Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory 9781474428705

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Cinema, If You Please

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Cinema, If You Please The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory Murray Pomerance

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Murray Pomerance, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2868 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2870 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2871 2 (epub) The right of Murray Pomerance to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Figures Introductory: Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, Frenesy/Cinéfacture/ RT, 2017), digital frame enlargement. Chapter 1: James Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1958), digital frame enlargement. Chapter 2: Marius Goring in A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers, 1946), digital frame enlargement. Chapter 3: Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in Gerry (Gus Van Sant, Epsilon/ My Cactus/Tango, 2002), digital frame enlargement. Intermezzo: Ava Gardner, Marius Goring, and Rossano Brazzi in The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Transoceanic/Figaro, 1954), digital frame enlargement. Chapter 4: Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, CG/Vortex Sutra/ Sirena, 2016), digital frame enlargement. Chapter 5: Vanessa Redgrave and Ronan O’Casey in Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, Bridge/Carlo Ponti/MGM, 1966), digital frame enlargement.

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Contents

Introductory 1 1 Beyond the Sea 8 2 A Barbaric Rose 36 3 Walk on the Wild Side 65 Intermezzo: Show Me Again 100 4 A Million Things 129 5 Rhapsody in Green 166 Acknowledgments 201 Index 204

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vi  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e

To Tom Conley We must always be prepared to learn something totally new. Ludwig Wittgenstein

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in troductory   1

Introductory

Criticism is always that: an eternal return to a fundamental pleasure. Serge Daney

W

e awaked from sweet repose after the luscious fatigues of the night. I got up between nine and ten and walked out till Louise should rise. I patrolled up and down Fleet Street, thinking on London, the seat of Parliament and the seat of pleasure.” So, on Thursday, 13 January 1763, rhapsodized James Boswell in his London diary (140), reflecting upon a night of amorous encounter—one of his first—and his prospects and hopes of achieving some position of consequence either in the army or in government. Here was a man making his way in the world and finding its stimulations and treasuring and reflecting back upon them, as through his days he lived out the “

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2  c i n e m a , i f yo u ple as e rich and ­unpredictable changes of the eighteenth century. When we think of ourselves as his progeny, when we see ourselves as eighteenth-century developments carried forward through modernity, can we not find it astonishing that our experience of life may seem, on its surface, with its urgency and its desperations, so much less pleasurable, or that, at least, we express ourselves with so little reference to the pleasure it brings. Yet there are pleasures we have ceased to notice as such because we experience them so routinely. I take cinema as a prime example of contemporary experience—it is the Royal Personage of our Image Culture—and I take pains to note how viewers of films express astonishment, an overwhelmed self-depreciation, a thrill mounting to anxiety, even a barely comprehending wonder at what they see, but often not, apparently, plain delight. Delight in the content of the screen image has dried and vanished in the name of meaning and “interest”; and delight in the very act of staring at the colorful screen is very much taken for granted. In this age of information, delight is dead. Boswell tells his Lady Mirabel: “I am very well amused here. I can have a great deal of entertainment just by looking around me” (142). If he were among us today, however, I think he would be embarrassed to speak this way. The eighteenth century was filled with grand formations cultural, architectonic, political, and aesthetic, exceeding in effect earlier, relatively short-lived, but more tumultuous military cataclysms, such as the progress of Napoléon. It was in this century that Captain James Cook conducted three extensive voyages to the far side of the world, bringing Australia, the tropics, the civilizations of the South Pacific home as exotic booty. Through his journeys the mappa mundi was extended and recolored, became real in a vibrant, altogether new way. To see otherness became a distinctly pleasurable, challenging sensation. The Galerie agréable du monde of 1729 depicted arcane beasts of the West, cannibal practices, gigantic vegetation, incomprehensible strangers. In London and beyond, the creation and development of pleasure gardens, exceptionally Ranelagh and Vauxhall, produced patterns of movement and entertainment that worked to dissolve much of the forbidding class distance that had kept the rich and poor even from examining one another; now one’s urban neighbors became sights to please the eye. And the pleasure of a walk in a public garden was accompaniment to the opening of urban space, a phenomenon that in the eighteenth century, notably in Paris and London, would reconfigure ideas about mobility and propriety. Academic painting went through a major shift away from historical and religious subject matter and into the world of the everyday, with the diffuse exhibition of still lifes, portraits, and landscapes and new modes of collecting and exhibiting the framed picture. Music that had been tightly structured and produced for the church entered a state of play, in which repetition and ornamentation took their places in phrasings that breathed of naturalness and the curvatures of hope. New ways of counting Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

in troductory   3 and keeping time led to strange experiences of memorialization, forgetfulness, anticipation, and the phantasmal sense of being lost: not only was urban space more complex and hard to navigate, but time itself became a “territory” in which one could find one’s way obscured. And a considerable portion of the obscurity had to do with rapture, rapture over nature, rapture over color, rapture over the sense of presence. If we think of these changes in terms of their simplest, most basic outcomes we find the elements of the cinematic experience: new exotic visions, temporal movement back and forth, the sense of discovering the globe, leisurely transit through and around highly decorative space, and a quality of eerie ghostliness pervading experience. All these features are retained and extended in the phenomenon we call film. All these qualities, the movement, the delirium, the musicality, the temporal shifting, the sense of a world conquered and reduced, the presentation of strange cultural types, the incessant perambulation, the invocation of exciting new visual frames: cinema. While it is not the purpose of this book to draw out the proposition that our cinema is a derivation from the eighteenth century—a too-confining and too-neglectful hypothesis, overlooking important nineteenth-century fundaments, such as the train and the camera–it is a purpose of this book to regard some examples of cinematic work with the kind of pleasured rapture in which people undertook to walk the London gardens, or to look at the watercolors struck after Cook’s voyages, or to listen to Mozart’s symphonies. Merely—but fully—to invest more in the cinematic moment than contemporary business usually has time for. To relish some of the deep traces our motion picture images very subtly convey, under or beyond the stories they tell, over and above their purported contemporary cultural relevance as themes, icons, or documents of a present (and transient) age. To offer pleasures of many kinds, and to a vast multitude, was foundational to the development of cinema, which in the beginning did not attract audiences for the express purpose of informing or educating them (see Gomery). It does seem useful to consider how a number of the specific pleasures that were socially organized in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries persist in transplantation to the garden of cinema. The essays here meander through the landscape of such a consideration. Our withdrawal into meditation (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1931], A Beautiful Mind [2001]), our delight at musical harmony and rhythm (Top Hat [1935], The Band Wagon [1953]), our recognition of harmonic elegance (Joy of Living [1933], The Sense of an Ending [2017]), our happiness in admiration of sights and social types (My Man Godfrey [1936], I Am Love [2009]), our sense of exploration (His Majesty O’Keefe [1954], Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country [1991]), our rhapsodic appreciation of color for its own sake (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg [1964], Anna Karenina [2012]), our thrill with repetition (Twentieth Century [1934], Edge of Tomorrow [2014])—all Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

4  c i n e m a , i f yo u ple as e these are very long-lived ways of delighting in life, and transcend motion pictures themselves, even if deeply invested in the motion pictures we see. Not that pleasure is always to be understood as an ultimate value. Many were the critical voices ascetically and moralistically proclaiming the drawbacks of delight. Socrates esteems intelligence above pleasure, and notes that “a ‘life of pleasure’ often means a vicious life . . . there may be pleasures of many kinds, and we have no right to assume that all must be good” (Taylor 410.12d). Aristotle declared pleasures “an impediment to thought” (Ethics VII.xi.174). Swinburne mourned, “Alas, that ever I went on Pilgrimage of Pleasure / And wist not what she was” (17). And many, too, are the critical voices addressing cinema today that focus on interpretation of text (notably dialogue and character construction seen through a moral lens), on technical rarefactions, and on biographical detail rather than on the intrinsic pleasures of film watching, the actual transport that the image on the big screen makes possible in the dark chamber filled with strangers. Our attention needs to wander beyond moral and political stricture into the direct impact of aesthetic principles, into a serious reconsideration of what it is to be swept away by film. It is to be confessed that the compositional principles in this book are musical, the chapters intended as rhapsodic dances, each in its own right, and each following from another according to an ordering logic of tone, movement, delicacy, harmony, and rhythm. In short, nothing of reason need prevent a reader from getting at these in any desired sequence, yet the sequence printed here is the one I offer. I do not forbear to hint at, sometimes to cry out, my own biases and proclivities as a watcher of film who is also interested in cultural and aesthetic history. In philosophical consideration, ideas are turned that we may hunt, as it were, the complex crux that holds them in gravity. Ironically, the book opens with a closure, the particularly illuminating but also alienating state of mind we discover in the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as he sits meditating—or catatonically forgetting—in a San Francisco sanatorium chamber. The discussion leads us backward in time, already announcing a vital motif of the book and of this film. Perhaps memory and color can be seen woven with the figure of Scottie, color as it is both seen and remembered and memory as it takes on the color of feeling: certainly the problematized feeling a man like this could endure in such a place at such a time. A musical figure is introduced—prod and high wall, stimulus and blockage. And the material on the page wanders with curiosity through history and through the angles of the screen, considers the pictorial composition but also some origins of such compositions, in a way that both escapes and hopelessly fails to escape the confines of Scottie’s room. More than an explication or theory about Vertigo as a whole, the chapter works to use this film as a way to open thought about what film is and can be for us as we experience it. As Vertigo really cannot be appreciated in its fullness except by watching it in a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

in troductory   5 straightforward manner from beginning to end, so does this chapter-dance work this way, explodable, fragmentable, interruptable to be sure and yet best comprehended when read in a straightforward manner from beginning to end. Every chapter in this book works that way. If blue is a foundational color of the first chapter, red takes over the second, as we weave through a single transitional moment in A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven). Here, the technical understanding we require to facilitate our journey (journey: another elemental theme) involves the colorprinting process the Technicolor Corporation used in the mid-1940s. But what we can learn by working our way through that process, and the transitional moment, has to do with the seemingly contradictory registers of dream and practicality, wish and realization, to which we gain entrance variably in film-watching moments. At issue in this film, but, as this analysis hopes to show, in all films, is the tension between reality and wish. Next follows a patient and, as I would have it, entertaining—­entertainment is the nub of the action—walk through various filmic deployments of the stroll, promenade, and walkabout. How do characters walk through their narratives, if at all, and how does cinema walk with them? This discussion stands upon the history of the pleasure garden and its use, especially in eighteenth-century London. Considered, among numerous other examples, are Antonioni’s The Passenger, Van Sant’s Gerry, and Wenders’s Paris, Texas, so that we may plumb the significance of walkers in the midst of ambulatory engagement. Does the film camera itself actually walk through the world of its narrative? And how does the older practice of finding leisure in the pleasure garden give shape, boundary, and social meaning to the organized act of walking, a practice upon which stands not only contemporary cinema but also the nineteenthcentury phenomenon of the flâneur? An intermezzo opens exploration of what I call the “multiplied narrative.” This is a form, which we can trace back at least to William Hogarth, in which a depiction or account is matched with one or more successive others inside a work, the narrative position changing and our view of the diegetic events shifting in accompaniment. How do we see in greater fullness when we are shown again what we have seen before? The discussion here ranges from Marriage à la Mode to Rashômon to Dutch flower painting to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s fascinating The Barefoot Contessa, a pair of sequences from which are analyzed in great detail, shot by shot. The problem of cinema’s relation to time and our own temporal movement through experience—including the experience of watching a film—is the next invocation, leading to a substantial consideration of two films by Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper. The difficulties of maturing, the challenges of relationship between persons of different ages, and the idea of a Life Voyage all bring light upon a significant history of ­exploratory Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

6  c i n e m a , i f yo u ple as e travel and its foundational aspect for thinking about these films. And if voyaging is a crucial and repetitive node here, what of the ultimate voyage, that leads to mortality? As we think of death, time, and experience we are prepared for a fascinating and long-lived cinematic trope, the ghost story. This chapter moves back in history to examine the voyages of Captain James Cook as exemplary of the conceptual problem of exploration. Finally, and unapologetically, an emotionally tinged consideration of the power of the color green to penetrate the limiting constraints of our taste and carry us beyond ourselves. This analysis, which works to understand Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, among other films, including Clarence Brown’s The Yearling, Joe Wright’s Atonement, and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, brings us back in time yet again, but also moves forward to suggest how of all colors green has a special—transparent and provoking—capacity, quite beyond indication, labeling, and signification, to come alive in the temple of thought. Since the green world is never finished, and since we can never say we are there at its inception, it seems a fitting endroit for bringing these meditations to a cadential silence. An avowed constructional principle is at work throughout, here: that new light can be thrown on the films we love by considering certain culturally established pleasures, that is, socially organized ways of achieving and sharing aesthetic delight, that took form in or just around the eighteenth century. Thus the chapters rove into discussions of Mozartean music (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: 1756–1791); oil painting and the trompe l’oeil still life, in Holland and elsewhere; the English pleasure garden and the public promenade; and travels of exploration, notably the voyages of Captain James Cook, in which navigation and time are interconnected and in which, repeatedly, encounter is made with beautiful strangers in unanticipated new lands. Particular filmic moments reach out across history and touch particular cultural developments, but more broadly speaking film watching as a dominant current cultural act brings pleasures to which we were introduced centuries ago—to the fullnesses of which we have so accustomed ourselves that we no longer notice. There is no sentence in this book that is written to facilitate making a claim: of what we must think cinema is, of the proper way to enjoy it, of some proscriptive, definitive, ultimate diagnosis of cinema and cinemagoing as practices. Instead, these pages contain excursions intended to reveal new colorations, new human forms, new rhythms of understanding, and new locomotions into taste and memory. When we think about what happened we taste the past. When we are sensing taste we are also remembering. Both memory and taste are transient, but what we have is our experience, a succession of transient moments that we must live or neglect at peril. When Spinoza wrote that the man “is indeed always wretched who is united to transient things” (79), he surely meant us to take special note of the word united; to note that transience Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

in troductory   7 and unity are impossible together. It is not in perduring Unity but only in the glory of a moment that one can live, only in tasting or calling up memory, only in sentiment. For myself, I feel unabashed to confess “But I’m sentimental,” just as Roger O. Thornhill does to Eve Kendall, as that train they’re riding moves into the dark. Murray Pomerance Cambridge, Toronto, Brockenhurst, Los Angeles, Melbourne, London, October 2018

Wor k s C i t e d Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. D. P. Chase. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1911. Boswell, James. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763. 2nd ed. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Kermode, Frank. Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Spinoza, Baruch. Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man, & His Well-Being. Trans. and Ed. A. Wolf. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Pilgrimage of Pleasure: Essays and Studies. Boston: Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1913. Taylor, A. E. Plato: The Man and His Work, including The Philebus. New York: Dial Press, 1929. Wolf, A., trans. and ed. Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man, & His Well-Being. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910.

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8  c i n e m a , i f yo u ple as e ch apter 1

Beyond the Sea

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly. Edward Albee, The Zoo Story

H

aving seen a film, as we think back upon it the whole thing is constituted for us something like a dream, with passages standing out clearly and others shuffling away into the mists of loss. It can be useful to think of film obliquely and incompletely in this way, grasping at something the trace of which remains clear and pressing, and finding our way around this moment by circling through the shards and detritus of the explosion of time, that breaks the film apart. We can move into some scene or expression, some musical beat, some arrangement of forms in space, some riddling statement, regardless of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   9 the storyline and regardless of materials that in actual fact surrounded what we wish to focus on, but in retrospect—always we see films in retrospect—has gone. Sometimes the pathway we must follow toward our cherished moment, and beginning with the point in space and time we occupy at present, is a long and twisting path, as though one is obliged to circle around the holy altar many times before finally arriving at the fire within.

F ir s t P r e a mb l e : I A m P r o v o ke d Given that it is surely the case that in watching Vertigo I am provoked, it strikes me, also, that in thinking about Vertigo here and now, thinking about watching it there and then, I am provoked to wonder, “What could it mean to say, ‘In watching Vertigo I am provoked’”? To begin with provocation. Certainly the events depicted onscreen in that 1958 film contribute to a confounding tale or cluster of tales, the work of some dexterous magician, Hitchcock as dazzler. Nor should one be surprised, since he is always a dazzler one way or another, since his magic was plain and entrancing long before this. In Vertigo, there are Hitchcockian tales that swirl vortically (casually invoking Ezra Pound’s vortices and those of Wyndham Lewis’s Blast) and threaten or promise to carry us irretrievably away; and there are tales that deliver us toward precipices of feeling and mortal concern, that raise the stakes on our experience—swiftly and, it seems, without preparation. We are urged to think and experience Vertigo seriously, albeit as in all of Hitchcock yet here more so, because we are directed to reach from the garden to the grave. Forced by the rhythm of the thing (or the rhythms), we dance with the characters, deliriously; swim forward and backward in time and across a rich plateau of evocation, and find ourselves at the end more confused, more caught in shadow than at the (even already mysterious) beginning. As with T. S. Eliot: And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. A circular provocation. The film’s social portraiture, always a passionate concern of this filmmaker, its careful, even anatomical, description of the behavior patterns of men and women in late-1950s America, provokes as well. Who, for instance, is the wraith we come to know as Gavin Elster? What sort of contemporary male do we find exemplified in his potency, his polish, his vague English origins, his unaccountable silences? Or whom do we find in Scottie Ferguson, that brittle old boy with the Midwestern twang and the gracile posture? Or in Pop Leibel, reflecting back into two pasts, that of San Francisco in the nineteenth century and that of his own Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

10  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e European ancestry? Or in that taciturn police chief “from that great city to the north,” or the droning solipsistic coroner who interviews him? But further: who are the inhabitants of the film altogether? The sales personnel at Ransohoff’s as agents of class, so diligent and helpful, so knowledgeable and servile about what their customers want, and so forcibly devoted to providing decorous pleasure? Are they geishas of the new commercial age? How, too, does Hitchcock reflect female life of the time in seductive Madeleine, that strange mannequin? In laborious Midge, whose graphic ability is so fluid, so effortless—like Hitchcock’s? In timid Judy, afraid to stand up tall in her shoes, afraid to look the world in the eye? In the self-possessed landlady at the McKittrick Hotel, nurturingly painting the leaves of her rubber plant with olive oil (my grandmother, also a green thumb, used milk)? In the curious nun at San Juan Bautista, who appears a shadow out of nowhere, a voice without a body, a caller from the other side? As we bond with any of these characters, even for a brief flash of time, what commitment of self do we make; are we obliged to make? And in making such a commitment, how and to what unpredictable end is a viewer borne outside the cell of the self? It is as well to say forthrightly here that the reader will benefit from pausing at this point and viewing the film. Viewing and listening to the film, since so very much of it is music to the ears. I press a step further. The cinephile—hopefully not only an aficionado of film but also someone who has come to know something about its ins and outs, its complexities of construction—can marvel at Hitchcock’s evident and preeminent mastery of expressive form, his shaping of the rise and fall of characterological sensibility and enunciation in any scene; his majestic composition; his careful placement of effects; his grammatical claims and grammatical elisions. He often worked past the limits of his script, on the set; and so reading the scripts will be of little avail in seeing fully what finally is filmed, how it is edited, how the performances are sculpted and given life through the breathing that is implicit in the edits. And he worked with a team of associates devoted not only to the film project at hand but to Hitchcock as filmmaker, so that they would, as a matter of normal course, go a long way out of the way to achieve shots that presented huge expense or challenge. In the redwoods, for example—a scene to which I will return—generators had to be imported from San Francisco for powering the arc lights that were used to give the effect of sunlight streaming down through the trees, arc lights because redwoods are so very tall they cover over the sun hundreds of feet off the ground. The shots had to be made in short bursts, to avoid incendiary risk. The interior of Ernie’s, the restaurant where Scottie first sees Madeleine’s little vortex of sea blue satin popping out against the red flocked wallpaper: this was a set built at Paramount by Henry Bumstead, in loving duplication of one of Hitchcock’s favorite San Francisco joints. The owners came down to participate in the shooting and couldn’t believe where they were; real steak dinners were served! Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   11 Vertigo as obsession about obsession: Chris Marker confesses in Sans soleil that he has seen the film nineteen times, and is addressing himself only to others who have seen it nineteen times, too. The adept who picks up all the clues: first Midge is designing a bra; later Judy has declined to wear one. (Marker also makes the—to me—inane suggestion that Scottie actually dies after the opening sequence.) In all his works Hitchcock is the master who pulls the strings of his puppets, but in Vertigo the sense of puppetry and stringpulling is especially pronounced, almost expressly denotated. Some force lurks behind the movements. The flow is not gestural, like Cyd Charisse’s in “Dancing in the Dark” or Silk Stockings, but more like that of an automaton, De Vaucanson’s animated duck, quacking around a room, leaving little deposits; here the machine presses forward, up the hill, down the hill, into a future that is a past and a past that is a future. Is there not perhaps a sense in which, watching assiduously, we feel puppeted ourselves? Hitchcock is taking us on a journey we did not expect, bringing us an anxiety and a resolution that feels, finally, arbitrary and effective. Effective, not desirable. Is there no alarm in sensing the loss of control implicit in such an arrangement, since in watching other films we exercise our desire as concern and joy, eagerness and hesitation? Because in Vertigo time moves inexorably forward. . . . Or else, another tack altogether: considerably more interested in what lies behind cinematic content, we can be moved to think of this and other films as having a place in Hollywood production history. Vertigo as a 1950s film, set in, and to some degree celebrating, consumer America. Vertigo as one of Hitchcock’s Paramount productions (he was consummately happy working at Paramount); after all, it was a big-budget VistaVision production made at a studio housing a camp-load of enormous moviemaking talents and using the full capacity of the Technicolor laboratory on Romaine Street; big stars; considerable creative genius; and genuine locations in a highly romanticized San Francisco (to recount a story of high romanticization). Could the very existence of this arcane and mystifying, this tidily untidy film be provocative in this way, a kind of colonization or at least an indication of imperial prospects and plots? Yet, forms of provocation aside, I have quite another purpose for the present endeavor, another destination in mind. I want to see the film as a kind of time machine, but I will come to that, shortly.

S ec o nd P r e a m b l e : I n f o r me d I s F or ea r med I offer a summary of the film, because, my advice aside, those who enjoy reading do not lay aside a book to watch a movie, even this movie! (This will be useful only for the reader who has never seen Vertigo.) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

12  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e On a routine police chase a detective named John Ferguson discovers his terrifying fear of heights and accompanying vertigo when, hanging for his life from an eavestrough, he witnesses a uniformed colleague plunge to his death. Soon after, he is set by an old school chum, Gavin Elster, on a mission to trail his wife, who apparently disappears for long hours at a time and seems to “travel” more distance than she herself knows. Scottie, as our hero is known, does proceed to follow Madeleine—a great beauty, full of charm and poise—and in this context watches her secure a bouquet at the florist Podesta Baldocchi and then deliver it to a strange grave in the cemetery of the Mission Dolores, afterward stare at a portrait in Gallery 6 of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and in general appear obsessed with the dead spirit of a Mexican emigrant named Carlotta Valdes. Elster informs Scottie that Carlotta is his wife’s great-grandmother, indeed, and that he believes Madeleine is possessed by that woman’s spirit and thus possibly in line to kill herself, as “the sad” Carlotta did at the same age. When together they visit a redwood forest, Madeleine and Scottie have already fallen in love; and at the Mission San Juan Bautista south of San Francisco, on a mad impulse, Madeleine runs away from him, mounts the bell tower, and plunges to her death. At the subsequent inquest, Scottie is found not guilty although morally culpable because he did nothing to prevent the suicide. Scottie now keeps seeing visions of Madeleine, each rekindling his inconsolable grief: it seems he not only felt much for her but was entirely carried away by her presence, entirely transformed. He lapses into a sort of catatonic silence in a sanatorium overlooking the city. His old girlfriend Midge visits him to no avail. He is lost. One day much later, he sees walking toward him on a sidewalk a woman who brings up strange, sharp memories of Madeleine. He begs permission to spend some time with her. They come to know one another, and he buys her clothes and shoes, arranges for her to have a makeup and hair job, and generally works to bring back, upon the armature of her body, the breathing image of his lost love. SPOILER ALERT. Judy Barton—for that is the girl’s name—waits until she is alone in the hotel room where she lives, then turns brusquely to the camera and confesses (in voiceover, writing a letter to Scottie she never sends) that he has finally found her. She had been in the employ of Elster, who used her in a complicated plot to murder his real wife (whose drugged body he tossed from the tower). But in all this, she did truly love Scottie, and had hoped against hope that he would never find her again (thus bringing the edifice of her painfully tortured, but still enchanted, memory into sudden ruin). She agrees to see him again, but dressing for dinner one evening, she inadvertently displays to Scottie—because she needs help putting it on—a necklace, the same necklace Madeleine wore and that had purportedly belonged to Carlotta. Now he knows. He drags her down to San Juan Bautista and insists on reliving the moment of the crime. But at the top of the bell Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   13 tower, where without warning he has been magically released from his vertigo, and as they clutch in a desperate embrace, Judy is terrified by a sound. She backs away from him and tumbles from the tower for real.

B lu e I s f o r D i s t a n c e More or less in the middle of the film (Vertigo is in some respects all middle, a middle that keeps changing its aspect), one comes upon a passage both fascinating and cryptic, so cryptic indeed that numerous observers have given it contradicting interpretations. A man recovering in a sanatorium is being paid a visit by his old girl. Old, as in long-time: he knows her now, but before our story began they were together in a more romantic, much less clearly defined way. They were engaged to be married, once. The film hints that the break-up was initiated by him. We know her as exceptionally charming, well intentioned, bright, and humorous. Her feet are on the ground, a ground on which towers are erected, a ground out of which redwoods grow. She is a caring and concerned soul, our Midge—Marjorie Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes)—even a little distraught today, because her Johnny—John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), whose old friends call him John and whose acquaintances call him Scottie—having lapsed into a fully uncommunicative state, does not appear to realize she is there. “You don’t even know I’m here, do you?” whispers she, performing what Erving Goffman poignantly calls a “say-for,” the interlocutive technique related to mimicry that we are charmed to use with babies and friendly animals (496ff.) when we articulate their side of a two-part conversation we are forced to play out alone: Johnny being unable to express himself, Midge is putting words in his mouth. But of course her doing this is one more—perhaps a too final—indication of her motherly willingness to do for Scottie what he deeply knows he can do for himself. Yet at the same time, in this particular scene, apparently, Scottie cannot do it, in fact cannot really do anything much for himself at all. On a little record player atop a bureau in his room, Mozart is playing, the second movement (Andante di molto) of his Symphony No. 34 in C, K. 338, and Midge comments on it while her Johnny sits in what appears an absolutely dulled stupor. Leaving his presence and visiting his doctor (Raymond Bailey, who, the year before, had given Grant Williams the bad news that he was getting smaller in Jack Arnolds’s indelible The Incredible Shrinking Man [1957]), Midge is forced to confide—with some horrible resignation, as we feel it—that Johnny’s trouble is caused at least in part because a woman he loved has died. More: he’s still in love with her. And, says our pretty visitor before walking away—walking away from the doctor; walking away from Johnny; walking away from the film, down a long dark corridor toward the daylight Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

14  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e that floods in through a window at the very end (walking away along one side of that corridor so that her shoulder almost brushes against the wall: François Truffaut recreated this space in Fahrenheit 451 [1966])—“One more thing, doctor. I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all.” I deem it important to give fulsome consideration to this scene, without, that is, troubling to wonder how it comes about, or where it is going. When I say “this scene” I do not mean the medical or quasi-medical chat in which the young woman’s deep knowledge of the patient comes onto the doctor’s desk as potentially utile diagnostic information. Nor the confused relationship she bears with the patient, who went to college with her before the movie began, came to her place of succor (her design studio) when, recovering from a life-altering bout of acrophobia and vertigo that involved his helplessly witnessing the death of a man, he needed to “get back on his feet” again and it became clear that “getting back on one’s feet” is no simple matter. Nor the inexpressible charm of the sanatorium visitor, her artful bearing, her cautious but meticulous language, her sweet, clean, overwhelmingly refreshing good looks (her unrelentingly refreshing good looks). Nor even the patient’s apparent catatonia, the dull glazed stare in the green-blue eyes. Not the medicinal quality of the place, not the perfunctory flowers, not the window giving onto nothing our patient could care about. Not—to go on—Johnny’s indubitably pressing memory (and ours) that the woman of his dreams, the present corpse, Madeleine, a balletic sylph with platinum hair and a long white coat, a whisperer to ghosts, an inhabitant of the evermore, a provocateuse if ever one lived, who taunted him with her perfection, gazed at him with a ferocious beckoning: not his memory that she is dead. That in front of his eyes she plummeted from a mission tower, the bloodcurdling scream as she went down still ringing in his innermost ear (the site of his balance) as he sits motionless in his chair, grasping the armrest hopelessly, and being reduced, apparently, so that he senses himself as no one and senses his world as nothing. Nor that, being overwhelmingly in love with Madeleine, he possessed at the time, and can retain now, no clue as to how he became the man he had to be for that bonding to happen. One event, one courtesy simply followed another, or so it seemed. And we can imagine him replaying the chain of events over and over, every reinstatement ending with the horrific, terminating Fall, the abyss. Hitchcock has Scottie—and his viewer—look down into that abyss, a red ceramic-tiled Spanish style roof, the body splayed upon it, trees receding in the distance. All angles, perspective, graphic composition, with the tiny vanquished figure as horrifying punctum (see Barthes). I also do not wish here to trouble a reflection that some old school chum of Scottie’s, materialized without warning out of the distant past, complained to him of anxiety regarding his strangely errant wife: that she spent long hours Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   15 away from him, that she took herself on mysterious journeys. Or that this man, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), cajoled Scottie into doing one more little job just for him (in a prototype of the oft-turned trope of police procedurals today, in which some charming but retired cop comes back for just one more time), Scottie who might love to have been safely and happily retired from detective work but was mentally still hanging from the eavestrough high above the ground, fragile Scottie, not quite so young Scottie, Scottie almost over the hill, perhaps indeed over the hill, Scottie a mere husk of his former self: just, please, the one little task of tailing the wife, that intriguing Lost One—only so that questions can be answered, only so that out of doubt and wondering knowledge can be produced and provided. Not that. And writing at this moment, I am but scarcely interested, too, in the fact that at Ernie’s, prior to attending the opera, Madeleine rose up from a table with great majesty and caught Scottie’s eye, a living jewel in a malachite-trimmed gown gliding through a blood-red room. Or that the next morning, as his car took the streets of San Francisco behind hers, she turned a lot of corners, perhaps one or two corners too many. One corner after the next, at any rate, until an enlightening moment when, peering at her secretively through the back door of a flower shop that seemed like very Paradise, he was . . . caught. Caught, hooked, snared, netted, mesmerized, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Beautiful Thing. I will come back to all these issues—I will initiate a Return—but they do not trigger my thought at present. At present they do not inspire me. None of the love, the murdered love, the liebestod—since at the very moment of its apex she was “gone forever”—is sufficient to catch me when I reflect that there is something else in that sanatorium, something I might hope to call “purely Hitchcockian.” Something subtle and at once huge, mysterious, and plainly open. What is the word?—provocative. Something no one but Hitchcock could have inserted into this film in this moment, that is, this clearly therapeutic moment. It is that, accompanying us in the cramped room, assisting our breathing, giving us the phrasing by which we can daydream our thoughts and take in words, however intangible they may at first seem, Mozart finds himself literally and bluntly invoked. “Mozart’s not going to help at all.” It is the fact that as Scottie rests himself and the trauma of Vertigo reaches its apogee, the magical word we hear is not “Scottie,” not “search,” not “Madeleine,” not “death,” not “love,” not “sorrow,” but: “Mozart.” Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791). A man of the eighteenth century. An icon of the eighteenth century. To see this classical presence more fully, it is necessary to list some evidential clues provided in this scene to prepare us properly for eventual plotted unfoldings: (a) Johnny’s bereftness is not just medically or constitutionally serious. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

16  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e First, the doctor does not consult with us, and we do not see the file. Next, we do not see Johnny more generally in his debilitation, so we cannot estimate the extent to which he has had the wind taken out of his sails. But the debilitation is certainly of such a magnitude that he has been hospitalized for it; nervous “disorders” were big in the 1950s as a stimulus for “treatment” of various kinds. It helps to remember the critical perception of Thomas Szasz: Until recently, the pathologist’s diagnosis, which always trumped the clinician’s, was considered to be the correct name of the disease that ailed or killed the patient. However, postwar developments in medical technology and the provision of health care services shifted the focus of nosology from postmortem to antemortem diagnoses, and from the patient’s body to the body politic. . . . Today, the identification of bodily abnormalities in living persons, making use of an array of sophisticated tools, is a highly developed science. . . . Today, there are no great diagnosticians. The sought-after physicians are now the great therapists, typically virtuoso surgeons or wizards of psychopharmacology. . . . Psychiatric metaphors play the same role in our therapeutic society that religious metaphors have played and continue to play in theological societies. (21–22; 28) Szasz continues, more or less ruminating on the condition in which Scottie finds himself: “Both Christianity and Islam affirm the existence of a life after death, and many people say they believe in such a life. . . . If a person believes in life after death, his conviction is not likely to be dispelled” (28), and refracting, too, an astute observation of Stanislaw Lem’s: “On the whole, people tend to trust too much in the evidence of their senses; if they should happen to see a deceased acquaintance in public, they would sooner believe in a resurrection than admit to their own insanity” (126). Of course, as we eventually learn about Scottie, it is resurrection by his own hand in which he believes; and his Madeleine, lost and found, dead and alive again, is no mere acquaintance. His grief has become a disease, at any rate. The fact that we are given a succinct but definitive view of the medical institution itself, high on a secluded street in Twin Peaks, and below which the city spreads upon the Bay, offers no such clear-cut view of the broader medical establishment, no way of seeing that it could guarantee to provide a cure (and of course it cannot). This disease may prove terminal. To its victim it is certainly overwhelmingly oppressive. In sum: Do not take Scottie or this scene lightly. (b) From the symptoms we can see, Johnny’s state of mind can be described as one of complete and unmodified isolation, implosion, and self-trapping, to the degree that no gesture or sung phrase from Midge has any apparent effect on his neutral gaze. Has he lost his hearing; has he gone blind with grief (his eyes barely move). He may well be an Orpheus nouveau, staring into the abyss Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   17 for his lost Eurydice. Hence Hitchcock’s carefully considered portrait shots of Stewart, from above his left side, as he sits stolidly unflinching in his chair. The camera—that is, Hitchcock and also the viewer—is positioned to be Scottie’s self-reflective ego. Julian Jaynes, noting how “speech, as has been long known, is a function of the left cerebral hemisphere. But song, as we are presently discovering, is primarily a function of the right cerebral hemisphere,” goes on to point out that “stroke patients who have hemorrhages on the left side of the cortex cannot speak, but still can understand” (365; 107). Johnny is cast as an object, his former incarnation now dissolved. The pleasant personality, the cozy wit, the anxious desperation, the confusion of love—all these seem vanished into thin air. Nor can we feel sure in making a reading from his superficial blankness to any conceivable internal state, except by imagining that special internal blankness I have described. In his “Breakdown” for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (13 November 1955), the filmmaker elaborated on the discontinuity between observable symptoms and internal sensations, with an accident victim (Joseph Cotten) presumed to be dead until at the very last moment a tiny, redeeming tear is seen descending from one of his eyes. (c) Now as always, faithfully but also hopelessly, Midge loves Johnny. He thinks—he has convinced himself—(as we happened to learn earlier) that she was the one to break off their engagement; but a look on her tender face— shown from above again, and to her right, as it was in her studio when the topic of marriage came up (see Rothman)—shows plainly that it was him. It was always him. Him and only him. She is ready to try anything to help now, within the bounds of grace and propriety (we saw the quality and extent of her love in that early studio scene, and also that Scottie did not manage to reciprocate). But here hopeful Midge is given no reason to hope for his recovery. She hopes beyond reason. Her exit from the film, at the end of this sequence, carries with it a powerful sense of evacuation: of hope as of presence, of systematic procedure as of chance, and of logic as much as music, since she stands for hope, presence, procedure, chance, logic, and music, just as, in its bizarre way, does the institution in which she (it would seem she, since he could not operate on himself) has worked to place him. To follow the developments of Hitchcock’s story—that is, in order that certain story points, as he makes them arise, might seem entirely logical and coherent with what has gone before; to the degree that we not pull out or angle ourselves by not quite understanding—it is necessary that we know all this, and therefore it is given to us. Hitchcock is relentlessly purposeful, an architect of narrative, who builds his moments on a substructure artfully put in place in advance (and before our eyes and ears), the way that in symphonic construction every note, every chord, is prepared by what comes before. The sanatorium scene culminates Hitchcock’s construction of Vertigo thus far (a construction that climaxed with Madeleine’s death and the coroner’s verdict Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

18  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e upon it) and establishes groundwork for his construction to come. The principle of erecting a story upon a base, establishing the viewer’s conviction so that an elegant structure of belief may stand upon it, is always fundamental to the Hitchcockian plan. He builds the continuity of the film, puts his markers not only in place but in proper syntactical order. So it is that in the Palace of the Legion of Honor, with Scottie (in search of Madeleine and walking into the gallery where she sits) being stunned by a painting on the wall, Hitchcock has taken pains that the work should be, of all possibilities, Charles-André (Carle) Vanloo’s Architecture (1752–1753), which shows three little boys pointing to an architect’s elevation of Madame de Pompadour’s Château de Bellevue, near Meudon. This painting is one of a quartet, Allegories of the Arts, depicting Painting, Sculpture, and Music as well; all four of them are in the collection of the Palace, but Hitchcock arranged for this particular one to be on the wall as Stewart moved into the room. This painting will reappear here soon, but for now let us rest with the observation that an architect has placed it in frame to signal the presence of architecture. (d) It is in our hearing that Midge informs the doctor about Scottie’s dead lover. That is, we are present not for the outcome nor for the impetus but for this moment itself, and we hear her tone and see the registration on the doctor’s attentive face. The informing is a technical requirement of the script, because Johnny isn’t talking to the sanatorium personnel any more than to Midge, there being therefore no other way for the doctor to come into the knowledge (whether or not, in this case, knowing will make any difference). Unless by some bridging method they could gain the information (that we already have), the authorities will never know about Madeleine, never be in position to estimate the lost relationship as causative. Yet, interestingly, we do not see the doctor (or any other member of staff) estimating Scottie’s lost relationship. But a Hitchcockian rule of narrative is being invoked. Since the doctor is being brought into Midge’s sphere of reaction; and since we already sympathize and bond with her; and since any hope we may cherish of bonding, still, with Scottie is challenged by his present condition, then if she shares her knowledge or intuition we must be present to see the sharing. The doctor cannot know anything beyond what we know him knowing. The doctor is not the grounding point of the arrangement of characters here; Midge is. And Midge is with us. The point isn’t that the doctor will now do something (although of course he might: Scottie does actually get freed of this place). The point is that Midge needs to share what she thinks: what she thinks, and what we already know. We know more, in fact, than she thinks, about Scottie’s love, because we were there to watch it and she was only at a distance. That she seems to know as much about Scottie and Madeleine as we do is Hitchcock’s way of indicating her totally irrational closeness to him, her feelingful association. She can read Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   19 Scottie’s mind, and she knows that the poor diagnosticians here actually cannot. If in her lay diagnosis Midge is correct that Madeleine is weighing on the sick man now, in such a way that he cannot escape from the gravity of his grief, she is likely right in supposing that he will never be cured without reference to Madeleine; yet soon after, for Hitchcock’s larger creation to play out, the part of the story he is just on point of beginning to relate to us, Johnny must be seen to have vacated this facility and to move about the city (as “himself” again). We must thus be in a position to conclude that Midge’s information did lead to some sort of “cure.” Her information or her music. She came to cure him and she succeeded, but only through some process so very indirect we can only desire to surmise it. Then, last, (e): John’s room itself, by contrast with every other dramaturgical space in this very elaborate film, is almost inconceivably dull, proportionately strict (and strictured), and without flair, just as he now seems to be. The place is the person. Placid, even tedious, in the corridor outside of which no interesting (if potentially distracting) action occurs, it is a space that is pretty but without character. In any such grounding, Hitchcock knew, characterizations risk standing out too forcefully, almost as caricatures. To give more texture to the scene it can’t hurt for some pleasant music to fill the “conversational” background. The volume isn’t turned up, and the music is far from intrusive, but it works to measure out the scene and give it temporal balance. As long as some background music is necessary in a scene played this way, lest the dead pauses seem too sharp, too discontinuous, a piece more or less like this one is dramaturgically inevitable or, at the very least, useful. But—and this is the but that opens the door to Hitchcock, in my view: In order to further the story as we have it, the sanatorium sequence does not require a specific notification of the presence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an open indication that he is the one who wrote this music, or that, by virtue of what he has written, it is he who is so oddly present in Johnny’s room. Nor, of course, does the sequence require the use of Mozart’s music in the first place, since so much other music was at hand of the sort Midge might have delivered with the best intent. The music, as we hear it, is Mozart’s presence. Midge is acknowledging that Mozart—not Mozart’s symphony—is here. Midge, who has been declared a woman with two feet on the ground; a believer in realities, not ghosts. Midge the realist, who evinces a mocking, or at least questioning, attitude to Madeleine’s tales of being possessed—precisely the tales that are engaging and entrapping Johnny (whom Midge would prefer not to lose). Midge, the efficient and effective commercial artist with acute perceptual skill (we see the sketch she is making for a bra ad, and it is accomplished). Midge, the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

