and the Cinematic Sublime; Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films. Edited by Todd A. Comer and Lloyd Isaac Vayo. Jefferson: McFarland 2013, 72-87. Kay, Glenn and Michael Rose. Disaster Movies; The Ultimate Guide. Oakville: Mosaic Press 2007. Keane, Stephen. Disaster Movies; The Cinema of Catastrophe. London: Wallflower 2006 [2001]. Keller, Susanne B. Naturgewalt im Bild; Strategien visueller Naturaneignung in Kunst und Wissenschaft 1750-1830. Weimar: VDG 2006. King, Geoff. Spectacular Narratives; Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London and New York: I.B. Tauris 2000. Kracauer, Siegfried. ‘Das Grauen im Film’. In Kino; Essays, Studien, Glossen zum Film. Edited by Karsten Witte. Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp 1974, 25-27. Loiperdinger, Martin. ‘Lumière’s “Arrival of the Train”; Cinema’s Founding Myth’. The Moving Image; The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, vol. 4, no. 1 (spring 2004), 89-118. Mercer, John and Martin Shingler. Melodrama; Genre, Style, Sensibility. London: Wallflower 2004.

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Murray, Robin L. and Joseph K. Heumann. ‘The First Eco-Disaster Film?’. Film Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3 (spring 2006), 44-51. Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon; Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press 1991. Musser, Charles. ‘The Travel Genre in 1903-1904; Moving Towards Fictional Narrative’. In Early Cinema; Space, Frame, Narrative. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: BFI Publishing 1990, 123-132. Nugent, Frank S. ‘“San Francisco”, at the Capitol, Is a Stirring Film of the Barbary Coast -- Other New Pictures’. The New York Times, 27 June 1936. Ramonet, Ignacio. ‘Katastrophenfilme als Krisenfantasien’. Translated by Bodo Schulze. In id. Liebesgrüße aus Hollywood; Die versteckten Botschaften der bewegten Bilder. Zürich: Rotpunktverlag 2002 [2000], 87-119. Roddick, Nick. ‘Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies’. In Performance and Politics in Popular Drama; Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television 1800-1976. Edited by David Bradby, Louis James and Bernhard Sharratt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980, 243-269. Salewicz, Chris. ‘Earthquake’. New Musical Express, 08 March 1975. ‘San Francisco (with Songs)’. Variety, 01 July 1936, 12. Sanders, John. Studying Disaster Movies. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur 2009. Sayre, Nora. ‘“Earthquake” Evokes Feelies: The Cast’. The New York Times, 16 November 1974. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System. New York: McGraw-Hill 1981. Singer, Ben. ‘Meanings of Melodrama’. In id. Melodrama and Modernity; Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press 2001, 37-58. Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in the Cinema; Revised and Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press 2001. Thompson, Kristin. ‘Part Three; The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909-28’. In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and id. The Classical Hollywood Cinema; Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge 1999 [1985], 155-240. Uricchio, William and Roberta E. Pearson. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993. Wasser, Frederick. ‘Disaster Films; The End of the World and the Risk-Society Hero’. In The Apocalypse in Film; Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World. Edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Angela Krewani. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2016, 119-131. Wedel, Michael. ‘Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer; Das Ereigniskino des Mime Misu’. In Kino der Kaiserzeit; Zwischen Tradition und Moderne. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser and id. Munich: edition text + kritik 2002, 197-252.

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Weiler, A. H. ‘“Poseidon Adventure” Arrives: Liner Disaster Opens the National Theater Hackman, as Minister, Leads Group to Safety’. The New York Times, 13 December 1972. Wood, Aylish. ‘Timespaces in Spectacular Cinema: Crossing the Great Divide of Spectacle versus Narrative’. Screen, vol. 43, no. 4 (winter 2002), 370-386. Yacowar, Maurice. ‘The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre’. In Film Genre Reader III. Edited by Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press 2003, 277-295.

7.

The Sublime in Disaster Cinema Abstract The film analytical chapter moves along the lines of different key moments of the sublime: the Sublime as somatic excess, subjectivity, transcendence, modality, presentability, the geological sublime, the sublime and the ridiculous, as well as sublime hyperobjects and the ecological sublime. The primary analytical tool applied are Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s theoretical models of the sublime. The application of these eighteenth-century theorems for the analysis of twentieth and twenty-f irst-century motion pictures is solely justif ied through their shared historical foundation. This historical account takes into view the broader cultural horizon of the sublime, encompassing aesthetic thought, art historical iconographies, media technologies, aesthetic receptive conventions and strategies, scientific, economic, and cultural discourses, as well as general concepts of man’s relation to nature’s forces. Keywords: Somatic Film Theory, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Morsch, Technological History of Film and Cinema, Aesthetic Categories

In this final chapter, I will analyze a wide range of disaster films, whose historical account I presented on the previous pages. The primary analytical tool to be applied will be the various facets of Burke and Kant’s theoretical models of the sublime, as I have occasionally made use of them in previous chapters. Let me stress once again that the application of these classical eighteenth-century theorems as a tool for the analysis of twentieth and twenty-first-century motion pictures is solely justified through the historical foundation shared by both theories and films. This historical account of the sublime, which I traced in the Chapters 2, 3, and 4 takes into view the broader cultural horizon of the sublime, encompassing aesthetic thought, art historical iconographies, media technologies, aesthetic receptive conventions and strategies, scientific, economic, and cultural discourses, as well as general concepts of man’s relation to nature’s forces.

Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch07

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As in the previous historical overview of the disaster film genre, also this chapter is essentially based on the technological and receptive frameworks of cinema that were pointed out earlier. My analysis of disaster films from all stages of cinema history must be considered against the backdrop of the divergent historical models of the cinematic experience. Unlike the previous film historical part though, this chapter will not follow a chronological order. Instead, its structure is based on specific themes of the sublime. These themes are: – The Sublime as Somatic Excess – Subjectivity – Transcendence – Modality – Presentability – The Geological Sublime – The Sublime and the Ridiculous – Sublime Hyperobjects and the Ecological Sublime Roughly, the chapter will depart from the analysis of the films’ immediate sensory appearance and then move toward their more reflective elements. That means that I will initially deal with singular shots, camera movements, montage sequences, sound effects, and the visuality of the filmic image in all its richness and complexity. Tendentially, these first subchapters will have a more descriptive character, while the subsequent parts will engage more deeply in matters of interpretation and current discussions within film studies concerning topics such as attraction vs. narrative cinema or the agency of cinematic spectatorship. Additional theoretical accounts, which will be brought in contact with Kant and Burke to enable a more precise analysis, include Vivian Sobchack and Thomas Morsch’s somatic models of cinema, Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of movement image and time image, Friedrich Schiller’s modification of the Kantian sublime as a tool for moral refinement, Georg Braungart’s geological sublime, the relation of the sublime and the ridiculous as explored by Pseudo-Longinus, Thomas Paine, Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and K.W.F. Solger, Christopher Hitt’s ecological sublime, and Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects.

Patterns of Violence, or, The Sublime as Somatic Excess In my discussion of cinema as a potential medium of the sublime, I established strong compatibility between Vivian Sobchack and Thomas Morsch’s

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somatic theories of cinema and Burke and Kant’s concepts of the sublime. Accordingly, Burke’s understanding of the sublime as translation processes of an object’s excessive qualities into various physical responses resonates with Morsch’s widened concept of somatic empathy. Burke’s sensualist model further resembles Sobchack’s understanding of cinema’s bodily entities (spectator, film, filmmaker) which form the corporeal foundation of any cinematic experience. In terms of Kant, I demonstrated how traces of his first stage of the sublime, the breakdown of sensibility, can be found within Morsch’s aesthetics of speed, which also reckons with the overwhelming of the spectator’s sensory capabilities. In the following, this theoretical juxtaposition will be employed to analyze disaster movies. I will especially focus on the sublime’s excessive side, its violent agitation of the senses and somatic faculties. Burke describes the mixed emotion of the sublime (its blending of pleasure and terror) as closely related to the sensation of physical pain. In the same spirit, it will be my task to shed light on the various receptive means by which disaster films shock, affect, and violate their viewers. 1.

Mise en images

To begin with, I am going to look at a couple of shots within the fourminute-long destruction sequence in The Rains Came (1936). The sequence takes place right in the middle of the f ilm. From a narrative point of view, it entirely rearranges the coordinates of the plot, as it forces the protagonists to react, take action, and readjust their goals to the new catastrophic environment. The first shot in question shows the destruction of Ranchipur’s dam by the flood (Fig. 12). As the waters rush toward the people on the bridge, they flee in panic. The event is captured in an extreme long shot, which lasts for c. seventeen seconds. The fleeing crowd is f ilmed from a slight high angle perspective. The camera itself remains static during the shot. The shot’s dynamic is fully conveyed by the sublime object as it chases its victims toward the foreground and out of the frame. The depth of the image, linking the bridge in the foreground with the dam in the background, is accentuated by the diagonals of the river and the artif icial waterfalls of the dam facility which align with the bridge. Toward the end of the shot, the water covers the whole landscape. The dwarfed appearance of the fleeing crowd is set against the monumental and powerful appearance of the flood, achieving an immediate representation of man’s inability to stand against the forces of nature.

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Figs. 12a-d: Film stills from The Rains Came. 1939. Directed by Clarence Brown. Written by Philip Dunne, Julien Josephson. Cinematography by Arthur C. Miller. Film editing by Barbara McLean. Music by Alfred Newman. Runtime: 103 min.

Following Kant’s line of argument at the beginning of his chapter on the dynamically sublime, the gigantic dam is in itself already an object of power; yet when the flood easily destroys the dam, the power of the flood acts as a dominion, revealing its superiority over an opposed power (that is the dam).1 A dynamically sublime object is necessarily an object of fear, because it confronts the recipient with its by far superior and overwhelming features, rendering any attempt of physical resistance futile.2 Since around the mid-eighteenth century, this fearful asymmetric relation between man and nature’s sublime phenomena has been visually represented by imagery similar to the filmic shot I just described. Within easel painting, one encounters this type of image for example within the works of John Martin. His painting The Great Day of His Wrath, as I pointed out earlier, features the same juxtaposition of overwhelming destructive forces and helpless human figures. However, while Martin presented the Apocalypse 1 2

Kant 2001, 143. Kant 2001, 143f.

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Figs. 13a-d: Film stills from The Rains Came. 1939. Directed by Clarence Brown. Written by Philip Dunne, Julien Josephson. Cinematography by Arthur C. Miller. Film editing by Barbara McLean. Music by Alfred Newman. Runtime: 103 min.

in a static, yet concise moment of intensity, which was set in motion by the viewer during perception, The Rains Came, as a cinematic descendant, fully visualizes the dynamically sublime movement of nature’s forces as a generic component of its motion pictures. In a second shot of the film, the camera is set up in the middle of a street (Fig. 13). The linear perspectival arrangement of a house on the right side functions as a depth cue and links the fleeing crowd in the foreground with the approaching flood in the background. After the people have fled the frame, the entire street is covered in water and wreckage. While the first shot I discussed presented the approaching flood from a safe viewpoint and from a certain distance, the spectator is now confronted with nature’s sublime power in a more immediate manner. The panic of the fleeing individuals is a lot more tangible, since one gets to see their desperate movements from up close. The flood, as it rushes toward the viewer, threatens the viewpoint and location of the camera, which s/he engages with on a somatic level. On the other hand, this effect of immediacy is diminished to a certain extent, because the people and the water never pass or penetrate the glass of the

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camera lens. As one looks closer (and identifies the shot’s special effect), one realizes that these objects fall downward, shortly before they would reach the camera’s location. Finally, a third shot displays an interior view of a hallway with two characters (master and servant) in an argument, which is resolved by the flood entering the room. The architecture bursts apart, and the interior view fully dissolves into a chaotic maelstrom of wreckage. This kind of implosion of interior living space and architectural forms also represents a key feature of the global destruction sequence in Deluge (1933). This type of shot is used several times in the f ilm. One of them shows the interior of a prison with several cells and two guards (Fig. 14). This space is presented in stark contrasts of light and darkness, illuminated only by several lamps hanging from the ceiling. As one of the guards walks toward the center of the image, the room starts to erupt, the ceiling collapses, and the prison implodes and bursts into pieces altogether. The breakdown of the room reveals the vista of the city’s highrise skyline. The camera seems to be located now in the open air. The shaking and disruption of the interior space finally extends to the skyscraper buildings, which also start collapsing. Through the sensomotoric bond between cinematic viewer and the bodies of the guards, s/he becomes affected by their fate as there are crushed by the falling architecture. ‘[S]omatic empathy [as described by Morsch] is based on our knowledge of owning and being a body’.3 The destruction of the guards’ bodies provokes a somatic response in the body of the spectator. Yet, Morsch’s concept of somatic empathy is not restricted to ‘the reception of body images, but [it] also represents a central element in terms of our relation to the objective realm of film’. 4 That means that the earthquake’s forces of power, mass, gravity, pressure, speed, dynamic, and movement are cinematically perceived in relation to the spectator’s own bodily-being-in-the-world. The imploding of the architectural interior space and its transformation from formal, social, and political order to a state of formless chaos impacts the viewer’s body in an immediate manner. A dynamic shift of aggregates takes place, which violently destroys the formal order of the prison architecture and its implied social, cultural, and political conventions. More specifically, the prison as a representation of ethical order and the presence of state control and jurisdiction is not merely destabilized but erased altogether. 3 4

Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 195. Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 201.

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Figs. 14a-d: Film stills from Deluge. 1933. Directed by Felix E. Feist. Written by Warren Duff, John F. Goodrich. Cinematography by Norbert Brodine. Film editing by Martin G. Cohn, Rose Loewinger. Music by Val Burton. Runtime: 70 min.

There are numerous other shots in Deluge that provoke somatic empathy (in the sense of a bodily-mimetic relation to filmic objects). In these shots, the destruction of the architectural spaces and objects of the city is presented through coarse and dynamic movements of falling, sinking and crashing sideways, and bursting apart, which the spectators not only follow with their eyes but with their whole bodily being. 2. Montage Moving on from the discussion of singular shots and the isolated description of the mise en images, I now turn toward more complex somatic agitations of the sublime, which are achieved through techniques of the montage and camera movement. In terms of montage techniques, I will look at four different modes of intensifying the viewer’s sensory and affective experience. The first appears as a rhythmic and successive alternation and organization of images. The second mode presents this succession as a build-up toward a climax. The third violates the viewer’s sensory

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perception through rapid cutting sequences, and the fourth makes itself felt as a sudden shock.5 Similar structurings of images are to be found within Burke’s exploration of the sublime’s phenomenology in his Philosophical Enquiry. He principally considers two models of how the eye perceives a sublime object: either the object is ‘painted in one piece’ on the retina, forcing the eye to ‘traverse the vast space of such bodies with great quickness’, thereby leading to its straining, or the object is perceived as ‘a vast number of distinct points’ whose succession overwhelms ‘the capacity of the eye […] near to the nature of what causes pain’.6 Without favoring one of these two optical concepts, Burke sees the experience of the sublime in both cases accomplished through a structural succession and organization of images, akin to the procedures of the cinematic montage, which, following Sobchack’s terminology, resembles the subjective procedures of the spectator’s embodied perception and mind. Furthermore, Burke discusses the effects of rapid changes between bright light and darkness, the succession and repetition of visual elements as heading toward a climax of sensory overpowering, the continuation of parts of a large object, magnificence through multitude and disorder, the contrasting of interior and exterior views, suddenness and unexpectedness, and the successive visual comprehension of large objects as unities. In all these cases, an organization and succession of images comes into play, aiming to provoke a state of crisis in the sensory faculties of the spectator. To begin with the first mode of montage techniques – the rhythmic and successive alternation and organization of images – I will give two examples in which this technique is employed. I return once more to the destruction sequence in Deluge. The sequence is structured into a range of static camera shots with an average duration of four to five seconds, alternating between near and far proximities in relation to the objects to be destroyed (city, harbor, blocks, houses, crowds, persons, rooms). As has been pointed out, these shots display coarse movements of destruction such as the horizontal movements of the flood and the tectonic shock waves, as well as the vertical movements of the falling and bursting architecture of the city (Fig. 15). In most cases, these movements are arranged by the film’s montage in such a way that they oppose each other and clash against one another in patterns like down – left – right – down – left and right – left and down, and so 5 Indeed, there is an important f ifth mode: the alternating mediation between sublime objects, their environments, and the filmic protagonists (their affects and bodies). This type of montage will be discussed in detail in the subsequent chapter on subjectivity. 6 Burke, 124.

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Figs. 15a-d: Film stills from Deluge. 1933. Directed by Felix E. Feist. Written by Warren Duff, John F. Goodrich. Cinematography by Norbert Brodine. Film editing by Martin G. Cohn, Rose Loewinger. Music by Val Burton. Runtime: 70 min.

on. This results in a chaotic and formless disorder of destructive forces, offering no place to hide or any clear direction in which to escape. As the spectator experiences the sequence through his/her embodied perception, its unsettling, violent, and shaky movements in all directions echoes in his/her body. The second example of a rhythmic alternation of shots is taken from another 1930s-melodrama, The Hurricane (1937). During the greatest part of the final storm sequence, the fairly steady ringing of a church bell caused by the winds of the hurricane can be heard (Fig. 16). This repetitive sound functions as a metronome and temporal measure for the unfolding of the storm and the rhythms of the montage. While there are periods of acceleration and deceleration in terms of the bell’s ringing and the film’s pace of cutting (equivalent to the varying intensity of the storm), both remain relatively stable and homogenous. To some extent, the steadiness of the montage is set against the dynamic and chaotic formlessness of the disaster. Even in the center of destruction, it manages to maintain its functioning as it connects the fates and actions of the various characters at their respective locations (inside the church, on

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Figs. 16a-d: Film stills from The Hurricane. 1937. Directed by John Ford. Written by Dudley Nichols. Cinematography by Bert Glennon. Film editing by Lloyd Nosler. Music by Alfred Newman. Runtime: 110 min.

top of a tree, in a boat on the ocean, in the water). The montage upholds both a certain formal and syntactic and a metaphysical and ethical order (with the bell of the Christian church as a moral shepherd in times of chaos and danger). Against the destructive economy of nature, the montage seeks to maintain the economic narrative principles of Classic Hollywood cinema. In spaces that temporarily provide safety from the hurricane (esp. the church), the camera occasionally dwells longer on the characters’ interaction, yet only so long that the disaster penetrates and destroys these spaces. Eventually, the church’s belfry is brought to collapse by the flood, and the bell falls. As its metronome falls silent, the montage immediately lapses into a rapid sequence of accelerated cuts, presenting the complete destruction of the church, the deaths of its congregation members and the remaining protagonists’ struggle for survival. The sudden accelerations of the montage rhythm that occasionally occur in The Hurricane already anticipate the second mode of montage procedures: the successive build-up toward a climax. Such a montage structure is also found in San Francisco (1936). At the beginning of the first earthquake scene, the disaster is captured in static camera shots in intervals of c. one

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Figs. 17a-d: Film stills from San Francisco. 1936. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke. Written by Anita Loos. Cinematography by Oliver T. Marsh. Film editing by Tom Held. Music by Herbert Stothart, Edward Ward. Runtime: 115 min.

to three seconds. Toward the end of the scene, the cutting speed accelerates significantly, with shots lasting only a fraction of a second. This rapid shot sequence presents detail views of breaking walls, people’s faces expressing panic and agony, clouds of dust, fleeing, crouching, and jumping bodies, raining bricks, splashing water, smashing furniture, and balking horses (Fig. 17). Finally, this staccato array of shots ends with a couple of close-up views of a tumbling and spinning wheel of a horse carriage, whose final coming to rest on the pavement indicates the end of the first quake. The scene successively increases its pace and rhythm toward a flickering state of a chaos of forces, directions, intentions, aggregates, and materials. Its rapid alternation of close-ups and extreme close-ups denies the spectator any overview over or distance to the event. S/He is confronted with a turmoil of intensities, which sensorily and somatically conveys the dynamic excessiveness of the sublime object and its affective impact on San Francisco’s citizens. In comparison, the scene’s emphasis on detail views, individual victims, and micro phenomena stands in stark opposition to the tectonic macro movements that are visualized in Deluge. While The Hurricane achieves its rising action through the intensification of the disaster, which is set against

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the relatively steady rhythm of the montage, in San Francisco, it is the accelerating montage itself that intensifies the sublime event’s affective force. Following Burke’s notes on reaching the limit of comprehension in view of sublime objects, one may also describe the effects of the acceleration of the montage as a successive increasing of the spectator’s nerve tension. This tension might reach a point when it starts resembling physical pain. It is at this point that the mixed emotion of the sublime – combining terror and pleasure – takes place. Furthermore, Burke’s concept coincides with Morsch’s account of cinema’s somatic agitations. As the perceived images and their dynamic succession force the spectator to somatically respond to them, his/ her cognitive and sensory capabilities are increasingly challenged; this is also because montage patterns as such transgress the boundaries of everyday life experiences and conventions of perception and somatic empathy. Another way to reach this ultimate point of crisis is through the third type of montage structures: the violation of the viewer’s perception through rapid cutting sequences. Regarding his aesthetics of speed, Morsch considers excessive montage techniques as a means to ‘surpass the challenges of accelerated, urban everyday life perception through an escalation of sensuality under the primacy of dynamization’.7 Reaching a point beyond the somatic framework of the human body and its usual conventions of perception, the excesses of the cinematic montage aim to overwhelm the spectator’s sensory faculties, similar to Burke and Kant’s descriptions of the sublime’s reception. As they prompt physical reactions in the spectator’s body, montage patterns of cinematic speed can be described as nervous convulsions and reflexes. They are more somatically felt than cognitively perceived and understood. During the rushing of images, the spectator is not able to synthesize singular phenomena into a spatio-temporal order, as had been conventionalized by the establishment of the continuity system of Classical Hollywood Cinema. Besides the climax of the first earthquake scene in San Francisco, a case in point of such rapid montage patterns is the final disaster sequence in the French melodrama La Fin du Monde (1931) (Fig. 18). In the film, mankind is threatened with annihilation by a comet on collision course with Earth. The final encounter of both terrestrial bodies is presented in a nervous rushing of either static or shaky shots, which only last for a split second each. During this excessive succession of images, one hardly recognizes the presented subject matter: bursting architecture, a fire in a city, particles of the meteor hitting a landscape, a volcano, a tidal wave, images of thick 7

Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 211.

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Figs. 18a-d: Film stills from La fin du monde. 1931. Directed by Abel Gance. Written by Abel Gance, Jean Boyer, H.S. Kraft. Cinematography by Maurice Forster, Robert Hubert, et al. Film editing by Marguerite Bruyere. Music by Arthus Honegger, Maurice Marthenot, et al. Runtime: 105 min.

smoke and blinding light, people in panic, trying to find shelter. Eventually, the montage calms and slows down, and one recognizes that the meteor has only passed Earth without impacting – an observation that was impossible to make during the previous episode of excessive speed. As for the fourth type of montage procedures, the appearance of the sublime as a sudden shock, I can refer once more to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry where he names characteristics such as suddenness, unexpectedness, uncertainty, and suspense as potential phenomena of the sublime. ‘In every thing sudden and unexpected, we are apt to start; that is, we have a perception of danger, and our nature rouses us to guard against it’.8 Thomas Morsch dedicates a whole chapter to the aesthetics of shock, considering its essential role within the discourse of modernity (Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin) as well as within particular cinematic genres such as thriller or horror. His subsequent analysis focuses primarily on filmic material of the latter, demonstrating the close relation between the 8

Burke, 76.

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somatic shocking of the viewer and the aesthetic category of disgust. The disgusting shocks of the horror genre move beyond the limits of classical aesthetic categories (including the sublime).9 While this genre specific approach does not offer its productive application to disaster films, Morsch also conceives a more general concept of cinematic shock. Accordingly, cinematic shock represents both an ecstatic event of terrifying nowness and presence, a structural appearance of the unexpected, and a shattering of temporal continuity.10 Taking this broader definition of cinematic shock and Burke’s thesis of the sublime’s suddenness into consideration, the question is: to what extent can they be said to be substantial to the montage procedures of the disaster genre? A rather rare case among the genre’s generic films is the shocking, in other words, sudden and unexpected appearance of disaster phenomena, functioning as equivalent to the killer in the horror genre. Such shocking disasters mostly occur in earthquake films like San Francisco, Flame of Barbary Coast (1945), or Earthquake (1974), in each of which the disaster happens suddenly and takes its victims by surprise. But shocking experiences are also prompted in shots in which harmful particles of the disaster suddenly appear from up close, or in which extreme changes of light and darkness, proximity and distance, tone, color, or space are displayed. To give an example, the Deluge sequence of Noah’s Ark (1928) deploys a strong alternation of interior views of the Ark and exterior views of the surrounding landscape: on the inside the idyllic imagery of the reunited family and the triumph of romantic love, on the outside the flood causing a mass panic (Fig. 19). There is a multitude of human bodies, desperately struggling to survive, clinging on to any hold they can find, lamenting over their deadly fate. The gentle panning and tracking of the camera inside the Ark are set against the mostly static and coldly observing shots of the people’s agony. Also, the alternating rhythms of the music score emphasize the clashing of the idyllic and the disaster spectacle. This clash of aesthetic categories – the pastoral, idyllic, and beautiful vs. the sublime – is also a collision of embodied temporalities, in that the scene operates with a stark contrast between the slow and successive babbling of time and the rushing nowness of moments of extreme intensity. The scene’s staging of clashing temporalities further resonates with the sudden appearance of shots of lightnings in the sky. These moments of rupture cut into the narrative’s temporal flow and the film’s spatio-temporal continuity, comparable to 9 Morsch, 236f. 10 Morsch, 239.

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Figs. 19a-d: Film stills from Noah’s Ark. 1928. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Anthony Coldeway. Cinematography by Barney McGill, Hal Mohr. Film editing by Harold McCord. Music by Alois Reiser. Runtime: 135 min. (original version).

the zips in a Barnett Newman painting, which cut into its abstract and monochrome uniformity of paint.11 3.

Camera Movement

In terms of camera movement, I pointed out techniques such as pans which fail to comprehend the sublime object in a procedure of movement along its visual parts as well as swish pans, the obscuring use of focal length, and swift tracking shots. As part of my media technological analysis of cinema, I discussed these techniques as potential means of the cinematic sublime. Within the disaster genre, camera movements operate either in alliance with or in opposition to the dynamics of sublime disasters; 11 As has been mentioned in the Introduction Chapter, the American Expressionist painter Barnett Newman located his work explicitly within the art historical strand of the sublime in his famous essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ (Newman). Accordingly, the zips – thin vertical color stripes – are to be understood as shocking events rupturing the desert-like and boundless uniformity of the canvas.

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Figs. 20a-d: Film stills from Godzilla. 2014. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Max Borenstein. Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey. Film editing by Bob Ducsay. Music by Alexandre Desplat. Runtime: 123 min.

they either reinforce and expand the forces of nature, or they become overwhelmed by them themselves. They ally with or against the sublime object, convey its power over its victims, penetrate it, try to capture and frame it, obscure, or flee it. A striking example of the camera’s incapability to capture and frame the sublime object are the various camera movements in Twister (1996) that attempt to present the last and, by far, biggest tornado of the film. While the tornadoes that occur earlier in the film are more easily framed in their totality, the panning and tracking movements of the camera mostly fail to comprehend this unusually vast (category ‘F5’) specimen. In turn, this failure of the f ilm’s techniques of visual representation reinforces and contributes to the experience of the twister as an object of sublimity. As the camera pans upward and sideways and moves through space with the car of the storm chasers, the visual appearance of the tornado remains fragmented, even though its sinister maelstrom covers wide parts of the moving image. The same effect is played out in a couple of shots in Godzilla (2014).12 In the scene that visually introduces the monster (the prehistoric lizard Godzilla), one particular shot sticks out (Fig. 20). It begins with a high angle view of the flooded city of Honolulu. This tsunami disaster was caused by the arrival of the monster and thus holds an indexical function in terms of Godzilla’s final visualization. Next, the camera begins to pan to the right and upward, moving along the vertical forms of a highrise building, whose electric lights 12 For a detailed analysis of the Godzilla monster as an object of geological sublimity, see pp. 254-260.

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stop functioning just at this instant. As the image rests for a moment on the dark rooftop, red lights appear, revealing a group of soldiers who shoot flares into the night sky. The camera continues to pan upward and follows the flight of the flares, which bathe the sky in a faint glowing of red color. Finally, the flares reach their highest point and begin to fall, followed by the camera. Fragments of rough lizard skin become visible throughout the falling of the flares. In the middle of this downward movement, the film cuts to the glowing red faces of the terrified civilians watching this visual spectacle. Then it returns immediately to the view of the falling flares, which now reveal the hips and legs of the monster. The shot ends as the flares reach the rooftop level of the city’s architecture. Using obscuring darkness – one of Burke’s principal features of the sublime – the massive scale of Godzilla is visually reinforced. While being able to present a visual link between the tsunami and the monster’s arrival, the camera fails to give a complete image of Godzilla, for it only shows fragments in a continuous vertical movement. Burke and Kant’s failing of comprehension in an act of continuous perceptual movement is distinctly exemplified here. Although the viewer gets to see large, yet obscured parts of the monster, s/he cannot gain a complete image of it, only the fuzzy notion of a creature of enormous size and power. A range of camera movements that display various relations to the sublime object can be found toward the end of the Red Sea’s parting in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). The film operates with a strong opposition between tracking shots moving away from the tidal wave’s path of destruction and tracking shots moving in the opposite direction, namely right toward and deeper into this space. Especially in the close-up and low angle shots of the wave, which almost cover the entire screen, the tracking backward of the camera can be experienced as fleeing the overwhelming force and visual presence of the sublime object. Yet the distance to the approaching wave remains the same. Camera and natural phenomenon move at the same pace. The viewer is forced to remain close to the crashing waters. Looking backward while moving forward, the perspective of the image resembles Walter Benjamin’s vision of the angel of history who moves in the exact same manner and who is forced to gaze at the piling up of history’s wreckage and destruction.13 Equivalently, the cinematic viewer is forced to witness the wave’s penetration and destruction of the space just in front of him/ her, without being able to turn away or create greater distance. Against 13 One could say that Benjamin’s allegorical image of history’s progression is itself deploying the aesthetic tropes and topoi of the sublime (Benjamin, Chap. 9).

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Figs. 21a-d: Film stills from 2012. 2009. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser. Cinematography by Dean Semler. Film editing by David Brenner, Peter S. Eliot. Music by Harald Kloser, Thomas Wanker. Runtime: 158 min.

this, the tracking shots that move deeper into the impact zone of the wave are somatically experienced as a daring penetration of a hostile space, in which opposing powers reign. Following Pharaoh Rameses on his chariot and Moses on his horse into this space, the spectator’s empathy engages with their physical existence through a somatic bond, as they become the inferior agents within a tension field of forces. A somatic reinforcement of the sublime object through camera movements is further exemplified by the tidal wave depictions in 2012 (2009) and in the Norwegian disaster movie Bølgen (‘The Wave’, 2015). In 2012, a rapid shifting of the tectonic plates causes gigantic tidal waves. One of them is displayed as it floods a landscape in India with thousands of refugees (Fig. 21). The shot in question lasts for c. eight seconds and starts off as a high angle view of the refugee stream in a mountainous landscape with various villages. Then, the camera steadily pans upward at a moderate pace, revealing the wave on the horizon, a phenomenon that easily surmounts every other landscape element in the image. The camera’s movement upward not only emphasizes the extreme vertical dimensions of the wave, it also reveals the threatening disaster in the first place. This shocking appearance of the wave on the horizon is also reinforced by the screaming of the people, who discover the wave in the same moment as the spectator does. The example from Bølgen is a horizontal tracking shot moving parallel to the approaching tidal wave, which resulted from a landslide into a fjord (Fig. 22). Within the duration of only four seconds, the shot concisely depicts the impacting of the wave as it crashes into the first houses of a village. The camera moves in alliance with the sublime object and conveys the clashing

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Figs. 22a-d: Film stills from Bølgen. 2015. Directed by Roar Uthaug. Written by John Kåre Raake, Harald Rosenløw-Eeg. Cinematography by John Christian Rosenlund. Film editing by Christian Siebenherz. Music by Magnus Beite. Runtime: 105 min. Courtesy Fante Film AS.

of the wave’s horizontal dynamic with the vertical and static forms of the village as a sensorily and somatically intensified spectacle. An alternative approach toward creating dynamic camera movements is the use of shaky handheld camera shots. In such images, the disaster’s affective impact on its human victims – manifesting as panic, terror, agony, nervousness, tenseness – is translated into hectic and vibrating movements of the camera, which usually captures the victims from up close. This technique is applied in the French global disaster melodrama La fin du monde, whose rapid montage patterns I have already addressed earlier in this chapter. In its final disaster sequence, the film also makes use of shaking and tumbling images, as if its recording technology got exhausted by and fails to withstand the disaster phenomenon. Both the people of Earth and the film’s recording device cannot stand the terrifying forces of the end of the world any longer. Other cases of shaky handheld camera images are especially to be found among recent productions such as the monster disaster film Cloverfield (2008), 2012, the tsunami disaster film The Impossible (2012), the tornado chaser movie Into the Storm (2014), and the earthquake disaster film San Andreas (2015). As a means to mediate the sublime object’s effects on its environment, shaky imagery as such has become a conventional tool in filmmaking. 4. Sound In Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, auditory sensations are just as much potential sources of the sublime as visual phenomena or literary forms:

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The eye is not the only organ of sensation, by which a sublime passion may be produced. Sounds have a great power in these as in most other passions. […] Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and aweful [sic] sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the sole strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the croud [sic].14

Other auditory elements and sound patterns pointed out by Burke basically correspond with his typology of visual sensations that I discussed in relation to cinematic montage techniques. Accordingly, sublime sound phenomena encompass the shocking appearance of sudden and unexpected sounds, intermitting sounds that create uncertainty and suspense, the repetition and continuation of sounds causing the idea of the infinite, as well as sound signals of increasing intensity rising toward a climax.15 How does this auditory repertoire of the sublime relate to the receptive functioning of sound in the disaster genre? It must be clear that only in a few cases of disaster cinema do auditory phenomena have an excessive quality on their own. Instead, auditory sensations like sound or music unfold their receptive effects primarily in alliance with visual experiences. I will thus analyze sound and music effects as multimedia agitations of the spectator’s body, which also include cinema’s visual dimension. Sound as a somatically agitating sensation of the sublime is employed in Earthquake. The film was designed to be experienced in Sensosurround sound, a technology that convincingly translates the earthquake’s vibrations into auditory tension, which ultimately resonates in the spectator’s body (see pp. 194f.). Moreover, Burke’s various forms of auditory excessiveness are featured in the town fire melodrama In Old Chicago (1938). During the conflagration, the film simultaneously employs multiple layers of auditory sensations. In compliance with the rapid montage rhythm of the scene in question, the soundscape creates a receptive pattern of increasing somatic tension. Gazing at a fenced herd of cows with the conflagration in the background, one hears the screaming of the animals in conjunction with 14 Burke, 75f. 15 Burke, 76f., 126f.

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the roaring sounds of the fire. Due to a loud explosion of a building, the cows start to panic and break through the fence. A rapid alternation of shots of diverse sizes follows, presenting the fleeing cows. Meanwhile, an additional auditory layer is added to the soundscape of the scene that is the stomping of the hoofs of the animals, which builds up to a dense and impermeable rhythm. Together with the sounds of the fire and the cries of the cows, this stomping rhythm creates a strong auditory intensity. Generally, the scene’s visual and auditory staging achieves a close intertwining of the disaster and the blind fear and reckless panic of the domesticated animals. The peculiar fact that Burke names ‘cries of animals’ and ‘angry tones of wild beasts’ as phenomena of the sublime also has some relevance for the disaster film genre.16 Both in Twister, in The Perfect Storm (2000), and in Deepwater Horizon (2016), the sounds of the disaster events – tornadoes, a storm at sea, a burning offshore oil rig – merge with the roaring of what appears to be predatory animals.17 The noisy blowing of the tornado, the smashing of the waves and the blast of the oil explosion both blend with animal sounds of hissing and roaring. Unlike the screaming of the cows in In Old Chicago, the sources of these animal sounds are not located within the frame of the image. They cannot be identified as diegetic sounds. Their occurrence is unexpected and neither motivated nor justified by the laws and rules of the films’ narrative worlds. Instead, they appear as extradiegetic phenomena, merely applied for the purpose of further intensifying the receptive drive of the depicted sublime objects. To give an example where disaster events provide excessive auditory sensations that get to dominate their visual counterparts, the film 2012 features a scene in which Washington D.C. and the White House in particular are destroyed by a tidal wave. Soundwise, the scene sets off with a faint rushing of water and whispering of wind. From then on, the soundscape successively increases during the scene. An American aircraft carrier, which is tumbling on the wave, causes displeasing metal screeching sounds. Toward the end, a climax is reached. An indistinguishable auditory chaos of destruction discharges and renders the distinction of singular sounds and the identification of their distinct sources impossible. In the disaster genre, extradiegetic music represents a traditional means to create atmosphere, tension, thrill, expectation, and rising action. It is 16 Burke, 77. 17 In Twister, this phenomenon is attached to all appearing tornadoes, whereas in The Perfect Storm, it is only the last wave, which finally capsizes the ship, that features animal sounds as such.

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further applied to accentuate sudden appearances, unexpected twists, and moments of shock. The music score by James Horner for The Perfect Storm exemplifies this functioning of extradiegetic music precisely. Generally, the film’s music score accompanies, dramatizes, and reinforces the unfolding of the storm at sea. During the scene of the turning maneuver of the fishing boat Andrea Gail, the extradiegetic music oscillates between several states of intensity. In the beginning, it conveys a feeling of ominous apprehension, with its dragging drum rhythm and its slowly rising string section. This is followed by threatening strikes of horns, leading to lengthy and dramatically resounding fanfares as well as quickly circulating string melodies, which convey a feeling of falling or holding the breath. This tension rises further and further until the boat capsizes. In accordance with the smashing of the wave and the spinning of the boat, the musical elements swirl in formless confusion until they fall silent altogether at once. When the spectator realizes after a short while that the turning maneuver was successful, the music starts again, building up toward a heroic and triumphant melody, which eventually transforms into the film’s main theme: an idealizing celebration of seafaring and the craft of fishing, yet combined with a melancholic note, keeping in mind the dangers and human losses that come with this craft. Cases in which the extradiegetic music score on its own becomes an excessive means to affect the viewer are rare among typical disaster films.18 A much more common convention within the disaster genre is the opposite case, the complete breakdown of the extradiegetic soundscape. Such a breakdown occurs during the turning maneuver in The Perfect Storm. In a broader sense, extradiegetic music, as it regulates a film’s tones and atmospheres, represents a control authority in terms of the filmic narrative and means of representation. When this regulating instrument suddenly falls silent in face of a sublime object, this breakdown decisively contributes to the violent and formless appearance of the disaster, as it eludes fully becoming an object of cinematic representation. One finds this type of breakdown repeatedly in Twister, as for instance in the scene with the tornado ‘sisters’. Right at the moment when the truck of the protagonists, Bill and Jo Harding, is caught by the winds, the music score goes silent, and the only sounds to be heard are the roaring of the storm and the screaming of its victims. 18 Music as an object and source of the sublime represents a traditional topic and discourse that reaches far back in cultural history. For its general relevance during Medieval Times, see: Jaeger. – Regarding the relevance of the sublime in nineteenth-century works of music, see: Purkis.

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Points of Disinterest: Subjectivity Diverging from Burke’s sensualist model, Kant drives the establishment of the sublime as a strictly subjective category. Accordingly, sublimity is neither a recognizable intrinsic quality of objects (Burke), nor is it possible to derive its a priori principles from the perception of its objects. The subjective and concrete sensory experience of the sublime remains its irreducible aesthetic foundation. This twofold negation of an objective status of the sublime is further based on Kant’s concept of judgment of taste, which simultaneously claims to be individual and universal: The judgment of taste differs from logical judgment in that the latter subsumes a representation under concepts of the object, but the former does not subsume under a concept at all, for otherwise the necessary universal approach could be compelled by proofs. All the same, however, it is similar to the latter in that it professes a universality and necessity, though not in accordance with concepts of the object, and hence a merely subjective one.19

Based on this subjective (merely seemingly objective) model of taste and on the inappropriate sensual appearance of the sublime, Kant rejects the idea of sublimity as an objective and empirically examinable quality: But from this one immediately sees that we express ourselves on the whole incorrectly if we call some object of nature sublime, although we can quite correctly call very many of them beautiful; for how can we designate with an expression of approval that which is apprehended in itself as contrapurposive? We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind […]. The self-sufficient beauty of nature reveals to us a technique of nature, which makes it possible to represent it as a system in accordance with laws the principle of which we do not encounter anywhere in our entire faculty of understanding, namely that of a purposiveness with respect to the use of the power of judgment in regard to appearances […]. But in that which we are accustomed to call sublime in nature there is so little that leads to particular objective principles and forms of nature corresponding to these that it is mostly rather in its chaos or in its wildest and most unruly

19 Kant 2001, 167.

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disorder and devastation, if only it allows a glimpse of magnitude and might, that it excites the idea of the sublime.20

At the same time, the subjective state of the sublime is fragile and contested from two directions. First, the sublime’s somatic foundation and its violent nature threaten to dismantle Kant’s requirement of an interest-free state of aesthetic contemplation, which brings forth his aesthetic subject (see pp. 152154). Second, the subject’s disinterestedness is put at risk by the interference of reason, which comes to the rescue of sensibility’s breakdown. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Kant has to make quite an effort to defend the absence of interests in the presence of reason, namely by introducing the paradox of a disinterested interestedness. That means that even though the sublime involves ideas of reason, and thus epistemic and ethical interests, these ideas are not being desired, sought after, or expected by the perceiving subject. To pursue these reflections on Kant’s aesthetic subject further would lead deep into the terrain of the sublime’s second stage, where the jump from immanence and sensibility to transcendence and reason has taken place. This is also where the ethical and general metaphysical dimensions of the sublime come into play. For that reason, they will be dealt with more extensively in the following chapter, which is dedicated to the matter of transcendence. Apart from such theoretical complications, Kant’s discussion of the sublime as a subjective category also includes concepts that can be immediately applied to the film analysis. As has been said, sublime objects do not owe their sublimity to their intrinsic features but to their appearance before a perceiving subject. Therefore, the particularities of the relation between perceived object and perceiving subject are of crucial interest for Kant. In his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, he reflects on the appearance of natural objects in terms of their relative scale. The technological devices telescope and microscope that he mentions can be utilized as tools for manipulating the scale of perceived objects (from ‘the infinitely small’ to ‘the magnitude of a world’). Cinema, with its enhanced means of manipulating visual perception, can be described as a successor of such devices. Further on, Kant mentions travel reports on the vistas of the Egyptian pyramids and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.21 In both descriptive accounts, the precise location of the subject and its spatial relation to the perceived object is of major importance ‘in order to get the full emotional effect’.22 20 Kant 2001, 129f. 21 Kant 2001, 135f. 22 Kant 2001, 125.

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Such relations between subject and object were also a central issue in my earlier chapter on volcano painting, in which I identified a diversity of spatio-temporal variations, degrees and aggregates of proximity and intensity, as well as narrative and topical focal points, thereby also addressing a number of limitations inherent to the medium of easel painting. Such limitations regard, for instance, the bridging of distances between the disaster object and its victims, the spatio-temporal organization of these motifs in an effective (that is affectively intense) manner, as well as the question of how to convey the scale and power of disasters beyond the conventional employment of staffage figures. With these potentials and limitations of static pictorial media in mind, I will now take a closer look at the various techniques that disaster cinema employs to establish, represent and reflect modes of subjectivity. Subjectivity will be investigated both as part of cinema’s somatic and immersive framework of reception and as a means to facilitate reflexivity (in the sense of subjective perception itself becoming a mediated object of reflection). However, the concrete social, gender, religious, cultural, and demographic identities of the subject-spectators of disaster cinema will not play a role here. In this regard, it should suffice to recall blockbuster cinema’s efforts to popularize and universalize its experiences, aiming at transcending any socio-cultural distinctions. Particularly, the disaster genre, as it employs the receptive framework of the sublime, seeks to establish a cinematic subject that is attuned to most essential and universal matters concerning affective immediacy, man’s relation to nature, the loss of civilization, and moral challenges and chances in the face of disaster scenarios. In terms of the relation between cinematic subjectivity and somatic models of the cinematic experience, a few preliminary remarks are called for. I understand cinematic subjectivity according to Sobchack’s phenomenological framework. That means that cinematic subjectivity is essentially established through the resemblance of the bodies of spectator, film, and filmmaker and their particularities of embodied perception. These three bodies are simultaneously objects for vision and subjects of vision, viewed objects and viewing subjects. By employing the body as a mediating agency, Sobchack distinguishes her model from realist, psychoanalytical, semiotic, and post-structuralist approaches. Opposed to concepts of cinematic realism, she rejects the claim of cinema’s ability to record the objective world and replaces it with the notion of shared subjective acts of perception and expression. Taking a stand against psychoanalytical, semiotic, and poststructuralist theories of film, she dismisses their one-sided concepts of cinematic subjectivity. Instead of establishing a seduced, deceived, and

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Figs. 23a-d: Film stills from Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii. 1913. Directed by Mario Caserini, Eleuterio Rodolfi. Written by Mario Caserini. Music by Palmer Clark. Runtime: 88 min.

helpless subject, who becomes a servant of capitalism’s will to power, she suggests a spectator-subject that interacts through a somatic bond with cinema’s various components and bodily entities. In the same manner, Morsch also recognizes and acknowledges cinematic forms of embodiment that enable a full realization and extension of subjectivity.23 The complexity of cinematic subjectivity is displayed quite graphically in disaster cinema’s early attempts to create a subjective bond between spectator, sublime object, and diegetic human figures. One such attempt is the novel adaptation and historical disaster epic Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii from 1913. During the eruption of Vesuvius, the volcano is visualized in two shots (Fig. 23). The first one shows its smoking, burning, and exploding crater in the background. The middle ground presents the spectator with a city square surrounded by ancient buildings. A multitude of panicking 23 Morsch, 99. – However, he also acknowledges cinema’s a-subjective affective agitations, which go beyond the phenomenological model of an embodied subject. This transgression of the phenomenological framework of cinematic reception will be discussed in the subsequent chapter on transcendence.

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people passes hastily through the frame. In the foreground, the entrance area of a building is visible. In addition to the clear spatial structure of the shot, the building’s columns frame the scene on the square with Vesuvius in the background. From inside the building, people start streaming onto the square. The wreckage and clumps of lava that rain on the scene link the depiction of a collective state of panic with the erupting volcano. The second shot in question displays a fleeing boat on the ocean. Vesuvius is presented once again in the background. The boat moves forward from the center of the image until it eventually exits the shot through the left frame. These are the film’s only two shots that attempt to present the sublime object and its human victims within one and the same image. The spatial organization and composition of both shots bear significant resemblance to volcano depictions in other media such as easel painting and nineteenth-century theater spectacles (which themselves tended to employ pictorial means of presentation). Also, in terms of earlier cinematic volcano depictions like Méliès’ Éruption volcanique à la Martinique, the Vesuvius shots of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii allude to certain iconographic predecessors.24 Apart from these two shots, the film’s montage operates with the alternation of detail views of the eruption – displaying singular phenomena like rolling lava boulders, thick smoke in the hillsides, and burning trees – and long shots of the streets of Pompeii with its terrified and fleeing citizens. The shots of the eruption phenomena are captured through small panning movements, which also present some of the wider stretches of the volcano landscape. The shots of Pompeii are entirely static. This spatial distinction between the realms of nature and culture is quite strict. The impression of the temporal coinciding of both realms is conveyed through the common elements of smoke and lava clumps, the sequence’s red toning, the music score, and the film’s narrative elements (e.g. character interaction). However, the causal link between the various volcanic phenomena, the vividly expressed agony of the people, and the city’s destruction remains rather loose and indistinct. In contrast to this early example of disaster cinema, the turning maneuver in The Perfect Storm fully exploits the medium’s technological and aesthetic 24 One also finds these types of shots in an even earlier film adaptation of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel: Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (1908, directed by Arturo Ambrosio, Luigi Maggi). In this version, the final eruption scene is displayed in three separate shots, which capture the film’s characters in theater stage-like foregrounds and the erupting volcano (or traces of it) in the background. With no effort made to mediate between the shots’ different elements, spaces, and perspectives by means of the montage, the film clearly remains within the aesthetic framework of the Diorama’s painted moving images and the conventions of the stage arts.

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Figs. 24a-d: Film stills from The Perfect Storm. 2000. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Written by William D. Witliff. Cinematography by John Seale. Film editing by Richard Francis-Bruce. Music by James Horner. Runtime: 130 min.

potential to establish strong subjective ties between its bodily entities (film, filmmaker, spectator). In this scene, the film spins an intricate web of relations between storm, wave, ship, crew, individual crew members, dynamic forces, movements, and spectator. The camera’s movements of tilting and panning imitate (or follow) the movements of the stormy ocean. The montage alternates between the individual faces of the crew members, the ship’s bridge, its under deck, and its exterior as it navigates through the storm. Through the camera movements and the montage, the scene interweaves the protagonists’ struggle for survival, whom the spectators are emotionally and somatically invested in, with the realm of nature’s forces. The visualizations of the ship’s desperate struggle to withstand the storm’s superior and violent dynamic instantly resonate in the terrified faces of each individual crew member. This applies especially to the dramatic seconds in which the Andrea Gail (the name of the boat) is tipped over and spun around by the wave (Fig. 24). The camera follows the vertical falling down movement of the wave as it crashes against the boat. Once the spinning movement of the Andrea Gail is initiated, the camera depicts this spinning around as a continuous movement while alternating between interior and exterior views of the ship. After the impacting of the wave, the film cuts to the interior of the ship. The crew falls and tumbles from wall to wall in the spinning room – then another exterior view (medium long shot) of the ship under water, turned upside down – then back inside to the chaos of splashing water and falling bodies – this is where the 360-degree turn is almost completed – finally,

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the Andrea Gail emerges again on the water surface – this is shown in a high angle and extreme long shot of the boat. The exterior views of the boat set against the storm resemble the use of staffage figures in static pictorial media: they convey the scale and force of the sublime object by juxtaposing it with the tiny boat, which becomes driven to and fro like a plaything. Staffage elements can function as surrogate subjects, enabling the beholder to project him/herself into the depicted landscape or event. Because of the staffage’s asymmetric relation to the overwhelming sublime object, the spectator empathizes with this surrogate subject, be it in a static or moving image. On the other hand, as these shots merely represent singular images within a rapid montage rhythm, the experience of cinematic staffage can be very different from viewing a shipwreck painting by Joseph Vernet. Unlike in static imagery, the cinema viewer is often not able to contemplate on an image for longer than a couple of seconds. Moreover, in a film like The Perfect Storm, the asymmetric relation between sublime object and staffage is not merely indicated and left to be further imagined by the viewer, as is the case with Diderot’s reflections on Vernet’s shipwreck images. Rather, such relational aspects become themselves externalized (that is visualized) through the film’s technical means of mediation and correlation. The staffage’s functioning as a surrogate subject is both reinforced and undermined in cinema. It is reinforced insofar as cinema’s far more elaborate and expanded means of narrative and character development facilitate the empathetic engagement with filmic staffage figures. It becomes at the same time undermined, because cinema’s receptive technology, which locates the viewer close to a monumental screen plane, already conveys in many cases the dimensions and forces of the sublime disaster object quite sufficiently. Thus, the use of staffage as a mediating element is rendered redundant. However, as for disaster depictions in much earlier film productions, shot compositions employing staffage figures play a more vital role. In this respect, I have already mentioned the volcano eruption in the influential historical epic Cabiria (1914) as well as the shot displaying the dam destruction in The Rains Came. Typical for these types of staffage shots are their comparably long durations.25 Even though the importance of staffage compositions declined parallel to the elaboration of the cinematic montage, 25 The shot in question in Cabiria lasts for c. eleven seconds. During the eruption sequence, the same composition is presented three more times, giving the spectator additional time to dwell on the volcano set against its fleeing victims. The shot in The Rains Came is seventeen seconds long and thereby also enables a far more extensive contemplation of the image.

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Fig. 25: Film still from 2012. 2009. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser. Cinematography by Dean Semler. Film editing by David Brenner, Peter S. Eliot. Music by Harald Kloser, Thomas Wanker. Runtime: 158 min.

it is safe to claim that staffage figures have remained a commonly applied visual element throughout the history of disaster cinema. At the same time, these images have become increasingly dynamized and ephemeral due to their framing within accelerated montage patterns and swift camera movements. In 2012, several of such dynamized staffage images are presented. One of them is part of the car flight scene in Los Angeles during an earthquake, in which the Curtis family (some of the film’s main protagonists) try to get out of the collapsing city. It is an extreme long shot presenting the family’s speeding car in the center of the image from a high angle position (Fig. 25). Around the car, the whole town is shaken by seismic waves and bursts apart and into pieces. In this brief shot of only three and a half seconds, the tracking movement of the camera is fully aligned with the forward movement of the car. Thereby, the car is clearly marked as the object to focus on by the viewer, as it makes its way through a stormy ocean of bursting materials. If it were not for this strong visual link, the spectator’s receptive connection with the staffage figure of the car might vanish. The shot’s extreme dynamic (resulting from the interplay of camera, staffage, and landscape) is further framed by a rapid alternation of shots which depict the car flight from various perspectives and proximities. Hence, this genuinely cinematic staffage composition also radically emphasizes its aesthetic, receptive, and media technological difference from its predecessors in other pictorial media. In terms of its temporal mode of reception, the car shot also stands in stark contrast to the aesthetic framework of another type of staffage figure composition: the Rückenfigur (‘back figure’) in the tradition of the works of the German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich. Especially in recent

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years, comparisons between filmic imagery and Friedrich’s pictorial works of art have been drawn in academic research. Among these media comparative accounts are several texts by Stella Hockenhull, in which she brings Friedrich’s works into contact with shots from films such as Avatar (2009), Sweet Sixteen (2002), or The War Zone (1999), Brigitte Peucker’s juxtaposition of Friedrich’s back figure with the Nosferatu films by Werner Herzog (1979) and F.W. Murnau (1922), Sabine Wilke’s analysis of Leni Riefenstahl’s Das blaue Licht (1932), and Laurie Ruth Johnson’s investigation of the back figures in several Herzog films.26 The back figure is not a genuine innovation by Friedrich. In fact, it has ‘a long if not quite coherent history in European painting before the nineteenth century’, which Joseph Leo Koerner traces back to works of Giotto and Jan van Eyck. After these Renaissance beginnings, the back figure ‘took its place within the stock repertoire of staffage’ within ‘landscape painting in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries’.27 What distinguishes Friedrich’s take on this traditional pictorial element is that his back figures function as ‘reflective foils of both artist and viewer, figures, that is, of the subject in the landscape’.28 They add a particularly self-reflexive moment to the pictorial experience. The act of viewing itself becomes a subject for reflection and contemplation. On the one hand, back figures in the style of Friedrich invite and channel the viewer’s gaze, while on the other hand, they block and reject it.29 This quality of introducing receptive moments of reflexivity becomes apparent in works such as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Woman Before the Setting Sun, where the centrally placed human figures cover great parts of the landscapes and thus block the view of the beholder.30 In relation to film, the reflexivity facilitated by Friedrich’s back figure images requires a receptive state of (predominantly) uninterrupted contemplation. Thus, one cannot expect to encounter it within disaster cinema’s swift cutting sequences. Instead, specific cases of back figures in films involving disaster depictions are rather to be found within disaster events that are staged in a much slower pace. The 1913 version of the many filmic adaptations of the late nineteenth-century novel Quo Vadis (by Henryk 26 Hockenhull 2013; Hockenhull 2014, Chap. 1; Peucker, 79-93; Wilke, Chap. 5; Johnson. – See also: Prager, 96-100. 27 Koerner, 162f. 28 Koerner, 163. 29 Nakama, 109-119. 30 Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. C. 1817. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 94.8 x 74.8 cm. Oil on canvas; Caspar David Friedrich. Woman Before the Setting Sun. C. 1818. Museum Folkwang, Essen. 22 x 30.5 cm. Oil on canvas.

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Figs. 26a-d: Film stills from Quo Vadis. 1913. Directed and written by Enrico Guazzoni. Cinematography by Eugenio Bava, Alessandro Bona. Film editing by Enrico Guazzoni. Runtime: 120 min.

Sienkiewicz) features several carefully depicted back figures. During the famous climax of the plot, the burning of Rome, Emperor Nero watches the disaster spectacle, which he caused himself, from the balcony of his palace and accompanies it on the lyre (Fig. 26). In a moderate pace, the scene displays the Emperor as a back figure, blocking the central parts of the unfolding disaster in front of him. In combination with Nero’s musical performance as a form of inspiration drawn from the town fire, these shots complexly reflect on the perception of the disaster event, as they create friction between aesthetic pleasure and ethical concerns. On the one side, the back figure gives expression to Nero’s insanity, while on the other, it problematizes and questions the viewer’s own aesthetic interest in the conflagration as a visual spectacle, which s/he consumed in the shots before Nero’s interference. As the back figure of the Emperor moves into the space between sublime object and viewer, the sensory experience of the disaster is restricted. The object’s immediate presence is substituted by a mediating (and morally problematic) diegetic subject, who prompts a more reflexive encounter with the cinematic attraction and makes the spectators consider their own ethical premises of their aesthetic experience. A more recent example of a cinematic back figure facing a natural disaster is given in the final scene of Take Shelter (2011). Although one would not

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regard the film as a typical disaster movie, it certainly plays with potential disaster scenarios, which eventually manifest and become reality. Its final scene features a shot that qualifies as a traditional back figure, showing Samantha, the wife of main protagonist Curtis, in a medium close-up. The central question of the film is: are Curtis’s apocalyptic visions genuine (which would make him a modern prophet) or merely the pathological outcome of a psychological sickness. Thus, when his visions eventually come true, the film depicts this disaster explicitly as a subjectively perceived and, to a certain degree, psychological phenomenon. However, the instability of the disaster, as it oscillates between interior projection and exterior manifestation, is not merely achieved by means of the traditional back figure image. The group of approaching waterspouts is also presented as a faint mirror image in the glass of the terrace door, or as to be traced from the faces of its perceiving subjects (Curtis, Samantha, and their daughter Hannah), who are shown in several reverse shots. As if not fully present, the disaster is depicted in its dependency on being perceived by human subjects. The scene in Take Shelter illustrates how cinema does not simply represent and imitate back figure images in the tradition of Friedrich; it also realizes its reflexive potential in particularly cinematic forms and manners. Thus, Stella Hockenhull’s analysis might fall short as she points out resemblances between filmic images and Friedrich’s paintings – a comparison that she solely justifies on the binary opposition between narrative and spectacle, as if the assessed lack of narrative functioning in shots of films like Sweet Sixteen, The War Zone, or London to Brighton (2006) would result in a cinematic experience identical to looking at a Friedrich picture. The more interesting question rather seems to me how cinema transforms the reflexive potential of the back figure into cinematic phenomena of subjective reflexivity. Such transformations take place in the various disaster scenes of Twister. In one shot of the sequence about the last (and biggest) tornado, the camera pans c. 90 degrees to the right. This movement begins with the twister partly visible in the right half of the frame. Then, the image fully traverses the twister until it comes to a halt on the team of storm researchers. They are captured in a medium close-up as they try to observe and document the tornado with a film camera. Throughout the shot, the twister is either reduced to fragments, fully visible only within a split second, or absent as it becomes replaced by its diegetic observers. Just like Friedrich’s back figure opens an intermediate space for reflecting subjective perception, this panning shot, in its own way, encourages reflections regarding the presentability of the sublime object (since it merely appears as a fragmentary and ephemeral phenomenon), the disaster’s becoming an object of scientific

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observation, and the premises of its aesthetic experience (safety, distance, technology). Generally, the act of viewing the tornadoes is one of the central motifs in Twister and represented and reflected throughout the film. Again and again, the viewer is presented with the faces of the tornadoes’ perceiving diegetic subjects. By constantly visualizing the act of seeing, the film invites the spectator to reflect on this process. In most of these cases, the applied editing technique is the eyeline match. That means that the shots of the viewing subjects directly alternate with shots of the viewed sublime object, following a shot-reverse shot pattern. The reverse shots of the twisters are implied as specific (embodied) visions of the characters. For a brief moment in time, the spectator shares their visions and bodies. Then again, eyeline matches in the disaster genre do not necessarily aim at creating distance and reflexivity. Quite the opposite, they are often used to intensify and expand the affective reach of the disaster object beyond the boundaries of its sensory appearance. First and foremost, an eyeline match locates the explicit image of a sublime disaster object within a concretely physical and perceiving body. In turn, this body is itself affected (and in most cases threatened) by the object and its forces. Thereby, the spectator’s somatic bond with the sublime object is reinforced. By locating the perceived image of the disaster in a body that exists in the same world, that is conditioned by the same physical laws, the immersive and affective appeal of the cinematic experience is intensified. Furthermore, eyeline matches make visible the affective impact of a disaster on its victims. The disaster inscribes itself into the faces of its diegetic spectators through the universally identifiable affective expressions of shock, terror, and (sometimes) thrilling fascination.