20  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e knowledgeable one, who can help Scottie, when he is clouded over by doubts and queries about the past, by introducing him to Pop Leibel (Konstantin Shayne), an expert, albeit pedantic, who might very well know “who killed who on the Embarcadero in August of 1879.” Pop is, yes, the exact sort of person who could tell Scottie what he wants to know, and his bookshop, as it turns out, is the exact site of the information that a person with Scottie’s sort of question would most need. If Pop’s clues are arbitrary ones, and if because of Midge’s recommendation to go to him Scottie is now set upon a wild goose chase after the chief presence in Pop’s story, the roving spirit of Carlotta Valdes, no matter: the point is only, and squarely, that Midge is practical as well as adorable. When Johnny has an important question, she has the direct answer. She knows the city, knows the sort of people who know its history, knows her Johnny and can see plainly enough that he is being seduced. So when this very Midge, of all people, says she doesn’t think Mozart’s going to help, she speaks from the most stable position given to us in this film and we are obliged to listen. To repeat: Mozart’s not going to help. Mozart, not Mozart’s symphony. (It may be mentioned briefly that Mozart has been thought “helpful” for some time, notably in silent cases like Scottie’s. “Mozart, more than any other composer, prepared the path, primed the nervous system, primed the brain— wired the brain—and gave it the rhythms, melodies, flow, and movement required for the acquisition of language” [Doidge 350–51].) And when Midge sighs that Mozart isn’t going to help, she certainly does mean to be pointing to “the Mozart,” that is, the particular piece Johnny may be listening to, and by extension music itself as a form of psychological therapy, especially classical music (music of the classical—rather than the baroque or the romantic—era). She also means—undeniably—Mozart, the individual. Not the Mozart implicit in the music as a compositional force but the Mozart behind it as a human being, the one who gave his breath to make the symphony sing. We may recall that there has been no single moment in the film where Midge speaks without precision and clarity. Nothing would have prevented her from telling the doctor, for instance, “That Mozart he’s playing isn’t going to help Johnny at all.” Or, “That music in his room.” Or even, “Music”: “He’s beyond music, Doc. Music won’t help.” She invokes, instead, “Mozart.” As though for her he’s there in much the same way that Carlotta was there for Madeleine; and that Madeleine is still there for Johnny. Midge means that Mozart is there when she says—specifically regarding John Ferguson—that he’s not going to help at all. But of course for Midge, or anyone else, it could make no sense to say this unless one hoped and anticipated that Mozart might have helped. Mozart might or should have been able to help, but now, unfortunately, Johnny has traversed a boundary and Mozart’s help is out of the question. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   21

M o z ar t Mozart, then. My present inquiry into Vertigo presses and springs from Midge’s observation about him. Why, after all, Mozart for her to point to? Why must it be he of all hopeless saviors who won’t be able to help; Mozart, indeed, who might ever imaginably have done so? Who is Johnny, that Mozart and only Mozart should have been his redemption, at least in Midge’s plan? And a corollary question: who is Midge, to have gifted Scottie that Mozart? Midge, to have trusted in Mozart and believed in his powers? Who are John “Scottie” Ferguson and Marjorie Wood in this secluded, bright little room, with Mozart circulating around them? Could Mozart in the film be an invocation of the eighteenth century, or indeed could he be anything else? The eighteenth was his time, he knew no other. And the time, the cultural era, as it wound forward, became increasingly Mozartean, in the sense that a meticulous arrangement of social order came to dominate various forms of experience. Could we think of Vertigo as a problematization of Johnny’s too contemporary presence, his inept confrontation with a brazenly modern world, played out through his intrinsic eighteenth-century sensibility and that of the old girlfriend in whom he confides? Is Midge now, and was Johnny back when they were together, a person of method, order, rigor, sensibility, measure, proportion, and cultivation herewith brought face to face with experiences that incite confusion, disorientation, boundless agony, and peremptory challenge? If Madeleine is in truth agonized by Carlotta — and Johnny/Scottie, on her tail, agonized in love with Madeleine — must not the extremely rational and proportionate Midge be thrown into chaos and pain as she watches Johnny face the agony? A momentary retreat to Vanloo’s Architecture: This canvas is, among other things, an essay on blue. It is the only painting among the Allegories of the Arts where a regal and intensive ultramarine blue is used in a dominant fashion, a blue that suggests stasis, limitlessness, termination. For Goethe, distance and attraction (151). Vanloo’s Sculpture has a blushing young figure—all four paintings use children, whose facial features, it has been claimed, are so similar it is possible only a single model was used (see Rosenberg and Stewart 305)—chiseling a marble bust in front of a window that has been opened to a blue sky, but the sky is pale, receding, dreamy. The young sculptor’s yellow robe is wrapped with a pale blue sash: again, not the powerful darker blue of Architecture. In Painting, a blushing young artist, again dressed in yellow and pale blue, sports a dark blue cap as he touches up a canvas. His sitter poses in front of a blue-grey drapery. The cap is close to the right blue, but in the canvas itself this area of coloration is small and hardly distinctive, so the color is not pronounced. A similar arrangement of the same drapery exists in Music, where a similarly undistinctive patch of the dark blue Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

22  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e appears in the upholstery of the chaise on which the pianist sits. The royal ultramarine is in Vanloo’s palette, but he is sparing with it in all three canvases that margin, and are not on display with, Architecture. But in Architecture, Hitchcock’s choice for the film, the dominating youth, the one whose gestural declaration attracts our attention to the Château in the drawing his chums are holding, is garbed entirely in this dark, alluring blue. A blue that radiates confrontation and nobility, postural complacency and richness. A blue in which navigational perception is swamped, analytical thought riddled, localizing perspective confounded, but in the name of a greater perspective, thought, and perception, which conspire to involve the purity of the gaze and the deep love of form. In the sanatorium scene, this is the blue of Johnny’s cardigan, but his is darker still, richer with color to the point of obscurity. To stare at his torso is to lose a sense of space. The Vanloo paintings date from the middle of the eighteenth century. The artist’s use of children posing in clever fabrications suggests them as the allegories they claim to be, removes the intentionality and seriousness of the posers from the power of the acts upon which they are engaged: demonstration, arrangement, beautification, construction, and articulation, all fundaments of the Enlightenment approach to civil life. But Johnny, it would appear (since he wears the blue), holds all these values high, and Midge (who has likely brought the sweater: Scottie’s choice in his home was a rich teal) is herself involved in his commitment. If his police history was modern in its relentless encounter with criminality, its penchant for categorization and placement, its confrontation with strangers, its urbanity, its play with darkness, still he is a man who has assimilated a desire for arranging and demonstrating, for seeking demonstrations from others, for appreciating displays and telling arrangements: as we shall see he is a contemporary figure built upon the framework of an eighteenth-century personality. He seeks beauty and inhabits its precincts. The construction of cases fascinates him, as does the construction of historical accounts. Order, perspective, illumination all swarmed over by movement, darkness, hopelessness. When he comes to Gallery 6 of the Palace of the Legion of Honor to locate Madeleine, and stops to look at the Vanloo canvas on the wall, can we find Scottie’s interest surprising, given the picture’s open invocation of principles for which he has clearly been demonstrated to stand? The château that the little pointer is pointing to has a pronouncement of verticality (even mirrors some aspects of the exterior of the Palace) and in his terrors with height Johnny has already been shown proximate to architectural challenge. It is through architectural science that men have conspired to build heights. But the boy in the painting is pointing like a detective: like a person who sees detail or aspect in a picture and wants to demonstrate it to his friends. And Johnny’s presence in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   23 the film is consistently arranged so that, like this boy, he makes demonstrations to us. He is a blue boy pointing the way.

G al l e r y Writing in his London diary on Saturday, 26 February 1763, James Boswell gives report of a late conversation, the night beforehand, with the “agreeable,” “skeptical,” and “serious” George Dempster M.P. Dempster’s considerations of thought and experience, transmitted to, and then by, the articulate and intensively self-reflective Boswell are fascinating to read in light of Hitchcock’s treatment in Vertigo of the thought and experience of John Ferguson. “He said he intended to write a treatise on the causes of happiness and misery,” Boswell begins: He considered the mind of man like a room, which is either made agreeable or the reverse by the pictures with which it is adorned. External circumstances are nothing to the purpose. Our great point is to have pleasing pictures in the inside. To illustrate this: we behold a man of quality in all the affluence of life. We are apt to imagine this man happy. We are apt to imagine that his gallery is hung with the most delightful paintings. But could we look into it, we should in all probability behold portraits of care, discontent, envy, languor, and distraction. (203) In their qualities, the paintings latterly described in the Boswell perfectly befit the Portrait of a Gentleman [Victor-Marie d’Estrées] (1710), by Nicolas de Largillière, which hangs adjacent the Vanloo Architecture before Scottie’s gaze. A bewigged figure in a long golden robe sits aware of the portraitist, and signals with a pointing finger (as do so many of the sitters for Largillière). What may be thought signally applicable to Vertigo in the Boswell recollection and summary—applicable and referential in the sense of producing an ­inspiration—is the thought that the Gallery in the Palace of the Legion of Honor might be taken as an indication of Scottie’s mind in itself. The dignity of the figure in Largillière’s Duc d’Estrées, the intoxicating blue of the boy’s garb in the Vanloo; the express pointing gesture of both Vanloo’s boy and Largillière’s Duc (surely a convention of portraiture at the time, yet also a signal in Hitchcock’s scene); the distinct address to architecture and to prominence of façade; the very idea of building a structure and of pointing to that idea—all these may figure with Scottie not as mere glancing observations of the surround but as fixed ideas “hung” in his “gallery,” just as the painted indices of these ideas are indeed hung in the gallery where he stands. In that sanatorium chamber, Johnny is listening or not listening to a Mozart Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

24  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e composition in C major (in some ways the most reductive of keys). While in the film no stipulation is made explicitly about that fact, the nature of the key of C, its given identity, resonates through—and infects—the scene. C means regularity and simplicity, even a kind of emptiness. It is to musical sound what the perfectly proportioned façade of the Château is to architecture, a profound balance offsetting any and all indispositions. The key of C seems to make a plain and unfettered announcement of prospect and orientation, as though to point to the world with undecorated implication or to state a case in unambiguous forthrightness. But C is also the most elementary of keys, that of the first scale a child learns to play (since it contains white notes only, a mechanical reduction of the keyboard), thus an appropriate key for such as the model(s) of Carle Vanloo. The eighteenth century, a period of delicious simplicity and elegant form, a period in which the culture we know began to unfurl with civic arrangements, new class consciousness, aesthetic proprieties, trompe l’oeil, dramatic performance—all the elements in the broth of Vertigo. I am taking it that the recording we hear with Scottie is not the property of his genteel nurse (June Jocelyn), nor of that down-to-business doctor, nor of Scottie himself, whose comfortable little abode is outfitted, as we saw already by this juncture, with no appurtenances of sound beyond his telephone (with its too jarring ring—Elster could not restrain himself from calling to see how his wife is, and the phone awakens her in Scottie’s bed: or does this Elster in fact know how this Madeleine is, and is he telephoning in order to jostle Scottie stunned by his mirage?). Midge, however, may well have left this recording on an earlier visit, so that the nurse could have it playing now. The comment to Johnny, “I had a long talk with the lady in musical therapy, and she said Mozart’s the boy for you. . . . The broom that sweeps the cobwebs away,” seems to evidence her role in the acquisition and presentation of this music, in the invocation of the late 1700s. Midge, then: designer of Johnny’s interior. Midge whose very first introduction to us, in her richly larded studio, with flowers and paintings jammed all around, was made to the tune of Johann Christian Bach’s Andante con sordini (the second movement) from his Sinfonia in E-flat major. Vertigo tells a very contemporary, a very jazzy story, full of abstractions and missing references and allusions; but Midge and Johnny are a pair of old-fashioned folk, inheritors of the legacy of a clearer, more ornate but also simpler age. David Cooper, who has given us a serious analysis of the entire musical treatment in Vertigo, quotes the editor of the Eulenberg score for the Bach piece, Fritz Stein, on the qualities that beset the ear as first we encounter Midge in a chatty conversation with her Johnny. Stein describes the music as “a cabinet piece of the most gracile rococo art” (qtd. in Cooper 71). Through this music, Midge is swiftly but subtly described as a woman with a certain classical (surely premodern, definitely preromantic) sensibility: Elisabeth Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   25 Weis notes the “hallmarks of Hitchcock’s treatment of music in his classical style,” including “his use of familiar music to define a character” (90). As to the rococo in Midge’s personal gallery (I am grateful to Brian Cookson of the Wallace Collection in London for clarifying the meaning of “rococo” for me): the rococo period is the early eighteenth century, the realm of Louis XV—a time iconized in many ways by the style and manners of Madame de Pompadour. Emphasis in rococo art is on the absence of straight lines and the roots of form in the natural world: in the Vanloo painting, for example, the curling dispositions of the bodies as made distinct from the rectilinear sanctity of the drawing. The baroque period, of the seventeenth century (Louis XIV), had featured impressive classical architecture with an imposing orientation: in that Vanloo canvas, the picture-within-the-picture. The painting itself is a rococo dispensation of the baroque. Interestingly, we can see in Midge and Johnny a predilection for, or at least an interest in, the baroque as well as the rococo, her bra drawing, which captivates Scottie’s interest, boldly exhibiting an “impressive architecture” in an “imposing orientation” while at the same time—and this is emphasized by her facial expressions and our view of her shapely body as she works—articulating adherence to the natural roots of the form. If Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was definitively baroque, his son Johann Christian (1735–1782) falls neatly under the rococo banner. But for Midge and her sensibility, the critical distinction to make is between music like this and the modernist inventiveness of the neo-Wagnerian score by Bernard Herrmann which backs most of the movement in the film. Midge is out of tune with the film in a particular way invoked openly and structurally by the film itself. Through the use of the Bach in her studio and the Mozart at the sanatorium we sense on the sound track miniature dramas-within-the-drama; pointed and delicate references to the characters’ sensibility and way of experien­cing. Hitchcock had notated his concerns to Herrmann (who, with the help of Paramount’s head of music at the time, Roy Fjastad, would have been responsible for everything musical to be heard in the film): “An important factor [in Midge’s apartment] is the contrast between the dramatic music over the Rooftops and the soft, totally different quality of the background music” (qtd. in Cooper 71). Key word, “dramatic,” which describes all the music written by Herrmann for the film. “Dramatic” describes late romanticism as well as the prefiguration of modern life, in which shock, dislocation, emphatic expression gain sway. The “contrast” that Hitchcock wanted would have the effect of bringing us “in,” that is, permitting access to the inner, very composed nature of Midge and Johnny’s lives before the encounter with Elster. When we consider the expressed formality of both the Bach Midge plays and the Mozart she touts, the openness of the skeletal arrangement, its simple nudity—especially, perhaps, that of the Mozart since it is heard more Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

26  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e ­ istinctively on the sound track; and when we think through the stylistic d formality of Midge (her gracious withholding of comment or subtle indications during the studio scene), her delicious sense of propriety (the way she tears at her own hair to berate herself after producing a painting that brings Johnny to the depths of disappointment), even the clarity and directness of her commercial art, it becomes possible to think that hers is now, and has long been, a vitally premodern way of being in the world. She is out of key with the main events of the Scottie-Madeleine tale, dressed with more (and more natural) color, more passionately connected to graphic form, more logical in her estimations. And hers is a strong personality, the sort that, if Johnny had been spending considerable time with her, would have produced influence. It is not, after all, because she alone loves Mozart that she thinks to offer it to him in his agony; it is because she has taught Johnny to love Mozart, too. The tense and thrusting story of the ghost possession and Scottie’s love are all, by contrast, dramatically postclassical, underlaid with swelling and ebbing passion in the romantic style (like the crashing waves at Cypress Point, which background his and Madeleine’s Klimptian kiss). The possession and the love are caught up, too, in a violent maelstrom of spinning fragmentations, halfrecountings, black fears, anxious hesitations, and, of course, as it turns out, foxy fabrication. If Midge has a classical sensibility—let us call it an eighteenth-century sensibility—and if Johnny was once her beau, it is not difficult to imagine that he, too, was once a man of another age. I think his eccentricity—his outof-placeness—will account for the sudden, almost time-traveling fascination he shows, however briefly, with the Vanloo and Largillière paintings, the sort of fascination that snatches concentration away from the present and repositions it in the past, bringing a man to something he knew with great familiarity, there, then, once before, but subsequently abandoned. What may be seen to draw his eye especially is the precise blue primarily featured in Architecture, with Largillière’s plump Gentleman’s hand pointing expressly to it.

F e e l i n g B l ue As I have mentioned, with less luminosity and greater depth, thus deeper allure, this blue is the color of the sweater John is wearing in the sanatorium. “This colour,” writes Goethe, “has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful, but it is on the negative side and in it highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose” (170–71). Through most of the film John/Johnny/Scottie is dressed in warm tones—brown, a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   27 soothing gray—but here in the therapy ward, shockingly for the viewer’s eye, he is presented in a stormy oceanic blue now tamed, a blue that calls up a man wholly different from the contemporary cop. John’s blue in the sanatorium, like the blue in the Vanloo at the gallery, is a blue that is distant, removed from the present vivacity of life, removed from the immemorial past that haunts it, removed from action, removed from all the warmth of life. Here are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza making their entrance in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real (1953): QUIXOTE (ranting above the wind in a voice which is nearly as old): Blue is the color of distance! SANCHO (wearily behind him): Yes, distance is blue. QUIXOTE: Blue is also the color of nobility. SANCHO: Yes, nobility’s blue. QUIXOTE: Blue is the color of distance and nobility, and that’s why an old knight should always have somewhere about him a bit of blue ribbon . . . (He jostles the elbow of an aisle-sitter as he staggers with fatigue; he mumbles an apology.) SANCHO: Yes, a bit of blue ribbon. QUIXOTE: A bit of faded blue ribbon, tucked away in whatever remains of his armor, or borne on the tip of his lance, his—unconquerable lance! It serves to remind an old knight of distance that he has gone and distance he has yet to go . . . Quixote and Sancho’s meditation invokes, more than blue itself, the very idea of meditating, and of giving a color this kind of speculation. Nobility’s blue, indeed. Blue thoughts, blue fascinations, blue truths. If blue is the color of nobility and distance, how can it be anything but right for the John Ferguson who sits atop James Stewart? William Gass’s many observations about blue work to position it: The shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and c­ ensorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity. (3–4) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

28  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Blue, says Gass, “is the color seen in all functions which are related to the cosmic or atmospheric” (34). But Vertigo’s blue has still another quality: it is an exquisite accompaniment to other colors. Midge’s studio has been painted a slightly grayed ochre yellow, and visiting there early in the film Scottie is wearing warm colors (a brown suit) to meld in with the surround. The rich dark blue, however, makes a perfect color contrast; it fits elegantly as accent and definer, escape and address, concentration and release. (Scottie himself wears a navy striped tie.) We may imagine this blue as part of Midge’s deep intelligence, the blue that undergirds the sunny world in which she works (she possesses a folding screen painted this rich dark blue in high gloss, and a cabinet of the same color resting beside it); and we may think, easily enough, that the blue sweater in the sanatorium scene has emanated from this blue consciousness, this ocean of solidary shade in which Midge dreams. It is her concern that Johnny should wear it. She dressed him in a reinvocation of the ultramarine in the Vanloo painting; arranged the Mozart to play under the scene; brings in her gait the classical attitude, that earnest conviction that a “cure” will be found for the patient’s “malady.” Is Johnny inhabiting a “blue period” and is blue the color of his cure? On maladies and cures, here once more is Boswell near the end of January 1763: This afternoon, by taking too much physic, I felt myself very ill. I was weak. I shivered, and I had flushes of heat. I began to be apprehensive that I was taking a nervous fever, a supposition not improbable, as I had one after such an illness when I was last in London. I was quite sunk. I looked with a degree of horror upon death. Some of my intrigues which in high health and spirits I valued myself upon now seemed to be deviations from the sacred road of virtue. My mind fluctuated, but grew more composed. I looked up to the beneficent Creator. I was resigned and more easy, and went to bed in hope. (172) Is our Johnny not also “quite sunk,” and does he not look “with a degree of [silent] horror” upon all that is miserable and hopeless in this world? Normally a socially chatty man, he has taken himself into a “blue” zone far from language, a denial of the word and the Word. On ultramarine: Victoria Finlay reminds us that in the Renaissance, ultramarine was “the most expensive of colours except for gold” (310). Deriving from the Italian oltromarino (beyond the sea), it was “made of the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli.” And all the real ultramarine in Western art came from “one set of mines in a valley in north-west Afghanistan, collectively called Sar-e-sang, the Place of the Stone. It was where the Buddha’s topknots Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   29 came from; it was where the monk painters of illuminated manuscripts found their skies” (313). One may think of the 1483 trompe l’oeil masterpiece of Girolamo da Cremona, a page “torn out” and floating upon a blue-emphasized Bacchanalian realm of cavorting satyrs, a mysterious cave, a blue blue clouded sky. As to John’s blue, the water, and the sky: Finlay also writes of the ­nineteenth-century British thinker John Tyndall, who “took his holidays in the Alps,” a place where “the sky was clear enough to think about”: Think of an ocean, he would say, and think of the waves crashing against the land. [You think, too, Reader, please, as you pause here, of Cypress Point, where Hitchcock shows the blue waves crashing and Scottie is fully lost to Madeleine.] If they came across a huge cliff then all the waves would stop; if they met a rock then only the smaller waves would be affected; while a pebble would change the course of only the tiniest waves washing against the beach. This is what happens with light from the sun. Going through the atmosphere the biggest wavelengths—the red ones—are usually unaffected, and it is only the smallest ones—the blue and violet ones—which are scattered by the tiny pebble-like molecules in the sky, giving the human eye the sensation of blue. (337) The “sensation of blue”: blue for distance, blue for sensation. Motion pictures are always sensational, Vertigo in some special ways. Blue is imperial, color of the sea, thus the color of voyages (Scottie is a voyager par excellence), the color of the unobtainable, of that for which one must travel across the highest mountains and over the world (the idea of bringing Madeleine back to life). Again to align Midge the painter (Midge, as we see by her self-portrait, the sufficiently accomplished painter) with the eighteenth-century vision: Vanloo’s canvas entitled Painting, not explicitly shown in Vertigo, is in fact invoked there subtly. The nude female body, to be seen in the Vanloo but as manifested by a child (the “painter’s model”), is bluntly referred to in Midge’s bra ad (with such directness that Scottie’s most superficial masculine feeling is caught by it). In the Vanloo a juvenile has her hair twisted up in curls. Her fleshy young body is a concoction of elegant, but innocent, curves. She is being rendered on canvas in full garb, not nude, so presumably the young painter needs her here only to capture the face, cherubic, pink-cheeked, meditative as an adult’s would be; or perhaps the arrangement in the canvas bespeaks a game. In terms of visual composition, Midge herself, an important female body, is allied in her studio with both Vanloo the painter and his (in Vertigo unseen) subject. The canvas drawn out of the quartet and exhibited in the film, Architecture, involves some of the same young models pointing now not Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

30  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e merely to a generalized drawing but to an architect’s rendering of the Meudon Château: it calls up the memory of baroque civilization seen through the eyes of (explicitly) younger, thus rococo, observers. “Look at this imposing structure,” the pointer’s finger seems to say. His mouth of course does not utter the implication, “Only to fall under the sway of nature.” But for our hero Scottie, as he gazes in the gallery, the message is, I think, something else. The message is, “Yesterday.” The general yesterday of an earlier history with another mode of thought regnant. And the personal yesterday which he can remember as his past with Midge (and which, later, in the sanatorium, he will perhaps remember again as his time with Madeleine). To gaze at the classical painting is to briefly live again in a time very distant from Madeleine and her current obsessions, a time when obsession itself was prefigured by an intensive commitment to form and propriety, the kind of commitment that informed his relationship with Midge. That relationship was ended, I think it safe to presume, because something pushed Scottie away from his classical orientation, some impulsive force (vis). We may name this vis, modern life. The police force, detection, racing after fleeing miscreants, all of which came from his need to make a living. We can see that as Midge draws, so skillfully, there is a sweet casualness to her movement, quite as though she makes visions in order to please herself. Certainly her faux-Carlotta canvas was completed by a painter for self-gratification as well as for signaling (but not to market for profit). Both Midge and Scottie apparently have money from some source (he is a “man of independent means,” which could mean nothing more than that he is paid a salary), in a way that Madeleine and Gavin only appear to have. Gavin’s money is his wife’s; before they married he had next to nothing. Our Madeleine has nothing. John and Midge’s classical idyll, their Mozartean age together, had to end (before the film began) so that he could get a job where identities are in flux, stabilities vulnerable, memories fleeting and inaccurate. The blue suit he wears at the inquest at San Juan Bautista is Scottie’s only other indulgence in this Mozartean hue (the inquest where the coroner [Henry Jones] seems to be an obnoxious satyr masked over as a bureaucratic toadie). Here we have a formal circumstance requiring nothing less than classical etiquettes, postures, and commitments. But given that as the session begins Scottie is in danger of being found culpable of Madeleine’s death—the dialogue in the scene has the coroner’s diatribe canting very closely to such an accusation—and given that he is as riddled with guilt now as he was earlier, regarding the dead police comrade (who also plummeted in his helpless view); given that he must feel he has no viable future to look forward to, since the best he can hope for is to be labeled as damaged goods, we must sense that he feels himself on uncertain ground and in need of protection. The uncertain ground is, of course, modernity in its true essence, the City of improbability. Johnny deeply knows himself unprepared for it, unequipped. And he is aware that if Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   31 he is rattling around in a modern shell, nevertheless his deepest convictions are classical. Thus he brings himself self-protectively into the classical mode by donning dark blue, blue the color Midge taught him to love, a blue suit that he likely purchased in the days when he was with Midge, blue that attracted his eye in the Vanloo, blue that signals an old knight knowing how far he has gone and how far he has to go, blue that will be his sheath as Mozart tries but fails to bring him back to life again. Or does Mozart really fail, since our man does come back to life?

P y g m al i o n Let us recollect that Scottie/Johnny/John always carries on his person some material trace of his classical memory, his Anlage-self, usually a necktie patterned with classical blue, and further, that when he meets Elster at the shipyard (for the first time in years and years) he is wearing with his charcoal-gray suit a rich ultramarine blue tie patterned with diamonds. Thus may he bring to Elster’s recall the Scottie Ferguson of student days, the “old” Scottie (upon whom he is counting now, upon whom he may well have conferred the nickname Scottie), the Scottie who would have been tight with Midge back then and would have had some chummy relationship with him. Gavin’s Scottie, like Midge’s Johnny, is the type of man who would appreciate formality, poise, dignity, and position. They were noble students together. They kept their distance. Here in his office, natural impulse recollected might yet strike Gavin as a profound and proper origin of feeling, in himself or in his friend, but he would expect to see impulse shaped and guided by restraint, modesty, and good form. Out of this reflection of classical values is born the construction of Madeleine—Gavin’s construction—as Scottie will come to know her (Gavin’s sculpture). She is a Galatea designed in advance for specific appeal, and the Pygmalion in this case will permit a stranger to step in and occupy his place for a while. As we learn only much later, and—I think—to our dismay, Madeleine as we met her was most deeply as modern as modern could be, that is, a simulacrum posed at a distant step away from the classical form Scottie would like to believe he loves. The eighteenth-century society whose values underpin Midge’s style and Scottie’s memories was organized according to property, class, possession, and capability. Personal identities were vulnerable to collapse should they be discovered false. People were expected to present themselves coherently, and to stand upon their presentations. “I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character,” inscribes Boswell, 21 November 1762, “very different from a rattling uncultivated one which for some time past I have been fond of. I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose” (47). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

32  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Be, not pretend; acquire a character, not assume one. Character, for Boswell, and for the eighteenth-century personality, is a serious molding of self, not a temporary sham. Madeleine, however, as we are to discover, is all surface, all fabrication in the precise sense of a performed role: very much a “character” in the twentieth-century sense. Adoring her, Scottie is something of a moviegoer falling for a sylph of the screen. But the key to the motor mechanism of the plot-within-Vertigo’s-plot is Elster’s awareness that in sculpting a Madeleine for Scottie’s delectation, he must play not to the modern man Scottie enacts in his job and his life away from Midge but to Scottie’s evocative taste for his own past. He must work, himself, as a redeemer, must manage to bring back to life what is in essence Midge’s character but in a new and more peripatetic version. Madeleine, at her root, must seem like Midge; the animator of Madeleine, Judy Barton as we find out, must be “channeling” Midge, Midge’s proprieties and modesty, Midge’s intelligence and grace, not herself. Madeleine, once Elster has completed her, must seem modern enough for Scottie’s enjoyment: she must emphasize not only wealth but also movement—both in her close-fitting (streamlined) suit and her Rolls-Royce. She must be continually on the move from inspiration to inspiration, moving, indeed, even through time. The floral posey she picks up at Podesta Baldocchi’s may have a classical composition, radiant and central; but our vision of the shop as she does her transaction carries the eye in rapid Brownian motion all over the screen, since the flowers are organized only in splotches of vivid color, not patterns, and the mirrors on the rear door, through which Scottie peers, multiply the vision and the refractions (preparing us for what we will see with mirrors later on, at Ransohoff’s). This mirror vision is a modern vision, punctured by a classical talismanic object which is carried forward. Scottie thinks he is bringing Madeleine back from the dead, but Elster has, in effect, done that already. Brought her back to the present from a past of which Scottie is presently unaware. Scottie is not at all the only time traveler in this film.

Go i n g S o m e w h e r e Outside Scottie’s home (900 Lombard Street, between Russian and Telegraph Hills), Madeleine confesses she plans to go wandering, and he replies that he plans to go wandering, too. Shall we do it together? “Only one is a wanderer,” she teaches. “Two or more are always going somewhere.” The wanderer is the modern soul par excellence, devoted to movement more than to a route. She is, implies Madeleine, utterly modern; and she recognizes that he is, too. But heading off to the redwood forest, side by side in the car, they have melded into Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   33 a duo and are shifting back in time. It becomes apparent that the relationship is by its very nature classical, but has entered modernity: this, too, is prefigured in the Vanloo, where the little boy pointing at Madame de Pompadour’s Château de Bellevue requires an audience, requires performativity, to fulfill his vision. The Château—Steven Jacobs notes it as a “strikingly emblematic image in a film dealing entirely with the illusions of appearances” (197)—is a solitary vision, but the experience of that vision is shared. Since it comes to its conclusion with Madeleine’s death on the tower, Elster’s scheme does not require the sort of formally classical cadence one would find in Mozart or Bach. In modernity events are explosive, fragmentary, unanticipated, unfinished. The tower climb at San Juan Bautista can be abrupt, even apparently discontinuous, shocking, and unexpected. That Scottie will be jarred out of his reverie by the events, that the fluid continuity of his love relationship with Madeleine (as he thinks it) will be ripped away, that a kind of spiritual vacuum will suck out the atmosphere of contentment and repose in which he had come to know himself with her—all of this, as it transpires in the film, is wholly incidental to the relatively classical love story that Elster has produced, a love story that was placid and whole in its construction but that has now been torn away. Scottie has no present now to occupy or to support him. He must find a connection to the world of his past. Jarring and calamitous sudden death is an experience of the modern world, notably, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has demonstrated at great length, after the incursion of railway travel. The accidental catastrophes that trains in motion made possible, even frequent, echo the dislocated sentiment expressed by Baudelaire’s poet in “Loss of a Halo,” explaining to a bourgeois acquaintance how he came to be found in a brothel: Just now as I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mud, in the midst of a moving chaos, with death galloping at me from every side, I made a sudden move [un mouvement brusque], and my halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I was much too scared to pick it up. I thought it was less unpleasant to lose my insignia than to get my bones broken. Besides, I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining. Now I can walk around incognito, do low things, throw myself into every kind of filth [me livrer à la crapule], just like ordinary mortals [simples mortels]. (Qtd. in Berman 155–56) Let us see how Baudelaire cites a refraction of the past, within an explosive feeling about the modern present. He was “crossing the boulevard in a great hurry,” not running, not rushing, not fleeing, not darting; thus, he had produced speed but was engaged in a measured, classical act. But suddenly he noted death “galloping” at him from all sides. Once again, the “gallop” of death Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

34  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e is a classically measured gait, but what we are to presume the poet encountered was moving city traffic, automobiles controlled not half so much by the feelingful disposition of the human body as by mechanical forces easily sent out of control. He is aware of himself as a fragile living body in a machine context (like Chaplin’s tramp caught in the factory in Modern Times [1936]). Now his experience passes without preparation into a zone of immediacy. “I made un mouvement brusque, a sudden movement,” which is the best the poet can do to justify and explain a spasm that overtook him entirely; and his halo, that is, his esteem and elevated standing, his “character,” fell away. Looking back as he explains, he finds that he skipped out of bearing, lost his composure entirely, became a completely new sort of person; and it seemed at that very moment that “bending down,” a way of figuring the recomposition of a classical self, was just too terrifying given the possible consequences. The classical identity is jostled out of him by the action of the place in which he finds himself. I would say this happened as well to Scottie Ferguson, who notices, in Elster’s office, that he is making an almost spontaneous decision to abandon his past. See how Baudelaire beautifully predicts the oncoming developments of Vertigo. To begin with, Scottie Ferguson can walk around incognito. It is true that for some while he will observe and follow Madeleine this way, as per Elster’s explicit instructions. But although he doesn’t see it, he is hardly the only person moving incognito in the film. Madeleine herself is incognito, Judy Barton is entirely incognito (invisible and unimaginable) at this point, and even Elster is incognito to an important degree. The dramatic action of the early part of the film obsessively intermingles a number of persons moving incognito, the only exception being the staid and somewhat unexciting Midge (who is only, and altogether, the reasonable person she seems to be). The “I” of Baudelaire’s text refers to all personages of the modern age, however. Society is made up of incognitos, wandering around, doing “low things,” throwing themselves “into every kind of filth.” Hence the development of the character of Judy, her notable lowness, her notably dirty sense of the real by comparison with the elevations we have encountered already from others. So, the experiential truth for Scottie as he races up the San Juan Bautista tower after Madeleine is that he is a man caught in the maelstrom of modernity, death galloping at him, his halo fallen, his hands incapable of reaching out to stop eternity. At the instant of the sudden death, death galloping, he draws back in terror, falls out of himself, the victim’s body blue in blur tumbling down, the blue stripes in his necktie (from across the sea) mirroring his gloomy catatonic eyes (here, now, already), the agony of height and falling drawing back the blue suffusion of the nocturnal moment that began the film, the blue chase, the blue fall, the blue excursion backward to the root. There is a solid truth in the blue feeling that Mozart’s not going to help at all. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

beyon d th e sea   35

Wor k s C i t e d Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1983. Boswell, James. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763. 2nd ed. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Cooper, David. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Doidge, Norman. The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity. New York: Viking, 2015. Finlay, Victoria. Colour: Travels through the Paintbox. London: Sceptre, 2002. Gass, William. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York: New York Review Books, 1976. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours. Trans. Charles Locke Eastlake. 1840. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Jacobs, Steven. “In the Gallery of the Gaze: The Museum in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” In The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham, 195–207. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Jaynes, Julian. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Lem, Stanislaw. Tales of Pirx the Pilot. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979. Rosenberg, Pierre, and Marion C. Stewart. French Paintings: 1500–1825. San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1987. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Szasz, Thomas. The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Weis, Elisabeth. The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

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36  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e c h apter 2

A Barbaric Rose

No one dreamed any longer of death, of mourning, nor of torture. Everyone succumbed, without fear, to the multiplied voluptuous pleasures bestowed by the sight of a masterpiece of living art. Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris (trans. Edward K. Kaplan)

I

n a late-1970s essay, “What Becomes of Things on Film,” Stanley Cavell wonders about the consequences of wishing for the completion of a world that is opposed to the world we share with others. I am drawn to affiliate with him in this project, at the very least because, compared to what I see onscreen, the world I share with others often seems so incomplete, uncooked, out of balance, yet also because at its best, as seems to me, the world outside the frame is prosaic and poetry is a fuller, plainer speech. The poem is finally Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   37 the way, and cinema can partake of poeisis. The world of the cinema is not the world of the everyday, at any rate. Cavell raises an issue fundamental to our experience of film art, and of art more generally, namely that the work obliges an entrance into a contract of understanding and acceptance with the manifestly unreal, or with that which is real in terms opposed (to strike Cavell’s emphasis) to those by which we judge routine life. This, at least, is my interpretation of Cavell’s interpretation of wishing and cinema. To take a further step: the presence of color, in a film or painting, pointedly instigates the wonder Cavell addresses. There are moments when color becomes not only a site of fascination and disorientation but an incredible and provocative possibility, the birth of splendor and of all the strange world that splendor inhabits and gives form. Technicolor is in many ways a special case. Because of its great range of contrast (not only between highlights and shadows but also, crucially, between one color and another); because of the saturation that is effected by its dyeimbibition process; and—very broadly speaking—because of the flamboyance with which it was used in narrative design, the Technicolor process made possible, certainly after the development of the three-strip version in the mid1930s, a certain poetic expressionism that had been unavailable before, one that black-and-white could never hope to effect regardless of its very powerful expressive range. Within the hued realm, Technicolor could state a condition and move a deep memory. It could substantiate wonder. The series of processes that came to be named and institutionalized as Technicolor was developed under the joint aegis of Herbert Kalmus, R. Burton Westcott, and Daniel Comstock, and has been well documented, as both an aesthetic technique and a financial enterprise, by such scholars as Richard W. Haines and Scott Higgins. Essentially: cyan, yellow, and magenta dyes, made in the laboratory each to a very specific (patented) recipe, were applied under pressure, in three successive passes, to a receiving strip of blank stock that was typically “flashed”—or pre-exposed—in order to boost the final image contrast. The actual dye application—or “imbibition,” since the receiving blank “drank up” the coloration—was managed by using red, blue, and green “matrices” loaded up with the chemicals, each matrix being a strip of film stock laid over with a thick emulsion that held the dye differentially according to the amount of that color in the scene, the scene that was photographed on set or on location using black-and-white recording stock. Each of the red, blue, and green black-and-white records was transferred to matrix stock, and, in addition, the green black-and-white record was used for “flashing” the final blank stock. The development, use, improvement, and quality control of matrices became a real specialty of the Technicolor Corporation, under Kalmus’s leadership, as did the development and continual improvement of the three-strip camera, a modified Mitchell device, that was used Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

38  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e in shooting. The black-and-white recording film itself was a specific Kodak product, three pieces of which passed through the camera simultaneously in such a way as to receive three beams of incoming light, filtered in the camera: thus, one red black-and-white record, one blue one, and one green one were produced in principal photography, these to be used in the production of the matrices and the matrices ultimately to finalize the product. Since matrices and final color films could be made from the black-and-white separation records at any time, and since the records could be stored for decades, it became possible, at least in theory, to strike a print of a film a long time after it had been shot, and to guarantee the color quality of that print. Technicolor prints had stunningly saturated colors, very deep blacks, and, in general, a startling sharpness of color contrast. Of course, if storage conditions were questionable—as happened, for example, with Vertigo—some of the records might be damaged over time (see Pomerance, “Man”). The color in Technicolor productions tended to have a deeply penetrating, powerfully affecting, and at the same time notably unreal quality, creating precisely the kind of world of which Cavell writes, a world opposed to what viewers would see with one another outside the theater. To note: when viewers of the 1940s and 1950s were swooning with the Technicolor effect, relocating oneself outside in the mundane world was a depressing enough experience, in which one had to resort to the storehold of knowledge one carried about as part of one’s negotiation of mundane reality. The color film itself was about anything but knowledge.1

Color in Dream Space Because the screen world and the everyday world fill space in different ways, indeed define different genres of space, it is not difficult to become lost in film. Technicolor film seduced in peculiar, idiosyncratic ways, by posing surfaces not only that one could not discover anywhere else but also that linked together harmoniously and inexplicably with one another. The screened images, very typically composed in the Academy 1.33: 1 ratio, were gigantic and loomed from above (theaters did not have stadium seating). Alluring widescreen technologies were in place by the mid-1950s. And with the cessation of threestrip filming (because by 1955 Kodak had ceased marketing the recording film and the three-strip cameras went out of use), studios sent their Eastmancolor negatives routinely to the Technicolor labs for imbibition printing. The screen 1

My very earliest experiences with Technicolor were The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), Lili (1953), His Majesty O’Keefe (1954), and Prince Valiant (1954), as well as Fantasia (1940).

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a barbaric rose   39 visions were consequently still deeply saturated and overwhelmingly charming but now, routinely, so huge as to be utterly unreal but also utterly captivating. The idea of being charmed by the unreal was a commonplace one; we experienced such charm, such entrancement, all the time, watching movies. To speak of screen space and mundane space is challenging, since no language exists for addressing both evenly. As we pass from one space to the other, and try to understand our experience of both, we participate in the traum that Merleau-Ponty invokes when he wonders about the space of dreaming: The dreamer dreams, and that is why his respiratory movements and his sexual impulses are not taken for what they are, and why they break the moorings that tie them to the world and drift before him in the form of the dream. But ultimately what does he really see? Shall we take his word for it? If he wants to know what he sees and to understand his dream himself, he will have to awaken. (301) Consider Scottie’s dream in Vertigo, when he is standing in the Palace of the Legion of Honor and looking at the Carle Vanloo painting. Here, actually, on earth, in reality, he is facing west, or slightly southwest. And therefore Madeleine sitting behind his back staring at Carlotta Valdes is facing east, or slightly northeast. These sentences describe the configuration of that gallery space at the time, and the way canvases were placed on the days of shooting. Scottie could know (on this knowledge see Boulding) that beyond the canvas is another room, beyond that room and the rooms behind it, Point Lobos Avenue and then Seal Rocks, and then the Pacific, and finally Hawaii and Australia, but he hardly troubles to think this way. In the film, however, there is no west, no east, no south, and no north—not as compass points. If we think of directions purely mythically, the west becomes the future, the promise of mortality, the unknown bourne, and Scottie may meaningfully be understood to be facing all that. The east is origins, the past, history: Madeleine is facing all that (on compasses and myths see Fiedler). But in thinking of these concepts we do not feel ourselves placed in three-dimensional territory. The film suggests dimensions, but only the extradiegetic material of cinema is actually dimensional in the way we typically understand dimension. The film itself is dimensionless. Technicolor exacerbates this effect, this problem, because it draws attention so very sharply and suddenly to spots of affect that variably linger and evanesce. It is worth a parenthetical comment that a kind of pre- or proto-color effect could exist in Hollywood design that was intended solely for black-and-white filming. One legendary example is Orry Kelly’s so-called “red” gown—in truth, siena brown—built for Bette Davis to wear, so shockingly, in Jezebel (1938). That film, being shot in black-and-white, never showed viewers red at all, yet many remain convinced they saw it, thanks to the script and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

40  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Davis’s performance of haughty pride and the precise tonality of that gown as rendered on film. Another case is more chilling, for me. I stood a few years ago gaping at the shimmering aqua gown that Claudette Colbert wore as Cleopatra (for Cecil B. DeMille, in 1934). Watching this stationary thing, it was as though she were present and bringing the gown to life, in a color film so present it seemed to transcend historical separation. I have never seen the film; and no one who saw the film saw it in color. Yet the uncanny allure of the color of this garment, mint green, is fixed in me, reflecting, no doubt, something entirely unrelated from my childhood, the color of an automobile, the color of a curtain (my father’s Chrysler; the curtain on The Ed Sullivan Show the only time I ever had opportunity to see it on a color television). I think of this couture aqua as Hollywood color, as proto-Technicolor. A few years later, once three-strip was in process, a color as intoxicating as this suffused the green chambers of the Wizard of Oz. Technicolor was intrinsically poetic, in that its effects spread and resonated, broke the boundaries of objectivity and the routes of navigation.

L i f e a nd D e a t h Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven, 1946) is a signally important work in the history of Technicolor filming. It culminates a developing expertise with the process in England, ongoing since 1937 and made notable with the Technicolor films of David Lean, In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944), and Blithe Spirit (1945), all shot by Ronald Neame and designed for the camera by David Rawnsley and C. P. Norman. Whilst no one film can be said to signal all the possibilities of Technicolor, even the monumental Black Narcissus (1947, the Powell/Pressburger-Jack Cardiff project that followed and claimed considerable attention for its color), nevertheless the screening and reception of Life and Death did precipitate a certain hunger that had grown in screen culture through and after the 1940s, a hunger that can be understood to go back a long way into the history of art and culture: namely, a desire for the special pleasure that radiant color can bring. Especially in certain of its passages, Life and Death apotheosizes the way filmmakers could structure deeply evocative narrative movements based purely on coloration and its absence, sometimes by way of an ingenious storytelling strategy which moves the vision back and forth between black-and-white sequences in “Heaven,” or “The Other World,” and full-color sequences on Earth. To make the full-color sequences, Jack Cardiff conceived a notably saturated, idiosyncratic palette that would contrast boldly against the black-and-white scenes, which often have a pearly, almost shimmering quality, quite as though we are watching a reality reflected in a polished Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   41 silver platter. This latter effect is possible because when one produces blackand-white imagery using the three-strip Technicolor camera—that is, finally printing the virtually null content of color, thus monochrome—very delicate controls are available over the final product. Why shoot in black-and-white?, Cardiff asked Powell: Why not monochrome? Technicolor can do that. Technicolor can do the whole job! We could shoot the Other World not in black and white, but in three-strip Technicolor, and print it without the dyes. That’s the only way you can get the effect you want. (qtd. in Powell 498) “Gradually,” concluded Powell, “I realized that I had to have Jack, or someone as inventive and experienced as Jack, throughout the picture” (500). In the fact of production, Kieron Webb has suggested to me, Cardiff and his team modified the three-strip shooting procedure for the “heaven” scenes, using an ordinary black-and-white camera loaded with a single strip of film; this black-and-white record was then duplicated twice, and these three records were used, as I explain below, in conjunction with other material shot in the three-strip camera. If this particular film works with color in a special way to satisfy the needs for setting, characterization, and movement, and if it manages to produce pointed effects that strike viewers with powerful emotional resonance, still, taken more broadly, the color of Technicolor productions resonates with, even genuflects to, a deeper and older fascination struck and repeated through the history of painting. Beneath Technicolor’s striking evocative strength lies a long and complex history of cultural fascination with color as an expressive, decorative, and symbolic effect. Involved here are twin—and in a way ­contradictory—streams of attachment and delight: the color of the screen effect can be indicative, which is to say, representational, realist, and pointing to direct experience; and it can remain stunningly momentary, almost explosive emotionally and experientially when seen against other artistic possibilities. As to the explosive richness of color, it produces a specific delight. As to color’s indications, we can say of them what can always be said of indications: that they may lie. The full glories of three-strip Technicolor production are no longer available. Considerable volumes of screen color today, what we see in cinemas and on our television screens from such suppliers as Netflix, continue a tradition of representational color, what I have elsewhere called “perfunctory” color (see Pomerance, “Introduction”), that was born, in a way, with Eastmancolor negative film. This mode of rendering cinematic color worked with a single layer of film stock coated with a dye-coupler emulsion that could register color directly. When color negative was given normal C-41 processing at the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

42  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e l­aboratory, the result was a full-spectrum rendition but one that lacked the vivid sharpness of the Technicolor blacks, the sharp color contrast, and some of the particular effects one found with Technicolor, such as the throbbing red and echoing, yearning blue. What was worst about negative film, however, was its tendency to fade, especially in the magenta range, after considerable screenings. But Eastmancolor negative, if it was not processed by Technicolor, also had a tendency to replicate day-to-day optical experience; to show the world roughly in its actuality, rather than by way of an intensively expressive and designed protocol. While in our contemporary film world there are still filmmakers eager to use methods of design and cinematography to capture color intensively—Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) and Anna Karenina (2012) are striking examples—a great deal of what we see onscreen, both in theaters and at home, has a blue (daylight) cast, a washed-out quality as though objects have been subjected to extremes of sunlight, and a flatness that comes with low color contrast. Of the latter, a good example, frustrating because the film purported to revel in a 1950s sensibility, was Carol (2015), where the fabric designs stood out, almost as in a magazine advertisement, but the general sense of color was, though harmonious, undistinctive. I will return for a look at pleasure to be taken in coloration, but first: A leap into Powell and Pressburger’s film, landing at a strange, enticing moment that relies upon pointed, or brilliant, color. We began over the English Channel, toward the end of the War, with Peter Carter, the young hero (David Niven), trapped in a disabled aircraft and having no option but to bail out without a parachute. Death is staring him in the face, in short, from the first moments. He has been spending these last moments in radio conversation with a voice on earth, June (Kim Hunter), a spirited American girl serving in England with the RAF. Could one not say she is trying with all her force to reach out through the airwaves to grasp him before he crashes? At any rate, the conversation is cut off. In the flaming cockpit, we see David drop himself into the air. But soon afterward, it is evident he has miraculously survived. Coming to in the lapping waters of a broad strand (the sequence was shot in Devonshire), and realizing he is still alive, he chances to meet—who else but June! Unsurprisingly he takes to her and she to him. They are soon trysting by night in a pleasant grove of sparkly rhododendrons. The film will be the story of their love, of how—or whether—David really did survive his fall. There is a brain problem, he will have to have it treated, June’s close friend is a neurosurgeon and expert diagnostician, the friend is suddenly killed in an accident, Peter’s treatment will be intercalated with a visit to Heaven, a trial for life or death that he must endure, since according to the heavenly records his time was up but something went wrong. Now he has been given leave to plead for life. But back to earth, that rhododendron grove, where, as Peter and June rest Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   43 tranquilly with one another, an unbidden visitor has arrived: the moment to which I would point. Our interrupter is a Frenchman got up in the eighteenth-century manner, eccentric, dandified, courteously effusive, and visible to Peter only, since June has been cast into a kind of trance: “She cannot wake! We are talking in space, not in time.” Apparently this fellow, Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), not only looks like an eighteenth-century fop but actually is one, and carries on his existence in two worlds at once, first a classical era of impeccable style and mannerism; secondly, an au-delà, a place up there, where time does not pass and all transformations are simple. 71 has voyaged into our presence, then, both coming from a long way off and also expertly materializing out of the air. We find him aggravated and trembling with fear, because in the infernal English fog—sacré brouillard!—he has missed Peter and failed to convey him to the Training Center. Missed Peter? “What should happen to a man who jumps from his aircraft without his parachute?” . . . “Training Center for what?” “Training Center for the Other World!” Peter, then, ought reasonably to be dead, was supposed to be dead, is registered in the “books” as an expected dead man—something of a disturbing revelation to him—but the system failed. (A fascinating and charming fictional trope that extends into all sorts of films classical and contemporary: the idea of bad design.) Now, suggests 71, Peter should allow himself to be borne off whither he properly belongs. This is a matter of honor and courtesy. And it follows that he must—inevitably—leave behind his newfound love interest. Brave Peter of course declines to obey (it is a tribute to Niven’s delicacy that one would not say “manfully declines,” since the declination is performed with such dignity and poise, a posture only and entirely human—Michael Powell said he was “shrewd, kind, quick-witted and full of fantasy” [488]), and there lies the nub that hits the switch that powers the mechanism that turns the plot. But back once more to this Conductor 71 and his swift materialization on earth. We are treated by the filmmakers to a marvelous, deeply pleasurable, if also fleeting demonstration of his prestige and powers. He has a magical existence, since he can travel from the “other world” to our everyday—read: from the cinematic world to the mundane—by means of, not a vehicle in the lowly, conventional sense but, a cinematic process. We first see him preeningly affixing a tiny rose to his lapel, up in the Training Center, standing before a tribunal where his misconduct is being questioned, this in pearly black-andwhite, the visual code for all of the film’s “heavenly” sequences. The camera comes in closer, transitioning to a close shot of that rose. Rose . . . finger . . . lapel. Now the shot slowly morphs into full color as the camera pulls back and we see the Conductor “arriving” to confront Peter. His rose has become a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

44  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e delicate fleshy pink, an insinuation, a bon bon, perched upon his stylish (if far from à la mode) loden green velvet coat. All around, the rhododendrons burst in spectacular, even explosive magenta. “One is starved for Technicolor . . . up there,” he remarks, somewhat archly. (The first British Technicolor film, processed in the United States because the English plant, opened in 1936, was still not in full operation, had been Wings of the Morning [1937], photographed by Ray Rennahan. Here and subsequently, most emphatically under the color supervision of Joan Bridge, some exceedingly beautiful Technicolor films were released. During the war, transoceanic shipment of materials became problematic and British Technicolor took over all operations.) Life and Death thus openly touted a process now come into its vogue in the UK. It drew attention to the expensive sophistication of the film’s own production process (Technicolor was always notably interested in self-promotion) even as it caught viewers’ attention with a visual spectacle of inordinate quality and measure. We must focus on that rose: It is initially colorless and bland, formal in shape and meaning. But once it is visible in full color it becomes glorious and intoxicating, as well as more rounded in form. As the color gradually picks up saturation, we can not only take note of the Conductor’s diegetic “movement” from the Ethereal to the Mundane—saturation increase as movement—but also detect, I think more provocatively, a certain passage away from perduring form toward momentary effect. It may not miss the mark to say that in black-and-white the rose has contour and recognizable line but in color it is first and foremost a shocking touch of stimulation, a kind of call. If Powell and Pressburger’s “Heaven” is black-and-white, then, or more precisely, as per Cardiff, monochrome, it is a domain of Platonic forms: extensivity, light, presence, materiality—finally intellect. Down here on earth is where we give play to sensation. Sensation, not symbolic meaning. The pinkness of the rose, its rosiness, its contrast with the green coat: these are directly stimulating, energizing in themselves, and do not rely on traditions of codification in order that they may find interpretation and “reading” as signs. The Conductor’s rose affects us; it does not send us a signal. When Peter protests that he shouldn’t be escorted away because he thinks he’s fallen in love, the Conductor gives a very formal response, calling up this very distinction between the Platonic and the sensual: “What is love? The feeling of the moment. But I represent eternity, the law of this world and the other.” Something of the intensity of the color, once it suffuses the shot, does seem to imply impermanence, the spark of the momentary. Surely, richness like this cannot last. Certainly experience so sharp cannot last forever. In its monochrome version, the flower was distinctly a representation, then, but not an embodiment, of the vivacious and experiential. If the vital effect of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   45 moving from representation to embodiment were to come fully home, the coloring would have to be produced with great fluidity and precision, a sophisticated maneuver involving precise control of the matrix wash temperature in the Technicolor lab, which must gradually increase as the color “arrives,” and, more crucially, frame by frame control of the matrices, each exposed separately and identically to the others. This little bit of visual magic, accomplished not only by the cinematographer but also by the optical printer and other technicians behind the scenes, is precisely the sort of glorious work that makes splendid films splendid, yet almost never comes to the light of day. In this case a particular challenge had to be faced. In moving from the medium shot of Conductor 71 taking his boutonnière to pin it, to the close-up of that rose on the lapel, an optically printed dissolve was called for (see Brown, Street, and Watkins 11–30). But very unlike the process of making dissolves in ordinary black-and-white films, with Technicolor the dissolves had to be already present in the matrices, which means they had to be done at the black-and-white record stage, effectively three times over, once for the red, once for the blue, and once for the green. For each separation record, to do the dissolve, a conventional process is employed: for the red record, the “heaven” medium shot and the garden close-up are each loaded on the projection end of the optical printer (which can handle multiple inputs); the “heaven” shot is projected onto a blank piece of black-and-white film stock that is loaded in the optical printer’s receiving end, with the optical printer’s aperture at first wide open and successively, frame by frame, closed down until finally no light comes through. The receiving stock is then rewound and the garden close-up is projected, this time with the aperture at first closed but gradually opening frame by frame. The final effect is that the medium shot disappears and the close-up appears. This dissolve is now repeated for the blue record and the green record. The three new records, each of them showing the dissolve, had now to be converted to matrices, and the three matrices run against blank stock with dyes in such a way that the dyes would register only cumulatively, and by control. Thus, the dye printing machine had to be operated with gradually increasing exposure—exposure was managed through the wash temperature control—to bleed the color in; but the three exposure increases, red for cyan dye, blue for yellow dye, green for magenta dye, had to be the same or the color would have shifted during the transition. Very likely the blank was run against the “key” first,2 in order to get a basic flashing 2

The “key” is a piece of film stock that has been pre-exposed against the green separation record—the one with the greatest contrast range—to produce a partial black-and-white image that will act as a kind of “underpainting” to the color that will be dyed over it later. An effect of desaturation can be obtained this way. The sound track and the image borders are also printed in at this point.

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46  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e for contrast, with the dye printing accomplished just afterward. In the theater, the viewer’s eye reads this conjoined transition-appearance as a move from a black-and-white to a color world in which the color itself seeps, then floods in. In Life and Death, the color-addition move is made rather quickly, but it should be obvious that technicians could produce color increases at virtually any rate. This little trip behind the scenes, which I have been able to render only thanks to the gracious help of Kieron Webb, is not, of course, the exciting voyage most viewers of A Matter of Life and Death experience as they watch the film. They merely see the effect of the magic. And without our thinking about what machines and artifices were employed to effect it, the transition has a directly visible and chilling import: the color world and the black-and-white world can exist together at every moment. Exist not side-by-side but occupying precisely the same space. That is, sensation and pleasure on one hand and abstract intellectuality on the other are always both exactly here and exactly everywhere, always felt and deduced but not in the same breath. The pink rose in A Matter of Life and Death isn’t the instigation of this effect; it is a mere demonstration. To get the fully emotional effect of the color we permit the formality of the black-and white to seem to vanish into history. A strong undertone of the film’s story and characterization, the latter of which includes angels and other denizens of the “Heavenly” world, is that “up there,” people have become inordinately rational. The lengthy trial sequence, with Raymond Massey prosecuting Niven’s Peter and the neurosurgeon Reeves (Roger Livesey) defending him, goes on and on about the concepts of fairness, liberty, honesty, justice, and love, without ever having benefit of the blushing cheek, the shining color of an iris, the cherished emotional details of life on earth. This does not mean the movie intends in its earthly sequences to be anti-intellectual, but it does mean to bring us repeatedly and dramatically to the torments of the flesh. Thus, the other-worldly trial scene is relentlessly structured through graphic order and balance, and through repetition and resonance of graphic ideas, as when an eye dissolves slowly into a gigantic forum with hundreds of thousands of milling citizens. This is a visual statement of metaphor as argumentational strategy. But on earth, we are treated not only to the lushness of Technicolor but also to posture, gesture, the eerie sound of a strange piano riff, eager young people rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and various rather stunning embodied effects: the strange gravel in the grain of Roger Livesey’s voice, the echoing gracefulness in Niven’s, a kind of lippy sensualism in Goring’s 71, sensible to us partly because of the too-stylish fit of his silks, his gracile hand movements, his powdered wig. Back and forth we are made to move, from what can be touched and tasted to what can only be thought and phrased in logic. To the blaze of the rhododendron, however, there is no logic. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   47

O il The financial gamble of Life and Death was that audiences would be hungry not only to detect, recognize, and comprehend color but also to relish in it; that color being played with, in its own right, could be successful as an object of demonstration. By the early 1940s, on both sides of the Atlantic, a fervor for color was being felt and applied, in musicals, melodramas, and other genre forms, with increasing prevalence and richness. Since La Cucaracha (1934) and Becky Sharp (1935), when three-strip was first used, significant improvements had been made to a process already thrilling and rich with promise. Producers were willing to spend the extra dollars on a contract with Technicolor Corporation because they felt assured the effect would sell tickets, regardless of the narrative content to which the color was applied. And once, with the assistance of the Technicolor consultants and engineers, the process had become somewhat normative—with cinematographers such as Rennahan, Leon Shamroy, Erwin Hillier, and Cardiff, among others, notably adept at using it—there were progressively fewer disconcertions about the extra work involved in a color picture, fewer complaints about the discomforts on set (the lights were very hot; actors had to wear yellow makeup), and a sense of structural ease came to affect production work. Further, as filmmakers learned, because in any Technicolor production the overall panoply of color could be disrupted and transcended by stunning and provocative manifestations, the audience’s experience of color onscreen was a more and more naturalized acceptance of it as expectedly astonishing and unpredictable, a channel through which the filmmaker and his design team could potentially spring a carefully planned, poignant surprise. Regardless of the context of its usage, Technicolor became astonishing and luscious in and of itself. Consider Judy Garland’s mauve gloves in the “Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), or Cyd Charisse’s opulent green gloves as she makes her entrance in Jack Buchanan’s apartment in The Band Wagon (1953), or the shocking magenta corridor of the Miami Beach hotel where Robert Stack hopes to romance Lauren Bacall in Written on the Wind (1956), or the jade-green swash of the river into which Robert Ryan falls in The Naked Spur (1953). As through the 1950s production teams increased their use of, and interest in, Technicolor effects, they at the same time educated audiences to recognize and find pleasure in the brilliances that could be afforded onscreen—the flamboyant, rhythmically repetitive sexy reds in the ballet of An American in Paris (1951); the imperial purple and spring green costumes in the circus parade of The Greatest Show on Earth (1952); the lilac-turquoise Wyoming mountains in Shane (1953); Jack Palance’s swarthy, gleaming skin in The Silver Chalice (1954). To find color bobbing upon the surface of the narrative; to cherish it for its own sake, because it is ravishingly delicious regardless of what it might Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

48  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e mean; to experience the sharp intake of breath at the illuminated moment; all these were to find delight in a distinct expressive extravagance, a usage that made for emphasis, to be sure, but also for a viewer’s unbounded regaling in the domain of the sensory, the momentary, and the plastic. Technicolor pleased the eye. And to give pleasure is to be in excess of relevance. By the 1960s the penchant for sensation was being displaced by a hunger for realism, and the charms of poetry were effaced by a poietophobic hunger for fact and consequence, a search for reality. If, for viewers, until the end of the 1950s films genially celebrated the opportunity for sensation, afterward they came to tickle the rational faculty, to riddle one’s ability at calculation, detection, determination. When we seek examples of the insatiable hunger for stirring color, it seems almost natural to jump directly to Jan Van Eyck (c. 1385–1441), painter of, among other prodigious pictures, the majestic Ghent Altarpiece (1432) and the beguiling Arnolfini Marriage (1434), both of these accomplished in such a way as to draw attention to particular placements of especially brilliant hues. In the Altarpiece it is difficult to look away from the odd, intoxicating sallowness of the flesh in the figurations of Adam and Eve, or from the charged auburn red of the angelic pipe organist’s hair, or from the remarkable blood red streaks in John the Baptist’s unruly hair or the glowing opals on his garment, or from the rubies and sapphires in Christ’s crown. In the Arnolfini, the woman’s gown is of a green so deeply intriguing one becomes paralyzed gazing upon its folds. To anyone who loves color, the captivating quality of this green, its achievement a signal event in the history of Western art, renders everything else in this mysterious canvas secondary in importance. Indeed, this green can call up the summation of all earthly greens, bringing one back to the earliest visual moments—the mysteries—of one’s childhood that lit the way to a love of color in the first place. If in studying Van Eyck what strikes the sensibility is the painter’s extraordinary precision with the brush—what can only be called his realism, while it is yet framed in an allegorical context: in the Altarpiece, we see the individual strands of the Baptist’s hair, and in the Arnolfini we see the fibers stitched to make the ruching of the dress—nevertheless the eye is fixed upon color, color, and more color, and especially that green, that forestial, primal, internal, horrifying green. It is, finally, oils that make painted color both radiant and glimmering, an allure and a tease to memory and feeling. “The power of fresco lies in light,” writes Benjamin Robert Haydon, “the power of oil in depth and tone. Oil is luminous in shadow—fresco in light. A mighty space of luminous depth and ‘darkness visible’ gives a murky splendor to a hall or public building” (11). A stunning green not very unlike Van Eyck’s will later appear in Courbet’s View of Ornans (mid-1850s), and in his woody sun-dappled glades where stags compete, as in Rue du printemps (1861). Another green will surround Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   49 Cézanne’s Baigneurs au repose (1875–1876), and flood into his apples and pears (1870s). But green does not have an uncontested claim. Not long after Van Eyck, Hans Memling painted Portrait of a Man with a Pink (1475), the tiny flower contradicting with its energetic red petals the man’s rather gross, insensate features, and perhaps, too, with its bright spunky assertion of presence his sad entrapment by time. The lush color that almost blinds us in Van Eyck, especially the Altarpiece, races and flows through the history of painting, with Della Francesca’s varied indigo garments in The Nativity (1470–1475) and the blushing muscularities in Rubens, say, the Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1618–1619), the green-dark turgid roiling seas of Turner’s Bridgewater Sea Piece (1803), the chrome yellow background behind Van Gogh’s sunflowers (1888), the sharp brutally red blocks of Malevich’s Supremus No. 50 (1915), or Munch’s murderer with his absinthe green face (1910). But paint did not always make color glow and protrude in the light. All these colors have a quality that surpasses materiality, intrudes into the dark private closet of philosophical meditation. There is debate about the invention of oil painting per se. It is to Van Eyck, as it happens, that in his 1604 Schilderboeck Carel Van Mander attributes the first use of oil. As we will see, the historian may well have been in error, yet the potency of his fascination with the problem, the intensity of his keen focus on oil paint’s radiance, themselves glow. Van Eyck, writes Van Mander, found the idea of mixing pigment with oil more or less by accident. He had devoted considerable time to a particular piece and then placed it to dry in the sunlight, but sadly, as he discovered, the panel on which he had painted split at its joints. “Joannes, much disappointed that his work was lost through the influence of the sun, took a resolve that the sun should not damage his work ever again.” Thus, he put aside his traditional egg-and-varnish method, in search of a varnish that would dry indoors, safely away from sunlight. “He had already examined many oils and other similar materials supplied by nature, and had found that linseed oil and nut oil had the best drying ability of them all. He boiled these oils with some other substances, and produced the finest varnish on earth.” Further, opines Van Mander, Van Eyck discovered that when colors were mixed with these oils they could not only be easily handled but dried well. Further, and for this present discussion surely the jewel in a discursive setting the accuracy of which needs little further attention, “The oil made the color appear more alive, owing to a lustre of its own, without varnish” (5). The author of course concluded, “As far as I can learn, Joannes invented the process of oil painting in the year 1410” (6). Nor was Van Mander alone in lauding Van Eyck. Bartolomeo Fazio describes him as “the foremost painter of our time” in his De viris illustribus, according to a discussion of the Arnolfini by Edwin Hall, who also comments upon Van Eyck’s having studied Pliny’s color theory. In The Art of Ancient Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

50  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Greece J. J. Pollitt notes of Pliny’s approach that “in the course of time the art differentiated itself and discovered light and dark shades, with the alternating contrast of colors heightening the effect of one and then the other. Afterwards splendor was finally added, which is something different from ‘light.’ . . . There are moreover ‘austere colors’ and ‘florid colors’” (229). I think of the painter’s search for a resolution to his technical problem; and of the art historian’s search for a tale of invention, as, both, quests after splendor; more bluntly, a quest for a rationale to justify and excuse the rapture of splendor and the pleasure to be had in it. It is the splendor possible with oil-based painted colors that counts. The pleasure of seeing becomes at once a splendid pleasure and a pleasure of splendor. Thus, that Stephan Kemperdick and Friso Lammertse are more sanguine about Van Eyck’s contributions, suggesting that his fundamental innovation “was to convey light and its effect on the visible world convincingly” (16) but also that “Van Mander was wrong . . . when he attributed the invention of oil paint to Jan van Eyck, a claim he copied from Vasari,” hardly troubles the deeper argument. “It is a myth,” they write, that has persisted until the present day, probably because it provides a physical, technical explanation for Van Eyck’s revolutionary art. The truth, however, is that oil was being used as a binding medium long before he appeared on the scene. There are, for instance, two altar wings from Worms dating from about 1260 that are painted almost entirely with oils, and around 1400 the Master of St Veronica and his circle in Cologne were working in pure oil paint. Van Eyck’s immediate predecessors at the Burgundian court, Beaumetz and Malouel among them, also used oil. (12) Yet at the same time, Kemperdick and Lammertse, and sources upon whom they rely, share with Van Mander the concentration on color’s exciting possibility to radiate, and do not even hint at denying the effect of oil in fostering this. A similarly profound enchantment with color is to be found with stained glass of the early Middle Ages, specifically the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when, according to Hugh Arnold, one could see color “of a barbaric richness, unequalled in the succeeding periods. A very deep and splendid blue is used, in contrast with the greyish-blue of later glass, and it is of an uneven tint, which greatly adds to its quality. The ruby, too, is often of a streaky character and of great beauty” (32–33). Arnold notes the typical practice of the time to describe a color in terms of the jewel it most closely resembled, thus a somewhat diffuse sense of rich color as being precious in itself, a jewel to the eye. Arnold describes glass artists (who were typically French Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   51 or Middle Eastern, by the way) as being “in love with” deep reds and blues. Later on, beginning in the fourteenth century, “the rich and intense reds and blues, with their ‘streakiness,’ their endless variety of tone and texture, which makes each piece of glass a jewel with an individuality of its own, and needing no enrichment [by drawing], give way to glass of a thinner, flatter quality” (147). There is a gradual substitution of white glass, sometimes stained with silver or drawn upon; white helped to “bind the design” (148), which is to say, a stained-glass window came to be not only constructed as, but also interpreted and experienced as, pictorial and designed, whereas in the earlier case the radiance of color sang its own melody, affected the viewer in a sharper, more immediate, and more involving way. To exemplify the transition to pictorialism and the “defeat” of color we may consider a window of “The Virgin and Child” (c. 1330–1335) from St. Michael and All Angels, Eaton Bishop, Herefordshire, reproduced by Roger Rosewell: The child and the virgin’s head and neck are white grisaille, with pale yellow (almost white) glass used for the virgin’s crown and the dove the child is clutching; but the virgin’s tunic is a burning orange, and her cloak a mottled scarlet (5). His reproduction of the “St Michael” (1100–1135) shows a red in the figure’s wings so mottled and streaky and deep that one cannot move the eye from it (8); nor from the background blue of the “Tree of Jesse” (c. 1180–1190) at the York Minster Museum (11). Whereas painting had begun with egg base and come around to the glimmer of oil, window design began with glimmering color and came around to mixing whites, inventing designs, and washing color down. In both cases, however, as the critics write about the products achieved, they find rapturous language for the saturated, brilliant, splendid possibilities of “barbaric” color. Here as elsewhere, the terms of expression stand in for the quality and extent of feeling.

B arb a r i c D e s i r e The rose Peter and June cannot see—she is sleeping, as we know, and the Conductor has not manifested himself to our young hero yet—is initially more for us than it is for them, indeed we follow the Conductor’s preening gesture, share or duplicate his intent, as he fingers his boutonnière, setting it exactly right, letting it catch the light in an ideal way. As to the color and vivacity of the flower, it never dies, never fades (because, English or no, it isn’t an earthly rose). We merely see it transformed into black-and-white as the man disappears back into “heaven,” where, everything and everyone being in black-and-white, the concept of “colorlessness” does not apply. Yet between black-and-white and color there is a profound separation, into which Tom Gunning made inquiry by way of a consideration of what we might call, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

52  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e following Truffaut (in Baisers volés [1968]), the provisional and the definitive. Color’s blazing presence and its merely temporal quality. The wonder of color’s flamboyance and decline has long riddled Western thought. That at one moment the eye can be engaged with something saturated, highly luminous, even radiant and captivating; and at another with this same object reduced to no more than a pallid visual echo of what it was. In a 1995 workshop, Gunning meditated about the Platonic, “non-essential” nature of color: that a thing’s form takes precedence over a quality that seems to be temporary, secondary, seems to have more to do with instants of time and situations than with the eternally knowable. In fact, part of the joy of color lies in . . . accepting transience. Color is indeed less intellectual, less tangible, less eternal than form. It’s always somehow associated with the fugitive and the ephemeral. Nicholas Hiley pointed out to me yesterday . . . that colour is very often represented by flowers. And this reflects not only the brilliant saturation of colour in flowers, but precisely the fact that it’s temporary, that it fades. A brilliant moment rather than something that is constant. (39) This is, of course, an eloquent declaration of the view that would be held by Conductor 71 or any other resident of the Training Center. Any theorist posing brilliance and constancy against one another might recall a stunning, then abruptly lapsing, moment in Vertigo, when Scottie, tailing Madeleine on that first morning, finds himself opening a back door and gazing into a glorious flower shop. As a display of floral complexity and unmitigated high-contrast color, the shot offering us his peeker’s view is unsurpassed for radiance, composition, and the evocation of optical interest. It glows and tantalizes. But too quickly, far too quickly, at the instant Scottie senses that Madeleine’s business there is finished, he backs away and we must follow him to the (far duller) outside world again. On one side of the balance here is the glorious vision of the flower shop, its capacity to draw and entice attention and provoke feeling. On the other is the imperious storyline, that our elusive figure and her follower have come from somewhere, and have somewhere else to go, so their movement, and ours in tailing them, must continue and continue. The movement is the constancy here (not a black-and-white one but no less constant for that), the imperative and enduring Law that seems to cause the momentary explosion of color to dissipate and dissolve in the name of . . . progress. As Julio Cortázar wrote it in his legendary Hopscotch: Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   53 it’s very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven . . . the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too. (214) Madeleine’s business in the flower shop, if we may usefully rationalize it as such, was to gather up a nosegay, something small and deliciously perfect that had been fashioned with, principally, little pink noisette roses. The nosegay will reappear in the film. She will visit an art gallery and stare at a portrait that represents a woman also holding a nosegay, indeed the very model of the one our heroine has ordered from the florist. The camera will show us in close-up the nosegay in the painting, its protruding rose petals, and then the item lying on the bench next to the gazer. Yes, the beautiful flowers in the painting are the same as the ones in reality: or, to be more precise, the flowers in the painted representation are the same as the flowers in the filmed representation. Later still, beside San Francisco Bay, this young woman will let the roses of her nosegay drop away into the water, before falling in, herself. Is the gathering of roses her self? In that gallery, two pictures hung side by side. The portrait (Portrait of Carlotta, painted in Italy expressly for Hitchcock’s production, at notable expense and with some extreme difficulty, and carefully shipped to Los Angeles for filming) was flanked by Jan-Frans van Dael’s Flowers Before a Window (1789), a perfectly typical, if in some ways unspectacular, example of eighteenth-century Dutch flower painting. In the Van Dael, the open window at left, with the rocky plateaus and low distant ranges of hills, and the ivy creeping through the window, all take attention from the floral display, which includes tulips, delphiniums, peonies, dahlias, irises, and the obligatory little bird’s nest sitting upon an adjacent table. Especially notable in this canvas is an unbalanced and bold array of colors: mauve, regal purple, numerous pinks, splashy red, orange, creamy white. The color animates the flowers, seems to empower them with voice; and they all cry out for attention, looping backward or forward, uncontent, urgently needing our eye. The brilliance that, for each blossom, draws us swiftly toward it is coupled with a kind of “social pressure,” through which the companion blooms crowd in, jostle for space and light. The crowd is a constancy, but the individuality persists in calling out. Madeleine is such a flower in Vertigo, protruding from whatever social Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

54  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e scene holds her. Judy Barton, a more garish type, seems to recede into her circumstances until Scottie persists in bringing her out, recoloring her. And of course both Madeleine and the reconstituted Judy are distinctly short-lived. Their flame and their promise burn swiftly and die away. Brilliance and constancy as antinomies: that which flashes and entices, seduces, provokes; and that which continues, which bears traces, which offers the stability (and the vitiation) of permanence. Scottie in the final shot of Vertigo, perched at a viewpoint, the sky roiling with blacking clouds, the colors of his own body virtually bleached away, knows the condition of mortality (and, it seems reasonable to think, only that). In A Matter of Life and Death, the subtle joke is that for all the lackluster “constancy” and “perduration” of the black-and-white sequences in the Other World, they, and their traces in the figuration of the Conductor, persevere in seeming the more attractive, the more mysterious, the more wondrous. The everyday world is colored for reality but not for intoxication, recognition but not surprise, except—and this is an exception that refigures the world of the film—when the Conductor makes his way earthward via the transportation system of Technicolor. In the early nineteenth century an idea circulated to the effect that even the very brilliance of forceful color could lose its power, just because of its ability to stir. Although most colors “are agreeable,” wrote Levesque de Pouilly, “Sir Isaac Newton has shewn us by experiments [that while] those rays which form the colour of fire have the greatest force,” still, notwithstanding that “their colour is the most brilliant,” we find that “it soon fatigues the sight. Those which form a green, having only a moderate motion, are therefore capable of exercising the fibres of the eye, without weakening them” (27–28). In the Conductor’s introductory moment, the pink, fleshy color of his rose, participating only slightly in the “colour of fire,” also vibrates against the duller green of the man’s coat, and so the eye is soothed and can gaze desirously without (Newtonian) limit. There remains a distinctive and vibratory pleasure in watching the bloom, a yearning to continue looking at it beyond the eclipse of the shot. As happens with the pink roses in the nosegay of Vertigo, the eye and the heart are attached to the flower in its coloration, precisely through, and because of, its impermanence or inconstancy. The eye seems to retain and cherish the color that fades. “Dans le souverain plaisir,” wrote Offray de La Mettrie in 1747, “dans ces momens divins, où l’âme semble nous quitter pour passer dans l’objet adoré, où les deux Amans ne forment plus q’un même Coeur, q’un même esprit animé par l’amour, . . . on est ravi, transporté” (In sovereign pleasure, in those divine moments when the soul seems to leave us in order to pass into the adored object, when the two lovers form only a single heart, a single spirit animated by love . . . one is ravished, transported [58–59; my translation]). Our love of color allows us to hold it extensively, not only in vision but in memory, which does not necessarily fade. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   55 In the gentle pink rose—a property of the Conductor but alive also, quite beyond him, in many varied exemplars through the history of painting, especially in the Dutch school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—we have lascivious fleshiness, impertinent freshness, and precision of articulation, all of which are thrown into solidification, objectification, and conceptual distance through formalism. Examine, for other cases of flamboyant color, Jan Van Huysum (1682–1749), Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621), and Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606–1684), who render the most explicit references to species and their origins and interrelations (by way of the artful combination of blooms in the exquisite, often Wan-li, vases where we find them reposing, beseeching our eye, and the skillfully interposed raindrops, caterpillars, butterflies, and other insects, a spider’s strand—everything accomplished with the smallest gestures of the brush and the most radiant application of color). Often in these paintings—there is a particularly explicit example in the case of De Heem—we find the background painted black, and the whole canvas powerfully glazed so that the contrast between flowers and the space around them is intense, and the colors spring out in shocking vivacity. Directly from such canvases, the Powell-Pressburger rose springs, materializing upon the Conductor’s lapel and calling back to our earliest desires for “barbaric” color. Art makes the color of the blooming world immortal.