Beyond Imagination: Transcendence While Burke occasionally points out the sublime’s potential to ‘raise a man in his own opinion, produc[ing] a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind’, and while the sublime may even convey the ‘idea of God’, it is particularly Kant who systematically establishes the sublime as an aesthetic experience shifting from immanence (first stage) to transcendence (second stage).31 Kant explains this complicated mechanism and the functioning of reason’s interference as follows: 31 Burke, 46, 62.

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For just as we found our own limitation in the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our capacity to adopt a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its domain, but nevertheless at the same time found in our own faculty of reason another, nonsensible standard, which has that very infinity under itself as a unit against which everything in nature is small, and thus found in our own mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability: likewise the irresistibility of its power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of it and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us, whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion. […] Thus nature is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to the point of presenting those cases in which the mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.32

The pleasure of the sublime experience emerges in reaction to the sensation of displeasure caused by sensibility’s breakdown. It surfaces because of reason’s demonstration to the mind that none of its concepts can ever be given and presented within perception, no matter how vast or powerful the perceived object may be. In this chapter, I will explore the various aspects and ethical and religious ramifications of the sublime’s transcendent dimension in relation to the reception of disaster cinema. The investigation will consist of three parts: first, I will attempt to identify and describe sublime cinematic moments in which sensibility breaks down and receptive spaces of transcendence open up. This descriptive approximation of such principally ungraspable and discursively uncatchable moments will be carried out by reference to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the cinematic time-image. Yet, in opposition to Deleuze, who locates his time-images in the works of the auteur directors of Italian neo-realism and the Nouvelle Vague, my focus will lie on commercial Hollywood productions. Hence, I will look for time-images deep within the paradigmatic realm of the movement-image. Second, I will analyze the sublime’s stage of transcendence as it manifests within and relates to ethical matters, which themselves become presented and reflected upon in films of the disaster genre. And third, I will explore cinematic reflections concerning the sublime’s affinity to matters of religion and spirituality. 32 Kant 2001, 145.

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Chasing Phantoms. The Disaster-Time-Image

Gilles Deleuze’s two Cinema books (Cinema 1; The Movement-Image, Cinema 2; The Time-Image) represent a fruitful conceptual framework, as they not only directly relate to the Kantian sublime on several occasions but they also somewhat systematically explore the connections between cinema’s imagery and affects and the realm of thinking. On the other hand, I do not wish to plunge too deeply into the vast and diverse theoretical discourse on Deleuzian film-philosophy. Neither will I engage in the lively discussion of the shortcomings and contradictions to be found in Deleuze’s Cinema books.33 Rather, my emphasis will lie more specifically on pointing out potential intersections and links between the Kantian sublime and the concept of the time-image as well as on applying these theoretical findings to the analysis of disaster cinema.34 According to Deleuze, the main historical event that led to the crisis of the movement-image (esp. the action-image) and to the discovery and development of the time-image is the Second World War. From its ashes, a new (cinematic) world arose, a world without sense and organic connections, without closure and motivation, without linear narrative drive and rational elements, without individual will and identity, without human agency and the ability to take action.35 Before the emergence of this new cinematic paradigm, the primary paradigmatic framework of cinematic production and reception had been represented by the movement-image. At the core of the movement-image, one finds what Deleuze calls the sensory-motor schema: The sensorimotor schema limits movement to a physical trajectory or transformation in space, giving a restricted sense to the image and to the narrative logic deriving from it. Affections must be translated into spatial images constitutive of a mise-en-scène. These in turn create 33 Such points of criticism encompass Deleuze’s emphasis on singular directors/cinematic thinkers and national schools, which results in a simplistic and generalized f ilm historical narrative; his Eurocentric view of film history; his fuzzy historical foundation of the shifting process from movement-image to time-image; his teleologic structuring of film history, which inevitably leads to the discovery of the time-image by passing through the movement-image and its crisis; his sometimes speculative and associative interpretations of filmic works, authors, and schools; the loss of contour of the time-image within the diversity of postwar cinema; his (deliberately) chaotic and wildly proliferating typology of film, as well as his often enigmatic and obscuring language. 34 Deleuze’s general indebtedness to the Kantian version of the sublime is explored in: Zepke. 35 Deleuze 2009, 205-211.

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the possibility of situations requiring series of actions and reactions, conflicts and resolutions. The whole of the sensorimotor schema unfolds as organic composition where commensurability is the rule: on the one hand, movement between the parts of the whole; on the other, montage within which the web of actions and reactions is woven.36

With the change of regimes from movement-image to time-image – with all the images, narratives, and themes of the former becoming a cliché – ‘[i]t is no longer time that depends on movement [within the unit of the interval]; it is aberrant movement that depends on time’.37 In her article on Deleuze’s cinematic subject, Temenuga Trifonova elucidates this distinction clearly: The movement-image prolongs a perception-image [one of its subcategories] into a sensory-motor response: instead of perceiving for the sake of perceiving, we utilize our perception for some practical purpose at hand, extending the image into a certain action upon the image. However, in the case of the time-image we perceive purely for the sake of perceiving: we do not respond to the image by acting upon it, but, rather, we stop at the perception or – what amounts to the same – we are returned to a kind of perception purged of any sensory-motor necessity.38

Trifonova further points out the resemblance between the freed act of perception that the time-image involves and Kant’s notion of aesthetic disinterestedness as well as the violent character (‘as if […] hypnotized by the images’) that is shared both by the time-image and the Kantian sublime.39 On the one hand, the time-image is a spectacular image, for it is freed from its sensory-motor responsibilities and therefore also from its narrative and representational functions. On the other hand, it is quite telling that this freedom of perception is forced upon the viewer by the hypnotic qualities of the time-image. It is this kind of receptive ambivalence (violence – freedom) that I have repeatedly addressed in connection with Kant’s theory of the sublime. What a time-image actually looks like is not clearly delineated in Deleuze’s second Cinema book. Regarding his opsigns and sonsigns (purely optical and auditory time-images), he explains: 36 37 38 39

Rodowick, 74. Deleuze 1989, 41. Trifonova, 140. Trifonova, 143, 149.

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It makes us grasp […] something intolerable and unbearable. Not a brutality as nervous aggression, an exaggerated violence that can always be extracted from the sensory-motor relations in the action-image. Nor is it a matter of scenes of terror, although there are sometimes corpses and blood. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities. Stromboli: a beauty which is too great for us, like too strong a pain. It can be a limit-situation, the eruption of the volcano, but also the most banal, a plain factory, a wasteland. 40

It is interesting noting here that Deleuze rejects the violent and affective first stage of the Kantian sublime as a receptive component of his image model while simultaneously holding on to the sublime’s appeal as an excessive and overwhelming sensation in the sense of a simply-too-much structure (‘too strong’, ‘too powerful’, ‘too great’, ‘too beautiful’, etc.) as well as to its traditional iconography (the volcano eruption). His claim that the time-image makes the beholder grasp something unbearable leads to what Deleuze calls the transcendental functioning of the time-image: to present mental images and figures of thought, to put cinematic imagery ‘in contact with thought’.41 Yet, apart from heightening the intelligibility of the cinematic image, Deleuze’s concept of the time-image also involves belief as an experience of transcendence. Accordingly, the postwar cinema of the time-image restores our lost belief in the world, which merely appears ‘to us like a bad film’. 42 As it breaks free from its sensory-motor connections, cinema, with its purified images, makes the spectator believe again in the body and the flesh, ‘reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named’. 43 As for the specific means to achieve this new status of cinema as an event of thought and belief, Deleuze builds an extensive and wildly proliferating typology of time-images: opsign, sonsign, chronosign, lectosign, noosign, recollection-image, dream-image, crystal-image, and so on. However, despite this rich and diverse catalogue of types, the actual features and aesthetic particularities of this new image regime do not become overly distinct. This lack of contour is exemplif ied by Deleuze’s discussion of the f ilms of the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. In his works, Deleuze 40 41 42 43

Deleuze 1989, 18. Deleuze 1989, 1; Deleuze 2009, 215. Deleuze 2009, 171. Deleuze 2009, 172f.

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recognizes the occurrence of time-images even before the historical caesura of WWII. This particularly regards Ozu’s still life shots. ‘The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it.’44 This media comparative and aesthetic distinction is based on the duration of the still life shot: ‘this duration […] is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states’. 45 What becomes clear here is that the time-image – namely a bare image, stripped off its connections to the sensory-motor schema – achieves its aesthetic effects in distinction from the movement-image, ‘as its negation or interruption’. 46 Trifonova strikingly describes the time-image’s dependency on the movement-image as a phenomenological bracketing out procedure during which all sensomotoric affects, subject-object relations, narrative links, points of view, and references are evacuated. Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), which Deleuze mentions repeatedly, is certainly not purely constructed of time-images. Rather, time-images seem to occur as shatterings and negations of the conventional movement-images that they are embedded in. At this point, I am also dealing with secondary aspects of the time-image, which represent an important framework and ‘necessary external condition’, yet, which ‘do not constitute’ the time-image themselves. 47 This framework consists of new narratives, characters, dialogues, spaces, landscapes, and ideologies, which relate to the movementimage in a deconstructive manner. While what actually constitutes a time-image remains indistinct – whether merely new forms and expressions (as a negation of the old), or also new ideas, content-matter, and a new climate of thinking about films and filmmaking – Deleuze adds the assertion that time-images ‘have always been there, in the cinema, like aberrant movements. […] The direct timeimage is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom’. 48 Thus, the appearance of time-images is generally and permanently possible, also within the historical regime of the movement-image where it surfaces as a phantom 44 45 46 47 48

Deleuze 1989, 17. Deleuze 1989, 17. Trifonova, 141. Deleuze 2009, 215. Deleuze 1989, 41.

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without body (that is the deconstructivist framework described above, which the time-images of the postwar period are embedded in). Finally, this is what I have been looking for: the phantoms of the time-image as they haunt the depictions of sublime disaster events in commercial Hollywood cinema, where ‘the soul of the cinema’ can no longer be found. 49 Disaster movies clearly operate deep within the paradigmatic conventions of the movement-image and its sensory-motor schema, first, because the succession of stimulus and effect, situation and action is their primary means of organizing their images, second, because they largely lack everything that Deleuze identifies as characteristic for modern cinema: empty and open landscapes and spaces, fragmentary plots of dead ends and blank spaces, viewer-protagonists without motivation and destination, failed connections and dialogues, to name but a few. To conceive the disaster-time-image, one also should consider the relevance of the sublime within the paradigm of the movement-image. In Cinema 1, Deleuze applies the two types of the Kantian sublime, the mathematically and dynamically sublime, to the movement-images of the prewar film schools of ‘French Impressionism’ and ‘German Expressionism’. While directors like Abel Gance, Jean Grémillon, or Marcel L’Herbier stage the sublime as a quantitative expansion of light, as an excessive movement of its own, German filmmakers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Lupu Pick, or Fritz Lang employ the movement of light (and shadow) as an intensified force which dynamically oscillates within a polarity of aggregates through movements of rising and falling.50 What both national schools with their individual types of the sublime have in common is that their movementimages provoke thinking ‘the whole as intellectual [and spiritual] totality’.51 Such merely indirect representations of totality are based on the limitations of the movement-image, merely giving an ‘indirect representation of time which follows from movement’.52 By relating the Kantian sublime to Deleuze’s two regimes of the cinematic image, I have gained a clearer idea of what Deleuze claims to be achieved by the time-image, namely a direct presentation or making perceptible of time, thought, and intellectual totality, an immediate image of the becoming of philosophical and spiritual concepts (without ever fully crystallizing). This may also explain why Deleuze struggles to grasp and capture the 49 50 51 52

Deleuze 1989, 206. Deleuze 2009, 40-55. Deleuze 1989, 157. Deleuze 1989, 158.

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particularities of the time-image and why this concept and the question of its existence are faced with a fair share of skepticism among scholars.53 It appears that Deleuze wants the impossible, the cinematic presentation of the Kantian thing in itself, a pure expression of the becoming of Kant’s ideas of reason (which the sublime is only able to present in a negative and therefore indirect manner).54 Once again, it is Trifonova who identifies the motives and limitations of Deleuze’s concept of the time-image: in his attempt to bracket out the sensory-motor schema (its connectivity to the body as ‘the ultimate source of signification’) until the image becomes pure expression, Deleuze hopes to establish an entirely asubjective and ahuman image, a nonhuman eye.55 Yet in fact, as Trifonova concludes (by comparing the time-image with the sublime), what Deleuze gets is merely an expansion of subjectivity: The breaking down of sensory-motor linkages in the time-image is not yet the end of subjectivity as a point of view. In fact, the opposite is true: the less able the subject is to act on other images, the further subjectivity is intensified or, as Deleuze himself acknowledges, a new kind of subjectivity is born.56

Likewise, Kant describes the sublime’s forced expansion and intensification of subjectivity as an ‘enlargement of the imagination’.57 Deleuze’s time-image represents an aesthetics of the impossible, the unpresentable. It is an aesthetics on the edge, on the brink to nonexistence, hardly to be thought or discursively described. This is why the subsequent attempt to delineate and capture the sublime time-images of the disaster genre merely represents an experiment, a vague descriptive approximation of something that is by nature unpresentable. Potentially, I am dealing with images and events on the threshold where sensibility (the spectator’s somatic and sensual link to the sensory-motor schema) breaks down and spaces of transcendence open up. Let me approach this complicated task by discussing a film that Deleuze himself classifies as belonging to the new regime of the time-image: Roberto 53 See for example: Flaxman, 39f.; Rancière, 107-123; Martin-Jones. 54 This notion of the time-image as a ‘certain Kantianism of the cinema […] or a Critique of Pure Reason in images’ (Rodowick, 83) is further explored in: Szaloky; Rodowick. – The Kantian term thing in itself is applied by Deleuze himself when discussing the time-image (Deleuze 1989, 20) 55 Trifonova, 140. 56 Trifonova, 150. 57 Kant 2001, 133.

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Rossellini’s Stromboli from 1950.58 Even though the film does not comprise spectacular formal deconstructions of Classical Hollywood cinema (such as Godard’s famous jump-cuts), it is certainly constructed of what Deleuze calls the ‘necessary external condition’ of the time-image: the island Stromboli appears as an emptied and transitory topography, a desert of volcanic rocks and ruin-like buildings, with its people leaving, waiting to leave, or waiting to die. Existence on the island is transitory also in the sense that it is only a matter of time until the active volcano erupts again and destroys the village, making human existence impossible. Thrown into this world of barrenness and terror is the film’s protagonist Karin (played by Ingrid Bergman), a Lithuanian emigrant who moves to Stromboli after marrying the Italian fisherman Antonio. Yet, if she had received a visa for Argentina, her life would have taken a different direction. A victim of chance, she arrives at the island without specific goals or motivations. Being a stranger of Stromboli and its society, she represents one of Deleuze’s viewer-characters who sensorily explore their environments rather than act upon them. These topographical, narrative, and thematic aspects are interwoven with seemingly unmotivated camera movements and events, giving all in all the impression of a loosened sensory-motor schema which leads to deviations from the conventional narrative and spatio-temporal structures and continuity editing techniques of Classical Hollywood cinema. The documentary-like footage of the fishermen’s work and the volcano eruption further contributes to the film’s body as an implied portrait of life itself (and not as an organic construction according to the sensory-motor schema). As for the volcano eruption in the last part of the film, its imagery and means of expression – apart from the use of documentary footage – do not significantly differ from other contemporary depictions of this subject within commercial Hollywood productions. The organization and linking of the various parts and spaces of the event as well as the applied cinematic means (camera movement, montage, mise en image, extradiegetic music) show clear parallels to the examples I have discussed within the previous film analytical chapters. The movement image’s typical structure ‘SA’ (Situation → Action) remains unmodified for the most part. Hence, if one wishes to locate the source of Deleuze’s description of Stromboli as a ‘beauty which is too great for us, like too strong a pain’, one rather must address an alternative element: the volcano’s impact on the body of Karin (Fig. 27). Her complete physical and psychological breakdown at the end of the film brings forth what Deleuze describes as ‘the immense tiredness of the body […], the body 58 A summary of the film’s main plot has already been given on p. 148.

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Figs. 27a-b: Film stills from Stromboli. 1950. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Written by Félix Morlión, Roberto Rossellini, et al. Cinematography by Otello Martelli. Film editing by Roland Gross, Alfred L. Werker. Music by Renzo Rossellini. Runtime: 107 min. Courtesy CMG Worldwide.

as a revealer of the deadline’.59 Shattered and overwhelmed by the crater view, the volcano’s force, and her own fate, Karin finds herself reduced to her bare carnal existence, to desperate utterings, begging God for mercy. Far from providing salvation or a solution for Karin’s situation, the film hints at God’s presence in her encounter with a sublime object of disaster. Within the image of Karin’s exhausted body, the spectator might believe s/he has sensed a glimpse of something unpresentable and unspeakable.60 Leaving Deleuze’s ‘comfort zone’ of Italian neo-realism, I now turn toward Hollywood produced disaster f ilms to locate some of the time-image’s ‘phantoms’. Deviating from Deleuze’s focus on individual auteur directors, I will neglect production aspects altogether and strictly address the films’ cinematic reception. Given the ambitious character of Deleuze’s concept, I, again, cannot stress enough the experimental, approximate, and even speculative character of this enquiry. In addition, one should consider the following descriptive and analytical steps in the context of the media technological and receptive framework of the films’ cinematic performance. For example, my discussion of specific shots in Earthquake could not have been realized without my personal experience of the film being shown on a monumental cinema screen with its original Sensosurround technology, which gives the film’s soundscape a particularly somatic and violent

59 Deleuze 1989, 189. 60 Exhausted: a term that Deleuze does not elaborate on in his Cinema books, yet which he explores more extensively in his later essay ‘The Exhausted’. Defining the exhausted as a mode of ‘apathy’ in which ‘all of the possible’ becomes exhausted, Deleuze also relates it more specifically to the exhausted state of ‘mental’ and ‘pure’ images (time-images). Thus, the exhausted also adequately applies to the concept of the ‘tiredness of the body’ as a subcategory of the time-image (as it manifests in Stromboli) (Deleuze 1995).

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Figs. 28a-d: Film stills from Hurricane. 1979. Directed by Jan Troell. Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. Film editing by Sam O’Steen. Music by Nino Rota. Runtime: 120 min.

dimension. The concrete cinematic experience represents the ineluctable fundament and point of departure for my analysis. Apart from Earthquake’s disaster shots, I will address the imagery of Hurricane (1979), another adaptation of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s novel about a hurricane hitting a colonial society on a Polynesian island.61 Both films feature water phenomena as disaster events.62 The sequence in Hurricane during which the disaster strikes is in the last quarter of the film and lasts for c. 20 to 23 minutes. It consists of only a few narrative units of dialogue and character interaction in which the plot is being progressed. These few units are embedded within dominating attraction elements presenting the storm’s destructive impact on the island and its people. The sequence’s imagery of sublime spectacle is bathed in dark blue color tones. The spectator is confronted with sinister and obscure images of sea spray, smoke, crashing water, wreckage, bodies, and (occasionally) fire (Fig. 28). It is an imagery of atmospheric plasticity and elementary strifes, similar to the (static) landscapes of William Turner. Solid objects and bodies are often hardly visible. The soundscape of the sequence entirely lacks extradiegetic music. All one hears is the roaring of storm and sea, the bursting of wood and stone, and the voices of the characters. Due to this specific staging of the hurricane, the scope of action for human agency becomes most widely 61 Its first cinematic adaptation, The Hurricane, was released in 1937. 62 Water phenomena such as rivers and oceans also catch Deleuze’s interest as they occur within the films of the French national school before WWII. He interprets the French directors’ affinity for fluid bodies as a ‘mechanics of fluids’, which sought to create ‘better conditions to pass from the concrete to the abstract, a greater possibility of communicating an irreversible duration of movements, independently of their figurative characters’ (Deleuze 2009, 40).

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Figs. 29a-f: Film stills from Hurricane. 1979. Directed by Jan Troell. Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. Film editing by Sam O’Steen. Music by Nino Rota. Runtime: 120 min.

suspended, whereas the agency of the storm appears boundless, formless, aimless, and chaotic. As a further radicalization of these tendencies, the sequence exhibits several shots in which aspects of representation, sensomotoric linking, subject-object relations, and narrative functionality are increasingly disconnected and eliminated. These shots display the morphing movements of ocean waves as they rise and fall, spin in circles, build up and crash down (Fig. 29). Over the course of the sequence, the camera frames these objects in closer and closer approximation and for increasingly longer durations.63 The last shots are extreme close-ups of the waves, in which the entire screen is covered in tones of blue and white and organized into morphing organic forms, constantly contracting and expanding, rising and falling, charging and releasing. Together with the mounting tendency of getting lost in the details of the waves, the hypnotic quality of the image increases. Images of equally spectacular, hypnotizing, and abstracted appeal are to be found in the final disaster sequence of Earthquake. The shots to focus on depict the rushing water masses, which are released on the outskirts of Los 63 The duration of the shots extends from f ive to ten seconds in the beginning to up to 20 seconds in the end of the sequence, thereby enabling a deepened and more contemplative mode of perception.

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Figs. 30a-f: Film stills from Earthquake. 1974. Directed by Mark Robson. Written by George Fox and Mario Puzo. Cinematography by Philip H. Lathrop. Film editing by Dorothy Spencer. Music by John Williams. Runtime: 123 min.

Angeles after the Mulholland Dam is destroyed by an earthquake. Like in Hurricane, the scene’s soundscape lacks any extradiegetic music. All to be heard (and felt) is the deep and bassy rumble of the flooding water, which is literally translated by the Sensosurround technology into a ‘gut feeling’ of the spectator. The shots in question present the streaming of the water and its destructive path as a shimmering and dynamically morphing phenomenon (Fig. 30). Viewed on an overwhelmingly large cinema screen, the spectator’s ability to perceive the disaster of the flood as a representational and sensomotoric event becomes increasingly suspended. Perceiving close to nothing more than shimmering and ever-transforming forms, movements of flow, force, and resistance, troubled and fissured lines and surfaces, a cyclical chaos of organic shapes and structures, any represented content-matter gets nearly lost in the act of perception. These images are approximately located outside the realm of sensomotoric agency and the construction of narrative and representation, thereby becoming pure spectacular sensations. In both filmic examples (esp. the first one), I have described moments in which the regime of the sublime movement-image breaks down (Kant’s first stage of immanence) and the sublimity of the time-image opens up (Kant’s second stage of transcendence). In moments as such, the image has forgotten about its sensomotoric (and, as a result, narrative) functioning and

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organization. When the violence of the sensomotoric image gets too strong, the time-image reveals a visual field beyond sensibility, representation, and comprehension, enabling cinematic experiences of visionary and insightful contemplation. This is what Kant describes as the point when ‘imagination reaches its maximum and […] sinks back into itself, […] thereby [being] transported into an emotionally moving satisfaction’ (which is based on reason’s uplifting intervention).64 At the sight of the disaster-time-image, and due to its ‘seeing function’, the viewer becomes a ‘visionary’, who makes experiences of ‘revelation’ and ‘illumination’.65 On the other hand, it appears that the time-image is constantly at risk of losing its hypnotic quality. Perhaps, this is why Deleuze feels compelled to stress the necessity to equip ‘the optical-sound image [the time-image] with the enormous forces that are not those of a simply intellectual consciousness, nor of a social one, but of a profound, vital intuition’.66 In terms of the timeimage phantoms of the disaster genre, they are always on the brink of losing their fascination. When this happens, they become a mere representation of the two-stage mechanism of the Kantian sublime, a representation of the breakdown of sensibility and the shifting motion from violent visual agitation (movement-image) toward an exhausted, numb, and emptied vision (time-image). In this scenario, the time-image becomes a visualization of the ruins of imagination, yet without being capable of making sensible reason’s interference, or, as Deleuze would say, without being able ‘to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and of sound’.67 2.

Last Line of Defense. Ethics

Now that I have given an approximate description of the cinematic moments of the second stage of the Kantian sublime that is the opening of transcendent spaces, I will focus in the following on how this potential of the disaster-time-image is framed, channeled, and targeted in the disaster movie genre in terms of ethical aspects and moral concerns. From a theoretical perspective, the ethical dimension of the sublime represents a central element, especially within the Kantian account. Even though the sublime object confronts the perceiving subject with his/her physical limitations (first stage), ‘the humanity in our person remains undemeaned’ (second 64 65 66 67

Kant 2001, 136. Deleuze 1989, 18f. Deleuze 1989, 22. Deleuze 1989, 18.

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stage) due to the faculty of reason which (to a certain degree) renders any perceived object small and powerless.68 Thus, the sublime enables the spectators to experience themselves as free and morally uncorrupted human beings, as it makes felt a mental independence from nature’s will and its physically superior forces. This is the foundation of the pleasure that the sublime evokes. More specifically, the sublime is connected to the field of ethics, insofar as it functions as a negative representation of the ‘(moral) good, judged aesthetically’.69 One of the central terms of Kant’s ethics is respect (Achtung). Defined as a moral feeling, respect designates the ‘consciousness of the subordination of my will to a [practical] law’.70 In the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant establishes a close resemblance between respect and sublimity by describing the former as a ‘feeling of inadequacy of our capacity for the attainment of an idea that is a law for us’.71 Moreover, both feelings have in common that they are emotionally mixed experiences: the sublime alternates between pleasure and displeasure, while respect both resembles fear (of the law) and enables experiences of individual freedom, since acting against one’s self-love and abiding by the moral law represents an act of free will.72 The surplus of this self-opposed repression is our self-experience as moral beings, who act independently from nature, quite similar to the surplus of pleasure of the sublime. Both mixed experiences, respect and the sublime, have a partly violent character, in that inclination and imagination are sacrificed for a greater gain. However, the origins of the positive sides of these experiences are hidden in both cases due to ‘a certain subreption (substitution73 of a respect for the [sublime] object instead of for the idea of humanity in our subject)’.74 Finally, what distinguishes both categories is that respect is based on the pure intellectual power of judgment, whereas the sublime belongs to the realm of the aesthetic power of judgment.75

68 Kant 2001, 145. 69 Kant 2001, 153. 70 Kant 1996, 56 (Footnote). 71 Kant 2001, 140. 72 Jean François Lyotard strikingly compares respect’s implicit and passive interestedness in its object (which is merely used by practical reason as an opportunity to actualize its law) with the disinterested interestedness of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime (Lyotard, 117). 73 More appropriately, the German term Verwechslung would translate into ‘confusion’, ‘mistaking’, or ‘mix-up’. 74 Kant 2001, 141. – Similarly, within Kant’s ethics ‘[any] respect for a person is properly only respect for the law’ (Kant 1996, 56 [Footnote]). 75 Kant 2001, 150.

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By means of this complex parallelism – the sublime as a ‘disposition of the mind that is similar to the moral disposition’ – Kant manages to conceive the sublime as both a subjective and disinterested mode of aesthetic perception and as an implicitly interested category, which violently pursues its agenda of actualizing the moral law and the potential of the faculty of reason.76 In succession of Kant, Friedrich Schiller modifies and further explores the ethical side of the Kantian sublime.77 From Kant’s concept of the dynamically sublime, which Schiller renames the practical sublime, he specifically adapts its quality of conveying feelings of freedom and human independence from nature.78 By means of stressing the sublime’s condition of the subject’s physical safety, he revaluates artistic works as potential objects of sublimity. In turn, natural objects become devaluated. More precisely, the sublime dynamics of nature are transformed into narrative intensities, as Schiller allocates the sublime a central position within his drama and theater theory. The sublime gets to function as a theatrical effect to facilitate ethical refinement among audiences. With this, Schiller contours a first cultural pedagogics of the sublime. At best, what his project aims at is to overcome death (in an ideally sense) through the sublime’s regular artistic reception. For everything, the proverb says, there is a remedy, but not for death. But this single exception, if it actually is one in the strictest sense, would annul the whole notion of Man. By no means can he be the being, which wills, if there is even but a single case, where he absolutely must, what he does not will.79

To defend man’s freedom and moral ground, one has to ‘annihilate’ death’s ultimate violence ‘as a concept’ through moral culture. ‘To annihilate violence as a concept, however, is called nothing other, than to voluntarily subject oneself to the same’.80 The aesthetic tool to prepare for this last act of self-defense of human dignity and freedom is the sublime. Schiller envisions a society in which an aesthetics of the sublime teaches the individual to honor his/her humanity and ethical potential to the fullest. 76 Kant 2001, 151. 77 At a distance of around eight years, Schiller published two theoretical treatises on the sublime: ‘Of the Sublime; Toward the Further Elaboration of Some Kantian Ideas’ (1793) and ‘On the Sublime’ (1801). 78 Schiller, ‘Of the sublime’. 79 Schiller, ‘On the Sublime’. 80 Schiller, ‘On the Sublime’.