S edu ce t he E ye Detail of rendition, a contemporary fad among aficionados of action film, in which CGI is conventionally used to fill in surfaces with reflections, with crazing, with minute forensic effects, is an interesting crucial feature of the pleasure we have learned to obtain and relish in the presence of natural color (a pleasure reborn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Painters modulated their supreme satisfaction in making pictures that evoked spiritual values, historical circumstances, or the personalities of esteemed personages and families and devoted themselves to indexing the world around them in all its variety and form. Beyond making her feel, painting made the viewer see. In Jan Van Huysum’s Vase of Flowers (1722), for just one example, a terra cotta vase with a Hellenic bas-relief contains a stunning array of blooms, including, at the center, some creamy white peonies adjacent a red-tinted day lily and a pink rose. Crawling on the peonies one can see, if one looks closely, ants, typical fans of the peony, indicators of the flower’s freshness and reality. Such small details painted with exquisite care, telling features, selection of blooms to indicate knowledge of the season as well as a sense of graphic arrangement: all these characteristics of the flower painting evoke appreciation and delight; so that in examining numerous such items, over a period of time, one repeats the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

56  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e pleasure of recognizing the artist’s recognitions. It is not simply the sharply limned sense of optical presence that is touching, but also the evidence presented in the canvas of knowledge about the social organization of flower gathering and arrangement, knowledge about natural patterns, knowledge about the way living things inhabit space together. To find pleasure in knowledge of nature, to find pleasure in seeing knowledge of nature reflected and stimulated in canvases, was itself a delight of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, since now, in gazing at paintings one could mark one’s sophistication. “To form a collection,” comments Mark Girouard, displaying a photographic record of the Green Closet in Ham House, Surrey, “needed leisure, know­ ledge and money; the possession of one added to the owner’s mystique and helped to separate him from lesser men. . . . To enrich ones [sic] house with rare and splendid collections, became an accepted part of the image of a great man” (173). Pictures needed special accommodation in great houses, becoming “an essential part of country-house life” (164). Indeed, in the eighteenth century the program of learning how to see—that is, being indoctrinated in a form of pleasure-taking—was rife among the young nobles who made the continental escapade their own, especially in Italy. “Once the young Englishman had settled into his lodgings,” writes Brinsley Ford, “the first thing to be done was to find a good cicerone or antiquarian to show him the sights” (45). An excitingly riddling, very singular, feature of Dutch flower painting at its height is trompe l’oeil, a tactic by which the observer’s eye is fooled into taking as fully real what is only a two-dimensional representation. To stand at precisely the right distance, to gaze at the floral array in these paintings, to block out the frame and everything outside of it in the room, is to be confronted with flowers themselves. And one must imagine that in the great country houses of the Netherlands and Northern Europe, with canvases such as these on the walls and lavish bouquets of flowers in vases upon tables next to them, the eye was pleasurably caught and challenged by the intricate array of colorful form spread into a balanced, harmonious rectangle. Bouncing between representation and reality the viewer could take pleasure in the riddle of the simulacrum. Marrigje Rikken observes how Melchior d’Hondecoeter, the fabulous bird painter, “played to the taste of the rich in the second half of the 17th century, when decorative paintings became very popular, and his scenes of birds were ideal for decorating the interiors of large town and country houses. In addition, those showing exotic and ornamental species held a particular appeal for rich citizens who maintained collections of animals” (6): in short, the painted birds, as opulent and detailed as painted flowers, could fraternize with living animals in the same vicinity, so starkly real did they appear. I am informed further by Nigel Williams that the Hondecoeter canvas was typically commissioned expressly for decorating wealthy Dutch patrons’ country seats; “they therefore formed part of a decorative architectural scheme, often in combinaNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   57 tion with paneling or leather hangings” (communication). The Hondecoeter painting, often quite large—four by four feet or much larger—could simulate an archway or window onto a patio where the collected birds—owls, peacocks, ducks, swans, along with peahens and egrets—had gathered in the sunlight, giving guests an unanticipated and wondrous thrill of delight. It is with this same thrill, as a twentieth-century inheritor, that we observe the little pink rose come into colorful bloom on the Conductor’s breast, and think, as the bleaching black and white tones evaporate and the evocative coloration bleeds in with increasing saturation, not only of presence and vivacity but of actuality and directness and inexplicable beauty. Here we are, it seems, with a real rose, not the abstract figuration of rosiness that was in pearly black and white. This real flower has its moment, and we are there to appreciate, savor, and value it. Yet also, given memory, not only momentarily appreciate but recall the moment of appreciation long afterward, thus extending it, turning it in the light of recollection. The boutonnière contributes a piquant sense of liveliness, a puncture of fabrication by a type of flesh. In Vertigo, after Scottie has lost his Madeleine, he is standing once again at Podesta Baldocchi’s, this time on the pavement outside, and in the vitrine he sees that piquant, trembling, seductive nosegay with its cascade of little pink roses. Seeing it he is called back into the past. Or seeing it, he finds the past drawn forward into his present moment. The flowers are here, they are as actual as he is; just as the Conductor’s boutonnière is as actual as him, too, participating in his reality. The color of the flower is both precise and strange, both indicative and suggestive; and the clarity with which it is shown adds immeasurably to its effect. Birds, like flowers, inhabit and embody nature, expressly in the way color describes and modifies their form. As to Hondecoeter, I have seen and been stunned by numerous of his canvases, which typically contain as many as a dozen or more species in fabular interrelation against backgrounds of ruined columns and lush garden vegetation. Rikken points to the smaller Still Life with Birds and Hunting Gear as a notable particular example of Hondecoeter’s trompe l’oeil: A partridge hangs from a nail in a niche, with two finches below it. He frequently used this motif of a stone background with a niche. In the 17th century the painting would have hung on a bare wall, creating the illusion that it was part of the wall. . . . Hondecoeter also painted a different type of trompe l’oeil which was even more illusionistic, showing one or more dead birds hanging against a wooden partition. . . . The finest of them shows two red-wings and a fieldfare hanging from a nail driven into the join between two wooden planks. Hanging behind the birds are three metal rings. In the 17th century they would be covered with berries and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

58  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e then tied to shrubs or trees. The birds were lured to them with a birdcall, and were caught as they were about to eat. . . . The grain and knots in the wood and the shadows cast by the birds are meticulously painted, and the illusionistic effect is heightened by the feather stuck between the two planks. (13–14) What is boldly evident to any viewer of his canvases, she goes on to note, is that “Hondecoeter used colour expressively, and the birds are painted in the most glorious colours. He succeeded not only in depicting them very accurately but was also the first to make them so lively and give them all their natural characteristics” (61). In brief, Hondecoeter had mastered the assimilation of color, realism, natural complexity, and pleasurable simulation, not to say dramatic choreography, since in his grandiose paintings the many birds—and sometimes other creatures—are in dynamic action relative to one another. His Birds and a Spaniel in a Garden (1660–1695) has a monkey and squirrel gazing up at a cawing peacock, whose gorgeous turquoise draping tail makes a swooping arc down the center of the canvas.

B r i l l i a nt M o me n t s The flower gardens and animal sanctuaries of the rich formed “open-air counterparts to the cabinets filled with foreign shells, ‘East-Indian curiosities’ and other exotic objects which were also passionately collected,” writes L. J. Bol (16); and owners of gardens “saw their transient floral possession perpetuated and eternalized in the panel on the wall” (17). By the 1920s, it seems clear, the movie screen had come to replace the “panel on the wall,” and the articulation of color and form in film, with its extraordinarily wide appeal—at first limited to tinting and toning and early filtration processes but by the third decade of the twentieth century fully realized—was the dominant twentieth-century instigation to visual pleasure (see Yumibe). Powell and Pressburger’s scene with the Conductor offers a concentrated visual pleasure based upon the kind of trompe l’oeil that Hondecoeter, Bosschaert, Huysum, and so many others offered for the delight of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century viewer. Since film is so democratic an art, however, the pleasure in the barbaric rose was not reserved for the sophisticated rich, in whose country houses such images might rest teasingly upon the walls. Now everyone could be stunned by the momentary, brilliant, utterly present thing. Yet to say that color is “emotional” can be entirely misleading—can lead us to think of our own particular feelingful responses to objects according to their various colors, mappable according to some categorical theorization that defines and generalizes color types. Romantic theorists, such as Goethe, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   59 pinned definite colors to particular states of feelingful response, opining that warm colors give us a feeling of repulsion, for example, and cool ones a feeling of distance and attraction. Aristotle had forsworn this sort of approach when he suggested yellow or white as sunlight, black as earth, and so on; he did not specify a reaction to these aspects of the physical world, yet at the same time he was positing a set of standing affiliations: black, for instance, is earthly just so far, and then it is not, and the earth turns red. After Goethe, Wittgenstein’s analysis had to do with colors in linguistic reference, that is, as stand-ins for thought: he notably asked of a number of different green objects what it was they all had in common that we should call it “green.” Much contemporary theorizing about color offers or implies a dictionary of affect: blue for alienation, green for envy, yellow either for warning or for soothing warmth, red for danger, and so on. With red, the red stoplight, red fire, the red cross. What is inherently problematic about theorization of this kind is that it isolates color as a discreet entity, and manages to explain the complexity of experience only additively. It also reduces ambiguity, which may sound a cultivated project but in life tends to bleach and erase the complexity that makes for experience. Red is never seen as itself, for instance; it is always a property of circumstance. Nor do we tend, except in psychological experiments, to see any single color in isolation from other colors, or scan our environment from one symbolic high point (condensation of importance) to another: a gray street (dullness) with a red stop sign at the end (danger) and a blue sky above (remoteness, Divinity): thus, movement through dullness under the eye of Divinity but with care for the hazards ahead. This is actually a patently nonsensical way of coming to terms with the far more variegated, subtle, and ultimately incomprehensible— because multivariate and optically diffused—thrill of color itself. To say that color is emotional, then, means not that it triggers particular discernable emotions but that in looking at it we bring a particular genre of response, one that is intensified, sharply placed in both space and time, rhythmic, interruptive of rational process. Color doesn’t tell a story, it breaks into the telling of stories. To return to Conductor 71’s little rose and the concern that its pink will fade. Indeed, its probability of fading is implied bluntly in the ideational, wholly faded quality of the flower at the beginning of the shot, and the shot moves forward in a reversal of historical time (another of Powell and Pressburger’s signals to their viewer that conventional Time has been adjusted here). The floridity and instantaneity of the pink can be contradistinguished with the unfurling delicacy of the blossom’s so-envisioned “pure form,” visible in the black-and-white. It would be easy to read Gunning’s comment on the temporal brevity of color as a relegation of color to some relatively impressionistic, less philosophically vital and fundamental sphere. But the fugitive and ephemeral are Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

60  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e e­ ssential elements of our experience, notably our experience of time, memory, and movement. My intent on elaborating a discussion of the “rose” transition shot in A Matter of Life and Death is to make plain that through its admixtures of color and black-and-white photography—this particular shot being an apotheosis both visually and technically—the film draws the relevance and mystery of color strikingly to mind. It frames and highlights the color of our experience, in a way that a fully colored film—and, as well, a film less teasingly about the “other world”—could not do. To watch A Matter of Life and Death is to revel in color, most especially its transitory but also stunningly vibrant qualities. The little pink rose will turn out to play a most critical role in the story but already, by virtue of its presence and adoptive color, the flower powerfully mobilizes not only our attention to the film but our deeply incomprehensible reaction. Of what can that precise color remind us? And what can be our full and honest response to the transition by which we see the form of the flower come “alive” in Technicolor? In pointing to color’s “brilliant moment,” Gunning might seem preoccupied with the transitory, impermanent quality of the conditional and fleeting nuance. Yet I would argue that we live our lives in fleeting moments, experiencing impermanence, conditionality, and the fading nuance as everyday realities, repetitive strokes of feeling. The Platonic ideals of conceptual verity are, in their way, less faithful to experience than is the momentary brilliance of color as it confronts us. Color need not always be seen or interpreted in an evocative way. What I have called “perfunctory color” is a repetitive, normalized, conventionalized arrangement, wherewith we recognize and steer by the already known and anticipated, rather than a deeper, emotionally gripping effect. This is a state of affairs intermediate between the conceptual generalization of permanence (in black-and-white) and what Gunning points to in the flower’s transitory “brilliance.” So, for example, seeing the green of a lawn in spring could lead us merely to accept it as an index of the season, merely to take it for granted as a signal, in the sense that the grassy green is as much an attribute of the vegetation as its shape. It is a “perfunctory” green that describes the lawns of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) or Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002). Or we might see the redness of an apple and think it a mere excrescence, since it is in the nature of some apples to be red: the apple munched after the strangling of Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) in Frenzy (1972). By comparison, to be vitally struck by an apple’s redness, by the greenness of grass; to find these brilliant and provocative and enchanting is to transcend everyday consciousness, to take up the vision of the artist. D. H. Lawrence writes that Cézanne’s apples “are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate entity, without transfusing it with personal emotion. Cézanne’s great effort was, as it were, to shove the apple away from him, to let it live of itself. . . . He terribly wanted to paint the real existence of the body, to make it artistically palpable” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a barbaric rose   61 (n.p.). For Cézanne, the landscape as subject of art, “a thing of pure luminosity and floating shadows, suddenly exploded” (n.p.).

Colorless Color But the color that is achieved in Technicolor’s three-strip system, and offered to the eye with such explicit design and surprising drama in A Matter of Life and Death, is not perfunctory color in any sense. It is a glorious example of chromatic brilliance, ironically designated in this film to identify the diegetic “everyday” rather than the “heavenly,” which latter condition is rendered not only permanent (in the sense adduced by Gunning) but also boring, at least to one long-time, malnourished resident (who not only yearns for Technicolor but is “starved” for it). We are to imagine, further, color as an agency of movement, since it is by means of Technicolor that Conductor 71 effects his passage from the Other World to Earth. Not only is the earthly existence a colored one (only sometimes a perfunctorily colored one) but Technicolor as a process presents him with a means of proceeding from one world to the other. It is not, after all, for color in a general sense that he sighs “they” are so “starved, up there,” but for Technicolor. In the original soundstage recording, Goring said the word “color,” and the line is overdubbed to make explicit reference to Technicolor. If any color can have presence, the production of radiance falls to certain color effects only. In the scene I have been discussing, the pink rose in the lapel functions as an example of, and warning about, radiant color. But similarly radiant are the rhododendrons, the Conductor’s painted lips, the loden green of his jacket, and the twilight turquoise of the sky. What is the passion for color saturation and brilliance that facilitates our regard of this little scene? What are the roots of a hunger, such as could have moved Kalmus and his partners Comstock and Westcott to proceed with the development of their system? Given that the world is always already in color, and that we are capable of experiencing—and then through film replicating—our most “perfunctory” experiences of it, why might we wish to push beyond, into the territory of the expressly radiant and brilliant? What desire is addressed by the purity, intensity, spontaneity, and deepness of brilliant color, the kind Technicolor offered? What adventures are to be had along the pathway that moved from Van Eyck through the Dutch flower painters to the animal paintings of Oudry, the flamboyant natural enchantments of Boucher, the fêtes galantes of Watteau, the splashing waters of Jacob Ruisdael, the forests of Courbet, the still lifes of Cézanne? Two features have been central to both painting’s continuing use of color and the sharpness of color onscreen. First, they have stilled and astonished our Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

62  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e sense of continuity by touching down to a stratum where feeling and memory both persevere outside of motion. And they have confounded our understanding through a precision of articulation that mimics, but only mimics, everyday perception of the natural world. Regarding feeling outside of motion, we can be guided by Heinrich Wölfflin to note a “gradual depreciation of line” leading to a perception that “surrender[s] itself to the mere visual appearance and can abandon ‘tangible’ design” so that the work “tends to look limitless” (14). With the new bold and saturated color, the new prominence of color effects, “composition, light, and color no longer merely serve to define form, but have their own life” (16). It will happen that the little rose on the Conductor’s lapel has enormous importance to a series of diegetic happenings in the unfolding of which we have become more than interested. And in working through its magic, the flower that sometimes takes on color and sometimes loses it, the variant rose, will through both its enchantment and its reality—both its delusionary aspect and its capacity to exert a kind of definite force—produce redemption. Here, briefly, is what happens: Peter Carter, in love with June, has been experiencing strange symptoms, which he attributes to the repeated visits of the Conductor, who has become increasingly importunate, increasingly nervous that his career “up there” is in jeopardy because of his mistake with Peter. June’s dear friend Frank Reeves, however, being a much-reputed neurologist, has his own suspicions, and they are, at least in his earthly frame of reasoning, grave ones. He believes Peter has a brain tumor and must be operated on forthwith if his life is to be saved. In the involvement of the neurologist character, a kindly and very British fellow, we see on one hand the imbrication of an unworldly, ethereal tale of interaction between the heavenly and earthly spheres—call it a spiritualist adventure—and on the other a materialist, medical tale of the disabled body and its vulnerabilities. Peter is beset by a messenger from On High but also by medical symptoms, simultaneously and without division. The message from the Conductor is now that Peter’s case will go to trial, and that he must select a defense counsel. The good Reeves being suddenly killed in a motorcycling accident, Peter “sees” him in his postmortem condition and Reeves cheerily agrees to defend him. The trial scene proceeds, a very long and narratively complex affair in a gigantic heavenly auditorium that seems to exist within the clouds and in which is gathered an audience so vast it might well encompass the entire aggregation of history’s dead souls.3 While 3

To remember: in 1945 there were no computer-generated multiplication effects available, such as one can see in, for instance, the army sequences of The Lord of the Rings. This sequence was shot on the No. 4 stage at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire, with numerous extras.

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a barbaric rose   63 the unearthly “trial” is underway, down in the local hospital surgery Peter’s head has been opened by the master surgeon who is replacing Frank (Abraham Sofaer, who also plays the Supreme Judge on high). The operation does not seem to be going particularly well, and June, observing through plate glass, is desperately anxious. But in the heavenly trial things have come to a sort of stalemate, and the only way for Peter to be saved—that is, given an extended date of death—is for him to provide the court with some real evidence of the love he claims he has found and provoked on earth. The judge, the prosecutor, the peevish Conductor, Reeves, and Peter take a recess, climb onto the giant moving stairway that leads from heaven to earth, and ride down through the stars to the operating chamber below. There, in what seems a moment of partial stop action, the judicial officials see June frozen, with a tear of loving anguish stopped in the middle of her cheek. If only he could possess that tear and transport it! sighs Peter. But the Conductor is now—happily—his aide. “Permit me.” And with the rose, pulled from the lapel, he gracefully scoops up the tear. A dissolve to the rose upon a plinth in the heavenly courtroom, pearly black and white again. It opens and the teardrop is revealed, glistening in the light. The teardrop, being salt water, is itself colorless, of course, yet it reflects any color around it, so that in the earthly portion of the moment, as it is caught, we sense the drop as a colored thing while here, in the trial chamber, it is only a “reflection of” color, only an immemorial form. Like that blooming flower, it can exist as both immaterial construct and as vivid material object; it can, in Wölfflin’s words, both articulate and depreciate the linearity of form. And, as we will always remember of this film, it was in the earthbound and colored variation, in the stilled moment when it was caught upon June’s blushing cheek, that the teardrop beckoned with its fullest force, beckoned and, in effect, called out to the pink rose, its servile but also adoring companion.

Wor k s C i t e d Arnold, Hugh. Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England and France. London: A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1925. Bol, L. J. The Bosschaert Dynasty: Painters of Flowers and Fruit. Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1960. Borchert, Till-Holger. “Jan van Eyck—The Myth and the Documents.” In The Road to Van Eyck, ed. Stephan Kemperdick and Friso Lammertse. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 201, 83–88. Boulding, Kenneth. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. Brown, Simon, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins, eds. British Colour Cinema: Practices and Theories. London: BFI, 2013. Cavell, Stanley. “What Becomes of Things on Film.” In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 1–11. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

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64  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon, 1966. Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1968. Ford, Brinsley. “The Englishman in Italy.” In The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting, 40–49. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1985. Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Gunning, Tom. “The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop, Session 3: A Slippery Topic: Colour as Metaphor, Intention or Attraction?.” In Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, 37–49. Amsterdam: Stiching Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996. Hall, Edwin. The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Haydon, Benjamin Robert. Thoughts on the Relative Value of Fresco and Oil Painting, as Applied to the Architectural Decorations on the House of Parliament; Read at the Friday Evening Meeting at the Royal Institution Albemarle Street, March 4, 1842. London: Henry Hooper, 1842. Kemperdick, Stephan, and Friso Lammertse. “The Road to Van Eyck.” In The Road to Van Eyck, 11–19. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2013. Lawrence, D. H. “Introduction to These Paintings.” In The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, London: The Mandrake Press, 1929. Levesque de Pouilly, Jean. The Theory of Agreeable Sensations. Boston: Bradford and Read, 1812. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2014. Offray de la Mettrie, Julien. L’école de la volupté. Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1747. Pollitt, Jerome J. The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pomerance, Murray. “Introduction: The Color of Our Eyes.” In The Color of Our Eyes, special issue of New Journal of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 1 (March 2017): 2–8. ———. “The Man Who Wanted to Go Back.” In The End of Cinema as We Know It, 43–49. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Rikken, Marrigje. Melchior d’Hondecoeter: Bird Painter. New Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2009. Rosewell, Roger. Stained Glass. Botley, Oxford: Shire, 2013. Van Mander, Carel. Dutch and Flemish Painters: Translation from the Schilderboeck (1604). Trans. Constant van de Wall. New York: McFarlane, Warde, McFarlane, 1936. Williams, Nigel. Personal communication, 4 December 2014. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Trans. M. D. Hottinger. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932. Yumibe, Joshua. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

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w alk on th e w ild side   65 c h apter 3

Walk on the Wild Side

Parisians make the street an interior. You could never be sure who might be there.

Walter Benjamin Liza Picard

Y

oung Søren Kierkegaard gives a tale that aligns walking with the dream. Walter Benjamin offers it in part:

When Johannes sometimes asked for permission to go out, it was usually denied him. But on occasion his father proposed, as a substitute, that they walk up and down the room hand in hand. This seemed at first a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

66  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e poor substitute, but . . . Off they went, then, right out the front entrance, out to a neighboring estate or to the seashore, or simply through the streets, exactly as Johannes could have wished; for his father managed everything. While they strolled in this way up and down the floor of his room, his father told him of all they saw. They greeted other pedestrians; passing wagons made a din around them and drowned out his father’s voice. (Geismar 12–13, qtd. in Benjamin, Arcades 421) Thus, local space and imaginative space are conflated; presence and desire; mundanity and adventure; the real and the hyperreal. This “Johannes” who wishes to go out but is denied permission: he is like the cinemagoer eager to be in front of the screen, eager to be escorted on a journey; and like the civilized man of the early eighteenth century, too, tied to his culture and its commerce, bounded by his knowledge, always scanning a horizon but not yet experiencing the thrills of getting around. When in his Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams has his young Tom proclaim, “We go to the movies instead of moving,” he is meaning to say that going to the movies is our way of moving, that we are walking through the screen. In a way that is related to Kierkegaard’s tiny tale, surely, I walk through the filmic narratives I see, using not so much my given body as others would recognize it, the typical and thus predictable body of my everyday me, as the body of my dreamlife, which can be extended in every direction of desire, and which picks up speed or is frozen according to laws that have their foundation in the oneiric, not the rational. I confess that here is a scheme in which I cannot with specificity identify the father, who “managed everything,” yet I can give him various names, such as Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Jean Vigo. Johannes, poor beleaguered Johannes, is surely me, reading a book, watching a film. Watching a film as though I were reading a book.

Go i n g f o r a W a l k It is an odd (if engaging) circumstance of cinema that while characters tend on the whole to be ambulant types, they do not, by and large, “take a walk.” Simply go for a walk, that is. Enjoy a walk, a “pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, upon the briny beach.” A walk in which the principal aim is aimlessness. The taste of space if not particularly its exploration. In an age of mechanized locomotion, moving for pleasure rather than in order to access a destination is in decline, and moving in any format by means of the legs is quite passé. (Springing to mind is an odd little 1956 moment, a depiction of the American West after the Civil War in a film with a great deal of horseback riding. Suddenly in The Searchers Ethan Edwards [John Wayne] and his sideNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   67 kick Mose Harper [Hank Worden] are racing their horses back to the homestead, from which billows of black smoke are rising, but Ethan’s undisciplined young half-breed nephew, Martin [Jeffrey Hunter], has been left without a horse. He must therefore race across the scrub in their tracks, over the hillocks, into the valley, the whole long desperate distance on foot, only to arrive at the smoldering wreck stunned and out of breath, both. Other ambulatory moments in the film stand out equally sharply, including a well-known one in which a squaw is obliged to trail her saddled husband on foot.) Generally speaking, actors certainly do step: here, there, and everywhere in a scene. They cross the room (Marius Goring, fuming, at the casino in The Barefoot Contessa [1954]); effect a sweeping entrance or exit (Grace Kelly, into Jimmy Stewart’s bachelor pad, silently, in Rear Window [1954]); pace back and forth in rhythm with, or in syncopation to, their speech (Simon Oakland psychiatrically expostulating at the end of Psycho [1960], Carl Benton Reid shifting around to view Humphrey Bogart from different angles as he interrogates him in In a Lonely Place [1950]). And a specific actorial talent is the ability to give an effortless appearance of doing this walking, this placement of self, when, in point of practical fact, walking and talking together, with a mind to the lighting and focal cues no less than to the dialogue, is no easy matter. Sometimes a character purports ambling, as when Gene Kelly, in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), browses down a sidewalk in a rainfall but suddenly, swept away by thoughts and feelings, begins his justly celebrated dance. At the end of that number, having handed his utterly useless umbrella to a passing cop, he resumes his walk, somewhat entranced by the memory of his entrancement as he is wetted to the skin. As we see in that scene, dancing is not walking; it is a way of using local space but in effect flying out of it at the same time. Dancing : walking = song : speech. In the “I Got Rhythm” number of An American in Paris (1951), and dancing with a crowd of French children, Kelly at one point does a step in homage to Chaplin’s Tramp’s shuffle—a walk step choreographed as dance. Sometimes, a dance move is calculated and carefully rehearsed yet not made explicit as such: if we look at the little “dance” of footsteps executed by Judy Holiday and Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday (1950) as they prepare to play gin rummy, we see two exciting animals trapped in the cell of their history together, continually stepping away from one another’s presence even as they bark at one another in remonstration. A somewhat similar routine is executed by Doris Day and James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), in a bedroom argument where, aptly, neither antagonist seems comfortable or able to bear the discomfort. In these scenes, and others like them (such as Cary Grant confronting Henry Kolker, Doris Nolan, Lew Ayres, and Katharine Hepburn, all together, in Holiday [1938]), there is clearly movement around a setting, not just in it; clearly a sharp trace of footsteps, even rhythmical footsteps Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

68  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e (Hepburn: step step step stop); yet not really action we could rightfully call “going for a walk.” In these scenes the walk is a purposive gait, a stomp, a stride to a beat, a preparation for dramatically being still for a vital close-up. Or, the character does take a walk, but with nothing other than an entirely navigational, locomotive purpose, the dramatic need of the moment being to transport the self from some specific here to some specific there. A. Lincoln Ryave and James M. Schenkein use the word “achievements” to refer to “walking together” and “walking alone.” These actions are carefully produced and fully recognized feats, solutions to “a navigational problem” that is a “commonplace feature of our everyday experience of the world,” namely, the “transportation of our bodies” (268; 265). In locomotive walking, feet are used to carry the body forward because no other utility is available, or as efficacious. In Written on the Wind (1956), humbled by the police as he escorts the patriarch’s randy daughter home late at night, Grant Williams sullenly stepping away from Robert Keith’s study. In Magnolia (1999), Tom Cruise gingerly stepping toward the dying Jason Robards’s bed. In A Stolen Life (1946), Bette Davis walking across a bedroom to be next to her sister. A poetic moment comes at the conclusion of Sweet Smell of Success (1957). J. J. Hunsecker’s (Burt Lancaster) little sister Susie (Susan Harrison) has come to the point of no return with her dismal, entirely repressed life in his posh apartment/prison. He has always been active in controlling her life and now, having ruined her love affair (with Martin Milner), has brought her all the way to the point of attempting suicide. She knows that there is nothing for it but to get out, and so, by the harsh light of dawn, we see her emerge from the lobby of his building and stride across the empty New York avenue, walking away: away from J.J., away from this life, away from this film, away from everything, as the credits roll. A similarly vacant New York is traversed by Cruise in Vanilla Sky (2001) and by the desperate Harry Belafonte in The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), and a terrifyingly vacant San Francisco is explored by a submariner in On the Beach (1959): things do not turn out well for any of these folk. Van Johnson, who in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) endures an amputation, is blind in 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956), an American in London (only somewhat familiar with the territory) who steps into a lethal trap high above ground without being aware. As to telltale footings, we can think of Luke Skywalker entering the cantina in Star Wars (1977), Philip Marlowe walking into Eddie Mars’s joint in The Big Sleep (1944), Michael Fassbender’s David walking into a troubling cave in Prometheus (2012), Amy Adams walking into an alien craft in Arrival (2016), and legion other examples of film protagonists walking to reach a key destination, walking to accomplish an action upon which the story depends, walking in order to find someone to whom connection will prove vital, or walking in order to escape (a no more clearly relieving example being Brad Davis in the concluding shot of Midnight Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   69 Express [1978], as he finds himself having stepped outside the prison hell-hole in which the Turkish authorities locked him away, delirious, almost unbelieving in the bright Istanbul sunshine and the preternatural quiet). Purposive walking, pure locomotion, all this is. Walking—in almost every case—because a more sophisticated means of movement is unavailable or impossible: you cannot drive your land speeder into the cantina, or you cannot get a cab before sun-up to escape a dictatorial older brother’s wrath, or you cannot hope for a vehicle to be awaiting you when you have secretly, even by means somewhat unclear to yourself, found a way out of the inescapable jail. Perhaps, in taking the signal walk, you cannot even expect a future. “We are already haunted by the future which brings our death,” write Derrida and Stiegler. “Our disappearance is already here” (117). At the conclusion of Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965), Richard Burton and Claire Bloom are dropped by car at the edge of a field of rubble. At the far end of their vantage stands the Berlin Wall. It is night. They make their way on furtive footsteps in the equivocal darkness. Do they dare to be hopeful? But as they begin to climb up, searchlights snap on and find them. The end is very near, too near. And then it is here.

N ar r a t i v e a s W a l k As with other forms of locomotion in cinema, the walk can become distinctly dramatic—ideal, therefore, as a subject for narrative. When, as, for example with Spy/Cold, walking is grossly compromised, when established conditions make for especially tricky performance or for performance under stress, the drama can become climactic. (Here it is the trick or the stress that form the content of cinema, not the walking in itself.) A classic example: in Tod Browning’s much celebrated Freaks (1932), some of the characters, limbdeprived, must at a key plot moment move forward urgently through use of what is, for each, an idiosyncratically modified body part (sometimes a limb), an adaptive technique of perambulation: the body parts “normal” people have are not there for use. What gains attention onscreen is not only the surging, forward-pressing movement, part of the story process at that juncture, or even the sense of a notable trajectory or destination, nor even merely a diffuse thrust “ahead,” but instead the various idiosyncratic bodily modifications themselves, ambulation as evidentiary and diagnostic, the bodies as “strange” taken as the primary material of a shot: the “crawling as walking,” “hopping as walking,” and so on. It may be that a fully limbed watcher would carry away from this cinematic moment a sharp awareness of capacity not universally shared, perhaps even sympathy or curiosity; and that a limb-deprived viewer, seeing a kind of “self” onscreen, might have another kind of consciousness Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

70  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e altogether, since methods of getting around without legs could already be familiar, even unnoticeable. To the extent that Freaks is a “freak show,” and especially in regard to locomotion (although many other issues are taken up in the film), it can be seen to have been made for the full-bodied who regard limb deprivation as marvelously strange. The film thus sheds light on the typical “normal” viewer’s complacent sense of being normal. In a similar analytical vein, we might understand L. B. “Jeff” Jefferies’s (James Stewart) paralyzed debility in his wheelchair in Rear Window (1954), as, his leg badly smashed, he can do nothing to bring himself closer to his girlfriend who is now being ravaged by a murderer in an apartment across the courtyard. Here, however, the filmmaker has taken a bold step to harmonize the character’s immobility with that of his audience counterpart, who is tied, however willingly, to a single seat by the isolating moral conventions of crowd behavior in the theater. Viewing Rear Window, each of us does fully ­comprehend—through feeling—the forced stasis of Jeff in his chair. A companionate subjective perspective allying watchers with a debilitated protagonist can be found with Rock Hudson’s horrified stretcher ride in Seconds (1966), or the cockpit shots of the air crash in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Rear Window’s Jeff is not, finally, abandoned to the imprisonment of the seat any more than Browning’s characters are abandoned in their embodiments. While with Jeff, the confining condition seems to have been imposed from without, and with the freaks to have developed from within, both he and they are fully aware, fully articulate in their ways. A kind of heroism inflects their locomotion, their canny adaptations to circumstance. Other variations in modes of walking can be seen in films that similarly involve, presently or in diegetic history, a particularly focused violence whereby the wounded character is deprived of the full use of some limb: the Ahab problem. Consider sci-fi scenarios in which characters must struggle with their walking: getting around in zero-gravity or in aggravated-gravity situations, a memorable case described tidily by Stanislaw Lem in his story “The Test.” Stanley Kubrick has a stewardess (Edwina Carroll) move with notable (because fully expected) awkwardness, in magnetic slippers, in the space station shuttle of his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As a uniformed airline employee she must maintain poise as she walks, but the natural conditions make every bodily gesture a challenge. In Peter Chelsom’s The Space Between Us (2017), Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield) was born on Mars and now visits Earth, where his enlarged heart and maladjustment to local gravity make casual walking a pronounced problem for him; the performer uses a flatfooted gait expressionistically through most of the second half of the film, continually drawing our attention to his away-from-home condition. For I, Claudius (1976), to effect the role of a limping emperor, Derek Jacobi worked with a stone inside one of his shoes. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   71 But “footing trouble” can be the basis of visual wit as much as narrative tension, as, for example, when it is repeatedly highlighted and made the subject of instructive play. Take Fred Astaire in the “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” number in Mark Sandrich’s Shall We Dance (1937), accomplished on roller skates, or later, in the elaborately conceived “You’re All the World to Me” in Donen’s Royal Wedding (1950), this one managed by the dancer on the floor, the walls, and the ceiling of his character’s hotel room (in a routine the technological basis of which, a rotating set, was imitated by Kubrick with his stewardess). Obviously the orientational difficulties of walking while inebriated, part of what Craig MacAndrew calls “drunken comportment,” can be seen in legion films. Acting drunk is a particular problem for actors, as Michael Caine teaches: If today’s actor emulates film, he’d be better off watching a documentary. The same is true of drunkenness. In real life, a drunk makes a huge effort to appear sober. A coarsely acted stage or film drunk reels all over the place to show you he’s drunk. It’s artificial. And eventually, that kind of acting puts up a barrier between the actor and the audience, so that nothing the character says or does will be believed. (6) In some cases human footsteps are imitated in strange quarters, as in the simulation of comical human walking given by Steven Spielberg in the tenement inspection routine of Minority Report (2002), with a small battalion of computer-guided mechanical spiders invading the private spaces of the tenants (all this seen from on high, the camera floating over the “walls” of the set from above, as in the juvenile hooker sequence of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver [1976]), beeping, winking, examining every private space with irresistible and insatiable intelligence. The spiders are derivations of R2-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars (1977), other mechanical monkeys: these droll drones stumble or glide through territory the human body would be blocked from traversing, modeled in their ambulation after the much-celebrated Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956).

B ad T e rr a i n As is the case with driving, but not with taking trains (where gradations have been leveled) or flying (where runways are cleared and “highways” typically have no other visible traffic), walking emphatically invokes terrain and its natural vicissitudes, and as we see with examples from Sunrise (1927) to Doctor Zhivago (1965) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), the vicissitudes of terrain can be a deliciously engaging feature of cinema, in themselves. Vehicles are Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

72  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e stunningly impeded in their movement in Jacques-Henri Clouzot’s Le salaire de la peur (1962). And impeded again, as a demi-lecture on social foibles and human conflict, in Godard’s Weekend (1968). A clear-cut mockup of locomotional headaches in vehicles can be seen in the Benny the Taxi routine of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), where live-action and animated footage are combined to illustrate a vehicle surmounting numerous modern-traffic obstructions in Pasadena. The car driven under duress very typically constitutes an urban problem, and surely a problem of modernity, where technology gets the better of human desire. In David Butler’s Just Imagine (1930) we are early on treated to the spectacle of an innocent pedestrian thrown down by a motor car at an urban intersection—the human agency trumped by mechanization—but soon later we discover that in the future age (1980!), vehicular traffic has moved entirely to the air, the congestion down on earth being so hopeless. Minority Report has striking scenes of congested highway traffic, operating on both flat and vertical highways. The car is no pedestrian, however. The locomotional obstruction to be found on roads is a different phenomenon from the impaired or severely cautioned walker through territory: Martin Sheen and Frederick Forrest in the jungle in Apocalypse Now (1979), Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in shifty New York in The Adjustment Bureau (2011). A particularly interesting invocation of the cinematic problem of walking in a bad situation is offered by a sequence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). David Locke (Jack Nicholson), an internationally celebrated investigative journalist, has traveled to an unspecified African country in search of a rebel contact. Guided by a local youth, he heads his Land Rover out of a village and into the desert, where soon later the vehicle stalls in the windblown sands. He gets out and scouts the surround, showing himself to be quite out of his element—failing, for example, to detect a camouflaged hut in the nearby hillside. We cut to him following a guide—the resident of this hut, as it turns out—up, up, up into the pink rocky heights, the camera gazing patiently downward upon the two men as they struggle against gravity and pass it. For the guide, struggle is perhaps not so appropriate a term. He knows his territory well. But the interloper Locke is flushed with midday heat, physically spent, out of breath, eager as a child to be at their destination. He blurts out a bevy of questions to which the guide doesn’t trouble to make reply, beyond muttering that he will find out the answers “when we get there.” The sun is indeed merciless, Locke’s pink madras shirt now fully saturated with sweat. After what we are given to presume has been a hike of some duration, the two men arrive at a lookout point, from which they can descry a passing caravan: police agents on camel back, prowling for the same people Locke has been hoping to meet. The guide growls unhappily and steals his way off, leaving the hapless reporter on his own in unknown territory. Now Antonioni cuts forward in time. Locke is back at his vehicle. The winds have blown so much sand over the wheels that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   73 the thing is half-buried. Attempts to dig with his military shovel are unproductive. Driving back to civilization is entirely out of the question. Angry, resentful, hopeless, Locke curses his fate and calls out to heaven, “All right! I don’t care!” In a jump cut we are back in the little village, and he is heading toward us from the vast desert reaches in the distance. He stumbles forward, as though with each step he might collapse into unconsciousness. David Locke has walked his way out of the desert! Consider how his walking has established a narrative tempo. The abandonment of the Land Rover, the reporter’s unkenning struggle upward into the unknown hills, the view from on high of the dangerous passing caravan, the vision of him sinking—melting—into the sand next to his incapacitated vehicle, the crumbling expectation and destructive dehydration as he “crawls” back toward the hotel—all these betoken not only a condition specific to the diegesis at this narrative point, Locke’s physical and emotional emptiness, but also, and much more broadly, a pace of action and history preliminary to, slower than, what became possible with the automobile: in short, a premodern world. Camels and footprints, with the tracks of the automobile swept over, eradicated, by the sand. When one walks in vast open places one must be a familiar; must know where to step, and how (the quicksand scene in Lawrence of Arabia [1962]). But Locke’s Western mind is not focused on territory; it is obsessed with politics, encounters, questions, and answers. Rat-a-tat-tat. Deadline. Byline. He drove into the desert with a daring abandon, paying no heed to the place itself. And the territory has engulfed him. His way of walking betokens that of a man accustomed to motor vehicles but now forced, by deplorable circumstance, to use his feet instead of his wheels. Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast. And also, how can survival be possible when one has only the body, only the corporeal package, as tool? What sort of movement can one plan or enact when the body is the vehicle?1 The focus on leg work in The Passenger may be part of Antonioni’s heritage. Perhaps because in postwar Italy the benefits of modernity were seized so aggressively by denizens of the ruling class, and because a great many films of the era were class-consciously neorealist, one often finds in the early work of Antonioni, De Sica, and Rossellini markedly normative pedestrian action, a kind of distancing from the automobile, which is alienated as the signal of wealth, power, and brutality. Thus, in La Notte (1961), the middle-class author Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his ennui-infected partner Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), both of them removed from the compulsion toward economic action, are in a kind of emotional and intellectual limbo as they float along the empty streets of Milan, flâneurs in desperation, their soft 1

J. G. Ballard’s Crash was published in 1973. David Cronenberg’s film of the book, in which the analogy of car to body was explicit, was released in 1996.