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As for disaster cinema’s affinity with ethical concerns, which will be explored in the following on the basis of Kant and Schiller’s theoretical thoughts, this connection was already addressed as early as 1940 by Siegfried Kracauer, as he identifies certain ‘ideal purposes’ and ‘moral or social demands’ in the works of the 1930s-disaster cycle (see pp. 9-11). Among the films Kracauer writes about is the disaster melodrama San Francisco. The film depicts the vice and moral degeneration of the Californian city prior to its destruction by the infamous earthquake of 1906. The city’s moral corruption manifests most visibly within the main character Blackie Norton and his treatment of the innocent Mary Blake. He defiles her talent as a classical singer by persuading her to perform at his Paradise Club, where bodily exhibition is put before vocal performance. When the earthquake strikes, Blackie (and with him the whole town) is violently forced to change his ways. With his eyes finally opened, he no longer appears as a proud, stubborn, and arrogant entrepreneur. The disaster turns him into a humbled man, who thanks God on his knees for letting Mary Blake live. The final shot of the film shows the ruins of San Francisco, slowly blending into the image of the town’s contemporary state (of 1936). Its saloons and nightclubs have been replaced by skyscrapers, indicating a moral rebirth of San Francisco and America as a whole. A similar transformation takes place in In Old Chicago, a film about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. At its beginning, the O’Leary family arrives in Chicago’s infamous quarter The Patch, where the three sons, Dion, Jack, and Bob, will grow up and pursue different careers. Like Blackie Norton, Dion becomes an entrepreneur in the entertainment industry. He starts running a saloon together with the nightclub singer Belle, whom he has a love affair with. Jack is the opposite of Dion. He is elected mayor and dedicates his life to fighting the corruption and vice in The Patch, thereby becoming an enemy of Dion and his fishy business deals. The climax of Dion’s misdemeanors is reached when he dishonors the sacred bond of marriage by only marrying Belle in order to avoid her testifying against him. Right afterward, the fire breaks out, which ultimately leads to Jack’s death but also brings Dion and Belle back together. Both the city of Chicago and their relationship are rebuilt on the values and the heroic example of Jack’s sacrifice, who died as a martyr for the struggle against corruption and vice. To name a third case from the disaster cycle of the 1930s, The Rains Came focuses on the moral transformation of two characters and lovers: on the one side, Lady Edwina Esketh, a spoiled, dissolute, and decadent woman with no purpose in life; on the other side, major Rama Safti, who works in the Indian kingdom Ranchipur as a doctor. Their growing affection for

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each other is disturbed by the rain and flood catastrophe, which violently reconfigures their inner moral compasses. Lady Esketh gives up her passive existence in luxury and begins treating the sick and wounded victims of the disaster. Eventually, she becomes infected by Cholera herself and dies. Major Safti is forced to put his humanitarian duties and his mission to lead India into a civilized and modern age of prosperity before protecting the love of his life. The rains prompt him to make a crucial decision, namely to value his ethical principles higher than the fulfillment of his individual inclination and happiness. By doing so he becomes a cinematic object of Kantian respect. The narrative patterns, character developments, and ethical themes addressed in the films of the 1930s-disaster cycle occur in close relation to their sublime disaster imagery. More generally, they represent prominent elements within the entire genre. Particularly invested in ethical questions on the human condition are works whose disasters threaten and affect mankind on a global scale, such as La fin du monde, Deluge, When Worlds Collide (1951), The Day After Tomorrow (2004, from here on: TDAT), and 2012. In the face of annihilation, mankind is put to the test. When the chips are down, what is left of man’s values and moral principles? Do we sink into an archaic state of self-preservation and the survival of the fittest? Or do we prove ourselves of being capable of empathy, solidarity, cooperation, and love? The sublime event reveals the true nature of singular characters, societies, and mankind. It lays open their moral foundations and puts them into perspective. As they flood, burn, and blow away all of civilization’s ideological and institutional cushioning, the sublime disasters distinguish right from wrong and justice from injustice. Thereby, they often re-establish ethical balance. This is one of the ways through which disaster events can convey ethical ideas by means of their immediate agency. A more distinct narrative type of deus ex machina resolutions can be found in early historical disaster epics like Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (1908) or Noah’s Ark. The former stages the final destruction of Pompeii as an appropriate response to the rottenness, decadence, and corruption of Roman culture. The latter interprets the disaster of the Deluge as a righteous punishment according to the Old Testament’s theme of God’s wrath and judgment. This type of narrative functioning also applies to films in which natural disasters are not perceived anymore as signs of divine punishment but as strictly secular phenomena. Cases that feature natural disasters pronouncing judgment on humanity are indeed numerous within the disaster genre. The disaster’s authority to punish and pardon is a repeatedly applied feature among what I called the disaster parkour movies of the 1970s (see

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pp. 193f.). Their devastated and inhospitable spaces created by catastrophic events (a sinking ship, a crashed airplane, a burning skyscraper) become the locations in which the members of a diverse group of characters are sacrificed and pardoned according to specific ethical and normative principles. Furthermore, their (partly) heroic struggle for survival and fight against nature are located within what Schiller describes as physical culture. In order to resist nature’s forces, ‘man opposes violence with violence, when he as nature rules over nature’.81 However, as Schiller explains, there are limits to the practices of physical culture. These limits are reached with the disaster scenarios of cinema, which always demand human casualties. According to Schiller, situations as such, which show mankind in its most helpless and humiliated state, are merely to be overcome in an ideally manner. Schiller’s idealistic scenario of annihilating death ‘as a concept’ by ‘voluntarily subject[ing] oneself to the same’ is what he calls the pathetically sublime. While in real life a person’s heroic death caused by a sublime object cannot become a source of aesthetic pleasure, because the ‘participatory pain’ of such a ‘sympathetic suffering’ simply becomes unbearable, in art this sympathetic experience of the sublime is generally possible, due to the ontological difference between death as a representation and death as a real-life event.82 This is Schiller’s main argument for the superiority of the sublime in art over the sublime in nature. Artistically produced sublimity allows for most intense affective agitations of the spectator without reaching the critical point when his/her empathy with the victim of the sublime object leads to the breakdown of aesthetic pleasure. The receptive effects of human casualties in disaster films are often based on the same principles. Generally, disaster cinema depicts heroic acts of self-sacrifice in which inclination and self-love are willingly given up to obey a moral law. Examples of such representations of the Kantian intertwining of respect and sublimity are many. Following Schiller, these pathetically sublime self-sacrifices can be presented in a highly affecting manner without needing to worry about crossing the line toward an overwhelming empathy, as it would be the case in view of a real dying person. More specifically, disaster cinema occasionally exhibits sublime human casualties in which death is ideally overcome and annihilated as a concept. This is the case in 2012 when an Indian mountain landscape is flooded by a gigantic tidal wave (Fig. 21). In the scene, the deaths of the scientist Dr. Satnam Tsurutani and his wife and son are distinctly depicted in accordance 81 Schiller, ‘On the Sublime’. 82 Schiller, ‘Of the Sublime’.

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with the receptive structure of the pathetically sublime. A transformation from exterior terror to its interior dissolution takes place. After viewing the approaching wave in a state of awe (established through a shot-reverse shot pattern), Tsurutani squats down, facing his son and wife. He holds his son’s face in his hands. Father and son look at each other with no sign of mortal fear. In this close-up, the wave is neither to be seen nor heard, merely present, at most, as a gentle murmur. The scene cuts to a medium long shot presenting the family in the foreground and the approaching wave in the background. The formless chaos and force of the disaster stand in stark contrast to the metaphysical unit and bond of the Tsurutanis, which is expressed through the semicircle formed by their bodies. Then, another reverse shot expels the wave once and for all. All that can be seen is the family in a medium close-up. Satnam kisses his son’s hair, thereby completing the semi-circular unit of the family. The rushing of the wave and the screaming of its victims become indistinct. The sound of the water turns into a gurgle. Overall, the scene displays an idealistic overcoming of death and a deadly force of nature. The same type of scene occurs in The Perfect Storm. The death of the f ilm’s main protagonist, the f isherman Bobby Shatford, is staged as an act of idealistic freedom from the physical superiority of the storm. The scene begins with an extreme long shot showing Shatford as a tiny spot in the middle of the roaring sea. With the cut to a close-up of Shatford’s face, the storm’s soundscape subsides gradually and finally falls silent. Equivalently, the non-diegetic music subsides from dramatic heights to more quiet, slower, and brighter tones. One is intimately close now to the helpless protagonist and his final thoughts, which are expressed through voice-over from the off-screen. The storm becomes almost entirely negated in terms of its visual and auditory presence. On the left side of the close-up of Shatford’s face, the figure of his girlfriend Christina is blended in. She reaches out with her right arm, waving goodbye before the vision fades away. The shot visualizes the event of a transcendent opening, during which the threatening and terrifying appearance of the disaster object is suspended and replaced by the protagonist’s last reflection on immortal love. Even though the storm regains its violent force on a visual level in the next extreme long shot, its auditory force, as expressed through sound and non-diegetic music, does not fully recover. The metaphysical inner space that opened up in the shot before as an immediate effect of the storm’s violent physical agitation leaves nature in a weakened state. Of course, nature will still demand Shatford’s physical death, yet the thought of his love’s immortality remains unspoiled.

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The sublime’s potential to enable transcendent moments of insight and self-awareness is also employed for the character development in Twister. The film’s opening sequence tells the traumatic childhood experience of Jo Harding, as she is forced to see her father being taken and killed by a tornado. This experience is established as Jo’s main motive for becoming a meteorologist and tornado chaser. When her father is taken away, the twister itself is not fully visible to her. All she sees is a fragment through the small window of the storm shelter. Thus, Jo’s repeatedly addressed desire to fully see and experience her objects of study is of a distinctly pathological nature. Because of her obsession, she gets herself into extremely dangerous situations, as if driven by an inner death wish. Her traumatized and troubled mental state is revealed, for instance, during the first fully visible tornado encounter in the film. The spectator sees Jo crouching toward the twister right in front of her, repeatedly screaming ‘I wanna see it!’ With the experience of the monumental category F5 twister at the end of the f ilm, Jo’s trauma is f inally healed. To save their lives, Jo and her husband Bill tie themselves with leather straps to a metal pipe. Due to his setup, they are enabled to experience the inside of the tornado without putting their lives at risk. Jo is finally able to fully see the phenomenon that killed her father. Inside the cathedral-like vertical space of the storm, old associations and connotations are loosened and reprogrammed. Unlike in Jo’s childhood, this F5 twister does not harm the family that is hidden in a storm shelter. The image of father, daughter, son, and mother arising from the shelter emphasizes once more Jo’s final coming-to-terms. In opposition to Twister’s employment of a sublime object as a trigger to initiate a healing process of a character’s pathological condition, and also in opposition to Kant and Schiller’s functioning of the sublime as a means for moral refinement and education within the project of Enlightenment, the end-of-the-world film Melancholia (2011) presents the viewer with a sublime object (Earth’s collision with the planet Melancholia) that rejects any productive ethical surplus. Steven Shaviro even goes so far to consider the movie as a work of the anti-sublime. In his essay ‘Melancholia; Or, the Romantic Anti-Sublime’ he gives two arguments to substantiate this attribution: first, Melancholia does not offer any ‘grandiose and sublime spectacle of destruction’, because it lacks sensory shocks and rapid editing techniques; second, the film is anti-sublime because of its ‘flat literalness of the catastrophe’.83 Unlike the Kantian sublime, whose receptive effects Shaviro describes as 83 Shaviro 2012, 6, 43.

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necessarily ‘metaphorical’ (due to its ‘figurative transference’ procedures), Melancholia lacks this metaphorical dimension.84 It seems to me that these two arguments contradict each other. On the one hand, Shaviro stresses the film’s heightened reflexivity and its rejection of elements of affective spectacle; on the other hand, it is the disaster’s immediacy and its very lack of (metaphorical) reflexivity that disqualifies Melancholia as a sublime disaster movie. Hence, while I principally agree with Shaviro’s claim of Melancholia’s anti-sublimity, my argument for this attribution aims at another aspect of the film, which I find more decisive. Indeed, Melancholia does not employ an aesthetics of shock, sending sudden eruptions through the spectator’s body. However, its opening and closing sequences feature sensorily and somatically powerful images of spectacular appeal. Its f irst eight minutes display sixteen tableaux of landscape views with human figures in extreme slow motion as well as cosmic views of the planets’ collision. Extravagantly spectacular is also the final shot of the movie, in which the tiny figures of the three protagonists (Justine, Claire, and her son Leo) are set against the overwhelming impacting of planet Melancholia. Thus, one cannot necessarily derive an anti-sublime nature from Melancholia’s spectacular appeal. Quite the opposite, the viewer could easily relate its imagery to the sublime’s rich iconographic history.85 But if Shaviro’s anti-sublimity does not manifest within the visual appearance of the film’s disaster object (that is within the first stage of the Kantian sublime), where else could it be located? I suggest tracking it down within the second stage of the Kantian sublime, the moment of transcendence. This requires turning my attention to the film’s contextual aspects which frame the sublime event of the end of the world. In this respect, the film offers a variety of narrative, historical, philosophical, symbolic, and iconographic layers. All these layers are pointed out by Shaviro in his sharp and insightful analysis of Melancholia. For example, he identifies the film’s anti-modernist aesthetic and director Lars van Trier’s mission to ‘dive headlong into the 84 Shaviro 2012, 42. 85 Even though they also position their analysis of Melancholia against Shaviro, there are similar issues with Sarah French and Zoe Shacklock’s reading of the f ilm as a work of the affective sublime. Following Lyotard’s distinction of the modern and the postmodern sublime, this theoretical application of Lyotard’s aesthetics – an aesthetics as void of representation as a Newman painting – to a film of such iconographical richness is not carried out in a fully convincing manner. What is more, French and Shacklock seem too certain on the sublimity of certain shots and on the affects and feelings they trigger in the spectator, instead of considering potentially sublime filmic images in their receptive complexity (French).

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abyss of German Romanticism’.86 This general aesthetic program of the film is explicitly illustrated in the scene in which the manic-depressive Justine changes the images shown in various art catalogues, which are displayed on book shelves in the study of Claire’s husband John. She pulls down the ‘reproductions of abstract modernist paintings […] and replaces them with older, figurative paintings’ (such as Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath).87 In extension of Shaviro’s account, according to which Melancholia opposes the modernist notion of rational order, scientific control, and human progress, one might say that the film also takes a broader stand against the project of Enlightenment. In Melancholia, the Kantian model of the sublime and its pedagogical modif ication through Schiller are reversed. Kant’s ethical surplus of the sublime – ‘to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial’ – does still apply, but only in a twisted way.88 It is not the rational and socially functional Claire who is lifted by the sight of approaching Melancholia but rather the mentally sick Justine. Her indifference regarding the destruction of the world originates from a life spent in pain and her knowledge about the evilness of ‘life on earth’. The upcoming disaster has a stabilizing and even arousing effect on her, not because it enables her to experience her higher faculty of reason as a moral feeling (aesthetically judged), but because her pathological lack of relations with the world allows for an intimate connection with the desired state of a world-without-us, which the collision of planets promises.89 As stated by Shaviro, Justine’s sickness is depathologized and located within a pre-modern formation of discourses, which re-ascribe depression (or melancholia) to the realm of the irrational, demonic, artistic, and psychic. Depression, ‘as a proper state of being’ and even privileged state of mind, is what draws Justine to the blue shimmering light of planet Melancholia.90 Through the character of Justine and her special relation to the worldwithout-us, ‘Melancholia presents a deflationary vision of “the truth of extinction”’ – a radical truth that perhaps cannot be reached by the Kantian sublime from within its normative and productive boundaries of ethical refinement.91 86 Qtd. in: Shaviro 2012, 26. 87 Shaviro 2012, 27. 88 Kant 2001, 145. 89 Shaviro adapts the concept of the world-without-us from Eugene Thacker. The term signifies ‘a “spectral and speculative world” that exists at the limits of our thought’ (Shaviro 2012, 38). 90 Shaviro 2012, 20. 91 Shaviro 2012, 37.

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‘Hear God Howl’ – Religion and Spirituality

When the first tornado is fully revealed to the eye in Twister, non-diegetic choral music arises, creating an auratic space of spirituality and sacred mystery. The same happens in the subsequent appearances of tornado phenomena in the film. The staging of sublime disaster objects as quasisacred auratic spaces to be penetrated and experienced by camera and viewer has become a repeatedly applied element within disaster cinema from the 1990s onward. With this, cinema also begins to reflect its ability to (digitally) present dynamically sublime objects – ergo: the sheer unpresentable and unexperienceable – as well as the spiritual and transcendent dimensions of the sublime. An aura of sacredness permeating and surrounding the sublime object is also given in the famous example of the Isis temple, which Kant gives in a footnote within his Critique of the Power of Judgment. He claims that ‘[p]erhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or any thought more sublimely expressed, than in the inscription over the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no mortal has removed”’.92 Equivalently, filmmakers present their phenomena impossible to be experienced in reality with a gesture of unveiling the mysteries of nature. In his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant feels compelled to position his concept toward religion and the idea of God. One reason for this necessity may lay in the fact that the two-stage model of the Kantian sublime has its roots within theological thought and aesthetics, as I have pointed out elsewhere (see pp. 44f.). Kant distinguishes religion from superstition and elaborates their relation to the experience of the sublime. He associates superstition with the notion of ‘God as exhibiting himself in anger but at the same time in his sublimity in thunder, storm, earthquake, etc. where to imagine that our minds have any superiority over the effects and as it seems even over the intentions of such a power would seem to be at once both foolishness and outrage’.93 The superstitious perspective on nature’s forces is further related to cultural practices of ‘submission, adoration with bowed head, and remorseful and anxious gestures and voice’.94 It is hard to imagine any aesthetic pleasure to be derived from such an experience of God’s anger. Thus, in Kant’s opinion, religious spirituality only functions as a 92 Kant 2001, 194 (Footnote). 93 Kant 2001, 146. 94 Kant 2001, 146.

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relevant component of the sublime when the subject ‘recognizes in himself a sublimity of disposition suitable to God’s will, […] thereby raised above the fear of such effects of nature, which he does not regard as outbursts of God’s wrath’.95 In the context of disaster cinema, this opposition of superstitious terror and religious sublimity represents a framework within which disasters’ discourses, their spiritual links and readings are negotiated. There are many films in which crowds of people find solace in prayer, begging God for mercy in the face of a life-threatening disaster. To name one of the earliest cases, La fin du monde features a parallel montage of Muslims, Christians, and an African indigenous tribe, all of which express their religious devotion. After the comet has missed Earth, various images of religious (mostly Christian) rituals indicate the beginning of an age of renewed spirituality and religious deity. But the film also shows how a group of Christian priests restores human dignity and moral order at an excessive, orgy-like gathering, providing guidance in times of crisis and imminent danger. Spiritual freedom from an approaching lethal disaster is ostentatiously exhibited in a scene of 2012. It presents the spectator with the destruction of a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayan mountains by a gigantic tidal wave. Instead of panicking, the old monk, as he becomes aware of the wave, starts ringing the monastery’s bell in a stoic manner. His gaze is directed at the approaching waters; this is presented in a shot-reverse shot sequence. His indifferent and irrational reaction to the disaster object expresses his spiritual independence from it – an ideally annihilation of death as a concept as conceived by Schiller. In contrast to this free act of Buddhist spirituality, 2012 also shows televised scenes of mass panics, apocalyptic prophets and religious freaks, as well as human crowds bowing their heads in prayer, yet breaking out into panic when disaster strikes. In The Hurricane, Christianity represents and takes a stand for universal values and human rights. In the conflict between the French colonial state and the Polynesian natives, the church, represented by the good priest Father Paul, functions as mediator, civilizing authority, and moral shepherd. When the hurricane threatens the community of the island Manakoora with annihilation, it is the roof and walls of the church that provide physical and spiritual shelter (at least until the water erodes and penetrates them). Finally, Father Paul is hit by falling wreckage of the church roof, dying with his arms stretched out wide, as if being crucified as a martyr for the sins of his people. He dies for the injustice and cruelty of the French colonial 95 Kant 2001, 147.

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law and its code of honor, which sentences the film’s hero, Terangi, a native and first mate on a French schooner, to sixteen years in prison while the racial discrimination against him goes unpunished. Burke’s claim that sublime objects can potentially convey the idea of God is also verbalized by the island’s doctor, Kersaint. Addressing the island’s Governor Eugene De Laage and his stubborn adherence to the colonial law, he says, ‘when you feel the might of the sea and the wind, maybe you’ll discover there’s something greater in this world than the French criminal code. […] Then hear God howl and laugh at you’. Later, having survived and experienced the storm, De Laage attests to his inner moral and spiritual change by deciding to ignore the law and let Terangi and his family get away in a canoe. The nearness of God during catastrophic events has already been pointed out on former occasions, as for instance in Karin’s experience of the volcano eruption in Stromboli (1950) or Blackie Norton’s discovery of God during the earthquake in San Francisco. The intertwining of the disaster’s sensory presence and the imagined or felt presence of God represents a conventional narrative element in the disaster genre. Consider alone the various film adaptations of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Akin to Briullov’s painted version of the novel, which displays a clashing of degenerate pagan culture and the nobleness of Christianity (see p. 90), these f ilms all stage the quarrel between the decadence of the Roman Empire and its belief system and the morally superior values of the early Christians. In the film version from 1935, Christianity is revealed as the one true world religion. While Jesus gets to perform a miracle, the pagan religion of the Roman Empire merely manifests in themes of decadence, injustice, and intrigue. Thus, the final eruption of Vesuvius punishes the rotten belief system and culture of the Romans. All protagonists get what they deserve, according to the moral and religious hierarchy that the film establishes. And even though the film’s hero, Marcus, gives his life so he can save his son, his salvation and ascension is instantly confirmed by Jesus who appears in front of him in a vision. Indeed, in terms of the numerous disaster events that are embedded within biblical epics, questions of religious relevance become redundant. In these cases, religious content is not to be derived from the disaster event in an act of interpretation, but on the contrary, it is the disaster that illustrates God’s wrath and judgment. At the same time, biblical narratives like the Deluge, the life of Moses, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are incarnated and transformed in their filmic adaptations. Like John Martin’s painting The Great Day of His Wrath, the films establish a connection between the embodied experience of the here-and-now and the immaterial

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and timeless sphere of the biblical myth. God’s vengeance, as it manifests in sublime events of destruction, is first and foremost experienced as an object of cinematic attraction, which affects the spectators as embodied beings before becoming a matter for spiritual and theological reflection. A transformation of biblical narrative into sensory and somatic experiences is emblematically staged in Exclusive Movie Studios’s (perhaps Vitagraph’s, see Chapter 6, Footnote 18) silent short film The Deluge from 1911. Serving a similar function like the pamphlets accompanying the exhibition of Martin’s disaster paintings, the film begins with some explanatory textual notes in which the event of the biblical Deluge is regarded as a confirmed scientific fact. To substantiate this claim, the text refers to philological, archeological, and natural scientific positions on this matter, yet without getting more specific. Apart from this meta-reflection on the presented narrative, the subsequent intertitles of the film are restricted to original text passages from the Old Testament. This is where silent film’s technology and narrative techniques intersect with the essentially textual foundation of Christianity and Judaism. In addition, the intertitles add theological authority and authenticity to the presented event. Their rigid textual agency frames and contains the film’s visual depictions of human figures, objects, landscapes, and meteorological phenomena. However, this framing function of the event’s textual essence is loosened during the actual Deluge scene, which represents the film’s longest part without intertitles (lasting for c. five minutes). During this interval, the film is primarily interested in displaying the water’s impact on the condemned humans outside the Ark. This exterior perspective is hardly covered in the textual source.96 The splashing and rushing of the water, the crowd’s desperate attempts to reach a safe spot (a tree, a rock), the agony of their bodies, and their physical powerlessness against the overwhelming presence and force of the flood – all of these phenomena are staged as affective agitations of the embodied cinematic spectator. In other films, biblical events are turned into episodes embedded in broader narratives, as for instance in Michael Curtiz’s Sodom and Gomorrah (1922) and Noah’s Ark, as well as in Cecil B. DeMille’s first version of The Ten Commandments (1923). In all three works, the respective biblical 96 In Genesis 7: 21-23, it merely says: ‘Every living thing that moved on land perished – birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth’ (New International Version).

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disasters – the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Deluge, the parting of the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army – are juxtaposed with modern events and moments of crisis, such as WWI (Noah’s Ark), incidents of female greed and betrayal (Sodom and Gomorrah), or the downfall of Jewish-Christian ethics in modern capitalist society (The Ten Commandments). Due to the episodic structure of Noah’s Ark, the bloodshed of the First World War is conceived as a disaster of biblical proportions, while the biblical narrative of the Deluge is transformed into a somatically agitating event of modern entertainment and cinematic attraction. More generally, the biblical Deluge not only appears as a represented event in the disaster genre, it also functions as an archetype narrative for works outside the subject matter of the biblical texts. The construction of arks (in form of space ships, underground bases, or swimming vessels) regularly occurs whenever mankind’s survival is at stake. The construction of several ‘Arc’ ships in 2012 represents one of the most obvious cases. However, Roland Emmerich’s global disaster film also employs more subliminal and hidden references to Christian religion and culture. This begins already with the names of the protagonists: the initials of Jackson Curtis reference Jesus Christ, which makes sense, since Curtis is the good shepherd who leads his family and others into safety. Moreover, the philanthropic end-of-theworld novel that he wrote functions as an ethical compass for mankind’s new beginning after the waters receded. His son’s name is Noah, which gives another hint at the biblical scenario of the Deluge. Apart from the Ark ships, which will ensure man’s survival, one also encounters a cruise ship named after the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, which is eventually capsized and destroyed by a tidal wave. Shortly before Curtis meets the prophet figure Charlie Frost, he and his daughter sing along to a country song on the radio with the lyrics: ‘bye-bye Lord, bye-bye […] in the sky Lord, in the sky’. The end of the world is connotated both as natural scientific scenario, as Christian Apocalypse, and as ancient prophecy by the Maya. Viewed from the perspective of Christian teleology, the end of the world presents itself as the reversal of the divine act of creation. During a mass in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, a crack occurs on Michelangelo’s iconic fresco, right at the spot where God and Adam’s fingers meet and the spark of life is passed over. Eventually, the whole building collapses, burying the participants of the congregation. The revoking of God’s grace is further expressed by the television images showing the collapsing of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro as well as by the televised announcement made by US-President Thomas Wilson. During his speech, Wilson quotes the biblical

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psalm verse ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want […]’ (Psalm 23: 1), however, the transmission is interrupted and cut off in the middle of the second sentence when the next catastrophic event occurs. 2012, with its densely-woven web of religious references and narratives spun around the event of the end of the world, illustrates the relevance of religious and spiritual content matter within the disaster genre. On the other hand, I have not yet addressed how narrative and textual elements as such are related to the somatic and sensory experiences of the films’ sublime disaster moments. This quite pressing matter, which also touches upon one of the big remaining question marks within the film theoretical discourse, will be dealt with in the following chapter.

Modality, or, The Pleasure of the Sublime A repeatedly expressed point of criticism against disaster movies revolves around the seductive appeal of their images and narratives. According to such ideology-critical positions, Hollywood cinema employs its powerful disaster images to get into the heads of its spectators. Once this goal is achieved, Hollywood plants its ideological messages there, which are usually based on capitalist, misogynist, racist, nationalist, and militaristic discourses (see Chapter 1, Footnote 3). Roughly, the theoretical foundation of such film analytical narratives lies within the Apparatus theorems that have taken into view cinema’s ideological entanglements since the early 1970s. Accordingly, the medium cinema – as it is put to use for the aesthetic agenda of mainstream Hollywood productions – is conceived of as a subjectivity machine, which employs a ‘mechanism of ideological mystification’, thereby releasing its subliminal reactionary messages upon a victimized and passive spectator.97 Most influential in this regard was perhaps Jean-Louis Baudry’s analysis of the cinematic apparatus, whose hidden mechanisms he reveals by analogy with Plato’s allegory of the cave (and Sigmund Freud’s psychical locality). Baudry describes the cinematic dispositif as a hallucinatory technology reproducing ‘the psychical apparatus during sleep’.98 Cinema gives a ‘simulation of a condition of the subject, a position of the subject, a subject and not of reality’.99 Elsewhere, he links this defenseless state of perception (and 97 Shaviro 1993, 65. 98 Baudry 1976, 122. 99 Baudry 1976, 123.

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mind) with the ‘ideological effects’ that occur with the establishment of the cinematic subject. ‘The cinema can thus appear as a sort of psychic apparatus of substitution, corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology. The system of repression (primarily economic) has as its goal the prevention of deviations and of the active exposure of this “model”’.100 Against this far-reaching notion of the cinematic experience and, more particularly, ideology-critical readings of disaster cinema, my aim in this chapter is to gain a more complex and nuanced understanding of the receptive reach of disaster films. This specifically calls for a detailed investigation of the relation between the metaphysical themes and narrative elements that I analyzed in the previous chapters and the sublime disaster events, which overwhelm the spectator through their excessive sensory and affective appeal. The analytical tool for this task will be, once again, the Kantian model of the sublime. In addition, as this chapter addresses the relation between disaster narrative and disaster spectacle, my investigation also touches upon a question which has received a great amount of scholarly attention in form of articles, monographs, edited volumes, and conferences over the last couple of decades: how are the opposing cinematic models of, on the one side, attraction, spectacle, affect, event, and presence, and, on the other side, narrative, textuality, intelligibility, and semiotic readability related? And how can they be synthesized? My point of departure is a text by Jörg Herrmann in which he analyzes disaster movies from the 1990s by means of applying the aesthetic category of the sublime. Herrmann bases his critical analysis of the films Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), and Jurassic Park (1993) on the aesthetic-historical distinction between the metaphysical sublime and the critical sublime, as it was conceptualized by Jean-François Lyotard’s former student and translator, Christine Pries. The category of the metaphysical sublime encompasses idealistic tendencies within the history of reception of Kant’s aesthetics. Pries criticizes theorists such as Johann Gottfried Herder, the brothers Schlegel (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), F.W.J. Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich Theodor Vischer for their one-sided interpretations of the Kantian two-stage model, which tend to overemphasize the intervention of reason (second stage).101 Consequently, this preference leads to taming the sublime’s first stage that is the collapsing of sensibility. Sublimity is reconciled with beauty and given the status of objectivity. Pries’ polemic yet stimulating account of the receptive history of the Kantian sublime eventually culminates in the 100 Baudry 1974-1975, 46. 101 Pries 1995, 15-26.

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aesthetics of the Third Reich, until postwar theorists like Theodor Adorno and Wilhelm Weischedel attempt a new start. Afterward, it is especially Pries’ teacher Lyotard who re-establishes the Kantian sublime as a critical category. Crucial for the understanding of Herrmann’s film analysis is the notion of the metaphysical sublime as a simple aesthetic mechanism of overcoming and domesticating nature and its shocking and terrifying objects, due to the conscious use of reason. The metaphysical sublime is the aesthetic concept to which Herrmann ascribes the receptive appeal of the analyzed films in question. The argument that he gives to substantiate this claim is the following: What has already been noticed in regard to “Independence Day” applies to all three films: the filmic simulations of the sublime also correspond to the two-stage structure of the Kantian model on a narrative level. The terror caused by monsters, aliens, or disasters becomes domesticated in the course of action through genius insights, heroic combat actions, and oaths of love. […] Filmic reason triumphs entirely over its simulated terror. […] The too-much for sensation is cushioned in this cosmos and therefore becomes harmlessly consumable. In this regard, popular cinema corresponds to the accentuation of the sublime criticized by Christine Pries: it does not appear as a chance for perceiving complexity but as a simplifying answer to it.102

Note here that Herrmann deviates distinctly from Pries’ concept of the metaphysical sublime (and from the Kantian sublime in general) in terms of its temporal structure. While Pries stresses the fact that it is the moment of sensory crisis itself which becomes weakened and domesticated within the metaphysical sublime, Herrmann bends the temporal duration of the sublime by contrasting the viewer’s overwhelming sensory agitation with narrative elements (‘genius insights, heroic combat actions, and oaths of love’). Hence, his application of Pries’ concept lacks precision and, ultimately, validity. In terms of the relation between disaster cinema’s attraction and narrative elements, Herrmann assumes an undisturbed and smoothly functioning permeability and interaction between both sides, which he does not further elaborate. Accordingly, he describes how the films’ disaster events and images are infiltrated, toned down, and domesticated by the stereotypical themes of their plots.103 This allows him to locate the disaster 102 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Herrmann, 229f. 103 One finds a similar line of argumentation in Chung’s Das Erhabene im Kinofilm, where she resolutely restricts the film 2012 from providing experiences of the sublime to the spectator. This restriction is based on the film’s stereotypical, unsubtle, and pseudo-humanistic plot (Chung, 313f.).

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genre within an aesthetic tradition shared with the painless monumentality and bombast of Nazi culture. While Herrmann fails to reflect and problematize the complicated relation between the cinematic realms of attraction and narrative, other film scholars offer elaborate descriptive accounts on this matter, some of which shall be presented in the following.104 Yvonne Tasker contests the film historical distinction between Classical Hollywood (narrative) cinema and the often announced rebirth of the cinema of attractions in the medium’s post-classical period, which started around the mid-1970s.105 Indeed, such a coarse divide seems to contradict the greater complexities of film history and its singular works, calling into question the validity of this historical distinction altogether. Beyond this criticism, Tasker attempts to synthesize both narrative and attraction cinema through genre theoretical reflections on the terms action and adventure. While adventure ‘bears much more explicit narrative expectations’, action, rather than being a genre of its own, is defined as a multi-generic mode through which the story (the adventure) is told.106 Sabine Nessel emphasizes the singularity and non-discursivity of the spectacular and somatically agitating cinematic event, which, strictly speaking, is never to be captured directly through criticism and discursive description. This is why she approaches these unpresentable moments from a more distant terrain, by discussing their appearance within film theoretical and critical discourses.107 But Nessel also does film analysis. In a second approach, she performs two steps: first, she establishes the plausible distinction between films that primarily want to be read and films that primarily want to be somatically felt; second, she demonstrates that even this opposition lacks accuracy by analytically pointing out both narrative and intelligible aspects in typical body genre films (e.g. Twister, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [1982], GI Blues [1960]) and the somatic dimensions of typical ‘readable’ specimens of film history (e.g. Summer in the City [1970], En avoir (ou pas) [1995], Der schöne Tag [2001]). 104 Even though they do not explicitly commit their theories to describing the relationship between attraction and narrative cinema, also Vivian Sobchack and Thomas Morsch’s somatic models of the cinematic experience represent significant contributions to the debate. In both texts, Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye and Morsch’s Medienästhetik des Films, embodied perception functions not only as the foundation for any cinematic experience but also as a mediating faculty between the medium’s affective agency and its more intelligible parts (Sobchack; Morsch). 105 Tasker, 1-13. 106 Tasker, 7. 107 Nessel.

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A closer intertwining of cinematic spectacle and narrative is also what Aylish Wood aims for by introducing her concept of timespace to the theoretical discourse. She argues that other theoretical models fail to give an accurate descriptive account of this matter, because they categorically distinguish between cinematic space (as associated with spectacle) and cinematic time (narrative). As Wood explains, [d]espite their different approaches to spectacle in special-effects films, the views outlined above nonetheless all sustain an opposition between time and space. Whether they suggest that spectacle provides cohesion, interrupts the narrative or acts as an integrated, if distinct, element of a film, these arguments reaffirm the separation of the spatial and the temporal.108

In opposition to such dualistic approaches, she proposes thinking cinematic time and space (and, equivalently, narrative and spectacle) as inextricably intertwined. Accordingly, the concept of timespace reveals a temporal (that is narrative) dimension within spaces of cinematic spectacle. In her subsequent analysis, Wood is particularly interested in demonstrating how spectacular digital images of action cinema convey essential narrative values. Thus, in her discussion of Twister, she describes how the tornadoes ‘act as another dimension of the narrative. They are mobile agents in which the environment of the film is modified’.109 In a comparable manner, Geoff King stresses the relevance of narrative structures and underlying mythological archetypes in films that mainly appeal to their audiences by means of their spectacular features. Among the films he discusses are Twister, Independence Day, Titanic, Deep Impact (1998), and Armageddon (1998). Regarding the attraction vs. narrative discussion, his position is rather diplomatic, stating that ‘[n]arrative and spectacle can work together in a variety of changing relationships and there is no single, all-embracing answer to the question of how the two are related’.110 In this spirit, I likewise do not claim to offer a definite descriptive model which will put an end to the theoretical debate. Instead, the following receptive concept is to be regarded as an additional contribution and asset to the several promising attempts presented above. Based on the Kantian account of the sublime – more specifically, on Kant’s reflections on the 108 Wood, 373. 109 Wood, 376. 110 King, 2.

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sublime’s modality – my receptive model is specifically suited to describe disaster cinema’s correlation of sublime attractions and narrative themes of transcendence, spirituality, and ethics. Additionally, this model attempts to productively oppose readings of disaster films which simply see an ideological indoctrination of the spectator at work. Let me begin by addressing some arguments from Kant’s ‘Analytic’ which already destabilize and complicate a successful realization of the experience of the sublime. Kant claims that the possibility of experiencing the shift from the sublime’s first stage (sensibility’s breakdown) to its second stage (reason’s intervention) depends, to a certain extent, on the individual qualification of the perceiving subject. On the one hand, ‘the modality of the judgment on the sublime in nature’ – weighing ‘the ground for the necessity of the assent of the judgment of other people concerning the sublime to our own’ – is based on the general human ‘predisposition to the feeling for (practical) ideas’.111 On the other hand, in contrast to beauty, the sublime has much greater dependency on the cultural and moral education of the subject. ‘In fact, without the development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime will appear merely repellent to the unrefined person’.112 Hence, due to the sublime’s tendentially elite character, the notion of its smooth functioning mechanism, which unfailingly bridges the gap between sensation and metaphysical content (or concepts), is rendered problematic. But even if the subject fulfills these moral and cultural requirements, this does not guarantee that the perception of the sublime object necessarily leads to the experience and judgment of the sublime; for Kant imposes another condition: Thus, if someone calls the sight of the starry heavens sublime, he must not ground such a judging of it on concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, taking the bright points with which we see the space above us to be filled as their suns, about which they move in their purposively appointed orbits, but must take it, as we see it, merely as a broad, all-embracing vault; and it must be merely under this representation that we posit the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment attributes to this object.113

Indeed, this requirement of deliberately viewing the sublime object in an aesthetic mode of sensation appears quite peculiar and inconsistent 111 Kant 2001, 148f. 112 Kant 2001, 148. 113 Kant 2001, 152.

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within the broader context of Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’. While the subject seems to have a freedom of choice here in the face of the object, the far greater parts of Kant’s treatise emphasize the violent character of the sublime. Essentially, the recipient’s sensibility is violated both by the object itself and by the faculty of reason. Apart from complicating conditions as such, which already give the experience of the sublime a fragile and unstable complexion, there is a more crucial point within Kant’s theory. This point will substantially constitute my receptive model of disaster cinema. The following sentence represents an essential, yet often overlooked component of the Kantian sublime: ‘Thus the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we show to an object in nature through a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the [sublime] object instead of for the idea of humanity in our subject)’.114 The subject confuses the respect s/he has for his/her own faculty of reason with a projected respect for the sublime object. This confusion decidedly qualifies the notion of the sublime as a self-experience of human independence from nature and moral superiority. Rather than being consciously experienced, the respect for man’s own ethical potential and the sublimity of human reason is merely felt as an indistinct pleasure (a moral feeling), which is projected upon a perceptible object. This indistinctness further resonates with the ideas of reason which are actualized during the experience of the sublime.115 God, immortality, and freedom, as the purest ideas of (practical) reason, are rarely specifically named in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’.116 Instead, Kant fuzzily speaks of ‘reason’s idea of the supersensible’, ‘the idea of humanity in our subject’, ‘the idea of the absolute whole’, and ‘the inscrutability of the idea of freedom’.117 As for the mathematically sublime in particular, he identifies ‘the idea of its infinity’ as a defining feature.118 Kant’s lack of interest for the specific content of reason’s ideas, which are experienced as a moral, pleasurable, and uplifting feeling for a sublime object, is perhaps based on the transcendental 114 Kant 2001, 141. – Equivalently, within Kant’s ethics, ‘[any] respect for a person is properly only respect for the law’ (Kant 1996, 56 [Footnote]). 115 Ideas of reason are def ined by Kant as follows: ‘Ideas in the most general meaning are representations related to an object in accordance with a certain (subjective or objective) principle, insofar as they can nevertheless never become a cognition of that object. […] An idea of reason can never become a cognition, because it contains a concept (of the supersensible) for which no suitable intuition can ever be given’ (Kant 2001, 217f.). 116 Eisler, 258f. 117 Kant 2001, 141, 143, 156. 118 Kant 2001, 138.

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pleasure principle of the sublime. Kant explains that ‘the displeasure and thus the contrapurposiveness of the faculty of imagination is yet represented as purposive for the ideas of reason and their awakening’.119 The sublime’s pleasure is derived from the fact that the sensorily appearing object is unable to match and present the actualized idea of reason, which is not further defined or specified during the aesthetic experience. In this regard, Kant emphasizes that ‘in judging a thing to be sublime the same faculty [imagination] is related to reason, in order to correspond subjectively with its ideas (though which is undetermined [emphasis added])’.120 In terms of the interlocking of the two stages of the Kantian sublime, four central arguments can be summarized: 1) the breakdown of sensibility and reason’s interference are not related in a strictly causal manner, for their relation is destabilized by the cultural qualification of the subject as a requirement for the sublime’s realization. 2) To a certain degree, the subject is required to experience the sublime object in a specifically aesthetic mode of perception.121 3) The sublime does not comprise a conscious act of self-experience during which moral ideas are explicitly represented and identified. Quite the opposite, these ideas are merely felt unconsciously and indistinctly as a projected aesthetic quality (sublimity) of an object. 4) The specific content of the ideas of reason involved in the experience of the sublime is only of secondary concern. The sublime’s transcendental pleasure principle does not rely on the distinctness and identification of reason’s ideas but merely on their comparative superiority over any perceptible object. Based on these arguments, I am now able to outline a set of receptive principles regarding the relation between spectacular disaster images and narrative themes of transcendence within disaster cinema. First, all the previously described themes of ethical, spiritual, and religious transcendence occurring on the narrative level of the films are not to be identified with the actual second stage of the Kantian sublime, which strictly takes place in the spectator’s mind. Neither are these themes to be regarded as an outsourcing of this second stage, according to which the subjectivity machine cinema externalizes and substitutes certain procedures of the spectator’s mental faculties. To the spectator, it is not even clear which 119 Kant 2001, 143. 120 Kant 2001, 139. 121 However, this requirement, apart from contradicting the general violent character of the Kantian sublime, can be widely assumed as a given regarding the sublime experience of disaster cinema. This is because cinema’s specific media technological setup highly facilitates such an aesthetic mode of perception, with its enclosed and darkened viewer-space, which is entered as a space designated for aesthetic attentiveness and experiences.

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ideas are evoked and actualized in response to his/her overwhelming of sensibility. The shocking moments of the sublime can merely prompt a not further specified moral feeling, which is ascribed to the perceived object (the cinematic disaster event). Second, I believe that my film analysis has convincingly demonstrated that simple either-or distinctions between elements of attraction and narrative cinema do not do justice to the greater complexity of the cinematic aesthetics of the sublime. As pointed out by film scholars like Wood, King, and Nessel, scenes of spectacle can indeed contain narrative information and function accordingly. However, I think that my investigation of the somatic excesses and sublime time-images of the disaster genre reveals that cinema also brings forth scenes, shots and images in which the dimension of the narrative is entirely suspended. Hence, instead of a strictly dichotomic relation, I propose to regard the terms attraction and narrative as the designated marking points of a polarity, which allows for gradual transitions, varying degrees of hybrid forms but also for pure states of attraction and narrative cinema.122 Third, in reaction to the sensorily and affectively most agitating moments of disaster cinema, the spectator experiences an expansion of his/her imagination toward indistinct metaphysical ideas which cannot be thought but merely felt as a moral feeling. The sublime’s terror provokes an opening toward ethical concepts which occurs on the level of emotional reception. Emotional reception, in turn, is to be understood in this respect as the hybrid border area between affective agitation and rational understanding, between asubjective intensity and subjective, personal, and conscious response. This is where contact between the two stages of the Kantian sublime, between immanence and transcendence is made. Fourth, what follows from this receptive mechanism is that the themes of transcendence given by the films’ narratives have no direct connection to and immediate influence on the receptive moments of affective intensity and moral emotionality, which only last for brief and instant periods of time. Thus, there is no guarantee that the spectator’s moral feeling resonates in any way with the films’ specific diegetic readings of their catastrophic events. These readings and narrative themes are not to be understood as powerful ideological indoctrinations of a helpless spectator but as proposals and suggestions for interpretation. They are attempts to occupy the transcendent spaces that open up within the spectator’s mind in reaction to his/her sensory and somatic 122 Admittedly, it is hard to imagine a cinematic image that is purely narrative and not visually appealing. Perhaps, some of the plainest and least ornamental intertitles of silent films represent the closest approximations to this type of image.

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affecting. Since they are cut off from the immediate sphere of power of the cinematic sublime, the films’ diegetic and narrative themes of transcendence have no choice but to merely position themselves within the periphery of this sphere. The suggestive and associative narrative spaces located around the disaster spectacles urge the recipient to transcend the breakdown of his/ her sensibility in accordance with their offered metaphysical readings. In addition, as they are not able to immediately tap into the affective potential of the sublime, the films’ narrative themes attempt to foster the spectator’s awareness for the ethical dimensions of the presented disasters. They prompt the spectator to reflect on the broader metaphysical and cultural implications of nature’s destructive impact on human civilization. *** The most crucial factor in terms of the sublime’s modality is physical safety. I have neglected this aspect so far, simply because it is hardly relevant when it comes to investigating the relation between cinematic sublime object and viewer, who is seated in the secured viewer-space of cinema. Physical safety is basically a constituent and essential part of cinema’s media technological foundation. However, this aspect becomes highly significant regarding the relation between cinematic sublime disasters and their diegetic victims. By means of character action, interaction, and development, physical safety, as it relates to aspects of affect and aesthetic pleasure, is complexly addressed and reflected upon in disaster cinema. Essentially, reflections as such revolve around questions of how and where to locate the experience of the sublime (in the sense of a concrete situatedness of an aesthetic appreciation of a terrifying object). What are the existential (and technological) ramifications for enabling the aesthetic pleasure of the sublime? Silent cinema primarily expresses the affective relation between characters and disaster events through expansive body gestures. This is certainly the case in Cabiria, when the household of the film’s protagonist, a little girl named Cabiria, takes notice of the eruption of Etna. In reaction to the terrible window view of the volcano, which is established through the implied identity of window frame and screen frame, Cabiria’s parents and their servants start pointing frantically toward the source of their fear, hide their faces in their hands, bow their heads, and reach out to heaven with their arms (Fig. 31). Unlike the cinematic spectator, who shares the same framed window view with Cabiria’s parents, the film’s characters are not able to draw any aesthetic appreciation from this image, for their lives are immediately threatened by the sublime object.

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Figs. 31a-d: Film stills from Cabiria. 1914. Directed, produced and written by Giovanni Pastrone. Cinematography by Augusto Battagliotti, Eugenio Bava, et al. Music by Manlio Mazza. Runtime: 181 min. (restored version, 2006).

A more current equivalent to this affective state of sheer existential terror represents the tsunami sequence of The Impossible. However, in terms of its applied means of expression, it opposes Cabiria’s montage of Etna and its victims. A distant and framed view of the sublime object, which is shared between diegetic protagonist and spectator, is strictly rejected in The Impossible. Instead, the camera produces shaky handheld shots and remains very close to the bodies of the film’s protagonists (Maria and her son Lucas). There is hardly any moment in which the tsunami is framed and sharply focused from a safe distance and for a longer period of time, which would allow for a more contemplative state of perception. This lack of distance translates into a somatically felt visualization of Maria’s inner affective state of panic and existential fear, a cinematic embodiment of finding oneself in the middle of a raging torrent and a swirling chaos of wreckage and bodies. The concrete act of visually perceiving the sublime object is also addressed and reflected in the historical epic The Ten Commandments (1956). During the scene of the parting of the Red Sea, the dynamic shifting of sheer unfathomable water masses is set against an ocean of wild gesturing bodies in affective tension. Yet, among the people of Israel who observe the

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miraculous act from a safe distance in a state of terror, awe, and admiration, there is one exception: a blind man sits calmly in the sand. Only he is spared seeing the at once terrifying, awe-inspiring, and pleasurable event. While the others cannot help but be literally moved by their sensation, he appears to be fully at rest. His glorified facial expression shows no sign of any mixed aesthetic experience. In a calm and confident voice, he plainly narrates, interprets, and verbalizes the otherwise inconceivable event: ‘God opens the sea with the blast of his nostrils’. Imagine, however, a case in which physical safety is not provided, yet aesthetic pleasure is drawn from the sublime object nonetheless. If this happens in disaster movies, it usually conveys significant implications about the mental condition of the perceiving diegetic subject. This certainly applies to Charlie Frost, an apocalyptic prophet, conspiracy theorist, and radio host in 2012. Standing on top of a mountain, he faces a gigantic volcanic eruption right in front of him. When the film’s protagonist, Jackson Curtis, urges him to flee, he rejects this offer with a glorified grin on his face, saying, ‘It’s so beautiful, I’m gonna stay’. Soon after, he gets smashed by a massive clump of lava. The fact that Frost is able to aesthetically enjoy a natural disaster that eventually takes his life, or, in other words, the fact that the Burkean and Kantian premise of physical safety does not apply for him, graphically illustrates the deficient state of his mental health. A similar state of psychological deficiency has already been pointed out in my discussion of the back figure of Emperor Nero, who watches Rome going up in flames while playing the lyre (see pp. 237f.). The major difference between him and Charlie Frost is that Nero views the disaster from a safe spot, removed from any potential physical harm. Hence, the implication of his insanity feeds off a different aspect of the perception of the sublime object. While Burke does not consider empathy a hindering factor for aesthetic pleasure, Schiller, as has been mentioned, makes a strong case for artistic presentations of the sublime, by arguing that the empathy caused by a real lethal disaster would render any aesthetic pleasure impossible.123 Accordingly, the inspiration and aesthetic pleasure that Nero gains from the sight of Rome’s conflagration with its countless human casualties reinforces his characterization as an insane and cruel tyrant. The event reveals the Emperor’s complete lack of empathy with the dying and suffering of his people, which enables him to enjoy the disaster as an aesthetic phenomenon in the first place. 123 Quite the opposite, Burke claims that the theater performance of ‘the most sublime and affecting tragedy’ (Burke, 43) can never become as intriguing and powerful as a real execution taking place, whose announcement would clear all seats in the theater within an instant.

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As if the aim was to give a perfect illustration of the sublime’s condition of physical safety, the Swedish film Turist (2014) depicts the transition from the sublime’s aesthetic surplus to mere existential terror in one shot. This long to extreme long shot lasts for about three minutes and 38 seconds and shows a group of tourists sitting on the terrace of a restaurant in the French Alps. During the shot, the camera remains completely static. Resembling a Panorama-rotunda, the terrace offers a scenic view of the mountains located in the background of the image. And just like a Panorama, the terrace also seems to present views of nature within the scope of human control and domestication. Hence, when the protagonists, the Swedish couple Tomas and Ebba and their children Vera and Harry, hear a detonation and see an avalanche approaching from the upper background, they – and especially Tomas – show no sign of worry. Assuring everybody that the avalanche is ‘controlled’ by human agency as a precautionary measure, Tomas goes on to admire the ‘power’ of the phenomenon. Other tourists take out their cameras and phones to capture and record the avalanche, as if it was staged as an aesthetic spectacle for the perceiving audience on the terrace. However, as the avalanche occupies more and more space of the image field, the atmosphere gradually shifts. Finally, when a cloud of snow immerses the terrace, it is turned from a safe space of aesthetic perception to a dangerous space invaded by the solely terrifying power of nature. The terrace has turned into a space where existential affects run their course and terror, panic, and self-preservation take over. Tomas, no longer able to contemplate the avalanche as a sublime object (and to verbalize this aesthetic judgment), jumps up from his chair and rushes toward the foreground and out of the image. In his affective state of deadly terror, he shows no concern for the lives of his wife and children, quite in opposition to Ebba who covers Vera and Harry with her body. With this revelation of an existential truth, which contrasts Tomas’s social and gender roles as father and protector, the main conflict of the film’s plot is established. An equally intricate and complex reflection of physical safety and the general conditions of cinematic spectatorship is presented in Twister. In one of its disaster scenes, the film employs a subtle intermedial referencing among and within moments of high affective intensity. The scene starts off with images of a drive-in movie theater in a small village, in which the tornado chasers take residence. The film being shown is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The camera captures the frightened, yet fascinated faces of the teenage viewers. One of the girls is so affected by the cinematic horror that she needs to look away and hide her face. Then, the next twister strikes, ripping apart the cinema screen just when The Shining’s protagonist,

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Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, uses an axe to tear apart the door which his wife and son are hiding behind. The last shot to be seen before the storm destroys the screen completely is the iconic ‘Here’s Johnny’-image of Torrance sticking his head through the hole in the door. In the meantime, Twister’s protagonists and the people of the village have taken shelter in a repair shop with a metal roof. As if being hit by invisible axe blows, the twister tears apart the house piece by piece. These are the elements through which the scene’s complex referencing is played out. In The Shining, the insane Torrance associates his destruction of the door with the popular tale of The Three Little Pigs, in which the wolf literally blows away two of the pigs’ houses. Torrance’s axe blows mimic the breath of the wolf. In Twister, the storm blows away the house just like Torrance destroys the door, causing sheer terror among the faces of its victims. But the twister is also the wolf, for it repeatedly roars with the voice of a wild animal, making the resemblance between the wolf’s breath and the winds of the storm even more distinct. The scene further presents the spectator with a juxtaposition of mediality and reality. The storm’s ripping apart the cinema screen represents a breakthrough of the real into a mediated situation. By means of this media reflexive arrangement, the film debates the question of who actually has the experience of the sublime. The faces of the spectators in the drive-in theater already give an approximation of the kind of aesthetic experience I am looking for. The mixture of terror and pleasure that shows on their faces cannot be found when the real storm strikes a few minutes later. In the face of life-threatening danger, the tornado’s victims turn into creatures driven by naked terror. Just like the diegetic spectators of The Shining, it is now only the spectators of the film Twister who draw pleasure from the striking of the storm, as they engage with the life-threatening scenario through their somatic and emotional empathy. Finally, the scene also reflects and problematizes the relationship between the film’s attraction and narrative elements. By intertwining subtle intermedial references and spectacular images of strong affective agency, it comes to a receptive short circuit. The clashing of the two receptive modes renders their interplay and simultaneous coexistence irreconcilable, because the complex referential links between the striking of the twister, the iconic axe scene of The Shining and the tale of The Three Little Pigs are hardly to be recognized during the scene’s cinematic performance. As it is perceived within the receptive and technological framework of cinema, the scene generates a tension field between its textual and referential elements and their factual unreadability in the presence of intense somatic attractions. Thus, these intermedial links

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Figs. 32a-d: Film stills from Twister. 1996. Directed by Jan de Bont. Written by Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin. Cinematography by Jack N. Green. Film editing by Michael Kahn. Music by Mark Mancina. Runtime: 113 min.

are only to be recognized, reflected, and discursively expressed in retrospect, after the scene’s affective intensity has faded away or the film has ended. At the end of Twister, the film finds a way to synthesize the receptive model of the drive-in theater with the real experience of the tornadoes terrorizing the plains of Oklahoma. This happens in the scene in which the protagonists, Bill and Jo Harding, use leather straps to tie themselves to a metal pipe. Only in this way can they survive the encounter with a category F5 twister. The technological setup of this survival technique appears to be an experimental arrangement, whose goal it is to achieve a physically safe, yet most powerful and affectively intense experience of a sublime disaster object (Fig. 32).124 Due to the cinema-like arrangement of this experiment, the scene also functions in analogy to the receptive model of contemporary blockbuster and disaster cinema, whose digital visual effects enable an enhanced realism and a widened repertoire of expressive means. By presenting Bill and Jo’s experience of the twister through eyeline matches, their perception is shared with the spectator. The extreme situation in which the protagonists find themselves is aligned with the location of the cinematic viewer. Hence, the film creates a scenario through which its digital representational opulence is both performed and reflected – a scenario that ostentatiously exhibits digital cinema’s ability to depict spaces so hostile that a film camera would hardly be able to penetrate and capture them. 124 In the subsequent tornado chaser movie Into the Storm (2014), this spontaneously produced technology for experiencing twisters has become a fixed technological component; the film’s storm chasers use cars that can be tightly anchored to the ground in order to withstand the forces of the winds.

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Border Conflicts. Presentability In the previous chapter, I opposed ideology-critical readings of disaster movies by reference to the indistinctness of the ideas of reason that are evoked during the second stage of the Kantian sublime. However, the same claim could be made regarding the sublime’s first stage of immanence; for Kant repeatedly stresses that the specific features of sublime objects are merely of secondary importance. Not their ‘particular forms’, only their ‘purposive use’ is of interest.125 Since the sublime, strictly speaking, does not represent a specific quality of a perceived object, ‘the concept of the sublime in nature is far from being as important and rich in consequences as that of its beauty’.126 ‘We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation that can be found in the mind’.127 While for Kant the appearing object merely seems to represent a sensory trigger for the sublime’s realization in the subject’s mind, Burke conceives the sublime as an objective quality. Yet, even he often employs a fairly abstract descriptive style in his sensualist account of the sublime, as he focuses on specific excessive formal features (darkness, uniformity, succession, loudness, etc.), rather than on content matter. To a certain degree, this tendential formlessness of the sublime object is already inherent to Pseudo-Longinus’s treatise Peri Hypsous (c. first century AD). By discussing the silence of the warrior Aias from Homer’s Odyssey as a potentially sublime object, he envisions a sublime speech, or, in a broader sense, a sublime work of art, that is entirely bare and formless.128 On the other hand, Pseudo-Longinus does not doubt the possibility of producing sublime artworks. This is where he differs from Burke and Kant, who are more skeptical regarding the production of sublime artifacts (especially visual ones), even though they contradict themselves on this point by giving numerous examples from various art disciplines in their texts. Given this skepticism, it makes sense that Kant names the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, not any likeness either of that which is in heaven, or on the earth, or yet under the earth, etc.’ from the ‘Jewish Book of the Law’ as a perfect illustration of the sublime’s principle of its merely negative presentation.129 125 Kant 2001, 130. 126 Kant 2001, 130. 127 Kant 2001, 129. 128 Longinus, 185. 129 Kant 2001, 156.