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74  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e footsteps setting a lethargic pace for the narrative to follow. In Miracolo in Milano (1948) an army of the poor and destitute march with increasing vitality and rhythm toward the inner-city headquarters of the wealthy despot who controls property development plans in their slum neighborhood. And in L’Amore (1948), a lonely and confused woman (Anna Magnani), who has had a distressing (and impregnating) encounter on a hillside with a man who turns out to be the Devil (Federico Fellini), walks across mountainous territory to a village aerie where her torment reaches its resolution. (This is a very old story. In a seventeenth-century citation we find this: “A young maid, very beautiful, and one that had refused the marriage of many Noble Persons, fell into strange familiarity with a Devil. . . . A handsome young man, came constantly by night and lay with her, but from whence, or whither he went, she knew not” [Pleasant Treatise 39].) We have Ingrid Bergman traipsing the hills of Stromboli (1950), Carlo Battisti walking his dog in Umberto D. (1952), and the pacing, deluded, uncomprehending, desperate movement around the island in L’Avventura (1960). In his Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni gives central focus to perambulation as we see the photographer enter the strange park by night and step across the too-green grass toward the mortality that is his fate.

T e r m i nal W a l ki n g It is a well-worn convention of narrative cinema to posit a dramatically culminating “final walk,” as in the climb to the gallows (The Battle of Algiers [1966], In Cold Blood [1967], Tom Horn [1980]) or the escorted journey to the firing squad (The Passenger, Paths of Glory [1957]), the gas chamber (I Want to Live! [1958], Kill Me If You Can [1977]), the electric chair (Manhattan Melodrama [1934], The Green Mile [1999]), or the lethal injection chamber (Dead Man Walking [1995], True Crime [1999]). In all such cases, the walker knows full well that with each progressive forward step he or she is making an approach to the end (an end that in Martin Scorsese’s Silence [2016] comes without a ceremonial walk), and often, as an ironic metadiegetic reflection (a shining example of which is to be seen in A Place in the Sun [1950]), filmmakers place these scenes in such a way that the entry to the terminal facility actually leads to a credit card indicating “The End” of the film. In such films, as a regular trope, vacating life, if not also vacating the diegesis, is equated to taking a walk; and death is the final “step.” Nor is it irregular or inconsequential to find the murder or debilitation committed in crime films visited upon a victim taking a walk at the time, or at least walking: walking is potentially perilous. The murder in front of the church in Blackmail (1929). Edward G. Robinson shot down to the pavement in Little Caesar (1931): “Is this the end of Rico?” Richard Widmark terminated in Night and the City (1950). Richard Conte Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   75 gunned down in The Godfather (1972), as he walks rhythmically down a flight of steps. Even in a fairy tale such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) we can see ­innocents—Dorothy and friends—assailed by evil as they optimistically stroll down a road. The setting through which a protagonist walks may read onto the walker and describe his action: for Widmark, the streets and quays near the Thames; for Dorothy and company, not just a road but a yellow brick road, offered by supernatural power as a magical pathway. Consider as well Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), at the beginning of which, and during an extended passage, Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson is seen negotiating the mountain wilds of California, a territory photographed by Robby Müller to look like a vast and magnificent Sierra Club advertisement. Travis is dwarfed here, rendered alien and alone, emptied of quality and motive by the empty and yawning landscape. (More on this episode to follow.) A signally intriguing case of problematic walking can be found in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002), where what begins as a pleasant hike in the countryside turns quietly and imperceptibly into a mortal passage. Two chums, Gerry (Casey Affleck) and Gerry (Matt Damon), have gone off for a casual day in the desert, without food or water and expecting nothing more than easy conversation and fresh air. They are surrounded by stunning rock formations, delicate colors of nature, perspectives of a vast distance and hazy mountains way off, and, of course, each other’s youthful presence, this last a feature of their experience that both young men take entirely for granted (as is the case with so many of us, unaccustomed to mortal thoughts and surrounded by indiscernible multitudes). So many are the blithe footsteps these two figures take, so very open the space, so intense the oppression of the sun’s heat that for viewers of the film, as for the characters, it becomes a matter of following along without expectation, just walking and breathing and walking and breathing to keep up the blind rhythm, in a somewhat hypnotic state of awareness. The precise instant when things start to go wrong is impossible to pin down. But the boys come to realize they are lost, that at some juncture the body as navigational organ was positioned at an incalculable angle to the presumably clear lines they were carrying in their mental maps. Looking around, they fail to recognize a single feature of the land. And there are no telltale sounds. The sun is climbing, but they are without direction, and in a place which is as arid as it is beautiful. To find the saving highway would be nothing more than a matter of stepping in the right direction, they sincerely believe, if only they could assess that direction. But every footstep carries them toward a world they do not know. The film is intriguing for the way it spatializes our passage through time, configures our experience in terms of defined natural features. In the complexities of our lives none of us really knows what each next step will bring and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

76  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e at least in that particular sense we are all lost. The blistering irony of Gerry is that after Gerry-Affleck perishes, Gerry-Damon soon notices that they are only a few hundred yards from the redeeming highway, the highway that was the river of life, but vanished. While it is possible to read the film as a story of audacious and blithe arrogance, vibrant youth confronted with a mortal limit never yet imagined, we actually never lose our stable spectatorial placement on the road of the narrative. We are safe and secure in Van Sant’s chauffeuring, but his own characters have left him (and us) behind and must suffer boundless terrain (terrain vague),2 brilliantly illuminated obfuscation and the long-lived, vexing problems of the compass. Walking is action, action has both energy and termination. And, as it will turn out in the film’s dramatic climax, taking a walk is a serious affair. A more pungent way of putting this is that in the throes of modernity the pleasure of the stroll has been converted into peril, every happy wandering gone black and mortal, a metaphor of the human condition. A contrast, both visually and conceptually, is the hapless, frightened peregrination of the Devonshire moors by night in various filmed representations of Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, where there is a clearly invoked, plainly anticipated terror in the inability to see one’s way. This “Hansel-Gretel” problem can be replicated whenever a character walks into oblivion, for example with the voyaging space travelers at the beginning of Alien (1979) as they enter a strange environment with no defenses mounted, or with the various (hilarious) predicaments into which Indiana Jones walks in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). An especially dramatic version of territorial charge is given with chorus boy Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) wandering through the dark, shadowy, secretive passageways of the London theater in Stage Fright (1950). And a limiting case is given with Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967), where as a blind woman assaulted by a team of thugs in a confined space she seems to be very easily victimized. But these threatening scenes all take place in darkness or semi-darkness. What makes Gerry astonishing is the high-key lighting of the desert, the fact that the boys’ every step toward danger appears to them, and to us, merely a step into glorious territory well worth amazement and investigation. We see plenty—we think—yet not the one thing it is imperative to see. In a particular way, all the walking passages I have mentioned show a character brought into some hitherto unknown, as yet unexplored, thus still only vaguely bounded space characterized onscreen as a distinct territory or landscape. The progressing character, accustomed to standing and moving in a familiar spot, now moves ahead into a zone where the land beneath the feet— factually or metaphorically—eludes knowledge in a significant way. Through locomotion, an old place becomes new. The new place is a space of adventure 2

See, on terrain vague in modern life, Tom Conley’s discussion of this “inhuman zone” in L’Atalante (268).

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w alk on th e w ild side   77 (often, in these cases, of signal danger), where lurks in waiting some bizarre equipment or topography (a gallows, a cliff, an innocent wildflower) that threatens all future forward movement. This is a simplistic way of addressing a pervasive quality of the modern experience (in which cinema finds its apotheosis), namely, movement as a fundamental form: social movement through circumstances by way of temporary affiliations, geographic movement from the country to the city, cultural movement through technological change, spiritual movement from natural sanctity to metropolitan definition. In the cases of walking that I have cited, movement is first exemplified and then challenged. In order that the adventure or crisis be a purely modern one, the fundamental circulation of modern life is put into jeopardy because it carries the vehicle, the person, or the intelligence outside the boundaries of what has been adapted into routine. If we reflect on Kafka’s parable— Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers. Finally their coming can be calculated in advance and it becomes a part of the ceremony. —we can deduce that in adventurous walking is to be found a case where the formerly unknown itself changes so rapidly and fully, and ongoingly, that it cannot be calculated and routinized. This failure of calculation and routinization becomes our tax. But taking a walk has not always been about moving into a new topography.

Wa l k i n g I s L i v i n g Here, discovering no new land, with Jane Austen’s Miss Elizabeth Bennett responding to an invitation from Miss Bingley to “take a turn about the room” is Mr Darcy, considering the prospect of joining them: He could imagine but two motives for their choosing to walk up and down the room together, with either of which motives his joining them would interfere. . . . “You either choose this method of passing the evening because you are in each other’s confidence, and have secret affairs to discuss, or because you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking. . . .” “Oh! shocking!” cried Miss Bingley. “I never heard anything so abominable.” (Pride and Prejudice 56–57) Abominably direct, no doubt, and abominably revealing of his own somewhat darker motives, as they may seem. But also, as Miss Bingley may be intuiting, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

78  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e suggestive one way or the other of self-aggrandizement on Darcy’s part, since even the recognition of their confidence would amount to his (perceptual) superiority to begin with, and would in their quiet perambulation find both emphasis and deeper secrecy, thus enriching his self-esteem in apprehending them; and since, at least to some calculable degree if not entirely, the concern with broadcasting one’s appearance could seem to her unpleasantly narcissistic, and his putatively pointing to such narcissism would seem to be superior morally. I should hasten to add that in a culture based on status signaling, managing and displaying one’s appearance went far beyond self-admiration, yet Miss Bingley may have thought Mr Darcy’s thoughts about her and her friend flowing in that odd direction of self-regard. About Miss Bingley’s proposal to Miss Bennett that they take a stroll, our Mr Darcy is certainly quite right in one respect: the walking is intended to serve a distinct purpose, in this case to deformalize or socially reposition the talk as a ceremonial that is set apart from seated conversations, which might be thought, as forms, and at least in the immediate, to bear more gravity. The ladies’ perambulation is thus, ultimately, yet another case of purposive legwork, a way of getting to a state of affairs that remaining seated could not support. But in the eighteenth century there were substantial passages opened for taking an entirely different kind of walk, for engaging in an act at once more diffuse and multipurposed, more ambiguous, more titillating, and entirely disconnected from the idea of progress or success in geophysical, spiritual, or social terms. This eighteenth-century manner of walking, cultivated principally in the pleasure gardens—as they were called—had numerous conceivable purposes beyond locomotive achievement in itself. If in fictions as in life one might walk across the dales from one’s country estate to that of a lover, one might also walk, say, about the streets of a village or in the promenades of the pleasure gardens, in order to admire the trees and the garments of other walkers, and perhaps to notice and take pleasure in noticing even more. Peter Borsay cites an observation of Laura Williams, that of a link between “circulation, walking, gardens, and health” in a “nascent form of environmentalism” (qtd. in Borsay 64) wherein “good health was vested in movement as opposed to stagnation, applicable not just to circulation within the body of the individual, but the body of the town itself” (Williams 194). Borsay continues: Building on scientific ideas such as William Harvey’s discovery of the body’s circulatory system, and contemporary views on the importance of allowing the free flow of air, public walks, and gardens—anticipating later ideas of the park as “the lungs of the city”—came to be seen as an antidote to the increasing congestion, pollution, and ill health associated with the city. (64) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   79 All sorts of folk were walking for refreshment, according to the esteemed German traveler Carl Philip Moritz, who witnessed “old and young, nobility and commoners, I saw them all crossing and recrossing in a motley swarm” (46–47). The myth of our cinematic age had not yet been sprung, that of continuous (and, except in catastrophes—such as I experienced as a child at summer camp, when the film clogged in the projector—uninterrupted) forward progression (endless unspooling: one thinks of Krapp’s Last Tape). Experiences were not always heading somewhere. Comments were not always setting up punch lines. By comparison with what could be found earlier in the pleasure gardens, where walking was its own reward, Austen’s early nineteenth-century walking characters (Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813), the detail of their discussion notwithstanding, were already indexing purposiveness, heralding the birth of a new myth and a rationale that brightened the author’s plot and clarified her characters, as prelude to a marvel. The ability to endure a moment’s extension by way of devotion, involvement, gazing not glancing, reflecting, reflecting again, is a premodern one. The Austenian moment is not its icon. One refreshed oneself by promenades that made possible consideration, fascination, entrancement without consequence either verbal or social. It is fascinating to study fascination, to note how a voyager’s meanderings through the marketplaces of an unknown and unanticipated culture might produce heightenings and extensions of perception, or of doubt. Adducing points, arguing to a conclusion—these were not yet the forward-looking bounty of all interaction. One might take a stroll for the benefits of invigoration, not education. An amazed account from Capt. Cook’s Endeavour—the Cook voyages were a telltale marker of eighteenth-century happening—notes how in Eaheinomauwe were found forests “of vast extent, full of the straightest, the cleanest, and the largest timber Mr. Cook and his friends had ever seen” (Kippis 117): the adulation of nature for its own sake, not as measurement leading to profitable calculation. George Forster reports how in the south seas, with William Hodges, Cook’s ship’s artist, he “breathed the most delicious air in the world, fraught with odours which might have revived a dying man” and then sat beneath a tree “remarkable for its roots, which came out of the stem near eight feet above the ground” (441–42); this was Saturday, 2 October 1773. Mr. Johnson is provocative in pressing for results: in Vol. 3, Part 1 of his Life of Johnson, Boswell recounts having dined alongside Johnson at Sir John Pringle’s with Captain Cook, where, his having “catched the enthusiasm of curiosity and adventure [and feeling] a strong inclination to go with him on his next voyage,” his learned friend brings warning: JOHNSON: Why, Sir, a man does feel so, till he considers how very little he can learn from such voyages. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

80  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e BOSWELL: But one is carried away with the general grand and indistinct notion of A VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD. JOHNSON: Yes, Sir, but a man is to guard himself against taking a thing in general. (7–8) Taking steps in general is what therapeutic walking was all about. Stepping to languish, stepping to meditate—upon the environment and upon stepping!— stepping in order to taste. Yet even in fresh air are troubles (Et in Arcadia ego). The pains of pleasure: M. Jean-Puget de la Serre in 1668 recollects how “Salomon a bien gousté toutes fortes de plaisirs; mais dans tous les bouquets que la Volupté luy presentoit, il y trouvoit toûjours des soucis & des épines” (4): having tasted pleasures strongly . . . still in whatever voluptuousness offered him he always found cares and agonies. And of all the false sweetnesses that plague us, “odors are the most innocent” (197). Aristotle on the pleasant pains of growing: “In youth the constant growth produces a state much like that of vinous intoxication, and youth is pleasant” (180); or: in pleasure we become young again. Offray de La Mettrie mentions a sovereign pleasure, “divine moments, when the soul seems to depart to enter the desired object” (58), this mixed departure and entrance being of course the unity of consciousness with the beautiful thing; one must imagine travelers, visitors, promeneurs, flâneurs all stunned by the momentary sense of unification in which they became, were transformed as, the objects of their own fascination. But if the soul departs, the soul departs. Pierre Louÿs with a cure at the end of the nineteenth century: “L’important est d’avoir toujours une cigarette à la main”—The important thing is always to be holding a cigarette; you have to fold objects in a fine celestial mist that bathes both light and shadow (3). Roland Barthes makes a claim in A Lover’s Discourse, “The first thing we love is a scene,” and in reflection Gaylyn Studlar muses, “The masochistic narrative finds its master plot in the primal scene” (132–33); thus pleasure is always a trip backward, not only to origins but to the origins of those origins. “The past,” Studlar writes, “is incessantly repeated in the fort/ da game of disappointment and desire” (127). This is no doubt a game with a rich reward, the emotion recollectable in tranquility that is charged with visions of the minute and the absolute. Eugène Delacroix’s notebooks of his journey to Morocco richly and colorfully detail not evidence of action or dramatic involvement but features of the public presentation of the citizens he saw there: saw from the side, as it were, with the purpose of annotating their dress, their coiffure, their accoutrements, their posture in taking up the sedentary gaze of everyday life. With hand-applied watercolor he specifies the rich variation in tincture that is part of skin coloration, jewelry, and hand-made clothing. Eye color, hair color, pursing of the lips, openness of the gaze—all these are open to his record. Immaterial that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   81 his notebooks will furnish material for paintings later on: the point is that, in the here and now immediately subterranean to his text, the direct precedent to his text, his traveler’s eye rests on the living surface of the culture, captures visual facts in socially organized array. Delacroix is a stroller. He walks through the market in order to see what can be seen, and his pleasure is in the very existence—within his field of vision—of strangers who are not reflections of himself until, perhaps, in gazing at them, he feels devoured. This is not the unraveling of mystery we find in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” it is sight for itself: a vigorous breathing in of color, shape, translucence, opacity, fold, braid, curvature, smile. The voyaging observer could be perplexed or despondent in his observations, as we find with John Keats traveling by foot through Ireland and writing to his brother Tom on 9 July 1818: On our walk in Ireland we had too much opportunity to see the worse than nakedness, the rags, the dirt and misery of the poor common Irish. A Scotch cottage, though in that sometimes the smoke has no exit but at the door is a palace to an Irish one. We could observe that impetuosity in man and boy and woman. We had the pleasure of finding our way through a peat-bog—three miles long at least—dreary, black, dank, flat, and spongy: here and there were poor dirty creatures and a few strong men cutting or carting peat. We heard on passing into Belfast through a most wretched suburb that most disgusting of all noises, worse than the bag-pipe, the laugh of a monkey, the chatter of women solus, the scream of a macaw—I mean the sound of the shuttle. (Keats) Beyond lambent description—the “dreary, black, dank, flat, and spongy” peat bog—this account furnishes us with Keats’s own pleasures of observation, though the object of his sight was lowly and poor. Still, he does not forebear to scan the territory with a keen and very hungry eye, to swallow the features of buildings, turf, sounds, colors, forms. It is true that what he sees will find its way into poetry, but he does not see and write in order to preface poems. He is taking in, and then sharing, his experience, his intense feeling at what the eye can reveal. For Keats, walking is living.

T h e O r g a ni z e d S t r o l l “We never see anything clearly,” wrote Ruskin. “Everything we look at, be it large or small, near or distant, has an equal quantity of mystery in it; and the only question is, not how much mystery there is, but at what part of the object mystification begins” (55). To look is to search, not for the reward of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

82  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e mystery, perhaps, but for the passageway that will bring on the unexpected. Could the search for mystery have been one of the wellsprings of the British grands tours? How charming and disarming it must have been, strolling in the pleasure garden at Ranelagh or Vauxhall of a weekend afternoon, to find in one’s fellow citizens—especially they who belonged to a social class distant from one’s own and were therefore unlikely under everyday conditions to be seen at close vantage—some powerful hint not only of indication but also, darkly, of confusion and strangeness. How exciting, but how debilitating, to be confronted by mystery and to seek “at what part . . . mystification begins.” What is the story that led this interesting person here? (And what is the story that led me?) Nor were humans the only spectacles. “Wild beasts of every kind proliferated” in London, so that strolling through the city was for some a venture into the wild. “A noble porcupine, a man-tyger from Bengall who very much resembled human nature, a wonderful and surprising Satyr, an amazing Dromedary from the Desarts of Arabia near the ruins of Palmyra, a half-andhalf from Aethiopia found in a cave, and every kind of miscellaneous beast, bird and insect you can think of, with many more,” lists Liza Picard, “John Cross and Company in Piccadilly offered anything from a wonderful large crocodile to small lap dogs” (251–52). London as pleasure garden in general, then; but of course there were the designated pleasure gardens, where the stroll was to some degree about taming and shaping variegated, spastic action, just as the cultivation of the garden as a guidance and manipulation of nature, say, in the hands of Capability Brown, was fruit of the desire to control form broadly. “The sort of daily and weekly routines associated with walks and pleasure gardens were essential to guarantee that all participants turned up at the right places at the right times,” Borsay notes. “They were effectively a herding mechanism to ensure that the company moved in unison and maximized the corporate experience of the occasions” (73). Yet even taken in small dimension, the invigorating promenade with only a handful of participants, or only a pair, could evince order and seemliness through a rhythmic balance of footsteps and a gracious, harmonious relation of bodies one to another. Walking was proper, but also a way of establishing and maintaining propriety. To stroll with someone was to be civilized. Quite as much as civilization did, by way of queer types and strange behaviors drawn under the aegis of happy observation and delight, vegetation could offer pleasure on the stroll—or on the voyage undertaken as an extended “stroll.” John Constable to C. R. Leslie from the West Sussex town of Arundel,3 16 July 1834: 3

Whither one can still travel, then stroll, to visit the Castle and the Wetland Centre.

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w alk on th e w ild side   83 The Castle is the chief ornament of this place; but all here sinks to insignificance in comparison with the woods and hills. The woods hang from steeps and precipices, and the trees are beyond everything beautiful. (Leslie 117) The pleasure gardens of London were constructed and maintained in order to offer this exact specificity, rich as they were with new plantations, with exotic flowers, with cultivated walkways, a green paradise. “It is a glorious thing for the King to keep such walks so near the Metropolis, open to all his subjects,” glowed Boswell, 23 May 1763 (Journal 265). (Indeed, a little more than two weeks earlier, having been made most dismal watching a hanging, he became delighted at the prospect of being taken at night to Ranelagh [252].) John Dixon Hunt notes how Vauxhall was “a deliberate creation to please [the] clientele with an acceptable, even wonderful, theater of garden hood for those who were happy and willing to see it as such” (36). Hunt adduces other English gardens designed to provide visual delight, including notably the mid-eighteenth-century reworking by the Earl and Countess of Hertford of Percy Lodge into “a bucolic, faux rural mode with a host of fantastic insertions: a temple, statues, grotto, gothic, classical and Chinese fabriques, rustic huts, and views into adjacent agricultural land” (37). When walkers were in the gardens, “the world of normal motion was suspended; when the company moved they were effectively going nowhere” (Borsay 62). That is to say, perambulation was dreaming. Walkers could take in voluminous natural forms, sculpted trees, shaved bushes, straightened waterways supplanting meandering streams, and also the becharmed, even intoxicated strangers walking beside them. The German Moritz observed that “all fashionable London revolved like a gaily coloured distaff, sauntering in a compact throng” (62), although it can hardly be said he was impressed off the cuff: “I found myself in a garden rather large but sickly in its aspect, unseemly, ill lit and sparsely inhabited. I had not been there long before a young lady who was likewise strolling about offered me her arm without introduction and asked me why I was going about all alone,” but momentarily he enters upon “the glare of a round building lit with hundreds of lamps, surpassing in splendor and beauty any I had ever seen before!” (45). Another German visitor has a more salutary experience, finding a “lovely effect” at Chiswick while at Chippenham wondering as to “the practice of having cattle come up right to the house itself . . . cows being altogether better seen from a distance” yet persisting in admiration for Capability Brown and “the artifice involved in making things look natural” (Meinhardt 3, 4). James Boswell gave special attention to the central Rotunda of Ranelagh, the hub around which the public garden spread, with its orchestra and “boxes to sit in and such a profusion of well-dressed people walking round” (62). There were paintings to gaze at, music to be entranced by, vegetation for allure. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

84  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e “Among the most uncritically admired attractions of Vauxhall were the more florid pieces of patriotic academy painting” (Watson 347). Gaily dressed persons shone like flowers in the pleasure gardens, the Ranelagh Rotunda offering a space some 185 feet in exterior diameter (Borsay 62), in which one could gauge and pleasure in the appearances cultivated and offered by one’s fellow Londoners. There was more proximate circulation of social classes here than in the city proper, where districts and neighborhoods more strictly reserved space for members of a common class. In the gardens one might pause to watch types who would not normally come into one’s purview; to watch them with the peculiar delight of apprehending form, color, gesture, posture, pace, apparent intent, and signs of satisfaction or dismay; compatriots as curiosities. Peter DeBolla notes how “contemporaries, particularly foreign tourists, were struck by the wide social mix found at the gardens. Moritz understood that ‘the poorest families make an effort to go to Ranelagh at least once a year’” (65). In the pleasure garden, and notably in the circular promenade, one could see the social world as a whole, by this path coming into some state of understanding of otherness and the self—some state of understanding, perhaps a slightly heady one. “Circular motion provided the ideal performative context in which people could engage in intensive types of display and voyeurism,” notes Borsay, quoting Miles Ogborn’s comment that “Vauxhall Gardens was made of spectacles” and an observation of Peter de Bolla, in The Education of the Eye, that “what the spectator is going to see, and be seen seeing, in Vauxhall Gardens is visuality itself” (64). Not just visuality, however, but illusion. DeBolla elaborates: “Deception ruled everywhere in [the] garden of pleasure, and the illusionistic registers of the visual sphere were not confined to exciting the eye alone. It was, nevertheless, primarily through the eye that such pleasures were to be taken” (86). This could not be otherwise if people dressed to the hilt to make their appearances, if postures and smiles were manufactured for the occasion, if the look of pleasurable ease in a promenade were a mask. And if deception ruled everywhere, the pleasure of the stroll and the pleasure of observation were both linked to it. To see and detect were to see and detect inaccurately. To stroll was to navigate space in error. In its brutal physical aspect the walking brought vigor and excitement, both to the limbs and to the eye, but in its intellectual aspect, as walkers penetrating space came to understand, a walk was always in some way precipitous. A particularly telling comment, in respect of the depiction of urban living in cinema today as spectacle (consider the marketplace-through-the-seasons scene in Notting Hill [1999]), is that “the streets of London were a perpetual pageant—not only in retrospect, now that they have receded into a costume play, and not only to strangers, but to Londoners” (George 173). Dorothy George quotes Johann Wilhelm Archenholtz: “Within the environs of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   85 capital there is a prodigious number of tea-gardens. The happy arrangement, the order, the cleanliness, the promptitude of the service, the company—always numerous and agreeable—make these gardens as pleasant as they are interesting” (190). A transformed Kensington Gardens “became a fashionable resort” with “servants placed at the different entrances to prevent persons meanly clad from going in” (186). Deer were kept there; a cheesecake house was featured. Conspicuous in the parks was “the curious mixture of fashion, squalor, and the macabre which characterized Johnson’s London, and had long characterized it” (186). But in all London, the pleasure gardens were in “a class apart,” “grand seminaries of luxury” (188). In the gardens of Vauxhall, nightingales sang. The London pleasure garden typically offered a number of features: Walks, lawns, clipped hedges, shrubberies, as much ornamental water as could be managed, with a grotto, fountains and statues, vistas and views. In fact, though a few gardens of course could combine all these attractions, they were cockneyfied and eclectic adaptations of the gardening fashions of the century. (191) To walk in the scopic paradise of London in the eighteenth century, then, was a model activity, a paradigm of self-indulgence but also aestheticized distraction. The watcher who walked took pleasure in the act of watching and that of taking steps, not in their productive consequences. One didn’t walk and gaze in order to accomplish a task. The stroll helped produce the illusion of movement and the sense of time, but did not bring one closer to any destination: in fact, both in touring foreign spaces and in visiting the urbanized garden, one could rest in knowing that locomotion was pointless by comparison with delight. But beyond its enchantments and its surprises, the walk and walking place could be commodified and reduced, the adventure transformed into a “little tour” in effect, merely simulating the depths of experience on offer in the Grand Tour. Here is a summation by Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton: In all directions the formal gardens, those lovely great machines of stone and water, were being overthrown and battered down, their sites converted into ingenious life-size models for the landscape painter. Bastions, stone terraces, and rusticated grottoes, robust avenues and basins edged with wavering white plumes, . . . thunderous cascades, crunching gravel and sculptured evergreens, gave way to simpering velvet slopes, serpentine and tinkling streams, winding paths, groves of delicate young trees. . . . So that the scene should still more nearly resemble a painting, artificial ruins, representing a Greek temple, or bits of one, were artfully disposed in the dip of a valley, or upon an inappropriate knoll. (33) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

86  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e If early on, then, an arena was designed and created especially to make the garden of civilization available for one’s pleasing and enriching regard, if one could take a walk in order to see, indeed if walking was seeing and seeing was taking a walk, it developed later on that the delighted gaze was a product in itself, the scene something of an artifice, and careful observation a widely shared toy.

W ho G o e s T h e r e In 1741, Baron von Bielfeld remarked his pleasure in observing, at St. James’s Park, the classical nymph represented in real life by “the milk-maid who milked the cows for those who came there for their morning draught of ‘what the English call “cillibub”’” (George 182). In just this way, at both Vauxhall and Ranelagh, “the notabilities of the day were to be seen at close quarters— ribbons and stars, as well as wits and beauties and the characters of the town” (188–89), making various appurtenances of their class and merit plainly visible for anyone devoted to visual collection. Nor were the pleasure gardens the only providers of enticement, as beyond them, upon the street walks, lay additional, notably piquant, living sights: for astute spectators like Johnson, who might gift them a coin, and for half-hearted others who merely passed with detached interest: “The homeless deserted children and young vagrants who grew up to form gangs of thieves . . . were one of the saddest sights of London,” to be seen at night “sleeping on bulks and under stalls” (195). But the parks and pleasure gardens amassed, concentrated, and focused humanity as display for the hungry eye. But more than the details of social form that could be gazed at, the fact of the gaze took prominence. Liza Picard quotes César de Saussure about Hyde Park, where “fine ladies and gentlemen come and drive slowly round in order to see and be seen” (35–36). She adds St. James’s Park, where “the thing to do . . . was to walk about and, as usual see and be seen.” Importantly, “You could never be sure who might be there” (37). Vauxhall and Ranelagh were a special treat for those who wanted to know themselves among other beings, those who wanted to see society: “The great thing was to see who else was there, and to be seen. For only a shilling entrance fee you might see the Prince of Wales, who went often, and most of the nobility and gentry” (246). “Vauxhall,” observes J. S. Watson, “was the meeting place of all orders in an age with few organized entertainments: it was the place for all in search of ostentation for clothes or of obscurity for flirtation, for music, gluttony, drink” (347). That taking a promenade could furnish a curious person with leisure and opportunity to examine similarly occupied strangers, to gaze at their presentations of self and furnish speculation as to their class, ethnic, or geographic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   87 origins, suggests one clear source—embedded in a concrete social organization of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—of the practice of detection formalized in modern life. One might argue that detecting began with taking a walk; that, operationally and figuratively, the detective, icon of modernity, “walked through” his world and appreciated its sights from a walker’s perspective: thus the flânerie of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was less generic to its time than an outgrowth of practices already in play in the 1700s. If the meticulous observations of latter-day detectives, apotheosized by the fictional Mr Holmes, had become more stringent than what resulted from the typical pleasure walks, perhaps more neurasthenic and pressured, still they rested on more than a century’s tradition of moving among strangers, seeing the habits unknown others saw fit to disclose, scribbling notations about costume, posture, language, and attitude, and in general cataloguing the population. Our favorite Holmes is only more fastidious and exacting than his predecessors when, for example, he swiftly calculates that his newfound friend Dr Watson has arrived in London from Afghanistan: The train of reasoning ran: “Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished. (30–31) In light of these fictional imaginations—both of the author Conan Doyle and his invented Holmes—consider Michel Foucault’s observation that punishment became in its development a practice related to the building of information archives; and Tom Gunning’s notice, derived from Christian Phéline, of the importance of the “scar of the branding iron which in France had been used to mark malefactors for life” as well as the countering of branding, on the criminal side, “by extreme physical disfiguration, such as the brigand’s carving of his own nose and treating his face with acid to render himself unidentifiable in Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris” (“Tracing” 21). Gunning is interested in Alphonse Bertillon’s photographic recording system and method of cataloguing criminal types according to markings of the physique, in short, methods of detection based on the observation of types by perambulating the circulation of the population using the agencies of police collection and what I might term photographic alienation. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

88  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Suddenly springing upon us in this regard might be the hellish dentist Szell (Laurence Olivier) in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), as he makes his way down Manhattan’s 47th Street (the diamond district) in search of opportunity to liquidate a purloined diamond treasure. His walk here is a mixture of purposeful ambulation and distracted wandering, a kind of evil flânerie, because he seems lost in his burning desire: lost among haggling traders, lost in the shuffling population (by strict intent, since he has his own good reasons for not wishing to be identified), and, of course, morally lost as well, a paradigm of unsentimental rapacity. Aggravating Szell’s passage down the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, is a middle-aged woman, survivor of the camps, convinced she has seen this man before (!) and remembering that beneath his suave and cultivated surface rests the skeletal horror of Die weisse engel, The White Angel (of death), former medical superintendent of a concentration camp and responsible in that capacity for countless tortures, horrific experimentations, and deaths. “He is there!” she calls out over and over, “Die weisse engel!” As he moves forward he casually slips a stiletto blade from his sleeve and genially slits the throat of a gaping old man who has come too near. The diamond district, the film not quite subtly implies, is a Jewish hangout; and many of these Jews are plenty old enough to remember this walker from his earlier, chilling strolls in quite another kind of place. A kind of negative detection occupies Szell’s efforts, because he becomes a man suddenly turned to movement as flight but under the strict public regulations of sidewalk traffic (where to run in desperation is surely to be caught). The eyes become not only beacons of the upcoming territory but also cameras catching images of the passersby, cataloguing them, assessing them, calculating his chances of brushing past each possible threat in safety. (The scene is a masterpiece of assistant directing by Burtt Harris and Howard Koch Jr., with a large number of pedestrian extras each giving off particular facial expressions and attitudes as they approach and pass him by.) If Szell is at work to preserve his own skin, he is a detective no less, a man committed to the by-now institutionalized practice of imaging as knowing, detailing as recognizing. If the pavement were replaced by flowers and history rewound, this could be a promenade at Ranelagh. But can the stroller of the eighteenth century usefully be seen as harbinger of the nineteenth- or twentieth-century flâneur? As is rather well known, the figure of the flâneur was “derived” by Charles Baudelaire, in his 1864 essay “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” where he quotes Constantin Guys affirming that “anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead. I repeat: a blockhead, and a contemptible one” (Benjamin, Arcades 37). It is from the principal agent in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 story “The Man of the Crowd” that Baudelaire took inspiration. Here he is, a man wandering aimlessly following a traumatic recuperation. He finds in the crowded street a significant—an Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   89 alluring—other, an old man who is also wandering but to a purpose our protagonist cannot quite make out. “Long and swiftly he fled, while I followed him in the wildest amazement, resolute not to abandon a scrutiny in which I now felt an interest all-absorbing” (91). Here again, then, is an urban setting in which is made possible a kind of psychological “remove,” as well as the casual act of inspection that will become institutionalized soon later as detection and recording. The follower acts as though believing, without the least shadow of a doubt, that his prey’s small gestures, his stops and starts, his moments of manifest behavior will furnish solid indication of his personal intent. We see walking as watching; and watching as calculating, since the hero of our story (the story we are presently reading), our formerly debilitated narrator now freed upon the streets, is nothing if not a reader himself, a man given over to reading the actions of a stranger for indications of intent. In Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), the psychological lecturer Prof. Dr. Baum (Oscar Beregi Sr.) tells his class about Mabuse the catatonic prisoner’s continual hand movements in the air, and explains that when a piece of paper and pen were supplied these—we may think of them as—movements in space were transformed into writing, that could be deciphered! Action transformed into statement, and, since Mabuse is planning a gigantic crime, not only statement but “indication of intent.” Anke Gleber draws our attention to how the flâneur’s wandering is reading, a systematic and ongoing process of decoding the urban environment, in the case of her analysis of Weimar Berlin as seen by Franz Hessel. Gleber suggests that the flâneur finds the material of his readings on the surfaces of a cityscape whose inflationary increase of marginalia forms a vast “wasteland” of textual fragments, a “crowd of temporary structures, of demolition scaffolding, construction fencings, board partitions, which become glowing spots of color in the service of advertising, voices of the city.” These voices and signals, signs and letters, together constitute a metropolitan text that abounds in countless facets and excessive hieroglyphs, a text whose decoding is carried out by Weimar flaneurs in what Hessel calls the “difficult art of taking a walk.” (67; emphasis mine) For Gleber, the flâneur “exhibits a potentially infinite curiosity” (152). The flâneur’s feeling while making observation in such a continuous, urgent way is all excitement at the chase: “All was dark yet splendid,” reflects Poe’s flâneur after a frenzy of observations, including “organ-grinders, monkeyexhibiters and ballad mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

90  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e sensation to the eye” (87). But the crisis of “Man of the Crowd,” established for us more by the positioning of material resources upon the page than by open declaration—so that we, too, are forced to make an inward reading—is the narrator’s awareness that he is walking through a narrative in order to see, that he is seeing mere behavior, only a twitch, as it were, and is perforce using an expansive vocabulary of interpretation for positioning his target in a social fabric chock full of such strollers and gesturers. “I was at a loss to comprehend the waywardness of his actions” (90). He was ill, Poe’s narrator, but is now gaining back not only an ability to walk—to walk for pleasure, to take pleasure in his own footsteps—but also a penchant for reading, for inspecting small movements, for calculating their true origins in invisible desire and strategy. Can it be a wonder that Poe begins his little story by pointing to “a certain German book” that “ ‘er lässt sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read” (84)? All this in the face of Walter Benjamin’s blunt assertion that in a big city, the intensified struggle for survival led an individual to make an imperious proclamation of his interests. “When it is a matter of evaluating a person’s behavior an intimate acquaintance with these interests will often be much more useful than an acquaintance with his personality” (Arcades 40). Poe’s narrator is out of touch with the interests of his total stranger. Yet, also, for Benjamin, when a person wants to play detective “strolling gives him the best prospects of doing so” (40). I might argue, however, that the users of the pleasure garden—avatars of a distinct form of enjoyment and release that persists to this day, if in abeyance— were less consciously intent upon dissecting their surround than embedded in a rich sea of possibilities, deliriously, casually, and through motion. The very pleasure they experienced was tied to the openness of the place, its susceptibility to both acute inspection and variable imagination. Being “at a loss to comprehend” was a root of their delight. Their eyes and ears were receptive, but in order that they might catch, not analyze. By comparison, the flâneur has more purpose, more pointed hunger, and a more articulate plan. The pleasure garden was its own plan. And to the extent that we might find resonances of the leisurely, pleasurable walk lingering in our world (our world of the screen) today, we would note stimulation through wandering, not focus upon grasping fleeting information.