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The sublime’s formlessness and indistinctness are what constitutes some of its most influential theoretical and artistic accounts of the twentieth century. The impossibility of presenting the sublime plays a crucial role in Theodor Adorno’s implicit aesthetics of sublime absence, in Barnett Newman’s barren, monochrome, and monumental canvases and his essay ‘The Sublime is Now’, as well as in Lyotard and Jacques Derrida’s postmodern perspectives on the Kantian sublime.130 However, in spite of this branch of the sublime’s history of reception, which operates with an aesthetics of the unpresentable, Burke and Kant’s theories also allow for alternative readings. For instance, the fact remains that both philosophers pick their examples of sublime phenomena from a typical group of motifs such as catastrophic events, monumental buildings, as well as specific literary themes and topographies conveying the qualities of boundlessness, force, and terror. Moreover, these typical motifs coincide widely with what I described as the iconography of the sublime, as it manifests within a broad range of media, artistic disciplines, and aesthetic experiences. Thus, when viewed as a broader cultural phenomenon (of Western culture), the aesthetic category of the sublime turns out to be inextricably linked to a set of content matters, which are far from merely functioning as random and indistinct sensory triggers (with qualities like darkness, obscurity, grandness, succession, etc.). As for most cultural branches of the sublime, a purely abstract sensation would not suffice in order to prompt the respective aesthetic judgment. Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea does not just present a monochrome absence of content matter but a very specific topography that is the sheer endless ocean, solely confined by the shoreline of the dune landscape. Even Barnett Newman, who places his viewers close to his monumental abstract canvases (the location of Friedrich’s monk figure), cannot elude contributing to the sublime’s iconography, in that his monochrome color fields and zips (see Footnote 11) have become canonized as sublime motifs within the art historical and critical discourse. Ultimately, the sublime’s contradictory state between being categorically unpresentable and its specific iconographic repertoire is irresolvable. One of the concepts that makes sense of this contradiction is Christine Pries’ fundamental notion of the sublime as a border category (‘the sublime is the border’), oscillating between sensibility and reason, immanence and transcendence, affect and understanding, attraction and narrative, wilderness 130 Pries 1989. – More recent theories (including those of Lyotard and Derrida) are discussed in: Morley, Chap. ‘The Unpresentable’ – See also: Librett.

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Figs. 33a-d: Film stills from Godzilla. 2014. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Max Borenstein. Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey. Film editing by Bob Ducsay. Music by Alexandre Desplat. Runtime: 123 min.

and civilization.131 It is not my aim to offer any theoretical resolution of the sublime’s contradictory and ambivalent essence. Instead, this chapter will shed a light on, first, how the sublime’s problem of presentability is related to aspects of representation and reception within disaster cinema, and second, how disaster films explicitly address and reflect this problem. An aesthetics of absence is clearly employed in the 2014 Hollywood version of the Godzilla franchise. The gigantic body of Godzilla is rarely fully revealed. Most of the time, it is fragmented, blocked, obscured, covered, or reduced to traces in the landscape, which refer to Godzilla’s presence merely indexically (Fig. 33). The giant lizard is staged as a sublime mystery, which is hardly presentable through filmic images. The first full revelation of Godzilla is cautiously approached through a successive build-up. The first fragmented views of the monster’s back, arms, and legs and the tsunami announcing its arrival are followed by the shot that initially presents its entire body. However, even there, the camera is not able to establish this entirety within the boundaries of its frame. As it slowly pans upward, it presents Godzilla’s body in an ephemeral succession of single parts, which are assembled through a continuous movement. Hence, even in such rare moments of revelation, the monster’s body remains nebulous and partly unpresentable. A more obvious case of the sublime object’s absence is given in The Happening (2008). The disaster threatening mankind with extinction is a neurotoxin that makes its human victims commit suicide instantly. Since this disaster object remains invisible, it only manifests through its effects 131 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Pries 1989, 12.

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Figs. 34a-d: Film stills from 2012. 2009. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser. Cinematography by Dean Semler. Film editing by David Brenner, Peter S. Eliot. Music by Harald Kloser, Thomas Wanker. Runtime: 158 min.

on human beings. Otherwise, the spectator keeps staring with the film’s protagonists into various empty and ordinary landscapes, as if the threat would reveal itself through the movement of grass and the rustling of leaves in the trees. It is left to the spectator to associate something unspeakable und unpresentable with these unspectacular shots of nature. The disaster itself remains a mystery and never becomes visualized in any way, neither through human perception nor artistically or scientifically. The radio host and apocalyptic prophet Charlie Frost, from 2012, is a character through which the question of the sublime’s presentability is reflected. As has been said, his life eventually ends at the Yellowstone National Park, where he is killed by an erupting volcano. During the volcano’s first explosive outburst, Frost is displayed as a back figure in an extreme long shot, standing on the top of a hill (Fig. 34). As the volcano explodes in front of him, the camera starts panning upward to capture the cloud of the explosion; yet, the phenomenon of nature turns out to be too vast and powerful, exceeding the recording capabilities of the film camera. The image is eventually flooded by the blinding light of the explosion. Both camera and spectator are left in a state of blindness, due to the overwhelming appeal of the sublime object. Thus, the shot not only depicts and provokes the sublime’s breakdown of sensibility – as it becomes nearly identical with the spectator’s perception – it also visualizes the limits of the sublime’s artistic depiction through recording and framing procedures. The presentation of the sublime object fails, or, rather, the shot simulates this failing by means of a virtual camera shot of a digitally animated event. However, as rightly stated by Sabine Nessel, such reflections can only be made in retrospect. During

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Figs. 35a-d: Film stills from Hellfighters. 1968. Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. Written by Clair Huffaker. Cinematography by William H. Clothier. Film editing by Folmar Blangsted. Music by Leonard Rosenman. Runtime: 121 min.

the moment of the cinematic event, any thoughts on its representational, narrative, and symbolic dimensions are suspended, due to its affective force and ephemeral nature.132 The film camera’s conditions and implications of representing sublime disaster objects are also reflected in the oil disaster movie Hellfighters (1968). An interesting tool used by the firefighters, who specialize in extinguishing burning oil wells, is a protective wall of metal, which is attached to a crane truck (Fig. 35). The crane is used to deliver explosives into the fire in order to put it out. The protective wall has a square cut out of its middle that enables the truck driver to observe the oil well. This measure not only allows viewing the fire from a relatively safe spot, it also represents a framing and depiction device. Standing in the tradition of the picturesque and its aestheticization of landscape, the protective wall employed by the firefighters provides framed views of the sublime object, sharpens the eye for its picture-like qualities and enables its aesthetic depiction, perception, and appreciation. The framing of the sublime object conditions its presentation and already implies a certain domestication and visual taming of the roaring fire. In other words, the fire’s visual domestication anticipates its factual and technologybased taming. The next step within this gradual domestication process is the commodification of the oil. The uncontrolled power of the burning oil well is eventually turned into an economic resource to capitalize upon. The framing function of the protective wall is further underlined by its direct juxtaposition with a TV-camera, which also visually frames and depicts 132 Nessel, 14-24.

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the event. Thus, Hellfighters draws direct connections between the image frame on the crane truck, the domestication of the burning oil well, the framing procedure of the TV-camera capturing the firefighters’ work, and the film’s own aesthetic means of framing and representing. The camera team in Hellfighters is an early example of media reflexivity in disaster cinema. While this aspect only plays a minor role within the disaster cycle of the 1970s, the occurrence of media footage, camera teams, and broadcasting of disaster events becomes a conventional feature from the 1990s onward. By taking into view phenomena of the Western media landscape, films such as Volcano (1997), Armageddon, Deep Impact, Godzilla (1998, 2014), TDAT, 2012, and Into the Storm complexly reflect on the implications of presenting and mediating sublime disaster events. Among the film characters’ various efforts to present and capture sublime disasters, not only aesthetic modes of presentation but also scientific ones may be identified. Remember in this regard that Kant distinguishes an aesthetic mode of perception (as a requirement of the sublime) from a scientific mode of perception, which prohibits any affective involvement with the viewed object (see pp. 273f.). This point is taken up by Schiller in his modification of the Kantian theorem. In ‘On the Sublime’, he distinguishes two modes of resistance against nature’s violent forces: an actual mode and an ideal mode. Given that the idealistic annihilation of death as a concept has already been discussed, I will focus in the following solely on the mode of actual resistance. This basically means to withstand nature in a physical manner, to ‘oppose[…] violence with violence’.133 Residing in physical culture, this set of practices also includes scientific efforts to present, record, tame, and domesticate nature’s forces. At the same time, scientific presentations (as part of physical culture) imply a loss of affective energy and aesthetic appeal of the perceived object. As Schiller explains in his earlier text, ‘Of the Sublime’, only that subject matter is sublime, against which we succumb as beings of Nature, but from which we as beings of Reason, as beings not belonging to Nature, feel absolutely independent. Thus all natural materials, that man employs, in order to withstand Nature’s might, are excluded from this concept of the sublime […].134

The – often merely temporary – vanishing of sublimity as a result of the scientific conquering of disaster objects also plays an important role within 133 Schiller, ‘On the Sublime’. 134 Schiller, ‘Of the Sublime’.

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disaster cinema. In La fin du monde, the end of the world as the event to come is presented for the most part through scientific speech, diagrams, maps, and numeric data. Only at the end of the film is the dominance of scientific imagery broken by scenes of destruction and explicit images of the encounter between Earth and the comet Lexell. This is when the film’s receptive means of melodrama – a love triangle and political intrigues – give way to the aesthetic framework of the sublime. Similarly, the establishing sequence of Deep Impact presents a series of scientific translation and data circulation processes to introduce the (later fully visualized) future threat of global annihilation. This series is initiated by the comet’s first sighting through a telescope, followed by the computer-based calculation of its course, the confirmation of the approaching collision scenario, and the informing of the political leaders. In Armageddon, the comet threatening to collide with Earth is visualized at first through four stitched photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, confirming the comet’s existence in the first place. After numerous visual translation processes into scientific material and fragmented views, the comet is finally shown in its actual appearance nearly one and a half hours into the film. A direct clash between the factual disaster and its scientific depiction is staged in Earthquake. At the Seismology Institute of Los Angeles, the minor earthquakes that precede the big one are accurately documented and translated into numeric values and diagrams. However, when the film’s major earthquake strikes, the institute and all its instruments are destroyed. With this breakthrough of the sublime and the actual, the abstract translations of seismic movements become replaced by real forces and dynamics. In contrast, the volcano film Dante’s Peak (1997) presents a gradual transition from abstract translation procedures to intense manifestations of the sublime. At first, activity of the volcano Dante’s Peak is detected at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington. This discovery is translated into a diagrammatic representation. Next, field work at the volcano site, led by protagonist Harry Dalton, is commissioned. As the spectator follows Dalton’s observation and examination of the terrain in and around the crater, a couple of isolated and minor volcanic activities are uncovered, until, finally, the fully visualized eruption of Dante’s Peak takes place. While Dante’s Peak creates this gradual development over the course of its whole runtime, The Perfect Storm bridges the same range between abstraction and immediacy almost seamlessly within three shots (Fig. 36). Initially, a computer screen displays a satellite image of the hurricanes whose collision leads to the ‘perfect storm’. The satellite image is combined with a map visualizing the borders of the singular states of the USA. The camera

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Figs. 36a-f: Film stills from The Perfect Storm. 2000. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Written by William D. Witliff. Cinematography by John Seale. Film editing by Richard Francis-Bruce. Music by James Horner. Runtime: 130 min.

begins to zoom in on the screen, toward the eye of the hurricane. Then, the scene cuts to the meteorologist, who comments on the screen image with an awestruck expression (‘Oh my God. It’s happening’). After the next cut, the camera has returned to the satellite view, only this time, it is not represented anymore as a computer screen image. The (virtual) camera starts moving into and through the thick layer of clouds of the hurricane, until the spectator suddenly finds him/herself right above the raging sea and surrounded by towering waves. With this gradual transformation from the storm’s scientific representation to its immediate and somatically sensed appearance, one can now fully comprehend the meteorologist’s emotional response to the schematic map on his computer. At the end of Twister, the Dorothy device, which is designed for enabling an enhanced tornado warning system, is finally applied successfully by the team of weather scientists led by Jo and Bill Harding. Dozens of probes are delivered into the funnel of the category F5 twister. Their delivery is accompanied by the ringing of bells, which temporarily drowns out the roaring noise of the storm. Their sound resembles the wind chimes in the garden of Jo’s aunt Meg, who domesticates the winds of Colorado for her artistic purposes. Hence, the chiming of the bells indicates a certain domestication of the tornado by means of the Dorothy technology. Right after,

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the extradiegetic music score intones the film’s main theme. Its triumphant fanfares and strings are initially introduced during the film’s first helicopter shot. There, the camera’s movement over the plains of Oklahoma eventually crosses the speeding truck of Bill and the flight of a crop duster plane. Thus, from early on, this musical theme is associated with the dynamic penetration, exploration, and conquering of space and, more particularly, the American land. Apart from the ringing bells, the scientific conquering of the tornado is represented on a visual level on the computer screens of the scientists. Due to the data retrieved by the probes, the tornado’s forces are translated into a diagrammatic model and numeric digits. As these images unite with the triumphant extradiegetic music score, it is immediately clear that the twister is temporarily stripped bare of its affective intensity, which dominated the screen just a few shots earlier. At the same time, these scientific translation procedures also represent a reversal of the tornado’s own production, since the film itself employs digital code for its depictions of sublime disaster objects. The scientific activities of Jo and Bill’s crew are further embedded within the broader conceptual scope of the American frontier and American national culture. I have discussed these concepts at length in my chapter on the American landscape painters of the mid- nineteenth century, whose images of the new continent’s unspoiled natural sites helped to shape the understanding of American culture as an embodiment of its God-given land. In Twister, these national themes are re-invoked and revisited. Especially the various helicopter shots, in which the plains of Oklahoma are visually explored and conquered, convey the pioneering spirit of the frontier project, as it was celebrated in images such as Albert Bierstadt’s Emigrants Crossing the Plains (Fig. 37), Emigrants Resting at Sunset, or Oregon Trail.135 Also, Geoff King interprets Twister as a modern frontier myth, as he associates (although not convincingly) the film’s elements of spectacle with the frontier and the American wilderness and the film’s narrative content with the domain of civilization (as the outcome of the frontier project).136 Although the American frontier reached the Pacific Ocean a long time ago, the tornadoes of Oklahoma are one of the few remaining natural objects that have not been brought under control by civilization.

135 Albert Bierstadt. Emigrants Resting at Sunset. Possibly 1861. The R.W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport. 94 x 147.3 cm. Oil on canvas. – Albert Bierstadt. The Oregon Trail. 1869. The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown. 78.7 x 124.5 cm. Oil on canvas. 136 King, 17-40.

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Fig. 37a: Albert Bierstadt. Emigrants Crossing the Plains. 1867. National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City. 152.4 x 243.8 cm. Oil on canvas. © Gift of Jasper D. Ackerman, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. 1972.019. Fig. 37b: Film still from Twister. 1996. Directed by Jan de Bont. Written by Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin. Cinematography by Jack N. Green. Film editing by Michael Kahn. Music by Mark Mancina. Runtime: 113 min.

In my analysis of the American landscapes of the Hudson River School, I observed an oscillation between shifting degrees of the sublime which mix with other aesthetic categories like the pastoral or the beautiful. Moreover, this hybridity coincides, on the one hand, with the frontier’s principle of demarcating the line between wilderness and civilization, and on the other hand, with the sublime’s essential functioning as a border category. The same coinciding hybridity is at work in Twister. The film’s different depictions, reflections, and experiences of the tornadoes all maneuver within the border territory between aesthetic and scientific modes of perception, between wilderness and civilization, between sublimity and other landscape

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Fig. 38: Film still from Twister. 1996. Directed by Jan de Bont. Written by Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin. Cinematography by Jack N. Green. Film editing by Michael Kahn. Music by Mark Mancina. Runtime: 113 min.

modes like the idyllic, heroic, or pastoral. The sublimity of the twisters emerges on a fragile and ephemeral border. If a tornado gets too violent and too close, all physical safety and with it all possibilities of its aesthetic experience and presentation vanish (at least for the film’s characters). In turn, if a tornado is tamed, domesticated, or translated into abstract data, the spectator’s aesthetic experience of the sublime object is suspended. Just like the frontier, the sublime captures civilization’s first fragile steps into untamed territory. Its location resides on the border between domesticated ground and wilderness.137 An emblematic scene illustrating the film’s affinity for the American frontier myth is given in the first third of the tornado chasers’ adventure in Twister (Fig. 38). Bill is displayed from behind in a long shot, standing by the road, observing the sky, trying to predict when and where the next storm will occur. In the background, the road leads up a small hill. What is 137 Note also the parallels between the paintings of the Hudson River School and Twister’s moving images in terms of their shared interest for natural science. While Twister focuses on the meteorological aspects of its sublime objects, it is the geological sciences that predominate in a greater number of works of the painters in question. Albert Bierstadt, for instance, accompanied the geologist Clarence King on some of his expeditions to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Thomas Moran travelled to the Grand Canyon with the geologist John Wesley Powell and painted a series of works, which depict the site in great geologic detail (see Chapter 2, Footnote 75). Frederic Edwin Church followed the footpath of his idol, the naturalist explorer Alexander von Humboldt, leading him to the Andes Mountains in South America (see Chapter 4, Footnote 115). Thomas Cole collected minerals, was acquainted with geologists, and undertook geological studies (Bedell). And Asher B. Durand gained a reputation for his detailed and geologically accurate presentations of boulders. Equivalently, in Twister, scientific presentation is also the goal of and driving force behind the protagonists’ exploration and experience of Oklahoma’s tornadoes, which the spectator is invited to join.

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beyond this hill, one cannot see. Also, the white fences that line the road end there. On top of the hill, to the left of the road, the American flag is erected, marking the borderline where the known and civilized territory ends and the wilderness begins. During the scene, the sky turns increasingly dark and cloudy, reinforcing the impression of a sublime wilderness that awaits Bill and the spectator beyond.

‘It Is Gonna Send Us Back to the Stone Age!’ – The Geological Sublime As discussed above, the concept of the geological sublime, according to Georg Braungart, represents a third type of the Kantian sublime (see pp. 51f.). Its overwhelming effect is not based on vastness (mathematically sublime) or force (dynamically sublime) but on its display of immeasurable timespaces. During its experience, the abyss of geologic deep time opens up before the recipient. Set against the geologic time scale, the lifespan of humanity is dwarfed to a grain of sand in an hourglass. Braungart demonstrates that geologic phenomena represent a prominent theme in some of the major theoretical accounts of the sublime. In turn, the aesthetic framework of the sublime was conventionally applied within the geological discourse during the emerging discipline’s so-called heroic age (c. 1800). As geological epistemes radically expanded the age of Earth from the biblical estimation of 6000 years to millions and, finally, billions of years, humanity became increasingly decentralized and relativized. The paleontologist and evolutionary researcher Stephen Jay Gould describes the temporal crisis caused by geology as a fundamental humiliation which degrades mankind to a side note of natural history.138 Friedrich Nietzsche strikingly encapsulates this degradation in his essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’: Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.139 138 Gould, 1f. 139 Nietzsche, 114.

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Looking into the abyss of geologic deep time allows Nietzsche to narrate the history of mankind from a transhuman perspective (to apply another term coined by Braungart).140 Kant, too, in his writings on the Lisbon earthquake, makes clear that the humanitarian catastrophe which followed the seismic eruption merely represents an epiphenomenon within much vaster processes of Earth history. ‘[The geological sciences] reveal dimensions that radically relativize man in his individual and collective significance’.141 Regarding the medium of landscape painting, I identified the affective force of the geological sublime as being inscribed in the structures of phenomena such as mountain ranges, gorges, glaciers, and volcanoes. These surface structures convey their historical formation to the trained eye and reveal the temporal scale of geologic deep time. Hence, in terms of disaster films, one may assume that the geological sublime has particular relevance for depictions of the same iconographical elements, as they occur in the mountain disasters of the Bergfilm (‘mountain film’) genre (see pp. 182f.) or the filmic imagery of volcano eruptions. However, in both these cases, the geologic time scale usually plays merely a minor role, especially during their disaster events where geologic phenomena are rather emphasized in their unpredictable dynamics, rather than in their head-spinning ages. As accurately observed by Roman Giesen, the Bergfilms of the 1920s and 1930s tend to present the Alps as both dynamic and static phenomena. The mountains’ sheer eternal persistence is juxtaposed with dynamic meteorological phenomena like clouds, snow, hail, wind, and fog.142 It is known that Arnold Fanck, the German director who invented and established the Bergfilm genre, even held a doctoral degree in geology.143 Yet, during the catastrophic storms and avalanches occurring in his films, the Alpine mountains are primarily presented as a dynamically and unpredictably shifting environment. The sublimity of the geologic time scale is not particularly conjured in scenes as such. The same can be said about contemporary mountain disaster f ilms like Everest (2015). Even though the film’s high definition images display the geologic structures of the Himalayan mountains in sharpest detail, one cannot expect these phenomena – as they are viewed by a globally distributed, diverse, and vast audience – to be as closely associated with 140 Braungart discusses the transhuman perspective triggered by geologic deep time in: Braungart 2008; Braungart 2000. 141 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Braungart 2008, 18. 142 Giesen, 15f., 23. 143 Horak.

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geologic deep time as they used to be in the nineteenth century. Neither does the film offer any hints at an underlying temporal dimension as such. The opposite is the case in a disaster film from 2014. It explicitly employs the geological sublime for its disaster depictions of a phenomenon that already conveyed the same effect in the nineteenth century: the prehistoric monster. The film in question is the 2014 Hollywood version of the Japanese monster franchise Godzilla. In the film, the geological sublime unfolds its receptive force in alliance with a current geological concept, namely the Anthropocene.144 The term designates the geologic age in which man begins having a decisive impact on the geologic processes of Earth. Since its introduction by Paul Crutzen in 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has spawned a lively scientific and cultural discussion regarding its meaning, relevance, and implications.145 Man’s sphere of influence encompasses processes of erosion, sedimentation, atmospheric warming, and the chemical balance of oceans and soils.146 Humanity entered the Anthropocene with the onset of the industrial revolution in Europe, thus around the year 1800. The fact that man is already deeply involved in Earth’s intrinsic geologic processes is graphically visualized in Godzilla. The destructive dynamics of global capitalism, which exploits planet Earth’s human and ecological resources, represent one of the film’s main themes. Right in the beginning, the spectator follows a helicopter into the crater of an uranium mine, which is run by international investors in the Philippines. Accompanied by mystifying and dramatic choral singing, the camera moves downward into the pit. Viewed from afar, the thousands of mine workers appear like a colony of ants, digging its way into the earth. Doctor Serizawa, one of the film’s protagonists, visits the mine, because during an accident, which kills dozens of workers, a prehistoric fossil has been uncovered. Its skeleton shows traces of an extremely dangerous parasite which is woken from its state of hibernation by laying open the Earth crust. Generally, the film confronts mankind with monsters that are much older than dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals. Hence, the pit of the uranium mine, which appears like a negative form of a pyramid, does not merely represent a spatial but also a temporal descent. The abyss of space is also an abyss of time.

144 See also Emily Brady’s attempt to conceptualize a contemporary anthropocentric version of the sublime (Brady, 193-200). 145 Zalasiewicz. 146 An overview of the natural scientific and political dimension of the Anthropocene is offered in: Ehlers.

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This evocation of the geologic time scale is more explicitly addressed during the film’s opening credits, which consist of a montage of archive material displaying an ancient cave painting of a dinosaur-like creature, medieval depictions of dragons, a sketched skeleton of an Ichthyosaur, a family tree of dinosaurs, and an original edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species. After these historical and scientific documents, the montage transitions into classified military video footage, documenting America’s attempt to destroy Godzilla with a nuclear strike. Thus, the film reveals an alternative and strictly classified natural history of monsters, which revises and contests certain knowledge about the origins of species and natural history as a whole. In accordance with the aesthetics of the geological sublime and its revelation of a transhuman perspective, Godzilla creates a scenario in which nature has always already arranged itself independently of human agency. Earth’s prehistoric age before the emergence of man could soon become reality again. A glimpse of this posthuman scenario is offered by the imagery of a restricted zone in Japan, where a whole city has been abandoned by its citizens and reconquered by nature. Its skyscrapers are covered with plants, and wild animals roam the streets. A scenario in which this artificially created posthuman topography would become re-integrated into an overall extinct world seems quite realistic, given the scale of the threat. The creatures awoken by man’s greed for the resources of Earth might indeed ‘send us back to the Stone Age’, as the nuclear scientist Joe Brody, another main protagonist of the film, predicts. Besides the giant lizard Godzilla, mankind is confronted with two other creatures, so-called MUTOs (an abbreviation for ‘Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism’). The appearance of the MUTOs is insect-like, as if they were aliens from another planet. The strangeness of their bodies accentuates the extreme temporal gap between their and human existence. Opposed to the openly exhibited bodies of the MUTOs, the body of Godzilla is hardly revealed in its entirety. The back of the lizard is the body part that is fragmentarily visualized most frequently (Fig. 39). Hardly organic, this visual element often appears as a prehistoric rock or mountain range when its crystalline-like structures emerge from the ocean. Due to its tactile qualities, the spectator feels as if s/he could sense the ruggedness and the sharp edges of the rock. Godzilla’s back is repeatedly set against human objects like bridges, ships, or houses. Through this clash of raw crystalline prehistoric rock against the shiny and sleek surfaces of metal and glass, the temporal distance between human civilization and the prehistoric creature

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Figs. 39a-d: Film stills from Godzilla. 2014. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Max Borenstein. Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey. Film editing by Bob Ducsay. Music by Alexandre Desplat. Runtime: 123 min.

is emphasized. With Godzilla, a hitherto unknown geologic age is revealed, deepening further the abyss of natural history. The transhuman perspective offered by the film also manifests in landscape depictions which degrade the topographies of human civilization to becoming the stage for much bigger and more powerful processes of natural history. During the film’s first half, several establishing shots and extreme long shots present human objects in their asymmetric relation to the spatial and temporal vastness of their surrounding natural environments. Topographies are not only introduced as locations for human interaction and narrative succession but also as landscape visualizations of natural history. The film shows eroded shorelines, the formations and macro structures of mountain ranges, and the craters of volcanoes. Later on, cities like San Francisco, Honolulu, or the fictitious Janjira are turned into stages for the evolutionary battles between Godzilla and the MUTOs. In the end, San Francisco has become an apparently volcanic, Stone Age ruin landscape, merely consisting of fire, smoke, lightning, and wreckage. Moreover, urban spaces as such become the MUTOs’s natural habitat, in which a whole biological cycle takes place: from hatching and pupation to foraging and partner searching to mating and ovipositioning. Which countermeasures are taken by mankind against the monsters? Since ‘mankind’ is merely represented by the US-American military, all taken actions are of military nature. This introduces a certain dashing rhetoric, well-known from countless other action genre films. Accordingly, the world is perceived, interpreted, and acted upon in a technical and coded terminology of ‘yes sir’, ‘no sir’, ‘imperatives’ and ‘targets’, ‘distress signals’, ‘visual pursuits’, ‘radar’ and ‘satellite feeds’, ‘airborne objects, heading east, west

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or north’, and ‘beacons setting foot on the ground’. This tone is maintained throughout the film, yet, it becomes increasingly ridiculous – more than it already might appear to some viewers – since all military actions against the monsters fail miserably. Even worse, they tend to have the opposite effect of what they aim for (that is to destroy the monsters). Even though the MUTOs feed on nuclear radiation, nuclear warheads are brought in against them. The fact that Godzilla acts as the natural enemy of the MUTOs is not realized until the end. Thus, both the MUTOs and Godzilla are attacked by the military as one and the same threat. In the age of the Anthropocene, military and economy form a (self-)destructive and globally operating alliance, which blindly proceeds with its exploitation of Earth’s natural and human resources. During these harmful undertakings, man comes in contact with the sphere of the prehistoric, which makes nature strike back. The prehistoric past before humanity is being actualized, threatening humanity with the scenario of a post-human future. The Anthropocene is about to collapse and discard itself after only 200 years. The encounter between geologic deep time, capitalist modernity, and the motif of the prehistoric monster, as it is presented in Godzilla, stands in a cultural and visual tradition that dates back to the earliest dinosaur depictions. Since its conception in the 1840s, the dinosaur has been employed in culture and popular science to confront modern Western societies with the abyss of deep time. Therefore, the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell defines dinosaurs as ‘thoroughly modern monsters’, which complexly relate to capitalist modernity.147 This also involves an affective potential inherent to dinosaur visualizations, which already shook the social fundament of Victorian London’s citizens. In this regard, the meaning of the word ‘dinosaur’, ‘terrible lizard’, is to be taken quite literally. For example, such an unsettling and subversive agency was ascribed to the dinosaur sculptures erected in Crystal Palace Park in London’s Sydenham district (Fig. 40). They represented the first visualizations of life-size dinosaurs for a broader audience (with hundreds of thousands of visitors).148 The park was opened in 1854 and featured objects from the arts as well as from scientific fields such as ethnology, zoology, and paleontology. Together, these objects formed a hierarchical structure according to the ‘divinely ordained Great Chain of Being’ of Victorian Britain.149 On its top, the visitor found the diverse achievements of the British Empire. The lower 147 Mitchell, 11. 148 Freeman, 159-161. 149 Marshall, 288. – The following deliberations are also based on Marshall’s essay.

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Fig. 40: (Ascribed to) John Leech. A Visit to the Antediluvian Reptiles at Sydenham. Cartoon in Punch, vol. 28 (Jan.-June 1855). Author’s collection.

ranks were given to different ‘primitive’ tribes. Finally, the lowest spots within the Great Chain were occupied by prehistory and the dinosaurs. At the park’s southern end, the visitor (still) finds a group of small artificial lakes, whose islands are inhabited by prehistoric monsters. These plastics, most of which represent dinosaurs, were created by the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Conceptual guidance was provided by the geologist Richard Owen, who had also coined the term ‘dinosaur’. The bones on which the sculptures were based were largely found in Great Britain. This ought to emphasize that the park’s lake landscape was meant to represent England in its prehistoric state. Thus, Hawkins’s dinosaurs were part of a rigidly structured ensemble, which embodied the glory of Great Britain and its global political dominion. As conceived by architect Joseph Paxton, the park served a clear pedagogic purpose, shaped by nationalist, economic, political, and colonialist discourses. However, the dinosaurs, which stood at the bottom of the hierarchy, undermined the park’s pedagogic and ideological program. By summoning the dinosaurs from the abyss of time, Hawkins empowered them to qualify and erode the splendor of British civilization. Species like Megalosaurus, Iguanodon,

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or Ichthyosaurus not only evoked fear and terror through their immediate visual appearance – as indicated in the caricature shown in Fig. 40 – they also had a terrifying and unsettling effect on the Victorian viewer, insofar as they were received as embodiments of natural history’s temporal abyss. Inevitably, they confronted the visitors with the scenario of their own extinction as a species, thereby undermining the park’s general idea of Victorian Britain’s faith in progress. Nancy Rose Marshall strikingly describes this effect as the visitor’s fear of his/her present time being engulfed by deep past.150 A quite similar disruption of a demonstration of human agency takes place in Godzilla; and likewise, this disruption is caused by a prehistoric monster. The ostentatiously expressed potency and agency of the US-military forces is undermined and even rendered ridiculous, due to the superior agency of the monsters. If one takes this comparison between Sydenham and Hollywood one step further, the relation between the motif of the prehistoric monster and the implications of its filmic production is taken into view. Just like the park’s dinosaur plastics expressed the creative and economic power of the British Empire, also the digitally produced monsters in Godzilla, whose creation bases on a 160-million-dollar production budget, can be seen as representations of the technological, creative, and economic power of the Hollywood production system. However, it is uncertain whether the filmic monsters manage to qualify their own production value as effectively as their ancestors did in Sydenham. That is because Godzilla, apart from its evocation of the geological sublime, employs an additional temporal and iconographical dimension. This dimension unavoidably conflicts with the heaviness and seriousness of its other elements. What is meant here is the film’s attempt to reference its Japanese precursors of the Godzilla franchise. Besides numerous small and hidden hints, it is especially Godzilla’s physiognomy that resembles its iconic ancestors from the Japanese films from the mid-1950s onward. In other words, the film also seeks to pay respect to the cult status of its franchise. Thus, when the largely concealed and fragmented body of Godzilla is finally revealed, and the monster turns out to be a reference to its iconic and cult-status predecessors, all sublimity and affective energy might indeed channel into another aesthetic category: the ridiculous. In one moment, the spectators are drawn toward the abyss of deep time; one moment later, they find themselves within the disaster cinema of the 1950s. This clash of temporal dimensions and auratic tones that shatters the receptive model of the sublime and replaces it with an aesthetic of the ridiculous is the subject of the following chapter. 150 Marshall, 296.

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Neighbor Relations: The Sublime and the Ridiculous In my film historical enquiry of disaster cinema, I drew on Ken Feil’s investigation of the genre’s transformation from its ‘melodramatic formula’ of the 1970s toward the merging of camp humor and high concept production value in the 1990s.151 While the disaster films of the 1970s have unintentionally become the target of camp mockery, their 1990s-successors deliberately employ humorous elements of camp and self-parody. With his history of reception of the disaster genre from the 1970s onward, Feil touches upon a more general phenomenon of disaster films and their elements of sublime spectacle: the sublime’s close relationship with the ridiculous. The pairing of the sublime and the ridiculous has been a prominent theme within Western aesthetics and cultural history, from Napoleon’s bon mot (‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step’) and Lord Shaftesbury’s Test of Ridicule to numerous British (Francis Hutcheson, Jacob Beattie, Thomas Paine) and German (Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, K.W.F. Solger, Friedrich Nietzsche) theoretical contributions up to more recent accounts such as Slavoj Žižek’s The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime.152 Traditionally, there is close kinship between both aesthetic categories. The sublime and the ridiculous meet each other as friendly neighbors, mutual profiteers, antagonists, and sworn enemies. The ridiculous challenges the sublime, because it threatens to burst the sublime’s terrifying and awe-inspiring aura. It might also put the sublime to the test by revealing its merely shallow and pretentious specimens. But the ridiculous can also increase the sublimity of a truly grand object. In the following, I will discuss some of the theorems addressing the relationship of the sublime and the ridiculous and, in a second step, analytically apply them to several filmic examples. The aim is to provide a model that accounts for the general instability of the receptive framework of 151 More broadly, Feil’s observation coincides with f ilm historical distinctions claiming an increased degree of ironic reflexivity, parody, and hybrid genre eclecticism in the decades after the 1960s. Jim Collins, for instance, describes tendencies of ironic hybridization of genres and eclectic dissonances as a key feature of popular films of the 1990s (Collins). And Dan Harries notices an increase of parodic films since the 1960s, when Western culture entered an epoch of postmodern irony. On the other hand, he also names cases of parody from earlier decades of cinema, such as the films of Buster Keaton in which the parodic relationship between prototext and parody film is already based on aspects of similarity and difference (Harries). 152 An overview of the historical occurrence of this relation is given in: Brittnacher. – Napoleon’s bon mot is quoted in: Hodgson, 477. – Friedrich Theodor Vischer mentions this bon mot in his treatise on the sublime and the comic as a ‘widely acknowledged sentence’ (translated from German by the author; orig.: Vischer, 155).

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disaster films. More precisely, this regards their potential receptive oscillation between intense somatic and sensory experiences of the sublime and aesthetic judgments of the ridiculous. This approach might also help to explain why many of the surrounding elements of disaster spectacles, such as plot, dialogue, characters, and their depiction through acting, are frequently dismissed as being flawed, ridiculous, melodramatic (in a normative sense), and inadequate. But what if this inappropriate relation between disaster events and their ridiculous surroundings is part of the films’ widened receptive aim of balancing empathy and (ironic) distance, seriousness and lightheartedness? This question also leads to the receptive phenomenon that disaster films, as affectively tantalizing as they might be, usually do not seriously spoil the spectators’ experience of cinematic entertainment. Generally, the presented deaths of millions of human beings leave them cold enough to not interrupt their popcorn crunching while the world goes down the drain. The sublime’s relation to the ridiculous thus also maneuvers within this receptive balancing of the spectators’ emotional engagement. The aim of this equilibrium is to provide unspoiled, yet affectively intense experiences of entertainment embedded in the wider framework of global mass appeal and consumption. A first substantial connection between the sublime and the ridiculous was established by Pseudo-Longinus. In the beginning of the third section of his treatise Peri Hupsous, he identifies ‘bombast [and] misplaced tumidity’ as features of the ‘pseudo-tragic’.153 He prompts the reader to ‘[e]xamine each [of such images] in the light of day and it gradually sinks from the terrible to the ridiculous’.154 A truly sublime object is bare of unnatural and exaggerated splendor and ornament. Rather than releasing its violence on the recipient, the pseudo-tragic exhibits its own richness. Filmic examples of such undirected indulgence and pomp, in which the sublime is about to tip over and become ridiculous, come to mind quite naturally, especially since digital production techniques have expanded the repertoire of filmic means of expression toward a sheer unlimited scale. 2012 features a shot that takes this phenomenon to an extreme. When Jackson Curtis and his family flee the imploding city of Los Angeles in a small airplane, they fly through the ravine of two collapsing highrises (Fig. 41). During the moment when the airplane passes the buildings, the (virtual) camera, while moving forward with the plane, pans to the left to exhibit some of the building’s bursting floors in slow motion. The image revels in 153 Longinus, 167. 154 Longinus, 167.

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Figs. 41a-d: Film stills from 2012. 2009. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser. Cinematography by Dean Semler. Film editing by David Brenner, Peter S. Eliot. Music by Harald Kloser, Thomas Wanker. Runtime: 158 min.

its enormous splendor of detail. The spectator recognizes falling wreckage, people who cling on to the edge of the chasm, tumbling boxes, and furniture. Given the gruesome subject matter of the scene that is the deaths of millions of people, its imagery and narrative elements manage to keep the spectator at a certain distance from this horrific fact. Moments before the airplane passes the highrises, the scene already displays several similar exhibition shots. Together with the airplane, the camera flies close to the ground, thereby ostentatiously putting on display the image’s pompous richness, with flashing blue lights on police cars, palm trees, panicking citizens, cars, street signs, electricity pylons, and falling elevated train lines.155 In accordance with the scene’s tendentially ridiculous pomposity, the protagonists’ behavior and interaction is characterized by a certain inappropriateness, which also functions as a receptive digression from the insufferableness of the event’s humanitarian tragedy. This applies particularly to the car ride through Los Angeles, which precedes the escape via airplane. To a certain extent, the protagonists seem to be removed from the immediate terror of the life-threatening situation. When Jackson Curtis backs out of the driveway and rams the car of his ex-wife’s boyfriend Gordon, which then falls into a crevice, Gordon looks at him reproachfully, awaiting Jackson’s apology. Even in the face of the end of the world and life-threatening danger, both men attend to their childish behavior of rivalry. Some shots later, the windshield of Jackson’s car is covered with dirt or oil from a broken pipe, an 155 The falling train could also be understood as a reference to the crashing train in John Martin’s Apocalypse painting The Last Judgment.

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insignificant mess compared with what is at stake; yet, Jackson’s daughter Lilly expresses her disgust (‘Yikes! That stinks!’), as if the imminent danger of being hit by a house does not fully concern her. In shots as such, a clash of sublime subject matter and ordinary and trivial phenomena takes place. The collapsing of an entire tectonic plate is mixed together with petty everyday life issues. This blending of the grand, infinite, and sublime with the small, finite, and ordinary represents a vital component within theories exploring the relation between the sublime and the ridiculous. As for Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, the purity and integrity of the sublime is being polluted through its appearance as finite and ordinary, thereby becoming ridiculous. However, since the sublime appears as sensation within the scope of the finite, there can never be perfectly pure forms of sublimity in the first place: ‘Nothing is ridiculous and comic that is not mixed with a blending of dignity or encouragement of melancholy; nothing is sublime and tragic that does not turn insignificant or ridiculous through its finite and even ordinary depiction.’156 But the ridiculous does not only have a negative and degenerating effect on the sublime, for it also puts the sublime to the test and reveals its potentially false (and merely seemingly sublime) objects.157 The idea of the ridiculous functioning as an instance of quality control, which is applied to higher aesthetic categories (the sublime, the beautiful), stands in a long aesthetic tradition. A substantial landmark within this tradition is Shaftesbury’s Test of Ridicule, which prompted a considerable number of theoretical responses, especially in Great Britain and in the German-speaking countries.158 Besides Solger, also the German writer Jean Paul and the German philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer took a stand on the Test, addressing questions such as: is ridiculing the sublime in any case appropriate and permissible? Are there specific cases and sublime objects (e.g. the idea of God) that ought to be ‘off limits’? Are there degrees of sublimity that cannot be harmed by the ridiculous at all? And if so, could these potentially even profit from their being ridiculed? While Jean Paul demands certain restrictions regarding the target range of the ridiculous, Vischer, in his habilitation treatise Über das Erhabene und Komische; Ein Beitrag zu der Philosophie des Schönen (‘On the Sublime and Comic; A Contribution to the Philosophy of Beauty’), states that the true sublime 156 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Solger, 354. 157 A lucid summary of the aesthetic principles that Solger elaborates in Erwin is given in: Oesterle. 158 The history of reception of Shaftesbury’s Test, with an emphasis on German aesthetics, is documented in: Müller, 218-229; Janz.

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can withstand any confrontation with the comic (which Vischer equates with the ridiculous). The sublime object that invites its own ridicule and thereby admits to its own limitations – since absolute infinite objects do not exist in human perception – is far from being devaluated; on the contrary, ‘its value grows through this freedom and liberty’.159 A sublime depiction of such kind is the Deluge sequence in The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966). Noah, God’s chosen savior and preserver of divine creation, is portrayed as a clumsy and slightly odd old man. One sees him stepping into a bucket of tar, taking care of a couple of all too slow tortoises, being teased by an elephant, and hissed at by an ostrich. At the same time, this lighthearted and silly side of mankind’s shepherd does not seem to corrupt his integrity and the monumental dimension of his task; neither does it diminish the sinister and violent aura of the Deluge itself. Perhaps, by contrast with this humanized presentation of the biblical figure, the Deluge’s catastrophic imagery appears even more existential and dramatic. Hence, the film’s sublime object of the Deluge does not merely pass the Test of Ridicule, it invites the ridiculous to form a symbiotic alliance. But the sublime can also play the far more powerful and dominant part in its relationship with the ridiculous. In instances as such, there can be no question of the sublime being tested. The sublime earthquake in San Francisco kills not only thousands of people, it also puts an end to the city’s prior atmosphere of vulgar humor and morally ambivalent irony. With San Francisco’s destruction and rebuilding, the times of witty dialogues, sexualized undertones, sarcasm, and questionable entertainment are over, as they are replaced by the prospect of a serious, righteous, and honest life in the grace of God. In Armageddon, during one of the scenes introducing the film’s end-ofthe-world scenario, a gradual shift takes place. The scene transforms from a witty and ironic perspective on the event of a meteor shower hitting New York City toward a more violently affecting and serious scenario of physical threat. The scene opens with establishing shots of Manhattan. Then, the camera starts following a man with a dog on a bike who is crossing Brooklyn Bridge (toward Manhattan). He clearly fits the ethnic stereotype of a mouthy, streetwise, and constantly babbling Afro-American. He ends up getting into an argument with a street seller over a damaged Godzilla puppet. Just when the tension between the men has reached a climax (with the dog owner screaming, ‘If I wasn’t no Christian, I’d be throwing your fat, pineapple-eating ass through the window!’), the first meteor splinter hits exactly the spot where they stand. A bit later, it turns out that the street 159 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Vischer, 165.

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seller did not survive the impact, whereas the others – man and dog – stayed alive. The disaster functions as a punchline to a joke, in that it resolves the conflict between both men in a grotesque and exaggerated manner. This little, witty sketch ends with a shot of the survivor, standing at the edge of the crater, holding on to his dog on a leash, screaming, ‘Somebody dial 911!’ On top of it all, this stereotypical phrase seems completely inappropriate and ridiculous given the scale of the disaster scenario. However, with the human casualties mounting, the scene increasingly loses its lighthearted and witty atmosphere. The disaster is released from its functioning as part of the scene’s comical narrative. This is further accentuated by the change of music, from a cheeky rock song to a more serious and dramatic classical score. Any ironic comments on the event are abandoned, as if restricted by an inner principle of decorum. The same type of self-restriction applies to later scenes of destruction, as for instance to the complete extinction of Paris, during which any act of ridicule – ‘triggered by the bagatelle of a thing belonging to the merely lower realm of appearance’ – would seem inappropriate.160 Generally, this underlying principle of decorum, which regulates matters of appropriateness and the respective affects involved, is a conventional feature of disaster cinema. A case in which the regulation of adequacy and appropriateness might be judged to have failed is the plague disaster film The Happening from 2008. The movie’s unintentional hilarity is one of the major themes among its film critical reception.161 The film itself does not offer any ironic distance to or witty treatment of its subject matter (the threat of being killed by a mysterious neurotoxin). Rather, it is the specific presentation of this subject matter that constantly undermines its own seriousness and the existential dimension of the film’s disaster scenario. This regards the characters and their interaction, the performance of the main actors (esp. Mark Wahlberg who plays the main protagonist, the high school teacher Elliot Moore), the comic absurdity of some of the depicted suicides, but also the various landscape shots through which nature’s involvement in the plague is expressed. On the one hand, these images of nature, as I have analyzed earlier, refer to the unspeakable and unpresentable essence of the sublime object of the plague. Yet, on the other hand, these images can be experienced as ridiculous, mainly because the seemingly random and ordinary natural spaces that they display are perceived by characters whose facial expressions and reactions to these sites seem hysterical and grotesquely exaggerated. Of course, this judgment is 160 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Vischer, 159. 161 ‘The Happening Reviews’.

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simply what is shared by many critics and viewers and not a universal fact that can be verified. While judgments of the film’s ridiculousness derive from its intrinsic features and, therefore, cannot be said to be entirely arbitrary, it is most likely that other recipients have judged differently.162 By addressing the reception of The Happening, I have entered the terrain where the ridiculous is no longer employed as a deliberate receptive strategy of a disaster film. Quite the opposite, it becomes an accidental aesthetic effect. Even though it is difficult to clearly distinguish between intended and accidental effects in aesthetic judgments, there is a case to be made that specific unintended effects have some relevance regarding the role of the ridiculous in disaster cinema. In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine gives an indication of how such receptive ‘errors’ can be described. In his interpretation of Joshua’s commanding of the sun, as it is narrated in the Old Testament, Paine illustrates how this sublime passage could have easily turned out to be ridiculous: The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again: [t]he time implied by the expression after it, that is, after that day, being put in comparison with all the time that passed before it, must, in order to give any expressive signification to the passage, mean a great length of time: – for example, it would have been ridiculous to have said so the next day, or the next week, or the next month, or the next year; to give therefore meaning to the passage, comparative with the wonder it relates, and the prior time it alludes to, it must mean centuries or years; less, however, than one, would be trifling, and less than two would be barely admissible.163

What Paine describes is how the monumentality of the sublime object – here in terms of its temporal structure – is suddenly corrupted, thereby prompting the aesthetic judgment of the ridiculous. This abrupt breakdown of the sublime’s aesthetic aura is caused by a descriptive element that relocates the apparently limitless and infinite monumentality of the sublime object 162 Indeed, Jiahe Chung’s firm judgment of 2012 as a ridiculous – not sublime – film fails to consider the complex, unstable, and subjective nature of the two aesthetic categories and their receptive interplay (Chung, 301-316). 163 Paine, 17. – The episode from the Old Testament Paine refers to goes as follows: ‘The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!’ (Joshua 10: 13-14).

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to the range of the measurable. This is also what happens in Godzilla (2014) when the geological sublimity and temporal infinity of the widely-obscured monster suddenly clashes with its franchise identity and heritage from the 1950s (see p. 301). Abruptly, the abyss of geologic deep time leads to postwar Japanese popular culture, collapsing the sinister and mysterious aura and the unsettling temporal structure of the film in an instant. Apart from the temporal infinitudes of the sublime, Paine’s text analysis can also be applied to the sublime’s excessive dimensions of space and force. Comic moments related to a relativization of the sublime’s (seemingly) absolute scale and dynamic occur, for instance, when the spectator experiences special effects that are outdated and therefore ineffective. The use of miniature models for the flooded houses in Noah’s Ark is not able to move today’s spectators in the same way as it moved its cinematic audiences when it was released in 1928. Since the spectator has become accustomed to much more realistic, agitating, and immersive visual effects, s/he immediately identifies the miniature models as what they are: cinematic means of presentation. S/He sees right through the constructedness of the film, which makes these visual elements appear gimmicky. The gimmick, according to the preliminary outlines of Sianne Ngai’s upcoming monograph on this aesthetic phenomenon, ‘confronts us with an object that would seem to undermine its own aesthetic power simply by drawing attention to the procedures by which its effects have been devised’.164 In an interview with the Scandinavian online art magazine kunstkritikk, Ngai explicitly names outdated special effects as gimmicks. As a case in point, she could have mentioned the smoke effects in the destruction scene of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are partly created by smoke flares (Fig. 42). When the spectator sees these flares raining on the town and being held in the hands of the panicking citizens, it is hard to not smile over this quite gimmicky effect. Apart from being ‘too old’, gimmicks also appear to recipients in an all too obvious and transparent manner: We feel that we’ve been cheated, that there is something too easy about it, but also that it’s working too hard to get our attention. So the gimmick is profoundly ambivalent. When you say something is gimmicky you’re are almost implicitly saying ‘I see through this, I’m not going to be seduced’ – but somebody else is. There’s always this sucker out there who is actually buying what you’re not buying.165 164 ‘Sianne Ngai’. 165 ‘The Politics of Minor Judgments’.

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Figs. 42a-d: Film stills from Sodom und Gomorrah. 1922. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Michael Curtiz, Ladislaus Vajda. Cinematography by Franz Planer, Gustav Ucicky. Music by Kazimir Boyle, Bernd Schultheis, Stefan Traub. Runtime: 98 min. (reconstructed, orig. ca. 3 hrs).

Hence, in disaster cinema one not only encounters gimmicks in the form of outdated special effects, they also manifest as receptive strategies that seem to try too hard (or too little) to get to the recipient. Their receptive purpose to shock and terrify the spectator is simply too transparent. However, the question remains whether Ngai’s self-assurance of the recipient – ‘I see through this, I’m not going to be seduced’ – always withstands the test that disaster cinema performs on the recipient’s sensibility and body. Is it not equally likely that I am ‘going to be seduced’, even though I ‘see through this’? There surely appear to be many cases in which the aesthetic force of a gimmick is so strong that it manages to affect the spectator anyway, against his/her will and intellect. Moreover, I would claim that in specific cases, gimmicky objects are so violently effective – for example, by means of their sublime qualities – that they temporarily suspend the spectator’s ability to identify and reflect on their gimmickyness in the moment of their appearance. That means that the comprehension and articulation of these gimmicks can only occur in retrospect, when the gimmicky disaster object has loosened its affective grip.

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A scene from Independence Day, which is as gimmicky (in the sense that its receptive aims are all too obvious) as it is effective, perfectly illustrates and embodies the ambivalent state of the gimmick within disaster cinema. When the film’s alien invaders begin to attack Earth, their space ships destroy entire cities. In the scene in question, protagonist Jasmine Dubrow, together with her son Dylan and her Labrador Boomer, flee from the approaching wave of destruction caused by the spaceship above Manhattan. In a tunnel, she finds a small maintenance room to hide and survive in. Only Boomer is still out on the street, and the explosion is closing in. Desperately, Dubrow calls out for him, and, only in the very last moment, he escapes death by reaching his master. The gimmicky character of the scene is quite obvious, as it employs a Labrador dog (the pinnacle of cuteness, loyalty, and innocence) whose potential death through a massive detonation wave provokes the spectator’s empathy and creates suspense. However, viewed in the cinema, it might be difficult to resist fearing for Boomer’s life. While this might be the case for some viewers, others perhaps manage to distance themselves from the gimmicky receptive mechanism of the scene. The same degree of ambivalence, instability, and uncertainty generally applies to the relation between the sublime and the ridiculous and their aesthetic interplay in disaster cinema. Whether they stand in a symbiotic relationship to reach a state of balance between affective proximity and distance, whether the ridiculous puts the sublime to the test, ridicules its shallow objects and elevates its truly grand objects, or whether the ridiculous represents an unintended effect which abruptly dissolves the sublime aura of a disaster event, one cannot always say for sure which of these models applies to the specific reception of a film. Principally, aesthetic experiences as such cannot be objectified. What is certain though is that the ridiculous can potentially surface in any disaster film, simply because the tragic height of their disaster themes and imagery is so excessive that their corruption through ordinary, low and, vulgar elements can easily lead to a breakdown and, thus, to becoming objects of ridicule.

What Lies Ahead? Hyperobjects and the Sublime Does the current state of disaster cinema allow for indications of its future modes of reception? And which role will the aesthetic of the sublime play in this future scenario? By addressing these questions, I do not mean to speculate on the technological development of the medium cinema. Yet, certainly one can expect that the technological history of cinematic

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immersion and the cinematic sublime has not come to an end. As my historical enquiry has shown, sublime depictions of disaster events are often closely connected to media technological innovations which aim for creating enhanced experiences of immersion and affective intensity. Hence, driven by these aims (as they promise turnover at the box office), cinema might again soon reconfigure its technological and receptive foundation. At the same time, it is thinkable that someday a limit of the spectator’s capability to be sensorily and affectively agitated will be reached. This would happen if a film’s balancing of perceptible content matter (the sublime’s iconography) and its overwhelming of the sensory faculties of its viewers were destroyed over longer durations. As the sublime is a threshold category moving among the border between immanence and transcendence, content matter and abstraction, affect and thought, a permanent prevalence of one of these sides can jeopardize the receptive functioning of its aesthetic altogether. Thus, the increasing rapidness of montage procedures and camera movements (in synergy with the dynamic movements of filmed bodies and objects), which I discussed as the cinematic aesthetics of speed and somatic empathy, can potentially reach a climax from which there is no room for further intensifications. This would be a limit set by the sheer physical boundaries of the human body’s ability of sensory and cognitive comprehension. This phenomenon seems to have advanced its realization, especially due to the technological development of digital cinema, whose expanded means of expression and representation promise a sheer limitless range of effects. Now, instead of further speculating on cinema’s technological future, I will focus on current filmic, cultural, and social phenomena, which might hint at a future development of the disaster genre in terms of its imagery, subject matter, and receptive aesthetics. A promising starting point is a recent trend within media and film theory labeled ecocinema, eco media, film ecology, or film ecocriticism.166 Since its inception in the late 1990s, ecocinema has been exploring film and cinema both as holistic mediators between the human and nonhuman worlds, thereby overcoming nature-culture binaries, and as potential forms of eco-activism.167 Moreover, cinema’s practices of production, distribution, and consumption are viewed from an ecocritical perspective, taking into account the film industry’s involvement in the exploitation of our planet’s resources as an agent within the global ecosystem. 166 Some of the numerous publications on ecocinema to be named are: Weik von Mossner, Moving Environments; Rust; Ivakhiv 2013; Willoquet-Maricondi; Cubitt; Murray. 167 In part, ecocinema evolved from the literary studies f ield of ecocriticism, which was established in the early 1990s.

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Critics and scholars revaluate film history (incl. documentary and fiction films) through the lens of ecology. The emergence of ecocinema can be said to be rooted within the heightened presence of the ecological discourse in recent decades. In turn, the broad and popular debate of ecological concepts and phenomena like global warming or the Anthropocene also prompted the release of a greater number of films concerned with topics as such. This body of films also (and perhaps especially) includes recent ecodisaster films such as TDAT, 2012, Godzilla (2014), and Deepwater Horizon. As for Godzilla, I have already pointed out the relevance of the Anthropocene and the geological sublime in connection with the film’s aesthetic appeal and ethical significance. I demonstrated how ecological thought and the sublime become inextricably intertwined in Godzilla, especially by means of the body of the primordial monster which threatens to recreate a world without human life. Apart from the geological sublime, which confronts the human subject with the transhuman abyss of geologic deep time (and therefore with the perspective of a world beyond human agency), there is another concept that attempts to synthesize the sublime with ecological thought. In his article ‘Toward an Ecological Sublime’, Christopher Hitt attempts to redeem the sublime as a productive category for ecocritical thinking. Building on the ‘ecocentric principles’ inherent in classical theorems of the sublime (Burke, Kant), he proposes a reconfigured version of the sublime which allows to encounter the otherness of nature through experiences of awe and wonder. For as long as nature continues to threaten and intimidate man, there can be no doing away with nature’s otherness in ecocritical thought. Hence, instead of offering an illusory holistic ecological model, Hitt employs the sublime as a reminder of the limits of human thought and agency, since it ‘seem[s] to adumbrate the ontological autonomy of the nonhuman by forcing us to recognize this limitation’.168 As stated by Hitt, [t]here will always be limits to our knowledge, and nature will always be, f inally, impenetrable. An ecological sublime would remind us of this lesson by restoring the wonder, the inaccessibility of wild nature. In an age of exploitation, commodification, and domination we need awe, envelopment, and transcendence. We need, at least occasionally, to be confronted with the wild otherness of nature and to be astonished, enchanted, humbled by it.169 168 Hitt, 615. 169 Hitt, 620.

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Consequently, he identifies ecological catastrophes as ‘a new source of the sublime’. Ecologically sublime objects present nature in its state of ‘devastation’.170 Alternatively, there is a conceptual model that also engages typical themes and receptive structures of the sublime and brings them into contact with recent ecological ideas; yet, this model goes beyond the theoretical framework presented in Hitt’s article, in that it addresses virulent ecologic issues like global warming and the Anthropocene and systematically aligns them with what clearly resembles the aesthetics of the sublime. I am talking about Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, an encompassing ecological account rooted in the key principles of object-oriented ontology (OOO).171 In a nutshell, Morton defines hyperobjects as ‘things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ like, for example, a black hole, the biosphere, the Alps, the totality of all nuclear materials on our planet, or the solar system.172 Mankind entered the realm of hyperobjects at the late eighteenth century ‘when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust – namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on planetary scale’.173 With entering the age of the Anthropocene, the end of the world occurred. That means that the encounter with hyperobjects provokes us to radically re-locate ourselves and think beyond any form of human-world correlationism. Accordingly, the concept of hyperobjects stands in a lineage of human humiliators like Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, or Sigmund Freud, insofar as it adds another layer to the decentralization of human existence and agency.174 How do hyperobjects appear to humans? And in what way can they be said to display central characteristics of the sublime? Hyperobjects are, first of all, immensely vast (both in terms of time and space). ‘The vastness of the hyperobject’s scale makes smaller beings – people, countries, even continents – seem like an illusion, or a small colored patch on a large dark 170 Hitt, 619. 171 In Morton’s own words, OOO is ‘an emerging philosophical movement committed to a unique form of realism and nonanthropocentric thinking’ (Morton, 2). Among the theorists (Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, Tristan Garcia, Quentin Meillassoux, Morton himself) locating their works within the flat ontological paradigm of OOO, Graham Harman, with his famous interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s tool-analysis, has been the most substantial and influential one. – The following deliberations, if not marked otherwise, are based on Morton’s text. 172 Morton, 1. 173 Morton, 7. 174 Morton also could have added to this lineage James Hutton’s concept of geologic deep time, as suggested by Stephen J. Gould (Gould, 1f.).