T he G ar d e n b e l o w t h e S ki n Here is a curious case study: In Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966), a group of medical personnel (professionals, not unlike detectives, eager to be on the lookout for Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   91 trouble), led by Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch, are miniaturized in a futuristic laboratory, then loaded into a hypodermic and injected into the body of a patient suffering an unlocatable tumor. Their mission is to travel through him, touring his various organic systems, there in its hiding place locate the tumor and thus facilitate its destruction. But of course in order to render this adventure onscreen it is necessary for Fleischer that parts of the patient’s “body” be established on the sound stage, as sets. Enormous alveoli floating in the air in what we are to take as “lungs.” Corpuscles in the “circulatory system” through which we raft. The pleasure of watching, however, depends on the curious circumstance that these intrepid explorers—initially bent on detecting a problem—might give up their professional charge in order to revel for a moment in each new organic system along the way, gawking at the colors and forms by which they are surrounded (and inviting viewers to gawk as well). In each of the syntactically arranged biological “systems,” the explorers’—the “walkers’”—struggle for identification takes second place to the pure wonder and awe with which they stare around, drink in their environment, clearly experience amazement and delight with the aesthetic—the aestheticized— forms. These forms, needless to say, part of an organ, a tubule, are all vaguely (and thrillingly) extraterrestrial-looking, subtending the extended irony that for each of us our body is an unknown, an alien, zone, that inside we are all something of a pleasure garden. Benjamin noted that Parisians “make the street an interior,” so, “Parisians” all, we make—or the explorers in Voyage make—the interior a street; and more still, an unknown street yet also a dimly recognizable one, a street of the kind that is seen, but only partially comprehended, in dreams. Movement through a very strange place brings its own delight and excitement, an excitement rationalized and somewhat mooted, of course, when query and knowledge take the place of wonder and surprised experience. In the film (for readers hooked on plot) the patient is saved, and we see the explorers (all but one, a traitor [the inevitable Donald Pleasence]) escape through a tear duct after swimming along the optic nerve: moving as seeing carried to microbiological proportion. The sense of wandering a strange space suffuses the sequence in Paris, Texas to which I made reference earlier. Not only is Travis negotiating his terrain attentively (he has to, because it is not exactly a highway, well paved and straight) but he marvels at it, one can feel the meditation in his every step. The hills and flats all around are radiant in the growing and waning light, splendid landscapes (in the painterly sense of the term) more than navigable topographies. As he paces forward in his red baseball cap (which stands out against the surround no matter what lens is on the camera, no matter how large or small he is), Travis seems caught in a wonderworld. And this quality of embodied encadrement, that he fully breathes his experience but is also bounded in it, gives us a sense that the unknown nature of his past and the unimagined nature Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

92  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e of his destination (if he has one) are merely, only obstructions to the sight. He is present in the environment, conscious of it, awed by it, yet leaving something behind and breathing his way forward. Thus, the experience of watching Travis walk across California simulates, for the viewer, being alive altogether. Does he himself know the origin of his journey, to which no explicit reference is made onscreen? Has he completely forgotten a past entirely eroded away? Can we think that his forward gaze, with eyes bright, as he makes to the horizon, is indication of a hunger to be somewhere else, somewhere particular, or is Travis only demonstrating the only way of looking we have? I argue in A Dream of Hitchcock that this forward gaze may in truth be directed to the past, since each moment of vision evanesces into history and we never manage to see what—precisely what—is to come next.

E nt r ’ ac t e A stunning entr’acte in Vertigo has Scottie and Judy going off for a little stroll. Under their footsteps, we hear Bernard Herrmann’s delicious “The Park,” a cue unlike any other composed for this film: purely lyrical, in a major key, elegiac, derived, as might seem, from a nursery song. The sweet melody evinces the way that every breath we take, expelled, becomes a vanishing trace of our lived experience.4 Scottie turns his head gently to gaze at the surround. The camera dollies backward as they step forward. The sun is shining. Judy seems at peace. There is not a syllable of dialogue, thus no projection of intent or reflection of impulse. There is no causal moment pointed to in the scene that came before, and there is no eventuating result of this stroll in the scene that comes afterward. They are advancing past San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts—built by arts-and-crafts architect Bernard Maybeck (1862–1957) for the PanamaPacific Exposition of 1915, and made originally of wood and staff, since it was intended for a view, not habitation. (This and the other palaces of the exposition helped San Francisco declare to the world its recovery from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake.) Young lovers are intertwined nearby on the lush grass margin (as one might well find them today), and countless seagulls swoop and flutter into the crisp air. The artfully beautiful setting lends this filmic moment a quality of Edenic stasis, produces a pause in the story development, in the progressive tempo of which we have been utterly caught up and enmeshed. 4

This is cue 12C, composed for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, two harps, and strings. It was recorded in London, in stereo, 10–11 March 1958, most likely under the baton of Muir Mathieson (Cooper 53).

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w alk on th e w ild side   93 Michael Oliver-Goodwin and Lynda Myles suggest that, notwithstanding the exquisite beauty, the scene is “all the more disturbing for the sinister subcurrent running through it. . . . It’s a good place for a thoughtful stroll, especially if you’re a couple and feel like playing Scottie and Judy” (94). We mustn’t neglect that Judy’s troubling revelation to the camera, her self-abasing self-identification, was concealed from Scottie and remains concealed from him at this moment, so that as they take their blissful promenade, the sun shining beneficently upon them, she knows (and we with her) more about what is going on than he does. Perhaps some viewers find his ease and casualness difficult to watch on this account. Hitchcock’s producer Herbert Coleman suspected that would be the case and argued strongly that the “revelation” scene was misplaced, but the suspense for which the filmmaker was on the prowl was not to be that of an ignorant audience, upon whom the characterological secret of the film would be sprung at the conclusion, but his central character’s, who would dramatically not know what we knew—and what we knew he did not know—until it was too late for him. Scottie is happy to be with Judy here on Baker Street, and, since if luck is with her he will never learn the truth (that is, if this is not, as tragically we must know it is, a Hitchcock film) she can be happy, too. This casual, beautiful little scene is structurally vital for Hitchcock, because in its contrapuntal relation with the deeper intrigue of the story a commonplace and pleasurable rationale is given for Scottie’s innocence and delight, the two treasures he is about to lose as events turn dark. To see this impeccably bright scene, this entirely harmonious scene, as dark and somehow ominous, is to close the eyes to Hitchcock’s artistry. While in his analysis of this scene the eminent musical scholar David Cooper (misidentifying the locale as Golden Gate Park) finds Judy “look[ing] at the lovers with ‘wistful envy,’ though he [Scottie] seems entirely unconscious of them, his mind apparently on other things” (136), it seems evident on direct viewing that our two friends—perhaps at this point we may reasonably think them would-be lovers—have found their urban oasis, their ideal bubble of withdrawal from the press of the everyday, their pleasure garden. “What an upheaval of the spirit!” Baudelaire would have said. “What divine inner worlds! Was this, then, the panacea, the pharmakon nepenthes for all human woes?” (101). The pleasure at hand is their presence in each other’s company (regardless of the fact that at this point in the film we cannot say with certainty they know each other), all tidily arranged in a splendid locale where natural life—avian, and vegetative, and human—effortlessly conspires to seduce their delighted attention. One can easily imagine Judy noting and considering the necking teenagers, in a way that suggests she is not delivered yet to a specific thought but may be heading in that way, working through their poses, their tableaux as silent anticipatory models of the pair she and Scottie could soon contrive to be. But no such imagination is necessary. They Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

94  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e are also just happy teenagers, an aesthetic subject it can be a tickle to watch, as we learn from Boucher: “un monde insouciant, un monde jeune, la joie de vivre dans une nature idyllique qui ignore l’hiver, un printemps riche en espérances, un été sans canicule” (a carefree domain, young, with the joy of life in an idyllic nature that ignores winter, a springtime rich in hopes, a summer without heat) (Rosenberg 13; my translation). Pascal smiled disparagingly at “admiration by . . . resemblance to things which we do not even admire in the original!” (Hedley 59), and one has to wonder here whether Judy has eclipsed him, having somehow learned to admire precisely the world in its originality. As the birds flap and fly in the background we sense not fear, not anxiety, not even self-protection, but the thrill and throb of natural stimulation, “a springtime rich in hopes.” The building itself, a temple in the Greco-Roman style, has a brassy, fiery glow in the afternoon sunlight—and “fire is a perfect poet” (Saltus 90). Beneath the structure sits a gloriously tranquil lagoon, the sunlight dappling its surface in a myriad flecks of green and brown and dark blue. Suddenly here, as though by some higher Purpose but surely with no warning, we have been deposited in Arcadia. The structure of the sequence is out of Claude Lorrain. The music rings vaguely of the high romantic. Cooper sagaciously notes Puccini and detects an echo of “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi, both pieces “[being] in 6/8 time, involv[ing] flat keys (A-flat major for the Puccini, G-flat major for the Herrmann), and hav[ing] rippling arpeggiated accompaniments based on similar diatonic harmony” (136–37). He sensitively concludes that this “lightweight and delicate intermezzo” manages to indicate “a leavening of the mood” (137). I might note that the descending scalar passage that leads the theme is borrowed from Saint-Saëns’s fifth piano concerto. And that something far more profound than “leavening” is in play here. If one asked, “To what purpose in the continuance of the film’s story is this leisurely walk devoted?” what sort of reasonable answer might be proposed, beyond what should, I think, be obvious, namely, that subjecting the pleasurable stroll to the dictates of diegetic purpose is hardly more reasonable than subjecting Londoners’ strolls in the Vauxhall or Ranelagh Gardens to a practical rationale beyond the pure provision of pleasure. Are not Scottie and Judy just taking a walk, finally? This is not a pretext for a conversation that might be problematic if staged without movement (as in the Jane Austen). It’s not a journey to a location, or away from one (as in Marathon Man). It’s not a form of self-expression, essentially. The central life in the story, Scottie’s life, is riddled with anxiety from the beginning of the film onward. We hardly have a moment to catch our breath, nor does he have a moment to catch his, safely removed from the press of fear, horror, bleak memory, and hopelessness that besets him. Here, suddenly, surprisingly, he is free to experience the rhythm of being, but without urgency, without fear, in a space that exists Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   95 out of time. The exceptional beauty of the setting can abstract Judy away from her wondering what Scottie’s end game might be (problematically, for her). We must note the tonal discontinuity this little scene provides with the surrounding film. It is the single point of contrast, the plain but unattenuated reference to a pure pleasure—that of taking delight in place and moment—in an overwhelming sea of reference to loss, death, nostalgia, and evacuation. But more, the action, settings, and tonality of the film more generally reflect the buzzing demands of contemporary modernity, the hunt for love in a maelstrom of painful association and busy contrivance. Hitchcock here gives himself a tiny platform from which one can reflect on the pressures of modernity as a momentary outsider, a citizen of—let us say—the eighteenth century when, social demands and pressures notwithstanding, a “proper” ceremonial existed and continued for the pleasurable withdrawal from the everyday. When we see Scottie and Judy walking beside the Palace, we see a man walking with a woman, side by side, step by step, a ritual of accompaniment, affective relation, and graceful progression. Any man could walk with any woman, politely, this way. The classical form of the architecture and vegetation push modernity away. The fluttering birds bring trepidation—as a musical form— into the sphere of the natural, thus belying and setting at a remove the psychological trepidations of the main characters. The behavior of the kids in the grass, drawn to our attention because they draw themselves to Judy’s, suggests timelessness, freedom, and unconstrained feeling: if their pleasure is sensual it is also philosophical, since they are brought by their encapsulation of passion to a unique sphere, a separate peace, that may be only for the young. Are they thinking of the grass? There are four keys to the distanciation, the elevation, and the specialization of this tranquil moment beside the Palace. First, while the awe-inspiring landmarks of San Francisco are generally on show in this film, the Golden Gate Bridge being the subject of a particularly spectacular (and commercially noteworthy) exposition, no setting is more classically elegant, more harmonically spacious as a composition, and more aesthetically transcendent than the Palace of Fine Arts as seen in our view here. The redwood forest transcends this in proportion and in wondrousness, it is more sublime, but it cannot be called an aesthetic composition, since Nature made it, not man. The Palace has curvature, height, color, and columnar form, and is positioned in a gorgeous natural setting artificially composed, involving the reedy lagoon before the temple and the vantage, behind it, of the Bay. Fresh air is here, daylight, effloration, shape, wildlife, human wildness, and serenity. To be here is to sense immortality. (But, as need hardly be said, mortality and immortality are the warp and woof of the film’s weaving, with the dead come to life, the idea of death followed by rebirth followed by death again, the centrality of monuments, the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

96  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e focus upon history, memory, nostalgia, and a kind of paralysis brought on by San Francisco, the magical city.) Second, just as this location is set away from other locations we visit, the performance styles of Stewart and Novak are set away from their behavior in other scenes, quite as though these two actors were surprised on set with the opportunity to take a leisurely walk that would not be part of the business of the film. This isn’t to argue the walk was filmed surreptitiously; it is to argue the walking feels spontaneous and natural, a form of performance different in weight and style from the rest of what we see. Scottie seems at peace within himself, unconcerned with the world, gazing off in uninterrupted meditation. Judy is caught with emotion a little more than he seems to be, but is still rapt with pleasure and release as she takes her steps. Neither of them is planning, analyzing, worrying, defending against the future or the past. It is the moment in Vertigo—I might argue it is the supreme moment in Hitchcock altogether—when two actors come closest onscreen to being only—but everything of—who they really are. Indeed, a curious feature of this scene is that for a mere instant, and in a way that quickly evanesces once this scene is followed by another, James Stewart isn’t Scottie anymore, and Kim Novak isn’t Judy, as they walk here. Each is someone else. One may easily imagine that in the pleasure gardens, clients would have had a similar sensation of transport through rapture, of loss of self through attachment to the available sights, and thus the pleasure of vivaciously not being. (Not being is another repetitive motif in Vertigo, involving in one way or another almost every single character. Not being is role playing, but also that strange activity in which one engages as one slides out of a role and back in the direction of one’s “true” self, but without yet having gone all the way. The actor in the dressing room with some, but only some, of the makeup removed.) A third contributor—as we experience the film it is surely the primary one—is Herrmann’s scored cue, which instantly affects us as an elegiac love song, a refrain emerging, as we may take it, from the deep consciousness of these two walkers. V. F. Perkins writes of Preminger’s Exodus (1960) that “the music is kept in the background. There it can work by suggestion, to colour our response to the action. More assertively used, it would have captured the event by imposing a single statement of meaning” (97). Here in the Hitchcock, things are different. We find the apotheosis of “assertive” usage of music, a musicality that is not at all only suggestive. Musically, the film in general is in a succession of minor keys, with much repetition of the trademark Herrmann double chord (two chords, in two keys, played at once, one atop the other). The rhythms and developments are generally symphonic, not “sung,” as we find here. The continual reminder of bleakness and pain that the film score legendarily offers listeners is here interrupted for a sweet, even paradisiacal riff, a side thought, a hope. As though the musical consciousness behind Vertigo Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

w alk on th e w ild side   97 taken as a whole has another life, here given just a tiny moment to express itself. The music thus reflects the characters whose steps it accompanies. And finally, the Hitchcockian camera, which is so meticulously placed in the film to contain objects, to consider a view, to show movement with the greatest dramatic force (Scottie tumbling from the stepladder into Midge’s arms; Midge’s retreat from the sanatorium, down that long green hallway; Madeleine stepping forward in the scarlet robe from Scottie’s bedroom, or in the gray suit under green reflected light from the Empire Hotel bathroom). Here, however, the camera is on a dolly, effortlessly gliding backward as Scottie and Judy walk. We can be delirious when we stroll or plagued with troubles, either way the fresh air and the rhythm of the pacing, the slow progression, the surrounding garden of delight all bring a sense of health and security and repose. It happens here that as the music builds and our two lovers meet the future, step by step, their future is slowly revealed to us, the peripheries of the frame coming unlocked and spreading around. The camera is taking its own promenade, relieved or anxious: anxious or relieved. And we are strolling with it, delighting in the prospect of a peaceable couple apparently oblivious in their own transport. Cinema itself has become a pleasure garden.

Wor k s C i t e d Archenholtz, Johann Wilhelm. A Picture of England: Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs, and Manners of England. Dublin: P. Byrne, 1791. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. D. P. Chase. London: J. M. Dent, 1911. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Scribner’s, 1918. Baudelaire, Charles. Artificial Paradises. Trans. Stacy Diamond. New York: Citadel, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, 9–106. London: Verso, 1997. Borsay, Peter. “Pleasure Gardens and Urban Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In The Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin, 49–77. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Boswell, James. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. ———. Life of Johnson: Including Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales. Ed. George Birkbeck Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. Caine, Michael. Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making. New York: Applause, 1997. Conan Doyle, Arthur. A Study in Scarlet: A Detective Story. London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co., 1892. Conley, Tom. “Getting Lost on the Waterways of L’Atalante.” In Cinema and Modernity, ed. Murray Pomerance, 253–72. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Conlin, Jonathan. The Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

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98  c i n e m a , if yo u ple as e Cooper, David. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. DeBolla, Peter. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in EighteenthCentury Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Delacroix, Eugène. Le voyage de Eugène Delacroix au Maroc. Fac-similé de l’album du Château de Chantilly. Introduction et description par Jean Guiffrey. Paris: J. Terquem et cie., 1913. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Forster, George. A Voyage Round the World in His Brittanic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5. London: B. White, 1777. Geismar, Eduard. Sören Kierkegaard. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1929. George, Dorothy. “London and the Life of the Town.” In Johnson’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of his Age, ed. A. S. Turberville, vol. 1, 160–97. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Gunning, Tom. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, 15–45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Hedley, Jo. François Boucher: Seductive Visions. London: Wallace Collection, 2004. Hunt, John Dixon. “Theaters of Hospitality: The Forms and Uses of Private Landscapes and Public Gardens.” In The Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin, 29–48. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Keats, John. Letters from a Walking Tour. Ed. Jack Stillinger. New York: Grolier Club, 1995. Kippis, Andrew. Voyages Round the World Performed by Capt. James Cook; with an Account of His Life, during the Previous and Intervening Periods. London: George Cowie & Co., 1831. La Serre, Jean-Puget de. Le Tombeau des delices et plaisirs du monde. Paris: Jean Cochart, 1668. Lem, Stanislaw. “The Test.” In Tales of Pirx the Pilot, 1–37. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Leslie, Peter, ed. The Letters of John Constable, R.A. to C. R. Leslie, R.A. 1826–1837. London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931. Louÿs, Pierre. Une Volupté nouvelle. Paris: Librairie Borel, 1899. MacAndrew, Craig. Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine, 1969. Meinhardt, Maren. “Unsentimental Journey: The Travels of a German Prince in Regency England in Pursuit of a Wife.” Times Literary Supplement (9 September 2016): 3–4. Moritz, Carl Philip. Journeys of a German in England: Carl Philip Moritz, a Walking Tour in England in 1782. Trans. Reginald Nettel. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Offray de La Mettrie, Julien. L’école de la volupté. Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1747. Oliver-Goodwin, Michael, and Lynda Myles. “Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco: You Can Hang by Your Fingers with James Stewart, Dream in the Fog with Kim Novak, and Relive Their Terrifying Love Story on the Vertigo Tour.” In The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham, 81–96. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012, Perkins, V. F. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Phéline, Christian. L’image accusatrice. Paris: Cahiers de la Photographie, 1985. Picard, Liza. Dr. Johnson’s London. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

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w alk on th e w ild side   99 A Pleasant Treatise of Witches. Their Imps, and Meetings, Persons bewitched, Magicians, Necromancers, Incubus, and Succubus’s, Familiar Spirits, Goblings, Pharys, Specters, Phantasms, Places Haunted, and Devillish Impostures. By a Pen neer the Covent of ELUTHERI. London: Printed by H. B. for C. Wilkinson at the Black Boy in Fleet Street, 1673. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd” (1839). In Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer, 84–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Pierre. “Preface.” In Esquisses, Pastels et dessins de François Boucher. Versailles: Musée Lambinet; Paris: Somogy, 2004. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. Part V, Volume IV, Of Mountain Beauty. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1878. Ryave, A. Lincoln, and James M. Schenkein. “Notes on the Art of Walking.” In Ethnomethodology, ed. Roy Turner, 265–74. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Saltus, Edgar. Imperial Purple. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1906. Saussure, Cesar de. A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II: The Letters of Monsieur César de Saussure to His Family. Trans. Madame Van Muyden. London: John Murray, 1902. Sitwell, Osbert, and Margaret Barton. “Taste.” In Johnson’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, vol. 2, ed. A. S. Turberville, 1–40. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Studlar, Gaylyn. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Watson, J. Steven. The Reign of George III: 1760–1815. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Williams, Laura. “ ‘To Recreate and Refresh Their Dulled Spirites in the Sweet and Wholesome Ayre’: Green Space and the Growth of the City.” In Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598–1720, ed. Julia F. Merritt, 185–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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100  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e

Intermezzo: Show Me Again

And twofold always, may God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep.

William Blake

W

hen between 1742 and 1745 William Hogarth painted his strange sextet, Marriage à la Mode, which now hangs in the National Gallery, London, he may not have been initiating but he was popularizing—at least to a limited degree, because the work was not very well received—the idea that could be called multiplied narrative. Simply: an event occurs, in Hogarth’s case an event of some magnitude: a man and woman join forces to lead their lives in tandem: but rather than being encapsulated and apotheosized through a single, thoroughly signal iconization, a selected moment of capital importance (as we Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   101 could find in Rubens, the Wolf and Fox Hunt [1616], for example), the subject is given as a chain of independent tableaux, each representing what may be understood as a phase of an ongoing narrative, or better still, a story understood from a collection of isolated, particularized points of view. Jenny Uglow sees dramatization as central to Hogarth’s division and multiplicity: This series shares [Alexander] Pope’s fascination with a woman playing a part. . . . But Hogarth’s work had a dramatic warmth quite at odds with Pope’s cold sneering and like all his series, it was more like a play than a poem. It was cast in separate scenes, with subplots and intervening events suggested by background incident and detail; the actors were ranged against elaborate wings and backdrops, and the plot line, as well as the staging, came from the theatre. . . . Marriage à la Mode was a stylistic tour de force, a rococo drama whose elaborate detail and intertwined forms have a unique complexity and richness. (374; 387) In Marriage, we begin with “The Marriage Contract,” in which the parties negotiate through lawyers; proceed to a point “Shortly After the Marriage,” with mutual disinterest and a breakdown already apparently imminent; then “Visit to the Quack Doctor” with the husband accompanied by a young prostitute; then “The Countess’s Morning Levee,” with the wife oblivious in company, as a lawyer suggests the existence of an affair; and “The Killing of the Earl,” where the young husband, having caught his wife with her lawyerlover, is slain; and “The Suicide of the Countess,” where in widowed grief the wife poisons herself. As a narrative device, the fragmentation and multiplication of points of view working here—quite as though a camera has been placed so as ideally to see a number of discreetly choreographed events—underpin a number of interesting latter-day developments and reflect, as well, other painted series by the same artist, such as A Harlot’s Progress (1731), A Rake’s Progress (1733–1735), Industry and Idleness (1747), and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), wherein the social world is seen and then seen again, either from a new point of view or with new protagonists or both. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; 1823) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) each, to some degree, involve the same device, as, with more bluntness, do Wilkie Collins’s The Lady in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868), where multiplied narration plays a structural role of great importance. Especially in The Moonstone it becomes evident to a reader how the many narrators are readers themselves, readers who can be influenced, interpreters of behavior and circumstance; and how the act of reading is a deeply idiosyncratic one, the shared grammar of communication notwithstanding, with individual observers led toward the conclusions they broadcast by both proclivities toward concentration—this object, this person, not that—and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

102  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e obstructions laid in their lines of “sight” by circumstance. The narrators are distinctly not elevated above the level of the everyday. “The question of how I am to start the story properly I have tried to settle in two ways,” we learn from the house steward Gabriel Betteredge: First, by scratching my head, which led to nothing. Second, by consulting my daughter Penelope, which has resulted in an entirely new idea. Penelope’s notion is that I should set down what happened regularly day by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Mr. Franklin Blake was expected on a visit to the house. (14) The omniscient narrator present in so much of literature outside this attempt is here shown up in all his brave fictionality, able to see and understand “everything” only because an arbitrary conceit, no matter how elegant and refined, proclaims him so. Betteredge could not be more limited in his access to the truth, more pointedly placed to get only a fractional view of “reality.” In reality—and the new fiction was obsessed with what could be called the “real”—no one spirit can see and know everything, and each narrator is timeand space-bound by his or her own class, social position, happenstantial placement, friendships, loyalties, fears, desires. Many early forms of multiplied narrative work by bringing different points of view into play in order that different phases of a grand event maybe be observed and recounted, much as we see in Marriage à la Mode. Through the multiplicity of observation the event is magnified in proportion. And the movement from fragment to fragment is formally celebrated, announced, through whatever convenient device of framing and temporary closure. Here is Collins’s Betteredge sweetly signing off after numerous delightful, if incomplete, pages of witness: At this place, then, we part for the present, at least—after long journeying together, with a companionable feeling, I hope, on both sides. The devil’s dance of the Indian Diamond has threaded its way to London; and to London you must go after it, leaving me at the country-house. Please to excuse the faults of this composition—my talking so much of myself, and being too familiar, I am afraid, with you. I mean no harm; and I drink most respectfully (having just done dinner) to your health and prosperity, in a tankard of her ladyship’s ale. May you find in these leaves of my writing what Robinson Crusoe found in his Experience on the desert island—namely, “something to comfort yourselves from, and to set in the Description of Good and Evil, on the Credit Side of the Account.”—Farewell. (100) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   103 To London you—you—must go, leaving me here. And: I’ve said too much about myself, that is, you’ve been reading only my view. Through this form of expression or intimation, the narrative ego is artfully and sociably diminished, removed from that pinnacle of self-conscious superiority so progressively discerned once “singular reality” steps in as a paramount measure of authenticity. By sweetly bowing and backing away, so that another voice can move into the center of the action, any narrator, however proud, takes on the mantle of civility and public-spirited equanimity, in this way gaining for the narrative he has just produced a patina of truth and, for him- or herself, most especially in offering a toast, a patina of kindness.

F am i ly The short-lived Japanese fantasist Ryūnosoke Akutagawa (1892–1927) took narrative multiplication forward to a new form. (A smoker of two brands of cigarettes, used in alternation, he took his own life by overdosing barbiturates, with his annotated Bible upon his chest [Peace 36].) In his 1921 story “In a Grove,” set on film in 1950, with some trimming, by Akira Kurosawa in his much-celebrated Rashômon, is to be found an event one is given to see over and over again, seven times. The body of a man is discovered in a woods and a woman has gone missing. We are treated to “explanatory” accounts from (1) a woodcutter, (2) a priest, (3) a bounty hunter, (4) the woman’s mother, (5) a confessing criminal, (6) the missing woman herself, and (7) the dead man’s ghost. Needless to say, every one of these accounts contradicts the others in some way, and therefore no two of our stories match up to verify one another. The reader is left confounded by the babel of voices and faced with the blunt impossibility of determining any single “truth” of the event, which, whatever it may have been, occurred before the story began and must continue now, unresolved and forever unclear, with the story done. The story is not an envelope to contain the event, then. The story is a bevy of arrows shot at the body of an “event,” some invisible target in some invisible space. The most celebrated remake of Rashômon is Martin Ritt’s The Outrage (1964), with Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Laurence Harvey, and Edward G. Robinson, photographed indelibly by James Wong Howe. The retold narrative is a special form of multiplied storytelling, because the singularity of the central event, its placement and replacement in version after version after version, leads us to suspect some deeply configured, always elusive clarity. When the story is divided into phases, there is always the chance that between any two of these something we might properly know has been inadvertently left out: inadvertently or perhaps intentionally! But when there is only one phase, one phrased action, and it is seen by conflicting forces, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

104  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e one has no alternative as reader but to doubt the solidity of every aspect of the presentation, even, finally, the words on the page themselves. If we are in the forest with the body, how many trees might there be for witnesses to hide behind? How many points of view may be concentrated upon a single object or movement? At stake, finally, is the shape and dimensionality of the universe, its physical capacity for holding (necessarily incompatible) lines of sight. If there is one sun, yet how many shadows may be produced through any instance of its reflection? Dramatically, the success of the multiplication trope hangs on the audience’s desire to be affixed to, or bend the attention toward, a particular statement or rendition. This hunger for fixation, a grasping after flotsam in the always-moving sea of experience, a desperate stretch for stable orientation, is chillingly thwarted as soon as multiplicity becomes evident. “There is another way to see this!” And the thwarting, the riddling of intelligence, is the thrill. And temporal progression, too, is halted in our sensibility. Each account seems to be leading to a conclusion, a resolution, an opening of the dark box— to what other end would we endure it?—but then suddenly we are thrown back to a tabula rasa, upon which yet another mystery begins to be etched, promising light in another darkness. Around and around, always back to the beginning, and always with a new voice that seems assured, truth-speaking, simply open and direct, except that in the world as newly revealed through this narrative device, this world of multiplied perspectives, no voice could be truth-speaking on its own. No one person can quite manage to be simple or direct in revealing. In classical narrative one is presented with numerous, often argumentative voices in discussion of some fact or presentation; but the overriding narrator never mistakes in finding one of these characterological sounders supreme and correct, a voice against which all other voices must be regarded as lacking, uninformed, egotistical, vain, illiterate. When we admit to the possibility of a story being susceptible to multiple narratives, everybody must be perceived as potentially correct in some way, or from some point of view. We can find the transition from classical to modernist multiplied narrative diffused through various forms of art, for one example in the stage work of Arthur Miller, as he moves from Death of a Salesman (1949) to After the Fall (1964), the first a single-voiced proclamation about numerous characterological voices in the Loman family, the second a confounding mystery—Marilyn Monroe, approached as in dream by all those who had a relationship with her, no two of whom can agree as to what she was, what they wanted, what happened. An interesting variant on multiplied presentation is to be found with the artist who returns again and again to the same subject matter, over a period of time, always seeing it from a slightly different point of view. Always a slightly different light, with a different personal perspective because of maturation, mortality, memory. Johannes Vermeer’s genealogy of women in closed Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   105 rooms (1650s). Aelbert Cuyp’s repetitive fixation on Dordrecht and surround (around 1650). The Dutch flower painters’ continual development of the still life (say Van Huysum, Bosschaert, Ruysch, and De Heem in the early and later 1600s). John Constable’s paintings in Wiltshire—Dedham Vale, Salisbury— (1820s). Paul Cézanne’s treatment of baigneurs and baigneuses (1898–1905), or of his beloved Jas de Bouffan (1885–1887), or of the challenging Mont Saint-Victoire (around 1887). Eugène Atget’s photography of trees in the Parc de Saint-Cloud in the 1920s. Every image is fresh and underived, as though the artist has just awakened and opened the eyes for the first time. Yet, also, each image is recognizable, stands in a series, is en famille.

I T e l l Y o u , I T e l l Y o u Ag a i n What, in point, are the pleasures of the retold story? As with all pleasures, and just as with the “actuality” repetitively implied, but never found, in multiplication narratives themselves, they can be at once contradictory and simultaneous, always multiply present even if without harmony. Erasure In her eye-opening The Moon by Whale Light, Diane Ackerman asks us to consider a repeated cetacean practice: Consider whales and their mating systems. Right whales are the supreme example of incredible sperm competition. A male who is going to mate with a female is competing with a whole series of males. . . . If you are a male, probably your best strategy for any given mating season is to be the last, not the first. The male that mates last is the one that has the most sperm of his left in the female. He is presumably producing colossal quantities of sperm and flooding it into the female’s reproductive tract, trying to fill it as much as possible with his sperm and, again, trying to wash out the sperm of the previous males. (156) So may we find introduced the pleasure of erasure, clearing a path, removing obstacles, starting over again. The chance for birth as rebirth, of possibility, of agency, of purpose. The pleasure of effect. The structure of a narrative as built and handed over can quickly wear, can erode in the moist cavern of our consciousness, so that it becomes something of a ruin, the sort of d ­ ilapidated— because completely understood in itself—framework we are eager to see bulldozed into the ground, dismantled, carted away in a breath. To erase is also to recognize the futility of an attempt, to see that it was headed nowhere, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

106  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e to acknowledge that one never reasonably had hope. Brushing aside opens the gates for fresh developments, for a wholesale reconception. The erased narrative holds place in our memory as a charming but altogether inutile try, ­something—as we can tell ourselves—through which we had to pass in order to arrive at the truly promising, more authentic grounds on which we now stand. A reason for both regret and optimism. Further, as with the lone triumphant whale, we can work in shunting away contradictions of our own purpose, tossing or storing any detritus that mars the clear story we would prefer to have told. Erasure is an announcement of the provisionality of an account, that while it may have seemed sound and precise it can now be more sensibly estimated as having lacked some key ingredient. To rub out is thus both to open possibilities and to wipe away error, to gain a sense of exciting momentum as a road opens ahead and a false trail is shut off behind. If one briefly imagines as avatar Ackerman’s right whale, it becomes possible to see how every telling, every thrusting move toward self-expression, takes on the character, while it is happening, of a full-fledged commitment to truth, a Being in the name of ultimate values. Each right whale, succeeding his competitors with the cow, takes itself to be as right as Boswell (never a syllable of uncertainty), but must dimly sense, too, the pressure of the surrounding, competing group. There is another creature who will take his place soon, another possibility that will eradicate the possibility he now offers. If it is an existential priority for the momentary narrator, then, the partial narrative is also a gamble. Vivacity Not only because it promises to replace an inadequacy, the narration newly arrived at has a vivacious quality. This is because a “but” is implicit before its first word, a “but” that both relativizes the former account, now in process of disappearance, and brings special shine to the present one, coming into the light, as it were, out of the blue darkness. Is there not an implicit logic of progressive development that makes each succeeding tale seem an improvement upon a past one? The irony is that multiplication narratives inherently show how improvement is a false hope, how any telling is no better and no worse than any other, when they are finally cumulated. Yet when a succeeding telling comes into effect we have the sensation of having arrived at greater clarity, a corrected vision, a more utopian state of affairs. After all, an announcement has been made that correction can be offered, the specific correction thus seeming, of its nature, better than what it corrects. The logic of progress. All generations appear to better their parentage. But do we, as a species, actually move forward in time? Or is the forward-goingness of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   107 our motion only an illusion, produced in part by the irreconcilability of movement, all movement, itself, with our need to account for having jettisoned the past? As with the right whales in their tactic of working to come last, the critic knows, when he speaks of an assertion or a work of art, that his words will gain supremacy over the thing itself, because they follow it. (In my view, this is a good reason for critics to think carefully before pronouncing about a work of art. Pronouncement may not be the ideal project.) The vivacity of new narration does quickly wane. It has value in its momentary presence—that the change of position opens a window to new light, and that new light always at least portends to fall upon some feature of the environment hitherto unnoticed or unvalued. With the Cézanne mountains in Provence, each painting seems to promise a revelation of space and form that the previous work had not quite succeeded to do, thus the inherent logic in his painting Mont Saint-Victoire again and again. And when the author revises a text, we may like to believe that the new version is crisper, clearer, more musical, more lambent than the sketch that was. Thus is formed a predisposition that leads us, looking at an annotated manuscript, to take marginal comment as dominant over the text to which it is applied (for instance, Ezra Pound’s additions to Eliot’s The Waste Land). The revised poem is the masterwork, the original draft was weak, etiolated, unfulfilled: a general proposition with revisions of all kinds. The artist was both humble enough to know that genius could not flow from his hand at fell swoop, thus that revision was called for; and somehow capable of making improvement through second sight. (To find the logical flaw in this argument, consider the stage work of professional singers, such as Frank Sinatra, who knew they always had to get it right on the first try. In his film work Sinatra would do one take only.) Error Revised or recalibrated narration also opens our eyes—or purports to open our eyes—to the prospect of a world that is broader, more detailed, and more complex. This new world, the universe of possibilities as now conceived by virtue of exposure to re-accountings of events, is one in which not only clarity and truth are obviously present (think of the single-minded painting of the Quattrocento, such as Titian’s exquisite Noli Me Tangere [c. 1514]) but one, too, in which error, sloppiness, imprecision, mistruth, construction, manipulation, stupidity, and helplessness all easily find a home, sneaking through the mouseholes. A direct implication of the second narrative in a sequence of narratives is that the first one was insufficient. Insufficient because erroneous. Insufficient because misplaced in perceptual angle. Insufficient because unfocused. Insufficient because incomplete, withheld, suspended, warped, ­unhelpfully (as yet unpleasurably) biased. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

108  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Now, with the new narrative, the old, discarded framing of the tale is a­ pparently—and happily—revealed as limited and wounded. She or he failed to find the right place to stand while “speaking,” or—through some evil wizard’s curse—lacked the necessary words. Even articulate, the narrator had delimited language; nothing else could have been possible because we find words only for what we know to say, and what has eluded the narrator’s ken will elude the narrator’s tongue. The sad fact that then, at the time we endured it, the narrative may have seemed coherent (coherent enough) merely reveals, now that we know better, how appearances can be deceiving, how the flawless description of events to which we were treated—to which we treated others— could have been nothing more than a simulacrum of flawlessness, a mere lie. To know the world, then, as full of both half-truths and deceptions which we had once thought glowing truths is to progress always to a more reasonable, more faithful, superior picture. Light within those shadows, if only to show their shadowiness. Of course, in presenting narrative accounts riddled with error the author is developing a mechanism by which the reader is made to feel more and more reasonable, more and more alive, the greater seems the resemblance between everyday, casual erroneousness and the grand Error found in art. The fiction becomes realer, the world of its characters less elevated and arcane, the more that everything we learn about it falls into question and engenders our doubt. Story like life. In classical narrative there were legion doubtable personages, folk with and without wisdom, agents with motive, but the narrative voice trumpeted from a peak above them all, the narrative hand drew pictures of all of them with an assured, evocative panache. When there is a single voice recounting the tale, all the characters both noble and lowly gain clear representation. But when multiple voices strive against each other, the narrators seem no better than characters themselves, indeed often are the characters themselves. If there is a controlling hand above all this, a puppeteer, he remains silent, modest in darkness, and lets his figures do the talking. And why might not a narrator, one of many, be a liar, a sort of Roger Ackroyd among competitors? And why not a perceptually handicapped sort who would like to see and know, but who couldn’t hear something correctly or couldn’t make out a shape? Or a type, faithfully attendant upon the action and vitally incorporated body and soul, yet insufficiently educated to discern what was going on? When the world of art expands so that we find addressing us not only the noble and dignified but also the venal and manipulative, not only the prince and princess but also the lawyer and the animal trainer and the scullery maid resentful in her sinks—we can feel we have a broader, a sumptuous picture. This expansion of the canvas, including so many variant social types, was one of Hogarth’s real contributions to our picturing the world. After him, they metaphorically take up the paint brush themselves. In Karel Reisz’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   109 Night Must Fall (1964), a housekeeper, Dora (Sheila Hancock), finally has her say about the other three principal characters, and notably Olivia (Susan Hampshire), to whom we may have thought her especially bonded. She now flips us away from the attitudes we were led to assume she had, casting doubt upon everything. Palimpsest For De Quincey, as we learn from Sarah Dillon, “the single most important fact about palimpsests and the palimpsest is . . . the possibility of recollection,” and his prime interest “is their implication in resurrection: their retentive function is merely a means to that end” (30). When we learn that every picture is an embedding of many pictures laid one upon another, that beneath every surface is a stratification of surfaces, we know the world is richer than we had thought, capable of containing within its edges a still more complex array of possibilities. If the surround has become richer, in being layered, possibly it has also become irritating. Consider this very youthful experience of Vladimir Nabokov’s perverse hero in Pnin: No sooner had the doctor left than Timofey’s mother and a robust servant girl with safety pins between her teeth encased the distressed little patient in a strait-jacket-like compress. It consisted of a layer of soaked linen, a thicker layer of absorbent cotton, and another of tight flannel, with a sticky diabolical oilcloth—the hue of urine and fever— coming between the clammy pang of the linen next to his skin and the excruciating squeak of the cotton around which the outer layer of flannel was wound. A poor cocooned pupa, Timosha (Tim) lay under a mass of additional blankets . . . (22) If every new narrative layer increases the reader’s sense of awe, not at the characters or the narrator who seems (only seems) to know them but at the very magnitude of the space where the action takes place, as space, it may also chafe, feel sticky and diabolical. Every room is numerous rooms, every street built upon other streets (as one may discover in Edinburgh, that palimpsest of stone). The impression of the world given in narrative multiplications is one of a subterranean chasm, a sociogeological accretion. Every character, further, is also a palimpsest, a layering of personalities built upon a base, with contingencies pressuring the formation of each biological stratum in turn. What we come to know of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) from Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), for instance, is modified and added to by what we learn of the so-called self-same man from Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and what we learn from Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore) is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

110  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e accreted upon that. All Kanes are Kane, yet the Kane of each narrator seems, at the moment of narration, a singular and unimpeachable Kane, a Kane of all Kanes. Citizen Kane (1941) is not typically attributed to “In a Grove,” but one can easily see the influence, and the influence, too, of stage design, since the building of the Kane story is like the construction of a stage set by use of multiple scrims, one upon the next, each progressively illuminated as “real” before it is made to disappear. There is nothing surprising here, since Welles was a man of the stage and knew his stage effects the way he knew the back of his (magician’s) hand. Kane as palimpsest is a well-known motif of that film. Yet in a way, every character in every film is a palimpsest, in the sense that what we see and know of him in any scene rests upon—is modified from—what we saw and knew in the scene(s) before. Especially poignant evidence of this condition is given by the gradually darkening performances of James Mason, Barbara Rush, and Christopher Olsen in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956). We tend to think of palimpsests now largely in terms of visual imagery, usually with a canvas painted over and sometimes with a disc wiped and rerecorded, but originally the term referred to inscription (typically of poetry) upon papyrus scraped expressly for reuse. Cicero wrote, “Nam quod in palimpsesto, laudo equidem parsimoniam. Sed mirror, quid in illa cartula fuerit, quod delere mauleris quam haec non scribere. As to your using a palimpsest, I admire your thrift. But I am wondering what could have been on that scrap of parchment that you should have been willing to erase it rather than not write as you do” (7.18.2). Here might be thought a powerful illumination of the palimpsest: that the undertext or underpaint had built a figure it could be preferable to hold onto. That in multiplying a perspective or a tale, even the now-corrected early version was felt important and should be cherished.  To look at any canvas and recognize how it is built through layers of struggle and hope, how any and every figure is drawn and painted over, how the colors are laid down one way but altered before the oil is dry—to see this is to see multiplicity everywhere. The multiple narrative becomes commonplace. Rhythm in Repetition And there is a unique and profound pleasure in hearing and seeing twice. Ding-dong, the doorbell (Marnie [1964]). “Hello? . . . Hello?” the telephone call from nowhere (Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark [1968]). Any statement repeated for effect: “Rosebud” mouthed at Kane’s beginning, visually presented at its end (1941). The voyage to a lavish estate followed some time later by a voyage to the same place, the voyagers grown notably older (Doctor Zhivago [1965]). Names spelled out again and again (Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo demanding that Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade put up his hands in The Maltese Falcon [1941]), or “No! No!!! . . . No!!!, No!!!!!” (James Cagney Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   111 learning about his mother in White Heat [1949]). Musical repetition, haunting, tricky, adorable, affecting: “I’ll go my way by myself, / All alone in the crowd” (Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon [1953], Jerry Lewis in The Delicate Delinquent [1958]); “. . . Who could ask for anything more? . . . Who could ask for anything more!” (Gene Kelly in An American in Paris [1951]). Or the great effect of simple poetic declaration and redeclaration: “I was born when she met me. I died when she left me. I lived awhile while she loved me” (Bogart in In a Lonely Place [1950]). Or optical duplication both approximated (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1931; 1941]; Julius Kelp and Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor [1963]) and shown with precision (the twins in Wonder Man [Danny Kaye, 1945], A Stolen Life [Bette Davis, 1945], The Man in the Iron Mask [Leonard DiCaprio, 1998], J. Edgar [Armie Hammer, 2011]). To see a whole scene played out again—and then again and again—is deeply thrilling, since one begins to memorize the action and to both anticipate and relax into each minuscule move in the chain order (see for a paramount example the repeated training sequence with Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow [2014]). The pleasure of repetition, in music, in picture, and in narration, stands upon two artful antinomies. First, every ensuing instantiation calls up reference to its predecessor, and thus assures us of the ability to recall and reflect. We know memory’s presence, not just because we use it to identify a new narration as subsequent to an older one but also because we taste ourselves making use of it, we feel the act of remembering. In this way we are over and over again recompensed with a singular certainty, that we can know ourselves in time, that we can know time passing, that we can realize a past falling behind a present. In the hypnotic reutterance, the story told twice, the twofold story told two times more, we feel a rhythm of historical movement: “Two nines are ninety-nine!” (Fahrenheit 451 [1966]). Musical pleasure thus not only reflects breathing but is breathing, a direct intimation of the living condition. I take it as significant, therefore, that in the conclusion of his Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Nicholas Ray has Sal Mineo’s Plato wearing unmatching socks, one red and one blue, so that at this striking moment of closure and caesura there is no harmonic doubling, no double beat. Second, the pleasure of repetition allows us to join to one another the affirmation and the reaffirmation, the statement and the correction, the gesture and the emendation, as members of a juncture, a family union, participants to a bond. If one narrative recounting in a multiplication tale is different from another—and the narratives must differ if there is to be rationale for the presence of them all—still the collection of all, the aggregate picture, makes sense in some fundamental way as a reflection of the coherence of many souls in one social company, many views in a cubist array. The world is not a solipsistic reflection of my thinking only but some inchoate arrangement of the many thoughts of many people, all co-present. Co-presence, in the end, is the fruit of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

112  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e the multiplied narrative. Not harmony, not necessarily resolution, not dominant and subdominant forms, but a state of affairs that exceeds the analytical powers of the single life. The lesson is that we live in company, that our every sensation, however indeterminate its origin, can become determined through its natural relation to the sensations of others. Many narratives, many realities, one tribe.

T he L a s t C o n t e ssa The flashback technique may well seem to herald, yet does not, multiplied narrative form. Typically in the flashback, a singular story is continued but at a point in diegetic time distinctly removed from that of its diegetic launch. A character remembers something that had been forgotten, or nostalgically swims back to youth, or, to exemplify a thought process—divination, ­inspiration—the filmmaker removes us back to an earlier moment with a newly inserted startling close-up or angle that shows a feature of the narrative world that had been hidden. We surely do get different views, but these views differ only in time structure from the array of other, similarly different, views to which we are exposed in cinematic storytelling. While multiplied narrative can operate through flashback as well as through conventional forward motion, it is not implicitly involved in flashbacks per se. The overlayering of time frames is not the same thing as an overlayering of points of view. When time frames are overlayered, the audience may become artfully confounded about its placement in diegetic time, but multiplied narrative forms tend to play instead with alterations of diegetic space, since a change of narrative point of view is most easily signaled by a novel recreation of angles, key places, and choreographies. With flashback, the underlying riddle is, “When am I?” With multiplied narrative it is, “Who gives me all this?” A particularly revealing and engrossing use of narrative multiplicity is to be found in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), an important work by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who often used straightforward flashbacks in his other works. Contessa is the sad tale of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), a poor Spanish cabaret dancer “discovered” by the great Hollywood mogul Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) as potential star of his upcoming picture. The writer and director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) befriends and mentors Maria, and thanks to the efforts of the far too obsequious press agent Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) she is transformed into Maria D’Amata, the international celebrity. Things go badly for her with Edwards, who clearly wanted only to dominate and abuse. Her desires, personal, political, economic, and sexual stretch far beyond him, and she throws him over for a South American magnate, Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring), who promises a gayer, freer life. With Bravano, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   113 however, she finds herself similarly constrained, demeaned, abused, and generally disrespected as both woman and person. By chance she meets a voyaging Italian nobleman, the Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), and falls in love, although she has already taken a forlorn paramour who has only his handsome masculinity to recommend him. The Count’s masculinity, it turns out, was wounded in the war, a fact Maria does not learn until after they marry. When she becomes pregnant by her lover and rushes to tell her husband that she will give the Torlato-Favrini family an heir after all, Vincenzo kills the lover and then the beautiful Maria. The film is one of the great 1950s Technicolor spectacles, with a story told in hushed whispers and sober musings and with performances of great subtlety and restraint. The cold, almost mechanical brutality of the boundlessly rich Edwards, the twisted self-loathing manipulations of the unctuous Bravano, and the hollow and fragile realm of the glamorous (and fading) Torlato-Favrinis, Vincenzo and his dignified but lonely sister (Valentina Cortese), play against the cupidity of the charlatan Muldoon, the wise and gentle nurturing of Harry Dawes, and the hungry mystery of Maria to make a story that is finally bittersweet and haunting. Maria’s transformation from bondage to Bravano to an involvement with the Torlato-Favrinis is accomplished through a unique cinematic mechanism involving narrative multiplicity in revolutionary form. There are three key sequences, (A) the termination of Maria’s relation to Bravano, (C) the beginning of Maria’s relation to Vincenzo, and, intermediate between them, very briefly, (B) Vincenzo’s first encounter with Maria, which allows us to understand how (C) is possible and also to meet, very casually, the hapless lover. I proceed now to a shot-by-shot analysis of sequences (A) and (C), so that we can come to a fuller grasp of the working of the multiplied narrative form. Gary Carey suggests “repeating the same scene as different characters recall it” was possible in the final film only because Mankiewicz had the power to control the edit (85–86), another way of indicating how his technique here ran against Hollywood convention. The point of view in (A) belongs to Muldoon, who has been narrating the story since Maria was swept away from Kirk Edwards’s soirée in Beverly Hills by the glamorous Bravano. O’Brien uses a matter-of-fact, journalist’s tone, here are the facts, with very careful elocution. We are in the gambling casino at Monte Carlo, by night. All is glitter and power, gilding and pink light. Women are clothed in high fashion (talismans), tuxedoed men are winning and losing millions. For both sequences there are essentially two spaces that we come to know: the inner room, which is the home of the roulette and other tables, and which is margined on one side by floor-to-ceiling windows draped over with lush olive-green fabric in regal swags; and a larger, seemingly unbounded outer chamber, where people sit to dine, pretty music is played, candles romantically burn, and the pleasure Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

114  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e of gossiping and speculating is fostered. Maria is dressed in a very sumptuous fuschia-pink gown (that touches the floor) and a diamond necklace glitters on her neck: she is the most famous movie star in the world. • A1. (Casino. Medium-long shot) We see four musicians in red tunics, the principal a violinist. Before him at a table sits a lonely woman. He moves right and camera pans to follow, picking up other patrons at their tables. MULDOON (voiceover): . . . any more than I could on that night I saw Maria for the last time. It was at one of the casinos . . . (The violinist bows as he plays expressly for two gilded mature women sitting with a man.) . . . kind of late. We’d finished dinner hours ago. (The camera now reveals an aging princess dressed in gold, a king holding a drink, a woman at left and another at right.) Bravano and Hector Eubanks were inside, gambling . . . (Muldoon is now picked up at extreme right, smoking, as the violinist circles behind the table.) . . . I assumed Maria was with Bravano. The rest of us had run out of conversation. (The violinist looks down at Muldoon; Muldoon looks back up at the violinist.) (With dry sarcasm:) After all, our little group hadn’t seen each other since cocktails. (The camera pulls back for a long-shot of all five persons, each one gazing into him- or herself.) And we hadn’t eaten together since lunch. (In the background, through parted brown curtains, we can see the gambling room bathed in mauve light, a milling crowd of bare-backed women and eager men under this seductive illumination.) Lulu was trying to work up interest in a word game . . . (The violinist crosses right to left in front of camera, momentarily blocking view of the table, then passes out of screen, left.) . . . This is not easy with people who know just enough words to tell room service what they want. LULU: It’s really very simple, your highness. You write the long word on top of the page, and under it you write all of the short words you can make out of the long one. PRINCESS: Oh. • A2 (medium shot, closer in) Muldoon is no longer visible in shot. The four others are looking down “seriously.” LULU: For the long word let’s use “vicissitude.” (The violin music is still very audible.) PRINCESS: Is that actually a word? LULU: V-i-c-i-s-s-i-t-u-d-e-s. Eh, changes, fluctuations, like the vicissitudes of life. PRINCESS: How clever of you, my dear. KING (muttering): J’ai besoin d’champagne. LULU: Did you say something, your majesty? Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   115 KING (enunciating): I shall require more champagne. LULU: Mais, certainment! Oscar— • A3 (Camera position as in A1 above, with Oscar turning a little and Lulu pointing to the King and nodding) • A 4 (Medium) Maria makes an entrance from the gambling room. A swag curtain hangs to the right of the connecting door. Just inside the doorway, Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini stands and watches her in silence. She moves rightward at the far end of the table, then comes down the length of it, as we pan to follow, taking a chair at the proximal end next to Muldoon, who holds out his hand graciously. The camera is moving in as a whitecoated waiter steps up between Maria and Muldoon and bows. Muldoon gestures to the waiter: MULDOON: More of the same, for the King. (He casts a gracious smile off-camera left, in the King’s direction.) WAITER: Yes, sir. (He bows again and departs.) MULDOON: What news from the gaming tables? (Suavely he is leaning toward Maria. A two-shot. A half-empty wineglass sits on the tablecloth in front of her. Her pink bag is on the tablecloth, too, near Muldoon’s hand.) MARIA: Very good! Alberto’s having a fantastic time! MULDOON: It’s about time. Last night that Greek took him for a whole South American jungle! MARIA (laughing good-naturedly): Yeah. (She throws her head back, thinking of it.) MULDOON: You know something? Off the screen I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh. MARIA: I feel very good tonight. MULDOON (cynical but friendly): Every night’s like every other night. MARIA (dropping her head): No, not tonight. MULDOON: What’s different? MARIA: I don’t know. Something in the way my heart beats. As if something very good were going to come out of tonight. What will it aid us to be detecting here, already? The comfortable familiarity, to all of these people, of this sumptuous place. It must of course be decorated as lavishly as this, there must of course be more, and still more, champagne. Endless pleasures, endless riches. The riches are secondary to the endlessness. Here is a zone in which the hierarchy of men is abandoned for their fancies: the King is merely a guzzler, the press agent is merely a camera unto himself, watching every move, calculating the odds. Maria’s poise, a little concocted Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

116  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e because, as we may have forgotten, she comes from poverty and none of this is natural to her class. The dominance of bank accounts over intelligence, at least over literacy. The distinct presence of perfectly socialized labor, that violinist who never stops giving off the sound of entertainment, whatever that has to be, the silent waiter. The polite camera, never coming too close to the table at this early juncture, since this is an evening party to which we have not really been invited. Maria’s radiance, the choice of color in that gown. She is the rose from A Matter of Life and Death come fully to life. Her mood: she is especially happy tonight, for whatever reason, and does not normally laugh off-camera. Off-camera, indeed: from Muldoon, not one of her fans. He goes to the set, he watches her make shot after shot. For him, space really is always and everywhere divided professionally, the area in front of the camera, the area behind. He is never unconscious of cameras, and where they are pointing. • A5 (Closer on the brass doors leading to the gaming room) Torlato-Favrini is leaning at the left, his hands folded behind him. He stares forward in pensive silence. Bravano, strapped into a white dinner jacket, purposefully strides forward with a glare, stops at TorlatoFavrini’s side unthinking, not looking, drops his hands. • A6 (Medium-close, the table) Muldoon and Maria are at the proximal end of table, being stared at by Bravano in the distance and looking back his way. Muldoon is concerned, his head turned off-camera left. Maria has her hands folded in her lap, and she is holding her breath. • A7 (As at the end of A5) MULDOON (off-camera): Something’s coming, all right, but it’s not— • A8 (As in A6, but now Maria has turned to look proudly at Muldoon) MULDOON: —good. It’s bad. (He stands abruptly, fingertips resting down on the tablecloth.) I’ve seen him like this before (Buttoning his jacket:)—He’s half crazy when he gets like this. (Maria is staring forward. Muldoon moves leftward.) • A9 (long shot from before the proximal end of table) Maria is angled so that her back is three-quarters to us as she sits, her fuchsia coat on the chair back behind her, her hands peacefully in her lap. The dinner guests are looking down in modest concentration. Muldoon is stepping back from table at far right; he goes around the end to head off Bravano. The camera pans slowly left. Bravano enters the frame and steps relentlessly forward, straight toward the camera behind the gilded chairs on table’s left side, with Muldoon watching him like a hawk from the far corner. Bravano stands at table’s end, looking down at Maria, his right hand clenched in a fist, his left hand on the table. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   117 BRAVANO (with extreme pique): How do I find the words to tell you what you are? (She looks up at him. The Princess looks up, too.) A tremendous weight of posture and restraint presses here, among all parties, Bravano clearly having come to an explosive point for some reason, Maria possibly fearful of being harmed—as we can tell by Muldoon’s signal movement to stand as her protector. (He is a gentleman, perhaps; but she is extremely valuable property, and not with her face marred.) Also evident, even more plainly at this point of the scene than earlier, is the carefully considered and very astutely monitored camera position, which is to say, the division of territory in the room. We remain always at the proximal end of the dining table, sometimes straining forward in the direction of the connecting door in the distance but not really jumping that way. We are strangers watching, not participants. And we must be given a very deeply etched picture of a bright and gala chamber with an exit at the far end, away from us; and a cozy table nearby, at which suitably decorous sorts sit attending to their game in such a (duplicitous) way that they can bring themselves to look away from the violence (that they recognize) when it seems to be erupting. Look away with gentility, not step in to prevent catastrophe. • A10 (A close shot from behind Alberto Bravano, his head and shoulder at the extreme left of the frame) Maria is looking up at him in the center of the picture, her eyes shining, the necklace glittering provocatively, the jewels on her bodice glittering as well. Her face is open, empty, the face of an actor listening to the director’s instructions. BRAVANO: To begin with, you’re a thief— • A11 (Maria’s point of view looking up at Alberto) His snow-white jacket and shirt, his blood-red bowtie and carnation, his jet-black hair slicked back. BRAVANO (continuing): You took money from me when I was playing, when I was winning. • A12 (Close, from behind Bravano, as in A10) BRAVANO (continuing): It changed my luck! You have cost me millions and millions of francs! • A13 (Maria’s point of view, as in A11) BRAVANO (continuing): You put a curse on me . . . (Torlato-Favrini is stepping up in shadow, silently, from behind) . . . not only for tonight but from the unhappy moment when I first knew of your existence! • A14 (Close, from behind Bravano, as in A12) BRAVANO (continuing): And you will put a curse (Maria’s lips tighten) with everyone and everything— Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

118  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e • A15 (Long shot from the proximal end of the table, as in A9) Bravano blocks our view of Lulu but the King, the Princess, and others look up at him in shock, as does Maria. BRAVANO (continuing): — near to you! MULDOON (stepping to the table across from Bravano): Maybe you talk this over later, in private maybe. (Maria has reached back with her right hand to her coat sleeve.) MARIA (strongly): Let him, Oscar. BRAVANO: Next, you are not a woman. • A16 (Maria’s point of view looking up at Bravano, as in A13) BRAVANO: I do not know what you are, but—you are not a woman. You will not let yourself be loved. You cannot love. Once you had the look for me of an . . . exquisite lady. • A17 (Close, from behind Bravano, as in A14) BRAVANO (continuing): Now I do not see that look. I only see that you have the . . . (Maria breathes in and out markedly; her cloak is now on) . . . body of an animal. A dead animal! (Her lips quivering in anger, Maria makes to rise swiftly and moves toward camera past him on the right.) Alberto Bravano has blown his composure. But the gracility evidenced in Harry’s restraint and eloquence (unfailing eloquence) earlier, which even when he is not onscreen, as now, we never forget; evidenced, too, in Maria’s affected but magnificent posture, in the royal visitation, even in Muldoon’s tense silence, make plain that the composure lost is more than the marshalling of feeling and attitude, it is the deep structure of a proper civility and etiquette, in Bravano’s case a correct masculinity, a quality he now ineradicably demonstrates that he lacks. Already when he berates Maria we can grasp the futility of her continuing with him. The issue for her is only how, precisely, she will conduct herself to vanish from his screen. In the great gown she has become something of a Presence, quite as though inhabiting a royal personage in her own right, and the personage is accompanied by statutes and decorums, adherence to which will now save her from the peril of investing her personal feeling. As to Alberto, his inflammation is evident in his necktie and boutonnière, chosen by him, no less, since he was clearly on point of arriving at this explosion even before heading to the casino tonight. Who are these squabbling people to the King and Princess, we may wonder? And, to flip the question, what is the pretense of royalty when a mouth has delivered an insult into one’s face? (Here, as in Life and Death, one of Goring’s principal attributes is the expressive capacity of his mouth, only part of which involves his vocal instrument. “There is hardly anything that Marius can’t do, or pretend to do” [Powell 656].) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   119 • A18 (Long shot from the proximal end of the table, as in A15) Oscar Muldoon is on his feet, arms at his side. The others are watching, as though this is championship sport. Bravano seizes Maria by the shoulders, very close up, and wrenches her still. BRAVANO: I have paid for your company! And you will come and go as I tell you! (He forces her back down into her chair, where she looks up in abject silence. A hand touches Bravano’s shoulder from behind, tapping. It is Torlato-Favrini.) VINCENZO: Monsieur? (Bravano turns to face him, glowering.) Permit me? (With his right hand he delivers Bravano a forceful slap on the cheek. Bravano swivels to glare in shock at Maria and Muldoon, turning to face Muldoon as though to demand, “What will you do about that?”) Vincenzo extends a hand to Maria, who grasps it, allows him to help her rise (the King is standing already), and to lead her camera-left out of the large room, as the camera pans to observe. They walk together toward a corridor. The violin music starts up again. (The violin music starts up again! In other words, it had stopped, and the emotional discourse had filled in, itself a music, a tempestuous music, the sforzando passage between two tranquilities. Behavior as form, form as melody, repeatable, difficult to grasp.) Interestingly, in considerable critique of the film Torlato-Favrini is described as a knight in shining armor, as “Prince Charming” to Maria’s “Cinderella” (see for example Lower and Palmer 106ff), perhaps because of this one singular, chivalric gesture of the challenge. When we see the male-to-male confrontational slap in Hollywood cinema, it is de rigueur a component of historical adventures depicting action in, and before, the nineteenth century. The slap is a dramatic icon of screen representations of European court life, especially French, and figures centrally as one man’s open declaration (the slap can be neither disguised nor retracted) of the social inadequacy of another, of a man’s despicable failure to play his proper role. In this case, Vincenzo is informing Alberto and the surrounding audience that he considers him entirely unequipped as a protector of the person and virtue of the “Good Lady,” now embodied by Maria. With this gesture, indeed with the construction of the scene thus far so as to stand beneath and perfectly position it, we have a voyage into Courtly Love of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Mankiewicz claimed himself to have been less than happy with Brazzi— I had wanted James Mason to play the nobleman that Ava ends up marrying, but I couldn’t get him. Mr. Nicholas M. Schenck, who controlled Loews Incorporated and MGM, was playing games with me. He had been angry with me while we were filming Julius Caesar and he waited Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

120  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e until the opening at this little theater in New York to let me have it. Well, I wouldn’t take it, and I bawled him out in public. That was the most destructive opening of a film. At any rate, I just bawled the sh— out of him in public, and he never forgave me for that. And I end up with Rossano Brazzi, who cannot act, cannot be sensual . . . could hardly speak English, for God’s sake, and so we had to hire someone to teach Brazzi his lines phonetically. (Laffel 194) —but in this critical scene, at this culminating moment, nothing less than the rich, continental tonalities of Brazzi’s restrained voice would have sufficed. If Mankiewicz had withstood Schenck (playing Alberto Bravano to his own Maria), he could now, even unconsciously, put the “slap” onto the screen, and with the force of a noble type to back it up. The few words Vincenzo must utter—“Please? Permit me?”—come across with stunning force precisely because they are calm, measured with a ruler centuries old, and specifically not sensual. At this loaded instant sensuality would have marred the dignity of the geste. • A19 (Medium long-shot of the casino, roughly as in A1) The King, on his feet, has his eyes trained off-left, following Vincenzo and Maria as they walk away. Oscar Muldoon has resumed his seat, his hand flaccid on the table, and he gazes off in that direction, too. Lulu is looking off-left. The Princess has twisted to look there as well. Bravano is almost seated, his right arm dangling limply, his eyes on the departing couple. Now he sits fully. BRAVANO (sourly): Is the gigolo known to anyone? KING (placidly): He is known to me. His name is Vincenzo, Count de Torlato-Favrini. He is not a gigolo. He is less a gigolo than anyone in our immediate company. . . . • A20 (Medium-close, roughly from Bravano’s point of view) (Lulu is looking off with some interest and the King is still looking in the direction of Vincenzo and Maria’s exit.) KING: . . . Surely less than anyone you will have the good fortune to meet (a brief nod Alberto’s way), Señor Bravano. LULU: He certainly acts high and mighty for just a count! KING (smiling radiantly, folding his hands): My dear Lulu, there are counts and counts, just as there are kings and kings. . . . • A21 (From the same angle, close-up of the King, chest up) KING: . . . Among the counts, Torlato-Favrini is a king . . . just as among the kings I am a clown. I am puzzled only about his presence in a place such as this, among such people as us. (He sits, takes the bottle of champagne, and pours.) My champagne is not properly cooled. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   121 • A22 (Long shot, as in A19) Maria’s empty chair is at the near end of the table, right. The King is still pouring his drink. Bravano is looking down in dismay. Oscar Muldoon is gazing off, in reflection. LULU (with a polite laugh): Alberto—Do you happen to know the Marquise de Beaudonnière? (The camera swings in close to frame Muldoon.) A really distinguished family. And the Marquis— MULDOON (voiceover): And that was the last I ever saw of Maria Vargas, whom the world knew as Maria d’Amata, but— DISSOLVE TO •A23 (Cemetery: funeral) MULDOON (Squinting in the rain): —who died as the Contessa Torlato-Favrini. Quite exactly as he warned in shot A1, the opener of this sequence, and although he has not offered a toast to our health, we have come to the end of Oscar Muldoon’s narration, not only of this event but of any part of Maria’s life. What becomes explicit at this point is the calm and calculated precision of his words, his journalistic focus, his entire (and perhaps galling) dispassion, not only as though he is devoted to the workings of his profession but also as though Maria never existed for him as anything but a materiel to be negotiated, manipulated, structured and restructured in his bloated prose. His job was to make her big, and, no Pygmalion, he used a system of contacts and exaggerations, not personal magnetism. In the hands of a man who could tie off her tale in so perfunctory a way, who never was anything but a puppeteer of sorts, the little dancer from Spain, whose passions produced her movements, never had a chance. It is a touch of genius and of beauty on Mankiewicz’s part (he is the writer as well as the director) to have the King utter the final evaluation of both Vincenzo and Alberto, elevating the first to a status unimaginable, since of course for the American middle-class audience kings come at the top of every mountain, even deposed kings, and lowering the second into the boue where he has always belonged. Another brilliance of the scene is embedded with the departure of Maria, which may call up, for viewers watching with commitment, that she came in after the scene began and leaves before it ends: in short, that the whole thing is staged as a party among people who do not really care about her, or about anyone other than themselves, except as momentary entertainment—which is exactly what she is (now and onscreen) for them and what all these characters are for us. The King and his entourage thus mimic the audience in a way, and poor Maria Vargas is merely the glittering diamond passed from hand to hand as they take note. She is already the fair maiden in Marriage à la Mode. What can happen to this wonderful arrangement, however, if it is seen a second time around, from a very different point of view? The idea Mankiewicz Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

122  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e plays out involves a repetition that is in many respects identical, but because it will form the essence of another person’s story—another memory, since the whole film is memories: Maria is gone—this will have to be seen from different angles. The narrative multiplication requires, then, that we cross the scenic axis, maintaining on one hand a memory of the events as we have just seen them whilst being prepared, on the other, to see things from the “other side.” As will become evident, everything about this construction implies a multifaceted view of reality, a kind of Rashômon, a tale, like Hogarth’s, in which different protagonists take the spotlight as we move through time.

S l a p R e pr i s e d First, the set-up. How can it come to be, the viewer may well wonder, that just outside the gaming room door, standing in benevolent tranquility in his pleasing, perfectly tailored gray suit, and without a name, a handsome stranger is present to watch this scene? And as the scene progresses with Maria’s sweeping entrance, and with the meaningless table chatter, and with Bravano’s uncouth rampage, does not the stranger seem prescient in having figured to be there, in expecting that his gallantry will be needed? Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini is taking over the narrative now, and we must be given a swift explanation for his interest in keeping sight of Maria D’Amata (the famous star we are about to discover he does not recognize, has never seen onscreen). (B): Torlato-Favrini is driving through the lush countryside one day (a high-tech version of a walk through a pleasure garden) and stops by a roadside where at a gypsy encampment a woman (Maria) is dancing beautifully with a young man. She is barefoot (which is to say, returned to the passion and honesty of her youth). She wears a short-sleeved pale yellow cashmere sweater, with a silk scarf tied around her neck. Vincenzo stands to watch and she comes up and sees him briefly. Their eyes lock (we can almost hear the snap). He drives away “knowing that inevitably we would meet again.” This brief sequence—it occupies only a little more than a screen minute—is preface to what Vincenzo will now recount: • C1 (Long shot; the gaming room) In the foreground is a baize table. Torlato-Favrini enters from rear left, pauses in the doorway a moment then walks to the right. Violin music is in the distant background (as we heard in sequence A). He passes behind a long table jammed with roulette players. VINCENZO (voiceover): And it was late that night in, of all places, a gambling casino when I saw Maria again. (He is standing behind a rear table now, but his eye is caught by something off-left.) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   123 When I saw Maria again. In short, when once again I saw the beautiful woman whose eyes locked onto mine at the gypsy encampment. The repetition of the moment—apparently happenstantial—he takes as a sign, since if she was beautiful dancing, in that tight yellow sweater and among the trees, she is magnificent now in her fuchsia gown. Is Vincenzo not self-identifying as a superstitious one, a man who believes in forces outside the curbs of the rational: forces of inheritance and kinship, forces of history, forces of magnetism? She is there, at any rate, and it is nothing but natural of him to fixate upon her and see what might happen. What unseen force leads Vincenzo to refrain from acting at this moment, to wait, to watch, to expect a dramatic future of some kind? • C2 (Reverse long shot, roughly from Vincenzo’s point of view) Maria is stepping into the gaming room, the brass doors behind her back and the red-coated musicians in the far distance in the front room. Moving forward and leftward, she enters a throng surrounding a table. Here is the shot in which our having crossed the axis is indisputably evident. In conventional narrative the axis is never crossed, our dramatic world is spread before us from one perspective only and with its inherent internal geography intact. Now that world is being twisted into itself. • C3 (Medium long shot from an aisle, looking toward Vincenzo at his table) Vincenzo steps forward with curiosity and moves toward the grouping that contains Maria. • C4 (Medium shot, from across a gaming table) A number of players are gathered with Bravano (more intensely lit) in the center, and Maria standing with a smile behind his back. Behind her, silent, is Vincenzo, watching. • C5 (Medium-close shot) One swarthy player in sunglasses, with a silent woman at his side and a factotum behind him, taps the table, with the baccarat spatula on the table nearby. • C6 (Medium-close shot, reverse of C5) The dealer draws from the shoe, with Maria behind him and Vincenzo still behind her. Bravano has a lit cigar in his mouth and is puffing anxiously as he moves his hands. How interesting that the story as witnessed by the English-deprived European Count (read, actor) is essentially told in mime, every little movement a telegram. In his mind’s eye as he remembers all this, we are being cued, Vincenzo was watching, as in a paralyzing dream. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

124  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e • C7 (As in C5, a reverse of C6) The swarthy man from C5 has just put into his mouth a mint offered by his factotum in white, from behind. He lifts a card to peek. • C8 (Medium-close shot, as in C6) Bravano dramatically slaps down a card. He draws another and slaps it down, too. He turns to gloat upward at Maria. Smiling encouragingly, she pats his shoulder, then reaches past him and lifts away a token from the table in front of him. Vincenzo seems serious. Bravano’s companion at the table, a man with a cigar, seems a little taken aback. Still smiling, Maria turns to exit, with Bravano’s gaze following her. Vincenzo turns. • C9 (Medium-close shot) Players are standing to watch off-right. Vincenzo looks past the camera following Maria with his eyes. He takes a step and cranes his neck. • C10 (Long shot, cashier’s cage) With a gaming table in the foreground, we see Maria at the cashier, receiving cash for her token. She heads left, moving past the door that leads to the outer room and toward a dark area behind the olive-green swag curtains. • C11 (Medium-long shot, casino exterior, outside the gaming room) Maria emerges from the gaming room onto a tiny balcony, with the green curtains now behind her. She is evidently looking for someone in the street below. • C12 (Medium-long shot; gaming room interior) Vincenzo is making way toward a second pair of olive-green curtains. He goes through them to another balcony door. • C13 (Close shot, balcony, from behind Maria) Maria is slightly out of focus in the foreground and standing in the road beyond is her dance partner from the roadside woods. Youthful, good looking, hopeful. She tosses him the packet of cash. He smiles broadly, salutes her, and runs off right as the camera follows. • C14 (Medium-close shot, gaming room interior) Vincenzo is coming back inside through the French doors between the curtain swags. He takes two steps and encounters her. Stops, looks into her face. She is walking forward from the other set of French doors, clutching her dress, and turns her head to look squarely at him. Not a word between them. She exhales, turns her face to screen right, and exits the shot as he follows with his gaze. He moves in her wake. She is several steps ahead of him, heading toward the brass doors that lead out of the gaming room and toward the dining area. As she exits, he steps toward those doors. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   125 Having visited the other side of the drama, we now know that when Vincenzo stood silently watching the dining table from afar, he already knew how Maria had reached for the chip on the table, how she had calmly cashed it in, and how she had tossed the money to her boyfriend: her boyfriend or some young man to whom she might be understood to feel a special responsibility: a special responsibility then, and perhaps a special fondness in times to come. When she stood silently behind Bravano as he concentrated on his game, Vincenzo might well wonder, was she observing him or simply waiting for the apt moment to get that chip? Was she already in flight from her “protector,” in other words, already disenchanted, and thus available as an honorable target for his sentiment? Or unavailable, because another (younger) man’s? • C15 (Close shot) Vincenzo standing in the doorway between the two rooms, seen from the gaming room side. He positions himself as we saw in A4 and looks off-left. • C16 (Long shot, Vincenzo’s point of view into the dining room) A long table with Lulu at the proximal end now, the King to her left, then another woman, the Princess at right, Oscar Muldoon half standing on the far left to welcome Maria, who has already arrived and is positioned at the distal end, taking her place. A waiter in white steps up and Muldoon gestures to him but we do not hear. The waiter bows and takes his leave. • C17 (Close shot of Vincenzo, as in C15, with his hands behind his back) From offscreen right, a despairing sound wafts from the gaming room. Vincenzo turns his head to look. • C18 (Medium-long shot) Bravano is striding angrily out of the gaming room, but he stops in the doorway next to Vincenzo. (The framing is very close to A5.) • C19 (Medium-close shot, from behind Muldoon, with Maria at his left) Muldoon and Maria are both looking off. Muldoon is standing, his hands fiddling with his jacket. He moves rightward along the table and stands at the end, looking over at what we saw at the end of C18, Bravano with Vincenzo at his side. Muldoon takes a few steps in their direction but Bravano continues his forward motion, and, very like a panning camera himself, Muldoon turns to watch as Bravano passes out of frame left. Vincenzo steps forward to see better. (The camera pans to follow him.) Muldoon turns to watch, too. At the end of the table, the Princess is looking up to watch and Vincenzo is standing behind her, watching, too. BRAVANO (vituperative): To begin with, a thief. (He looks down at Maria, left.) You took money from me when I was playing, when I was winning. (Vincenzo steps closer.) It changed my luck! You have cost Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

126  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e me millions and millions of francs! You put a curse on me, not only for tonight but from the unhappy moment I first knew of your existence. As you will put a curse always, on everyone and everything near to you! MULDOON (entering frame from right, touching the table): Maybe you can talk this over later, in private, maybe. MARIA: Let him, Oscar. BRAVANO (continuing): Next—(Maria is slipping into her coat) —You are not a woman! I do not know what you are . . . (She gets the jacket on) . . . but you are not a woman. You will not let yourself be loved and you cannot love. Once you had the look for me of an exquisite lady. Now I do not see that look. I see only that you have the body of an animal. A dead animal! (She stands, he seizes her, desperation on his face.) (Glowering:) I have paid for your company and you will come and go as I tell you. (He throws her down again. Vincenzo moves behind him and taps his shoulder.) VINCENZO: Monsieur? (Bravano turns away from the camera) Permit me? (A vicious slap.) We see at a far table a man and woman staring disbelievingly, with Vincenzo framed between them. Bravano turns back to stare into Muldoon’s face dumbfounded, with Vincenzo purposive at his side. The Princess drops her gaze. Bravano’s eyes open wide at Muldoon. Vincenzo looks to Maria, takes her hand and guides her upward as Bravano turns to watch in shock. Muldoon has been seated again. Bravano is crumbling to the table but watching Maria and Vincenzo march off toward the corridor. The violinist has started to play for the other table. VINCENZO (voiceover): I cannot remember much of that shabby little scene, except for some cheap heroics on my part. (The camera tilts up with Bravano and the Princess at screen bottom, back to back, both with heads turned to watch, and Maria marching away into the corridor with Vincenzo.) But I do remember that Maria seemed unsurprised at my being there, that she left with me without question, as if she had been waiting for it. (They disappear at corridor’s end.) As if she had been waiting for it: that is, as if, in both versions of the narrative, she had been conscious of herself before the explosion and after it. As if she could see the future. By layering these two accounts one atop the other, tissues of a palimpsest, Mankiewicz achieves several narrative victories. First, he produces for his audience the distinct pleasure of roundly comprehending the sympathetic Vincenzo’s final conclusion that Maria seems to have waited for him to be there, this principally—and simply—because in point of edited fact, she has Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

sh o w me a gain   127 waited for him to be there, waited, in fact, twice, but surely waited through the Muldoon narration, relatively verbose as it is, for the silent graceful gesture of the hero’s sudden, silent appearance in his story. We see the slap twice, the second version having the power of a reiteration, a musical reprise, but one that takes place at the end of a sequence of virtual silent film. The Bravano invective comes—in the Count’s version—very much as a shocking outpouring of sound after a long and elaborate soundless pictorial outplaying. In the face of it, Maria’s “knowing” speechless gesture of standing and walking off does seem preordained (beyond the fact of its being scripted). But in any musical doubling, any second iteration of a tone or a phrase, the truth seems more solid and incontrovertible the second time around. The system of doubling the narrative, then, giving us the same action played through as Muldoon saw it and then as Vincenzo did, offers a circumstance in which the second version seems, finally, real, whereas the first was more a recounting, a bias, a construction to a purpose. It is not, I think, merely because we believe in the Count at this point in the film that we prefer his narration. It is because his narration comes second. In the same essentially musical way, Alberto Bravano seems angrier the second time around; more vicious; more deplorable; more finally and utterly and indefensibly hopeless in his rage. Although part of the double construction’s strength is that, while couched in only one part of it one cannot mine all the facts (Vincenzo’s vision of Maria on the balcony, for example), still the gathering and accretion of facts is not the central tenet of narrative multiplication. The central tenet is narrative accumulation itself, the process of layering, in which every correction seems an innovation, every second opinion a landing upon the isle of fact. What makes for the supremest delight is the recognition that in some vital, deeply rooted, hardily poetic sense, our many stories are finally One.

Wor k s C i t e d Ackerman, Diane. The Moon by Whale Light and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales. New York: Vintage, 1992. Carey, Gary. “More about All About Eve.” In Joseph Mankiewicz Interviews, ed. Brian Dauth, 46–124. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Letters to His Friends Vol. 2. Trans. W. Glynn Williams. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1929. Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868. Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Laffel, Jeff. “Interview with Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1991).” In Joseph Mankiewicz Interviews, ed. Brian Dauth, 189–204. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Lower, Cheryl Bray, and R. Barton Palmer. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. New York: Vintage, 1989.