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surface’.175 In order to account for the ‘overall aesthetic “feel”’ of hyperobjects, which ‘is a sense of asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite being of things’, it is not surprising that Morton occasionally (and often critically) refers to Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’.176 In terms of hyperobjects’ temporal vastness, Morton, as he rather vaguely acknowledges, certainly draws on the concept of geologic deep time, whose aesthetic appeal I repeatedly discussed as a third Kantian type of the sublime, the geological sublime.177 The sensation of the spatial and temporal excessiveness of hyperobjects is at once ‘fascinating, horrifying, and powerful’.178 Just like the sublime, it violently forces itself on the recipient who cannot but respond with a mixed emotion (Burke’s ‘delightful horror’). On the other hand, hyperobjects never fully reveal themselves, or rather, their dimensions are simply too vast to be comprehended through sensation. This is what Morton calls the nonlocality of hyperobjects. Aesthetically, they merely appear as indexical signs, as ‘figments and fragments of doom’, a causality pointing toward a future in which the world will have ended, a ‘future, somehow beamed into the “present”’.179 The equivalent to this nonlocality is the sublime’s unpresentability, the merely negative presentation of the sublime object. Remember that the pleasure of the Kantian sublime derives from the inappropriateness – Morton would say, asymmetry – between perceived objects (with their seemingly infinite dimensions) and concepts of reason. Apart from the excessiveness and unpresentability of hyperobjects, they also entail an ethical surplus, which resembles the transcendent stage and moral potential of the experience of the sublime. By forcing the perceiving subject to abandon his/her correlational concepts of the human world, hyperobjects prompt the intimate experience of human-nonhuman alliances. They ‘compel us to think ecologically’ and to overcome outdated concepts of individualism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism, racism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and capitalism.180 Being pushed into the realm of hyperobjects is rewarded with the nonhuman perspective of objective existence, or, as Morton calls it, the no-self view. However, instead of linking this ethical surplus of hyperobjects to the sublime’s potential to facilitate experiencing the fragile borders and complex 175 Morton, 32. 176 Morton, 22. – Morton refers to the Kantian sublime on the following pages: 60, 105, 132f., 162f., 196. 177 Morton, 55-68, 122. 178 Morton, 20. 179 Morton, 153, 91. 180 Morton, 48.

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interrelations between aesthetics and ethics; nature and culture; past, present, and future; body, sensibility, and reason, Morton – like many other Kant interpreters – regards the Kantian sublime primarily as an aesthetic tool to gain control over nature through the sovereign agency of reason. Even though the ‘Kantian experiences of beauty and the sublime are inner echoes of other beings’, it is ‘the power and freedom of the Romantic sublime’ that need to be inverted into a state of lameness.181 By means of their inner lameness, objects (and especially hyperobjects) exhibit their ontological inconsistency. This lameness makes itself felt to human beings ‘who now stand within the resonance of hyperobjects’.182 Indeed, if Morton took into account the affective, violent, destabilizing, ambivalent, and paralyzing side of the sublime, he could have recognized its closer kinship with his hyperobjects. Art in the age of hyperobjects is attuned to these very objects. ‘Art becomes a collaboration between humans and nonhumans’.183 Morton seeks to overcome aesthetic models in which nature and nonhuman objects are kept at a distance through human-world correlations. Hyperobjects ‘bring to an end the idea that Nature is something “over yonder” behind the glass window of an aesthetic screen’.184 On the other hand, this attuning to nature should not be mistaken with a holistic and harmonic image of man’s connectivity with nature. Instead, Morton envisions ‘the disturbing quality of the ecological vision’ as something that conveys the strange and withdrawn world of (hyper)objects, man’s asymmetric relation to their overwhelming dimensions and a vivid image of ‘how things do not coincide with their appearance’.185 As for cinema’s potential to meet these demands, he discusses Deleuzian cinematic flow as an ‘aesthetic in contemporary thought [that] manifests precisely to the extent that it has enabled us to track hyperobjects’.186 However, as his filmic examples indicate, Morton hardly had in mind the imagery of blockbuster cinema and the disaster genre when he thought about a hyperobjective aesthetics of film. Nonetheless, I will take the liberty to act against Morton’s art preferences and apply his concept to some recent examples of disaster cinema. What I envision is a notion of disaster cinema that – rather than operating on a discursive and narrative level – employs 181 Morton, 196. 182 Morton, 196. 183 Morton, 174. 184 Morton, 174. 185 Morton, 73, 174. 186 Morton, 72.

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its sublime imagery and receptive tactics to prompt new experiences and thoughts regarding mankind’s asymmetric role in and connectedness with the world of hyperobjects. Accordingly, disasters are not staged anymore as biblical plagues or isolated natural phenomena to be scientif ically permeated. A disaster cinema of hyperobjects would take a more holistic perspective and put on display human agency among the much vaster agents of nature, all within the paradigmatic framework of the Anthropocene. Yet, once again, it is not a harmonic oneness of all existence that is sought here but an encountering of nature’s terrifying strangeness, as conceived both by Hitt with his concept of the ecological sublime and by Morton and his hyperobjects. A hyperobjective disaster cinema confronts the spectator with the existence of the (usually withdrawn) nonhuman. The social, philosophical, cultural, and political coordinates of sublime disaster events are re-arranged, insofar as part of their affective energy is generated by their indexical referencing to their overarching hyperobjects, whose sphere of agency is far more encompassing. One disaster film that immediately comes to mind in this regard is TDAT. The film depicts the sudden inception of a new ice age, which is paradoxically caused by global warming’s impact on Earth’s network of ocean currents. It is one of the rare cases in which a film’s effects on its audiences’ perception of climate change and ecological concerns were empirically studied in an encompassing survey, conducted in several countries all over the world. Alexa Weik von Mossner, reflecting on the overall results of the individual surveys, concludes that ‘Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, regardless of the fact that it is a rather crude disaster science fiction film, had considerable effects on its audiences’ perceptions of climate risk’.187 She further identifies the film’s emotional and affective receptive tactics as being responsible for the extent to which TDAT was able to raise public awareness for climate change. In contrast, Sean Cubitt critically points out the film’s scientifically questionable future disaster scenario and its superficial exploitation of its ecological subject matter. As it dynamizes and spectacularizes the incredibly slow processes of the global ecosystem, it merely evokes a ‘fearing the future’, instead of offering a ‘listening to the past’.188 In addition to Weik von Mossner’s explanations for TDAT’s influence on public ecological thought, the (rudimentarily) hyperobjective qualities of its disaster attractions should also be considered. The film generally conveys the 187 Weik von Mossner, ‘Emotions of Consequence?’, 56. – For a more detailed discussion of the reception of TDAT, see: Weik von Mossner 2012. 188 Cubitt, 127.

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notion that all its presented disaster phenomena are in fact local symptoms of much more encompassing ecological processes. Their sublime affect images also represent indexical signs of their overarching hyperobject that is the global ecosystem. The biosphere, a usually withdrawn hyperobject, now enters the stage of human consciousness, or rather, one should say that human-world correlations are dissolved into the flat ontology of objective existence. Besides the film’s indexical disaster events, repeated attempts are made to visualize the hyperobject’s dimensions and agency in form of maps, diagrams, and satellite images. What all these visualizations – the sublime imagery and the scientific illustrations – have in common is their inability to create a sense of the temporal abyss of the biosphere. This lack of temporal depth primarily derives from the fact that the film condenses long-term processes of nature to the ridiculously short duration of a couple of days. On the other hand, the instant bang with which the end of the world is presented here could also be regarded, first, as an effective means to push the film’s implied eco-activist agenda and send a wake-up call to its audiences, and second, as an allegory for the sudden shock that mankind experiences as it finds itself lost in the widened landscape of the Anthropocene and the hidden world of hyperobjects.189 An even wider scope, namely a cosmic vision, is employed in Roland Emmerich’s subsequent disaster film 2012. The scenario it depicts is an overheating of Earth’s core caused by neutrino particles, which are sent by solar storms. Consequently, the inner structure of Earth becomes unstable, leading to rapid movements of the tectonic plates, which manifest as earthquakes, volcanic activities, and tsunamis. This (quite adventurous) scientific explanation for the end of the world is addressed rather briefly and mediated merely through a short animation film by the radio host and conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost. Far more dominant are religious themes and discourses (both Christian and pagan), which seek to gain the interpretive hegemony over the event. Thus, for the most part, the film’s narrative elements counteract potential experiences of being thrown into the disturbing sphere of hyperobjects. This kind of opposition is further reinforced by the melodramatic framework of the narrative, insofar as it focuses on the integrity of the protagonists, who are led to live in a postdiluvian world. Mankind gets the chance to start anew; yet, instead of exploring the new social, cultural, political, and economic terrain offered by the occurrence of the end of the world, this new beginning is founded on 189 A matter which Morton surely would disapprove, for he makes it clear that art ‘[i]n no sense […] should […] be PR for climate change’ (Morton, 196).

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traditional moral premises of Christianity, humanism, and philanthropy. This is different from TDAT where a remapping of the political order, an inversion of north and south, is indicated by the stream of North American refugees looking for shelter in Mexico. In 2012, it turns out that the African continent was lifted by the disaster, providing the land for the resettlement of an exclusive elite of survivors. To give a third and more recent example, in Deepwater Horizon the 2010 explosion of the eponymous oil platform, which was followed by the largest oil spill in US history, is staged as a disaster film. Predominantly through its visuality, it disturbingly conveys man’s inferior role within the orbit of Earth’s hyperobjects. This particularly regards the asymmetric relation between the extreme dimensions and forces of nature’s materials (oil, gas) and their exploitation through human technology. Deepwater Horizon takes the viewer deep under the water’s surface and richly exhibits the drilling operation as a fragile undertaking, which, in its greed and hubris, tries to cultivate a dark and completely overwhelming ecological sphere. The various shots of the thin drilling pipe, which vertically taps into the rumbling horizontal plane of the soil, enable the spectator to experience the sublime asymmetry of the Anthropocene on a sensory and affective level (Fig. 43). The vastness of the hyperobject that is the totality of Earth’s oil resources is also repeatedly addressed in terms of its temporal distribution. Mike Williams, Chief Electrician on the oil rig and the film’s protagonist, brings into play this temporal dimension in his conversations with his daughter Sydney. Sydney asks her father to bring her a dinosaur tooth as a gift from his next trip to the platform. This quite typical clashing of dinosaur monsters and the instruments and objects of capitalist modernity points to the millions of years that went into the biotic formation of fossil oil. In juxtaposition with this sheer fathomless duration of time, the applied human technology to drill for oil and the capitalist cycle of transforming it into profit appear insignificantly small in their temporal structures. The coastal landscape of the Gulf of Mexico, which will be flooded with millions of barrels of oil after the accident, is only briefly presented in the film. However, with its sublime imagery of the overwhelming and humiliating supremacy of nature’s withdrawn sphere, Deepwater Horizon makes an affectively powerful statement on human existence in the age of the Anthropocene.190 By pointing out some of the hyperobjective and ecologically sublime aspects of a couple of recent disaster movies, I believe to have gained an 190 For other filmic works dealing with environmental concerns and Anthropocene scenarios through sublime landscape depictions, see: Hockenhull 2018; Ivakhiv 2018.

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Figs. 43a-d: Film stills from Deepwater Horizon. 2016. Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Matthew Sand. Cinematography by Enrique Chediak. Film editing by Gabriel Fleming, Colby Parker Jr. Music by Steve Jablonsky. Runtime: 107 min.

approximate, yet promising prospect of the near future of the disaster genre. Expectedly, mankind’s role within the Anthropocene and ecological concerns in general are going to remain pressing topics in the public discourse. Thus, in my opinion, the sublime’s ability to aesthetically convey this new ecological, ontological, social, and political paradigm on a popular and (almost) universal scale will certainly ensure the aesthetic relevance of cinematic disaster depictions for the years and decades to come. Perhaps, after having viewed cinema’s disaster imagery in relation to the unsettling surfacing of hyperobjects, an outlook on potential technological transformations of disaster cinema, which I evaded in the beginning of this chapter, might be conceived after all. This is because the hyperobjects of the Anthropocene are closely tied to the apparently infinite depths as well as to the material and social reality of the networks of today’s digital media landscape. Far from qualifying for an ontological status of the purely virtual and immaterial (as imagined in the cyber aesthetics of the 1980s), digital network culture rests on a set of technological, ecological, and geological factors and labor practices.191 The sphere of digital rubbish, manifesting as the harvesting and discarding of natural resources needed to produce digital technologies and as the exploitation of human labor, has been addressed in monographs by Jennifer Gabrys and Jussi Parikka in recent years.192 The natural and human waste of digital has become a factor in 191 Matthew Kirschenbaum wrote an illuminating analysis of the tropes, icons, and subjects of 1980s-digital/cyber culture (Kirschenbaum). 192 Gabrys; Parikka.

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the Anthropocene scenario and in terms of the agency of hyperobjects. This connectedness further encompasses a structural analogy between the vast spaces and temporalities of hyperobjects on the one side and the deep time of the media193 and the massive distribution of digital networks on the other.194 This is where (disaster) cinema’s potential role in the new (that is digital) media landscape surfaces. As part of the discourse of expanded cinema, the institution cinema is increasingly losing its status as the key medium of Western (and non-Western) societies, as it merges with other media and alternative models of production, distribution, and reception.195 Within the scope of digital media culture and practices, cinema re-appears as bits and fragments, as discursive traces and references. With the mobilization and fragmentation of cinema, as it is shared among the channels of digital network culture, its receptive framework shifts accordingly. In terms of the experience of the sublime in disaster cinema, this shift most likely implies a certain loss of affective agency, since the receptive aesthetics of the cinematic performance in the cinema space becomes suspended. At the same time, with its distribution in the infinitely convoluted digital network spaces, disaster cinema shimmers in accordance with the withdrawn and overwhelmingly vast and complex world of hyperobjects. Thus, it seems this is where a new chapter in the history of disaster cinema and the iconography of the sublime might begin. Before this future history can be written, it has been necessary to lay the ground for the understanding of the aesthetic history and functioning of disaster cinema and its engagement with the sublime until today. That is the task that I have attempted to achieve with this book.

193 Initially, the concept of the media’s deep time was coined by Siegfried Zielinski (in the sense of an extended timeframe of media history). In A Geology of the Media, Parikka adapts the term to describe the geological time span of the material history of digital technologies (Zielinski; Parikka, Chap. 2). 194 In this respect, it is signif icant that Morton himself names artworks employing digital technology – computer algorithms, digital sound recording and manipulation, digital mapping, and photo editing – as cases responding to and resonating with the emergence of the world of hyperobjects (Morton,184-189). 195 The term expanded cinema dates back to Gene Youngblood’s monograph with the same title from 1970, in which he already recognizes cinema’s shifting role and aesthetic transformations in the age of computers, cybernetics, and digital. Since then, the term has served as a label for artistic and scholarly investigations of cinema’s expanded realm of appearance, be it as performance, art installation, video art, computer art, or internet art (Youngblood). – See also: Uroskie; Rees.

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Index Aberli, Johann Ludwig 76-77 Addison, Joseph 43 Adorno, Theodor 270, 284 Agassiz, Louis 54 Ambrosio, Arturo 233 n.24 Arnheim, Rudolf 146 Atherstone, Edwin 109 Aumont, Jacques 134 Bakhuizen, Ludolf 39 Bamberger, Fritz 56 n.78 Barker, Robert 116-117, 120, 133 Barthes, Roland 66-67, 143 n.2 Baudry, Jean-Louis 268-269 Baugh, Christopher 97 n.6 Bazin, André 143 n.2 Beattie, Jacob 302 Beaver, Frank Eugene 29 Beckford, William 100 Begemann, Christian 48 n.49, 119 Benjamin, Walter 148, 219, 223 Bergman, Ingrid 248 Bergson, Henri 148 Bierstadt, Albert 55 n.75, 123-126, 291-292, 293 n.137 Birmann, Samuel 57 Bisset, Robert 81 n.43 Bodmer, Johann Jacob 44 Boehm, Gottfried 24 n.40 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 41 Booth, Walther R. 181 n.20 Börsch-Supan, Helmut 120 n.89 Bottomore, Stephen 165 Bouton, Charles Marie 129-133 Braungart, Georg 52, 208, 294-295 Breitinger, Johann Jacob 44 Brentano, Clemens 118-121 Brett, John 54 Briullov, Karl 82-91, 265 Brockes, Barthold Heinrich 44-45 Buddemeier, Heinz 122 n.98, 133-134 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de 49 n.57 Bukatman, Scott 19 n.27 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 181, 233 n.24, 265 Burke, Edmund 11-16, 23, 25, 39-40, 43-44, 50, 70-72, 81-82, 86, 89, 101, 107, 109, 134-135, 142, 146, 149-152, 157-158, 160-161, 207-209, 214, 218-220, 223, 225-227, 229, 240, 265, 279, 283-284, 313, 315 Burnet, Thomas 43, 45 Burney, Edward Francis 97 Calame, Alexandre 57 Cameron, James 196 Canby, Vincent 192, 194

Carroll, Noëll 12 n.7, 144 Carus, Carl Gustav 52-54, 57 Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland 120 Châtelet, Claude-Louis 77 n.29 Chung, Jihae 19-20, 167 n.79, 270 n.103, 308 n.162 Church, Frederic Edwin 123-124, 127-129, 293 n.137 Cole, Thomas 123, 125-126, 293 n.137 Collins, Jim 302 n.151 Comment, Bernard 122 n.98 Constable, John 106 Copernicus, Nicolaus 314 Crary, Jonathan 21, 37, 104, 134, 145 Crow, Thomas 72 Crutzen, Paul 296 Cubitt, Sean 317 Curtiz, Michael 221, 266, 310 Cuvier, Georges 49-50 n.57, 113 Daguerre, Louis 129-134, 143, 154, 177 Dahl, Johan Christian Clausen 56 n.78, 57 Daniell, William 50 n.60 Darwin, Charles 297, 314 Deleuze, Gilles 156, 208, 241, 242-253 DeMille, Cecil B. 180, 190, 266 Dennis, John 43 Derham, William 45 Derrida, Jacques 284 Diderot, Denis 44, 66-75, 78, 96 n.3, 235 Didi-Huberman, Georges 19 n.26 Durand, Asher Brown 123, 293 n.137 During, Simon 100 Eberhard, Johann August 121-122 Edison, Thomas 177 Elkins, James 15 Elsaesser, Thomas 155 n.36 Emmerich, Roland 202, 224, 236, 267, 286, 304, 317-318 Epicurus 153 Everdingen, Allaert van 39-40 Eyck, Jan van 237 Fabris, Pietro 88 Falgano, Giovanni da 41 Fanck, Arnold 183, 295 Feaver, William 104, 108 Feil, Ken 194, 200-202, 302 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 54 n.72 Fluck, Winfried 124-125, 128 Foucault, Michel 17-18 French, Sarah 261 n.85 Freud, Sigmund 268, 314

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Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspec tive

Fried, Michael 67 n.6 Friedberg, Anne 73 Friedrich, Caspar David 57, 118-121, 236-239, 284 Fumerton, Richard 23 n.37 Fuseli, Henry 90 n.66

Humboldt, Wilhelm von 54 n.72 Hume, David 103, 23 n.37, 43 n.24 Hutcheson, Francis 302 Hutton, James 49-50 n.57, 52 n.64, 55, 314 n.174

Gable, Clark 185 Gabrys, Jennifer 320 Gainsborough, Thomas 99 Galiani, Ferdinando 75 Gance, Abel 187, 219, 246 Garrick, David 96 Gautier, Théophile 106 n.45 Geoffrin, Marie Thérèse 78 Géricault, Théodore 91 Gessner, Salomon 78 n.34 Giesen, Roman 295 Gilpin, William 46 Giotto 237 Girodet, Anne-Louis 90 n.66 Godard, Jean-Luc 245, 248 Gorky, Maxim 166 Gould, Stephen Jay 294, 314 n.174 Grau, Oliver 20-21, 117-118 Gregg, Melissa 26 Grémillon, Jean 246 Griffith, David Wark 155, 180-181 Griffiths, Alison 20 n.29 Groom, Gloria 103 Gunning, Tom 26 n.45, 155-157, 165, 167

Imdahl, Max 19 n.26, 113-114

Hale, George C. 183-184 Hall, James Norman 250 Hall, John 41 Hall, Sheldon 182, 192, 195 n.70, 197 Haller, Albrecht von 56-57, 77-78 Hamilton, William 88-89 Handmann, Jakob Emanuel 76 Harman, Graham 314 n.171 Harries, Dan 302 n.151 Hawkins, Benjamin Waterhouse 300 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 106 Hegel, G.W.F. 269 Heidegger, Martin 314 n.171 Herder, Johann Gottfried 269 Herrmann, Jörg 269-271 Herzog, Werner 237 Heston, Charlton 193 Heumann, Joseph 179 Hick, Ulrike 155 n.36 Hitt, Christopher 208, 313-314, 317 Hobsch, Manfred 30 Hockenhull, Stella 237, 239 Hollander, Anne 22 n.36 Holly, Michael Ann 18 Homer 42, 283 Horner, James 228 Hoüel, Jean 50-51 Humboldt, Alexander von 126, 127 n.115, 293 n.137

Jeske, Diane 23 n.37 Johnson, Laurie Ruth 237 Joppien, Rüdiger 102 Kant, Immanuel 11-14, 16-17, 23, 25, 44-45, 47-49, 52, 81, 86-87, 112, 114, 118-119, 134-135, 142, 145-146, 149, 152-154, 157-158, 168, 207-210, 218, 223, 229-230, 240-244, 246-247, 252-258, 260-264, 269-270, 272-276, 279, 283-284, 288, 294-295, 313, 315-316 Keane, Stephen 28-29 Keaton, Buster 302 n.151 Keller, Susanne 50 King, Clarence 55 n.75, 293 n.137 King, Geoff 272, 276, 291 Kirwan, James 15 n.16 Kleist, Heinrich von 118-122 Koch, Joseph Anton 57 Koerner, Joseph Leo 237 Kornhaber, David 99 n.13 Kozák, Jan 48 n.50, 49 n.52 Kracauer, Siegfried 9-12, 219, 256 Kubrick, Stanley 188, 280 Küttner, Karl Gottlob 80 Lang, Fritz 246 Lastra, James 144 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 47 Leonardi, Monica 89-90 Leonardo 122 n.99 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 66 n.2, 112 L’Herbier, Marcel 246 Lister, Raymond 97 n.6, 104 Loiperdinger, Martin 165-166 Lord Byron 57 Lord Shaftesbury 43, 302, 305 Lorrain, Claude 41, 46-47, 124-125 Lory the Younger, Gabriel 57 Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de 78, 81, 90 n.66, 95-105, 107, 133, 145, 178 Lowe, Mauritius 90 n.66 Lucretius 75 Lumet, Sydney 188 Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis 143, 165-167, 175-176, 178-179 Lyell, Charles 49-50 n.57 Lyotard, Jean-François 13 n.8, 145, 254 n.72, 261 n.85, 269-270, 284 MacDonald, Jeanette 185 Macpherson, James alias Ossian 46, 53, 57 Macsotay, Thomas 72

Index

Maggi, Luigi 233 n.24 Manovich, Lev 160, 197 Marmontel, Jean-François 78 n.34 Marshall, Nancy Rose 301 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando 76 n.26 Martin, John 104-115, 125-126, 132, 145, 177, 181, 210-211, 265-266, 304 n.155 Marx, Karl 314 McCalman, Iain 100, 104 Méliès, Georges 143, 176-180, 233 Mendelssohn, Moses 44 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 25 Metz, Christian 126 n.110 Meyer, Felix 76 Michaud, Philippe-Alain 82-83 Michelangelo 42, 267 Miller, Angela 124-126 Milton, John 42, 46, 47, 101, 106 Mitchell, Charles P. 29 Mitchell, W.J.T. 24 n.40, 299 Momper the Younger, Joos de 40 Monk, Samuel 42 n.18, 45, 46-47 Montaigne, Michel de 75 Moran, Thomas 55 n.75, 123, 127 n.155, 293 n.137 Morden, Barbara C. 104 Morsch, Thomas 25, 142, 148-150, 152, 154, 159160, 162, 208-209, 212, 218-220, 232, 271 n.104 Morton, Timothy 208, 314-318, 321 n.194 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 237, 246 Murray, Robin 179 Musser, Charles 183 Napoleon Bonaparte 302 Neale, Steve 182, 192, 195 n.70, 197 Nessel, Sabine 271, 276, 286 Newman, Barnett 13 n.8, 221, 261 n.85, 284 Ngai, Sianne 309-10 Nicholson, Jack 281 Nietzsche, Friedrich 294-295, 302 Nordhoff, Charles 250 O’Connor, Ralph 38, 108 Owen, Richard 300 Ozu, Yasujirō 244 Pächt, Otto 19 n.26 Paine, Thomas 107 n.47, 208, 302, 308-309 Panofsky, Erwin 18-19, 22, 24, 113 Parikka, Jussi 320-321 Paul, Jean 208, 302, 305 Paxton, Joseph 300 Payne Knight, Richard 46 Pérignon, Nicolas 77 n.29 Peucker, Brigitte 237 Pick, Lupu 246 Plantinga, Carl 23 Plato 268 Playfair, John 52 n.64 Pliny the Elder 86, 90, 108

355 Pliny the Younger 86, 90 Pointon, Marcia 50 Polgar, Alfred 121-122 Porcellis, Jan 39 n.3 Porter, James 16 n.18 Poussin, Nicolas 41-42, 47, 69, 107 n.47 Powell, John Wesley 55 n.75, 293 n.137 Prévost, Pierre 121, 130 Pries, Christine 269-270, 284-285 Price, Uvedale 46 Prince, Stephen 144, 197-200 Prümm, Karl 24 Pseudo-Longinus 13, 16, 40-42, 52, 208, 283, 303 Pyne, William Henry 101-102 Raphael 42 Reynolds, Joshua 40-41, 81 n.43, 99 Richter, Ludwig 57 Riefenstahl, Leni 237 Robert, Hubert 78 Roddick, Nick 29-30 Rosa, Salvator 41-42, 45-48, 125 Rossellini, Roberto 191, 248-249 Rothko, Mark 13 n.8 Rottmann, Carl 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 78 n.34 Rubens, Peter Paul 40 Rudwick, Martin J.S. 50 Ruisdael, Jacob van 39-40 Ruskin, John 54, 105 n.37, 106-107 n.45, 126, 128 Sachs-Hombach, Klaus 143 n.2 Saint Aubin, Gabriel de 72 Sanders, John 29 Sayre, Nora 192-194 Schatz, Thomas 194 n.67 Schelling, F.W.J. 269 Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob 76 n.26 Schiller, Friedrich 44-45, 208, 255-256, 258, 260, 262, 264, 279, 288 Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich 269 Schopin, Henri-Frédéric 90 n.66 Scrope, George Poulett 50 n.60 Sébron, Hippolyte 132 Seigworth, Gregory J. 25-26 Serf, Kamill 178 Shacklock, Zoe 261 n.85 Shakespeare, William 42, 46 Shaviro, Steven 12 n.7, 25, 260-262 Shelley, Mary 57 Shelley, Percy 57 Sienkiewicz, Henryk 237-238 Silverman, Kaja 156 Simmel, Georg 73, 219 Singer, Ben 184 Sobchack, Vivian 25, 142, 146-147, 150, 152, 156-157, 159, 162, 167-168, 208-209, 214, 231, 271 n.104

356  Solger, K.W.F. 208, 302, 305 Solkin, David 43 Stalla, Robert 78 n.34 Still, Clyfford 13 n.8 Stoichita, Victor 73 Sulzer, Johann Georg 44 Tanke, Joseph J. 18 Tasker, Yvonne 271 Thacker, Eugene 262 n.89 Thompson, Kristin 155 n.36, 158, 164, 183 Thomson, James 45 Till, Dietmar 42 n.19 Trier, Lars van 261 Trifonova, Temenuga 243, 245, 247 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 57, 103, 107, 108 n.51, 178 n.9, 250 Ullrich, Wolfgang 114 Valenciennes, Pierre-Henri de 82-90, 177 Van Dyke, W.S. 185, 217 Velde the Younger, Willem van de 39 Vernet, Joseph 44, 65-76, 78, 80-82, 88, 96, 100, 105, 174, 235 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 208, 269, 302, 305-307 Vlieger, Simon de 39 n.3 Volaire, Pierre-Jacques 82-90, 105, 177 Voltaire 47, 75

Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspec tive

Wagner, Abraham 77 Wahlberg, Mark 307 Wallach, Alan 126-128 Warburg, Aby 82-83, 88, 157 Warnke, Martin 24 Watt, James 314 Webster, Thomas 50 n.60 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 317 Weiler, A.H. 192-193 Weischedel, Wilhelm 270 Werner, Abraham Gottlob 49 n.57, 55 Werner, Anton von 117 Wilke, Sabine 237 Wilton, Andrew 45, 124-125 Wolf, Caspar 76-82, 103, 105 Wood, Aylish 199 n.79, 272, 276 Wright of Derby, Joseph 82-90, 100, 177 Wüest, Johann Heinrich 77 Wutky, Michael 82-90 Wyttenbach, Jakob Samuel 77, 80 Xaver, Franz, Prince of Saxony 55 Yacowar, Maurice 30 Youngblood, Gene 321 n.195 Zecca, Ferdinand 177 Zelle, Carsten 45 Zielinski, Sigfried 321 n.193 Žižek, Slavoj 302 Zumbühl, Heinz 79-80