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128  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Peace, David. “There’d Be Dragons: The Productive Life and Portentous Death of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.” Times Literary Supplement (27 March 2018): 36. Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

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a million th in g s   129 c h apter 4

A Million Things

There is no stage you comprehend better than the one you have just left. John Knowles, A Separate Peace

F

undamental principles: One. To voyage is to encounter strangeness. And to encounter strangeness is to voyage. Two. When one arrives, one is older than when one started. All voyages lead forward, which is to say, toward death. Three. It is often difficult to know where we are. * * * Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

130  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Riddles of time differ from riddles of space. Space is extensive, proportioned, subject to gravity and expectation, fertile, bright, eccentric, bounded. In space something may potentially be obscene or inappropriate. Time invokes energy and depletion, motive, impetus, the beat and the offbeat, melody, anticipation, rhythmic stress, the way a sound strikes into the void and then vanishes. Latitude is spatial: we measure it by the position of the sun. Longitude is temporal: we cannot find it without a clock. As we listen we experience the continuing death of sound, the continuing birth of silence. “As long as something remains obviously present, we pay little attention to it, but as soon as we believe that it’s fading away, we feel irresistibly attracted to the ruins” (Manguel 8). When we look, we are captured by (lost in the arrangement of) what we see. Time is also spatial; space is also temporal. This may seem ironic until we consider that movement—a gesture, an anxious twitch, a celebrated rhythm, celestial shift—tends to shunt the body across both time and space together. You cannot cross a room without getting older. Were one to take as read and understood (impossible!) the magnanimous sliding of planets and stars—the unimaginably immense Movement of the Universe—and then focus upon only the localized human experience down here in this little room (the same room, I think, in which Kierkegaard’s Johannes took a walk with his father), time might become almost palpable as a matter of accretion and evaporation, a taking up and relinquishing of space: the froth of life would boil off, leaving behind the hard matter of the eternal. As Rilke wrote in Abend (around 1910): und lassen dir (unsäglich zu entwirrn) dein Leben bang und risenhaft und reifend, so dass es, bald begrenzt und bald begreifend, abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn. ––– To you is left (unspeakably confused) your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears, so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all, is changed in you by turns to stone and stars. (trans. C. F. MacIntyre) There is no way to escape from time, one of the principal glories of cinema being an unfettered enunciation of this fact. But because we navigate time when we watch the screen, in our cinemagoing we are invariably at sea. This is fascinating in two dimensions, that of the profound and poetic, and that of the mundane. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   131

C ine m a ’ s T i me It is a mundane fact that until recently, and quite apart from its natural weddedness to the temporal, cinema and its pleasures were more distinctly timebound than they are today. Because of the storage and retrieval made possible by our mass-produced visual recordings, live streaming, and computer downloads, cinema can today almost always seem present: present around the world, present all day and all night long, present on the impulse of the moment. One can will oneself into and out of film, on a breath. But in the classical age, roughly 1930–1960, and before it, no possibilities for storage existed in the viewer’s world, even as dream. A film appeared on a theater screen (in all but the very largest metropolitan areas, and sometimes even there, on one screen only) for the duration of a sharply limited exhibition period, typically a few weeks—longer only in the cases of major (road-show) attractions or very big box-office hits—and once the screenings were over the film totally disappeared. Indeed, it wasn’t until Psycho in 1960 that films were always regarded as coherent discreet entities, full-fledged products in their own right, since before this film entry to theaters was possible virtually all day long and one could come in and go out at any point in the screening schedule. One went to the movies, not necessarily to see a particular movie. Nor were there pathways toward retrieving a movie for personal use, for gaining the pleasure of repeating a narrative that had given pleasure once before, for studying shots, for calculating writers’ biases. Cinema glowed and passed, and those who were in love with it experienced trauma, horror even, at its continual evanescence. To see this sort of agony depicted, watch the opening sequence of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), the scene of the screening at the Cinémathèque Française, and look at the expression on the faces of those hungry young watchers. In his Day for Night (1973), Truffaut casts himself as a filmmaker who has a recurring dream of himself as a young boy, vanquished by passion for cinema to such a degree that by night he creeps to a local cinema and steals, from behind the iron grille that is guarding them, the 8 × 10 ad photographs from the lobby windows: his way, his only way, of cherishing Orson Welles. As cultural products identifiable to consumers—passersby on the sidewalk outside the theater, say—films themselves seemed to lack a past, a history, surely for the very young, swept away by visions that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. I know that in the mid-1950s I watched Tarzan the Ape Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1932) in an elaborate remarketing campaign from Universal that was unknown to and unsuspected by me, certain as I watched it that the film was brand new, that Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O’Sullivan and Cheetah were out there somewhere, looking like this, now. Nor did any film have a future to bank on—it would just vanish into the ether, to be replaced by something else, a something that was typically not a sequel. When films Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

132  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e were remakes of earlier films—Imitation of Life, Living It Up, The Man Who Knew Too Much—they were invariably not billed as such, but looked fresh and recent and independent. Favorite characters might return in series—Charlie Chan, the Thin Man, Tarzan—but one knew that any presentation one looked forward to would vanish in its own time; that one would be looking forward to yet another disappearance. Although after the late 1950s some films were screened on television, usually late at night, one had only the slightest warning of their appearance; and again, without recording systems, one could not trap and retain them there, nor could one reasonably consider them wondrous to see on the very small screen, interrupted every eight minutes by obnoxious commercial messages. In the 1970s, the thought of actually gaining VHS access to—of collecting—movies from the past came as a thrilling new idea. French critical theory hailed la médiathèque. The entire (rather oceanic) enterprise upon which this tiny book floats like a mere raft is one in which it has been possible to be involved for only a relatively short while. We now think nothing about hoarding films, referring to films in casual discourse, making reference to films or filmic moments in our conversations and scholarly endeavors, using films pedagogically, being entertained by filmmakers sitting in comfortable chairs and telling interviewers how they made their work, playing video games or binge-watching television programs that openly avow to having been created with film-style photography, performance, and writing. Film and film talk are everywhere: in a university, a dean interviewing a man for a chair’s position wants to know, “What’s your favorite movie?” On a network news show a feature centers on a man who interacts with an autistic child by playing out Disney cartoon films, in costume, in the basement every night. One can find blogs now in which authors catalog their reactions to the films they see, for all to read. In the classical age, the age in which I grew up, unless he was being paid as a newspaper critic and engaged in preparing a review nobody would have even scribbled notes while watching a film, let alone kept any other record. And even the film critic tended to get most of what was in his column from the hash synopsis available in the studio press release (available today for scholarly study). To know about film of the past was to have access to newspaper and magazine reviews, such as they were, but that is all. There were few critical books in print, and until the mid-1990s there was no IMDb affording instantaneous access to film casts and crews on a searchable basis. Therefore, what is frequent and easy now was once an exceeding rarity: to see a film more than once. Seeing again brings its own torments. One always moves in time whilst watching, because as the unspooling carries us forward we are offered ongoing recollection of what has just passed. One sees whilst being lost, and one is lost in what one sees. More: as film continually evaporates one is forced to re-taste it through agencies of recollection, many of which center Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   133 on commercial advertisement, and now there are so many films in distribution (a function of the capitalism of cinema) that one product swiftly washes away another. Discovered are the pleasures of forgetting. Here as with other experiences, in looking back one returns to youth, or to relative youth. As we return to long-forgotten moments onscreen, we can be induced to believe that it was just a moment ago that we left them, that life’s trench warfare has not intervened. This is film’s way of warping and transmuting time. A queer piano obbligato in a church hall, during a play rehearsal, in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), heard and heard and heard again, never comprehended, never put to rest: hands upon a keyboard, seen no matter how long ago but still present. Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight (1933), turning partially to the camera and staring out to the end of the universe when she remarks how death is so very final, even the young can’t stop it. Trevor Howard reaching across the universe with his tiny piece of handkerchief and extracting a tiny cinder from Celia Johnson’s eye in Brief Encounter (1945). The voice of Frank Oz in Yoda’s little body, giving Luke Skywalker the existential mantra (The Empire Strikes Back [1980]): “Do or do not. There is no try.” A little boy crying out for a man riding away on horseback (1953): “Shane! Come back, Shane!” With cinema, one accesses pasts, not like an archaeologist, who must scrape and delve, but like a time traveler who merely pushes a button and sees again. One feels the ability to say with Baudelaire, “I see the time; it is Eternity!” (34).

A T i m e f o r P l e a s ur e Time is explicit in the structure of all films. Stanley Cavell writes of the “natural evanescence of film, the fact that its events exist only in motion, in passing” (11–12). Thus, films involve both hope and loss, and imply the possibility of forgetting and retrieving. But some narrative films—temporal structurings already—work to manifest another, second-order, structure that is overlaid or implied. In this second structure, the story is understood to move through some posited historical timeline; one event happens discernably and irrevocably before, and another after. Temporal passage is directly and openly invoked. Oskar Werner musing in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966): “That was . . . before.” Some generic possibilities for this device: flashbacks and amnesia tales such as Random Harvest (1942) or Spellbound (1945) (see Pomerance, Moment 146ff.), time-traveling films (The Time Machine [1960; 2002], Somewhere in Time [1980], Back to the Future [1985]), and that ornery, delicious little trope, the “memorial,” where a character who has stimulated our involvement turns out to be not really there as such (quite differently from how all characters in cinema are “not really there”) but alive instead in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

134  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e a future to which we travel only later, there recollecting the youthful self we knew so well without knowing we were knowing it that way, recollecting a person in a place while no longer residing there, remembering but not being. Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1971), for example, turns out to center not on Leo (Dominic Guard), the young boy who is carrying messages between illicit lovers (Alan Bates and Julie Christie) as we surreptitiously watch, but on an old man (Michael Redgrave), recalling and justifying all his sordid and clumsy behavior a lifetime later, as he sits sheltered from the spring rain. The same fundamental tactic, now with some advance notice, is employed by Joe Wright in Atonement (2007), where thirteen-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan) turns out to be Vanessa Redgrave looking back upon herself (one might add, ruefully, looking back too late: as a child she destroyed two other people’s love). In these sorts of film, a child is “really” an adult, “as it turns out”; an adult is living through the memory of being a child; our placement in biographical space and time is confounded. With the onscreen telling seen retroactively—seen essentially as memory— some device is required for tagging the diegetic present differently than the diegetic past at any critical juncture when the filmmaker needs us to know where we “are,” both the younger and the older versions of the vital character being in essence only variant aspects of the same essential and deeply unchanged “being” but the events in which this person acted coming “clear” only in terms of temporal situation. In order for the narrative trick to work, the youthful presence must look sufficiently like the older one as to engender our belief in temporal continuity between the two (a continuity only fragments of which are offered to us), yet not so very like that we may come to be suspicious of artifice. A signal gesture or tic must be discernable, but the bodies must not seem to overlap. (In filming, is the younger actor imitating a gesture of the older one, or the other way round?) Thus, effectively, Ronan seems by her look capable of being Vanessa Redgrave’s “granddaughter”; Guard’s “grandfather” could be Michael Redgrave. If most of the “affiliative” work is done by virtue of the script, especially in the way the reminiscing older character uses language to frame the younger version of self as a kind of aesthetic construction achieved by looking back, nevertheless in these films of biography lost and found a character remembering what we see onscreen as a Past Self analogizes our own present viewing experience, since all visions are fleeting: every self onscreen and every self of the viewer, too, flies into a past.

Looking Forward A chilling riddle of time presents itself, with eerie provocation and through the signal of a strange natural phenomenon, in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   135 Sils Maria (2014), a poetically challenging story of generations, the decay of feeling, the way time affects our yearning and our vision of the past, but also, very rewardingly, of performance. Here is a film where time and temporal riddles are openly invoked, thrown at the watcher who must struggle forcefully at grasping and feeling relation to what has just been seen and heard. There is no way to understand the film easily, or to know, at any moment of it, where exactly any character is in relation to any other except in the most superficial terms. Since the life cycle is a voyage in itself, there is nothing very surprising in the thought that viewers of different ages will see Clouds of Sils Maria in different ways, and may be distanced from one another in their interpretations exactly as the principal characters are distanced, too. We are introduced to the internationally celebrated film actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) and her hip young personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), decamped to the mountains of Switzerland to rehearse Wilhelm Melchior’s celebrated play Maloja Snake, which is soon to be mounted in a new production with Enders in one of the two principal roles. This play showcases the glory and pains of a love relationship between an older and a younger woman. We are expressly made aware of a pungent fact: that some twenty years before our film story began, Maria exploded on the international scene by playing Sigrid, the younger figure, in the play’s original production. This time that part has gone to the Hollywood icon Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) with Maria signed to take the part of Helene, the rejected but mature (perhaps, rejected because mature) Other. Maria’s desire is to hole up with Valentine and run the lines, over and over, striving for more and more depth, more and more inwardness, just as more and more outwardly these two will establish, unavoidably if strictly in the context of “dramatic rehearsal,” a model of the characterological relationship itself. As a performer, Maria is far from the ingénue she once was, remote from the feelings she had when she was Sigrid. For her part, Valentine is caught in the throes of her twenties. She is bright, affable enough, tactful, and very adept, but she sees only the glimmering surface of the waters in which she swims. Is Valentine an actor, herself? A young actor eager for apprenticeship to a star, and thus eager to play at being an assistant, while at every turn capable of deft performance? We are never told. Working with Maria, Valentine certainly does not pretend to be an actor but, generally speaking, she does know how to do what her employer asks, and so the rehearsal scenario is possible at least in a rudimentary way. Interestingly, by the time of the film’s release (May 2014 at Cannes) Binoche was indeed recognized around the world as a leading actress of her generation, having done Rendez-vous for André Téchiné (1985), Je vous salue Marie for Jean-Luc Godard (1985), Mauvais sang for Léos Carax (1986), The Unbearable Lightness of Being for Philip Kaufman (1988), Les amants du Pont-Neuf for Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

136  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Carax (1991), Damage for Louis Malle (1992), the Three Colors trilogy for Krzysztof Kieslowski (1993–1994), The English Patient for Anthony Minghella (1996), Chocolat for Lasse Hallström (2000), Mary for Abel Ferrara (2005), L’heure d’été for Assayas (2008), and Cosmopolis for David Cronenberg (2012), among numerous other films. For her part, Stewart had an equally stunning, if perhaps more equivocal, career, including David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), Mike Figgis’s Cold Creek Manor (2003), David Gordon Green’s Undertow (2004), Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), Doug Liman’s Jumper (2008), Walter Salles’s On the Road (2012), and five episodes of the somewhat notorious Twilight saga (2008–2012).1 It should be said that in Sils Maria, there is brilliance in every instance of these women’s work. And indeed, at stake for viewers in Clouds of Sils Maria is the phenomenon of the actor at work, the question of what performance is and through what gestures of acceptance and permutation we might come to apprehend it. Ultimately, as we learn from William James, central is the issue of events’ status as “real.” Crucial for those who deliberate upon acting is the problem of intelligibility, that the viewer must always be sufficiently familiar with the act of the moment in order to effect recognition and appraisal. With strangers, whose cultural patterns are unknown, acting is hard to make out as such. And the making out of a performance is the understructure of the viewer’s experience watching. Whatever the character’s glory and his torture, and his own glory and torture in realizing it, the actor must be doubly alive, or alive as two beings at once, and openly and avowedly so, all of this elaborate pretense aimed to produce light and pleasure but also to address the difficulties of going onward, especially in the face of ever-crumbling monuments from yesterday. “It is no easy task,” writes David Collard, “to evoke the impact of performances from the remote past” (8). And if in the end acting is being, not all being is acting (see, for example, Naremore; Klevan; Pomerance, Moment; Pomerance and Stevens; and Kracauer). All the world may be a stage, but only some of the world seems that way. It is by way of a voyage that we see and appreciate screen performance. We 1

For more on Stewart’s performance in Clouds see Logan. If Stewart was the ideal prototype for this particular Valentine, a fresh-faced charmer with a feisty spirit, critics of her earlier work found her a curiosity. “19-year-old actress Kristen Stewart swears she’s boring. But we (and millions of obsessed fans) beg to differ” (Cavaco). “She can be unnervingly silent—she thinks carefully about each question and often has many stabs at a reply before settling on a finished sentence—but she is intelligent and engaging” (Lawrence). “There aren’t enough of those kinds of mad ones these days. . . . So rarely do we witness a young artist, singer, or actor who wants to burn, burn, burn, to set off on a new path that will inspire future generations, but who is also willing to suffer the rod that comes with saying no to things as they are” (Diehl and Sischy). “Stewart is a warrior, of sorts. Albeit a warrior . . . with the weight of the world on her shoulders” (D’Souza).

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a million th in g s   137 move into an unknown space and strain at critical discernments, appreciations, judgments. We meet glorious “natives” and revel in their beauty and curious wisdom. Our sense of self and of normality is altered, tickled, rendered questionable. Watching acting invokes the pleasure of exploration, of navigation finally, because in seeing the actor we are lost in a definitional, locational conundrum, able to be seduced away from our quotidian reality for moments of stunning power. Boswell noted, 10 January 1763, that David Garrick drew tears from his eyes (134), Garrick the trickster who apparently sometimes performed in a trick wig that could mechanically stand up (thus his Hamlet’s shock at seeing the ghost of his father). So carried away is Boswell by Garrick onstage that he chastises his doubting comrade Sheridan about the actor’s expertise, and draws from Sheridan a revealing comment that may startle us today, as we attend to the performative struggles of Maria and Valentine preparing for their show: SHERIDAN: I don’t value acting. I shall suppose that I was the greatest actor that ever lived and universally acknowledged so, I would not choose that it should be remembered. I would have it erased out of the anecdotes of my life. Acting is a poor thing in the present state of the stage. For my own part, I engaged in it merely as a step to something greater, a just notion of eloquence. (136–37; emphasis mine) Engaged merely as a step to something greater. Maria surely wants to act in such a way that her audience will not think of “acting.” She wants to lure Valentine into doing the same, no doubt for some “greater, just notion of eloquence.” It is to touch this subtle tissue of experiential “reality” that she begs Valentine’s assistance: eloquence as to the truth of one’s full person, the being who is, after all, inhabiting the role, who is alive as the character is alive—a person, in Maria’s case, no longer as young as the company she likes to keep, now in sight of farther horizons. Her chum (she appears to have befriended Valentine) is perforce less complexly aware, equipped with only the dimmest touch upon her all-too-present youth. These two actors, the professional and the aide, work in relative luxury. In the eighteenth century, according to Liza Picard, “the confined space of a theatre was a splendid place for rioting”: the famous Bottle Hoax of 1749 in the New Theatre in the Haymarket was all because the promise to produce a man out of a bottle was not kept. The house was crowded with “nobility and gentry of both sexes,” who waited noisily until their patience gave out and someone threw a lighted candle onto the stage” (255). In 1762 Garrick tried to eliminate the tradition “that anyone missing the first three acts of the usual five need pay only half price,” but the audience rioted against this, too (255). Maloja Snake, the play-within-the-film, the hydraulic structure that lifts Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

138  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e the reality status of its surround (on the play-within-the-play see Goffman 475), constantly invoked and reinvoked in the film, rehearsed and dissected, worried over to a heat, argued through, and finally performed in part for a theater audience in which we sit, takes its name from a curious weather formation near the Alpine village of Sils Maria, only a short hike from the mountain cottage where Melchior lived. In this strange spot, with some regularity under certain temperature conditions, an inordinately long, thin, twisting cloud emerges from the furthest distance and snakes its way forward, between mountaintops and over an alluring lake, darkening with menace as it looms in perfect silence. Maria and Valentine sit on a hillside to watch, dumbstruck. The Maloja Snake is bigger than all the snakes of the imagination put together; malevolent, as it would seem; torturous, yet also delicate, evanescent if the temperature changes abruptly; poetically inspiring. As, miles long, it looms forward, extension is invoked, as well as some inchoate past tailing behind an invisible future, and also appearance and disappearance, a pronouncement of sensibility (since the vapors that constitute it are continually shifting), history, promise, and magic. The cloud is Time. Watching, Maria and Valentine must each know—and each know ­separately—how she has come to be here, how her presence in fact fills out a temporal instant, a “now,” how this “now” is the only possible now (as always, in the dark, it is the only now for the viewer as well), a now built out of breath and expenditure. But they also, and painfully, know how the doubleness of the experience is a conundrum, that for each, the older looking at youth, the youth looking at maturity, true understanding is a riddle beyond a veil. A generation separates these two, and, as Alexander Herzen wrote, “Each age, each generation, each life had and has its own fullness” (37). As a visual entity, but one that holds form only precariously—precariously yet magnificently—the Maloja Snake calls up all the subtleties, all the strange effects of age and human relationship that beset Maria and Valentine, and beset all of us as we live, the piquing sense of continuity of the self whilst looking in mirrors we discover a stranger. Even as we imagine that the front part of the snake-cloud is “older” than the back (the back is just now emerging from the distant mountains, the head emerged some time ago), so may we be curious to think every body a cloud of this sort, to see Maria, a dignified woman in her mid-fifties, still bonded to—emerging from—this vivacious youth in her mid-twenties. As Maria did before, Valentine looks toward an event she can only dimly imagine, that she desires outside of experience. In recapitulating a theme Maria knows her present as a trace of an already disappeared past. These two cannot share a language, in the sense of a capacity to verbally signify: they have words, etiquette, smiles, but for both, all of these are attached to sensibility in dissimilar ways. Especially in the modern world, with social changes racing, people like these are mutually out of touch, strangers to one another’s eyes. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   139 Above all, the play Maloja Snake involves touch. A love affair has turned sour, inside a prospering business enterprise. In a culminating moment Sigrid abandons Helene coldly and abruptly (a blade through flesh), so that Helene must now, in her refinement and vulnerability to contact, face the starkest emptiness, loneliness, mortality, and memory. Wounded by youth one is stung by its beauty. Thus Valentine’s provocative youth is a continuing shock to Maria’s system. Perhaps professional discourse will aid communication, she thinks, so late in the film Maria takes Jo-Ann aside to offer big-sisterly (and, of course, quintessentially informed) advice as to how Sigrid could be played. But no, coolly smiling Jo-Ann puts Maria in her place with a declaration of independence. Is Maria sensing echoes or foreshadows of Valentine putting her in her place, too—reaching across time to pose her in some arcane tableau? Valentine, who does not inform Maria she wants to “break up” but simply vanishes one afternoon, into thin air.

N av i g at i o n Now that Maria’s youth is dissolved away, now that she must recognize the enslavement of imagination to memory, can she imagine Valentine has anything to learn from her? Can one learn from history by acknowledging it as fact but not as experience? A climactic demonstration of the slippage between Maria and Valentine, the disconnect between their ships wandering the sea of time, is to be found in the long rehearsal sequence, at Melchior’s empty house in the mountains. Maria is working to read each of her lines with passion and desire (as Helene would do) and Valentine rejoins with what seem, to Maria and to us, purely textual, emotionally vacant responses from “Sigrid”: feeding cues but nothing more. This expressive emptiness works for Assayas to highlight the young woman’s amateur status in performance, perhaps even to imply that Valentine is conscious of that status in the session, but it is also her way of keeping distant from the intimacy—at least the intimacy between selves—that Maria solicits by her working style. To kindle the emotional involvement of the other is Maria’s actorly task, and for the present, in this scene, Valentine is the other. Maria wants a sense of real involvement from this Sigrid, so that she can find real involvement in herself as Helene and the rehearsal can be productive. But emotional involvement comes with self-assurance and self-assurance comes with age, along with forgetting the absence of self-assurance that came with youth. In the tension of the rehearsal we find Maria the person, very like Helene, openly hungry for the involvement of Valentine/Sigrid; and Valentine the person, very like Sigrid, considering herself sufficiently involved already, thank you very much. After all, one cannot dig deeper into a self until one realizes that the self is deep, that it Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

140  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e can be dug into, can be a portal. Contact or purity, touch or self-defense, two high values in a stand-off. She who understands contact wishes to touch purity again. And she who clings to her purity is unknowingly starved for contact. Maria and Valentine are explorers facing unknown territory, unknown civilization. The two of them remain at sea, through the whole film. Committed to mastering actions, picking up facts, learning choreography, Valentine the diligent assistant is not yet ready to dance. The women take a rehearsal break and go for a refreshing hike, the scenery Alpine and splendid, the air fresh and invigorating. A secluded lake—as though in Eden. Some beautiful, still trees. Maria strips and plunges into the water, but Valentine stands timidly at the edge, water licking her toes, careful to have kept on her bra and panties. Is this modesty? Is it fear? Is it respect? Having forgotten her own sense of being a girl, Maria is out of touch with Valentine’s guardedness, but at the same time she knows that in Maloja Snake the younger and older women are engaged in a homosexual relationship that terminates at the end. Is eroticism part of the real feeling between these two exotic others, or is eroticism a button Maria knows she must find a way to push in order to make real the preparation for performance? It is as though looking back to shore from the water, watching this tender girl, Maria is professionally laboring whilst personally time-traveling. Everything has become, or must become, new. “One of the dilemmas of the twentieth-century man,” wrote I. Rice Pereira, “is finding a position in relation to frames of reference in space and time; otherwise he will be driven from pole to pole, only to be lost or overwhelmed by the infinitudes of anxiety” (n.p.).

Lost If Maria and Valentine circle around some point of intersection, the “vehicles” in which they travel their universe are separated, and they have begun their journey with different clocks: this is the emphatic significance of framing the story of the film around one younger and one older character. Oddly significant in Clouds of Sils Maria, with its continual reference to time (the playwright’s unanticipated death, the repeat production of the play and consequent shifting of roles for Maria, Maria’s daily impasse with Valentine), is the absence of clock mechanisms, since the vital clocks of this story are only in the protagonists’ hearts. Whilst Maria and Valentine are both aging as we watch, Valentine will never catch up, will have to run just as fast as she can in order to stay where she is. Maria and Valentine are experiencing navigation trouble, nothing if not an eighteenth-century problem, here handed over to viewers through the ways in which each woman’s intentfulness, articulation, energy, and fascination with the partner glide past the other’s, fail to contact, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   141 fail on so many levels to bring peace. Radically separated in experience and memory, they are—like all of us—navigators on the Real Sea. With special force, two special features of Clouds of Sils Maria bring to the surface the stress and nightmare of navigation, and make this film a signal treatment of the much broader, culturally, philosophically, and technically fraught issue of being lost. When a man is lost, the folk he chances upon seem exotic, otherworldly, wonderful. “How beauteous mankind is!” When a man is lost, he is ripe for, as Leslie Fiedler taught, racism or anthropology. First, the emphatically recursive nature of the story and therefore of the characters within it. (a) That Valentine and Maria are giving us a show, but in the guise of characters already engaged in show business.2 (b) That, as content of the film, their fraught relationship is being dramatized by Assayas, not merely seen, and in the somewhat strict form of a story about two women whose relationship is given in Melchior’s recursive stage play. (c) That, as happens in our lives, temporally distinct personalities, moving through time, come to play roles opposite to the roles they played once before; the younger woman becomes older and in meeting another younger woman (and employing her in so personal a way) is brought face to face with some vision, albeit current, of a long-gone self. We can imagine that one of Valentine’s many fears in being so close to sophisticated and mature Maria is that someday she will become like this; that, because time happens to us all, she will age, contrary to her narcissistic hopes.3 As Maria gazes at Valentine, she becomes visible to the young woman as a stunning and internationally celebrated Presence, a person unable to stop manifesting evidence of a Significant Career, while for her part Valentine is at an earlier stage in the life cycle, a girl in formation, a person whose intelligence is moderated by way of anticipation. However, Maria knows herself to be much more than her Famous Surface. As would any person, she feels herself both sentient and wondering, both assured and challenged, both eager and fearful. And because she is an actor who works out of her state of feeling—the rehearsal sequence makes it plain she is trained in some Method or other—she is sufficiently invested in the momentarily present and always shifting self that she does not see, or at least does not privilege, the mask that has seduced but also intimidates her assistant. She means herself to be authentic, touching, direct, and entirely—deeply—amicable, and Valentine respects her from a distance, eludes her grasp. Indeed, for Valentine, and in 2

An arrangement shadowing a long history of such recursive performative stories, including such films as Dangerous (1935), A Double Life (1947), Stage Fright (1950), Sudden Fear (1952), and numerous Hollywood musicals of the golden age where the backstage structure is central (see Feuer; Pomerance, “Christmas”). 3 The mythical Narcissus was male; yet Stewart carries a slightly boyish demeanor wherever she goes (and may well have been cast partly because of this).

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142  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e the face of Maria’s great Reputation, the older woman’s marked personability and openness to friendship must seem inexplicable and alien. Or, Valentine may quite reasonably wonder, is the openness to friendship unreal, just part of Maria’s working style? And Maria must ask herself about Valentine, is the cool retreat natural and personal or a diligent attempt to bring Sigrid to life? All this speaks and respeaks the foreignness implicit in every breath here. A second attribute of Clouds that makes it stand out as a navigational metaphor is the maloja snake itself, winding and swimming toward the camera and beyond. Beyond: in the direction of some future which is extrinsic to the narrative, perhaps even extrinsic to the viewer’s sense of self watching the film. A “forward” that has no map. The cloud phenomenon is a dragon, perhaps— heading our way just as it heads Maria and Valentine’s way. Yet the “snake” is a metaphor, a trick of the eye. What we, and they, are seeing is a cloud. To make the thing reptilian is to place it, in the far reaches of the imagination, in some Garden, at a prime, early moment in mythohistorical time, to attribute consciousness and seductive intent. But a cloud has manifest quality, not consciousness. There is no will urging it forward; it merely moves through space according to wind speed, air pressure, and relative moisture, a repeating natural phenomenon that has in this case picked up a nickname, and that openly and provokingly suggests intended progress, development, urgency. Thus, as a signal of the film, it directly opens the idea of sailing—it is a sailing cloud-dragon and a dragon-cloud sailing through the sky: both sides of a metaphor are always simultaneously true. Sailing: at each instant we are made exceptionally conscious of a present position and likely ensuing positions. Thus, as this “snake” sails over Sils Maria—and over Valentine and Maria— the film evokes momentum, searching, exploration, and the beautiful Other, but also, always, endlessly, yesterday and tomorrow, which are the fundamental poles of exploration. It was in the eighteenth, not the twentieth or twenty-first, century that exploration and its pleasures became an organized public phenomenon, when the fascination with voyaging captured the Western imagination. Our delight in going to the movie theater to see strange new worlds, our delight in expectation and wonder, our delight in watching the encounter of a voyager (Maria) with a striking and incomprehensible stranger (Valentine), our profound interest in their joint movements under the (confounding, brilliant) stars, indeed the excitement inherent in the idea of life experience as journey—all were born with the voyages of Captain James Cook, and with the broad cultivation of travel, exploration, and discovery that his labors engendered in literature and science and moral philosophy. To watch Clouds of Sils Maria as only a character tale, without this palpable sense of an unspecified and always present great ocean on which two beings are desperately foundering in sight of one another; to fail to see the riddle of time that plagues their navigation, is to find only a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   143 superficial, uneventful tedium. But to see the voyaging is to open oneself to operatic experience. Voyages of exploration involve two elements unavoidably: clocks and beauty; time and allure. Seductive time is always lapsing. And the world is full of beautiful strangers.

T h a t B e au ti f ul H e a t h e n Repeatedly in the furnished annals of Captain Cook’s travels, travels which could under no circumstances be regarded as entirely innocent, one finds descriptions of beautiful strangers encountered along the way (Valentine’s tribe, one might think: untutored, as yet uninstitutionalized sorts) resident upon the many charming islands that dotted the stormy byways of his routes.4 I will return to the problem of localization and the culture of mapping, which was flourishing in the eighteenth century. But even from the diaries we can see that at the heart of Cook’s enterprises were surprise, moral delight, and enchantment (as well as the exploitation, dispossession, and dominance of aboriginals). Here is Andrew Kippis recalling with wonder in 1831: In all the visits made to their towns, where old and young, men and women, crowded about our voyagers, they never observed a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint; nor among the numbers that were seen naked, was once perceived the slightest eruption upon the skin, or the least mark which indicated that such an eruption had formerly existed. (119) A similar sense of marvel taints George Forster’s record of 16 August 1773: The people around us had mild features, and a pleasing countenance; they were about our size, of a pale mahogany brown, had fine black hair and eyes, and wore a piece of cloth round their middle of their own manufacture, and another wrapped about the head in various picturesque 4

In his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe reprises many of the chords of amazement and aesthetic wonder at sight of native hordes canoeing out to meet travelers in the relative safety of their ship; for Poe, the delight turns distinctly sour later on. Particularly interesting as antecedent is an account of Forster’s, 16 August 1773: “The canoes soon passed through the openings in the reef, and one of them approached within hale. In it were two men almost naked, with a kind of turban on the head, and a sash round their waist. They waved a large grene leaf, and accosted us with the repeated exclamation of tayo! Which even without the help of vocabularies, we could easily translate into the expression of proffered friendship” (254).

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144  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e shapes like a turban. Among them were several females, pretty enough to attract the attention of Europeans, who had not seen their own countrywomen for twelve long months past. (255–56) Male desire in long seclusion is beside the point that the strangers met on the islands shone with beauty. On 21 August in Taheiti, Forster found it fascinating that, eagerly pressing the Europeans’ hands, the natives “seemed to wonder that we had no punctures on them, nor long nail on our fingers, and eagerly enquired for our names, which when known, they were happy to repeat” (291). In Sils Maria no indication is made in language such as this, but even the most casual regard makes clear that Maria looks upon Valentine within a wondrous register of appreciation, the register that Cook’s crew used on the islands; and that, confronted by her mentor’s curious moods and silences, Valentine is also encountering something indigenous and unknown. Perhaps we can imagine Maria’s young assistant in the period before the film begins, striding at her employer’s side among the rich and famous, learning a myriad names, repeating catch-phrases, smiling silently with the tranquil and lambent expression of which Kristen Stewart is so capable. How fortunate Maria must have thought herself, to have chanced upon this girl (this lovely, this as yet thoroughly uneducated girl), and how unsure she must have been as to the best pathway for reaching her soul. Maria and Valentine’s silent, tickled appraisals mirror those we find in ourselves if we consider the way cinematic characters—these two notably, but others as well—appeal to our fascination and challenge our easy knowledge. The natives Cook’s men found could often seem both cultured and entertaining, if in the most rudimentary way: One of the young men had a flute made of bamboo, which had but three holes; he blew it with his nostrils, whilst another accompanied him with the voice. The whole music, both vocal and instrumental, consisted of three or four notes, which were between half and quarter notes, being neither whole tones nor semi-tones. The effect of these notes, without variety or order, was only a kind of frowsy hum. (Forster 291) (Valentine plays her twin cell phones like musical instruments!) As a watcher, writes Forster, Mr. Hodges (the acclaimed William Hodges [1744–1797], an artist traveling on Cook’s second voyage) “filled his port-folio with several sketches, which will convey to future times the beauties of a scene, of which words give but a faint idea” (292). Hodges indeed brought back his sketches and in London worked them up into vivid watercolors of a strange and magnificent world. It is not difficult to imagine Assayas as a Hodges nouveau, keeping his sharp eyes on Binoche one moment, Stewart the next. In cinema Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   145 as in voyaging, everything about the Other intoxicates, and this must be so, because the swelling of the cinematic body, its special lighting and coloration, require justification. The records kept by Cook’s recorders give meticulous observations of exact, bounded, localized pleasures—they constitute the deep ancestry of the cinematic reveal. It is as though the eyes never stop wandering the terrain, fixating on objects, reveling in tricks of the light. Newly observed territories invariably produce in the European connoisseurs rapturous, intelligently considered delight. This is true of both vegetation— The banana, whose rich clusters seem too great a weight for the herbaceous stem, annually shoots afresh from the root. The royal palm, at once the ornament of the plain, and a useful gift of nature to its inhabitants; the golden apple, whose salutary effects we have so strongly experienced, and a number of other plants, all thrive with such luxuriance, and require so little trouble, that I may venture to call them spontaneous. (Forster, Saturday, 14 May 1774, VII: 110) —and human beings: Their features are sweet, and unruffled by violent passions. Their large eyes, their arched eyebrows, and high forehead give a noble air to their heads, which are adorned by strong beards, and a comely growth of hair. These, as well as their beautiful teeth, are the proofs of vigour and of a sound habit of body. The Sex, the partners of their felicity, are likewise well formed; their irregular charms win the heart of their countrymen, and their unaffected smiles, and a wish to please, insure them mutual esteem and love. . . . They amuse themselves with smoothing their hair, and anoint it with fragrant oils; or they blow the flute, and sing to it, or listen to the songs of the birds. (111) They amuse themselves with smoothing their hair. Forster calls up a reflection of Sir John Mandeville, in the early eighteenth century, artfully describing the manner in which a native elder was catered, and generally paid obeisance, by the sweet-tempered young of his tribe. This is action that cousins, albeit at a great distance, not only the comforting servitude of Valentine in the presence of the elder she esteems (and who, for her own part, has risen to a point above mundane self-care) but also our ability to find that servitude both strange and pleasing to watch: He hathe so longe nayles, that he may take nothing, ne handle no thing, for the noblesse of that contree is to have longe nayles, and to make hem growen all ways to ben as longe as men may.—-And alle weys theise Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

146  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e damyseles, that I spak of beforn, syngen all the tyme that this riche man etethe: and whan that he etethe no more of his first cours, thane other 5 and 5 of faire damyseles bryngen him his seconde cours alle weys syngynge as thei dide beforn. And so thei don contynuelly every day to the ende of his mete. And in this manere he ledethe his lf, and so did thei beforn him that weren his auncestres, and so schulle thei that comen after him. (376) This etiquette perfectly anticipates the sharply kenning service, including silence, we catch from Valentine when she and Maria sit with Jo-Ann and her boyfriend for an important meeting with cocktails. Assayas need not be imitating or calling up Mandeville explicitly to revel in the pleasures of voyaging as he knows them (and to anticipate successfully that the audience will know pleasures, too). Valentine possesses an untutored beauty, and if Maria has spent decades cultivating her surface, inwardly hers is an untutored beauty, too—­sufficiently so that she can recognize Valentine almost out of the corner of the eye. Europe’s fascination for the untutored beauty of the soul, what E. H. Gombrich calls the “preference for the primitive,” directs attention to the frequent notice of polished features and uncontrived sociability in Cook’s natives, the deeply redeeming pleasures of the natural and soulful that bare the under-truths of the human experience. Giorgio Vasari, Gombrich notes, is almost carried away by painters’ imitation of nature: “One might be so bold as to say that these arts had not merely advanced, but had also been brought back to the flower of their youth and carried the promise of that fruit that they were later to bear’” (Vasari 107, qtd. in Gombrich 145–46). Note the focal centrality of the metaphor connecting youth and floral expression, youth as promise, youth’s maturation as a kind of fruiting—a most genial and frequently copied way of looking at experience and time. Similarly, Gombrich shows us Herbert Read’s concentration on primitivity in the Bushmen and negro art: “We are led to an understanding of art in its most elementary form and the elementary is always the most vital” (Read 329, qtd. in Gombrich 269, after a discussion of regression as a “lure”). Expressive youth; primitive youth. Flowers; vitality. The sweet, genteel manners of the natives Cook met, like the sweet, genteel manners of Valentine, can be compared as parallel regressions to a soulful simplicity that is presumably incapable of guile, tactical play, or clever artifice. We develop a yearning for the naturalness of unaffected personality. The wedding of navigation and cultural strangeness—the sense that the voyage moves toward places and creatures heretofore unknown—vibrates through Clouds of Sils Maria without pause, and it was in the eighteenth century that that wedding gained formal recognition, celebration, and framing. Cook’s had been a politically pronounced endeavor (supported by the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   147 Throne) to circumnavigate the globe, map its landfalls, encounter whatever strangenesses in the name of greater understanding (that is, appropriation): in short, to expand knowledge and control of the Earth. With Cook’s voyages, and the subsequent published accounts of them that fell into wide circulation, European culture could come to think of itself as being in motion. The idea of navigating one’s way through experience and age, rather than passively being subjected to them, made for new and haunting fears, for instance that navigation could be fraught with difficulties and one might lose one’s way; worse still, lose all possibility of finding any way at all, lose time and memory and be forced to bob hopelessly on the ocean, to lose one’s “moorings in time” (Sacks 23). Moreover, beauty could be lethal. At Kealakekua Bay in the Sandwich Islands, 14 February 1779 a “beautiful other” produced Cook’s death: “Being almost spent in the struggle, he naturally turned to the rock, and was endeavouring to support himself by it, when a savage gave him a blow with a club, and he was seen alive no more” (Kippis 239–40). The exoticism of the Cook voyages, the delectable lagoons and beauteous savages shown in Hodges’s marvelous watercolors and in pictures from other artists as well,5 is reflected in Clouds by a contemporary exoticism, the delicious alienness Maria and Valentine find in each other’s persons and generational affiliations. For each of these women, placing the self and the other upon some kind of intelligible map of moments and distances is an ongoing challenge. But the principle of mapping so as to indicate the hazards of confronting the daunting and the indecipherable had roots considerably earlier. Take the well-known Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus, published originally in Venice in 1539 and in Rome in 1572. This glorious creation, in the vividest of colors, by a Scandinavian Catholic dissident who fled to Rome, features a number of encyclopaedic creations to show off the genius loci (see Nigg for a contemporary reproduction). The Magnus map shows Scandinavia, from Finmarchia in the far north down to Dania and Gothia in the far south, the surrounding seas chockful of serpents and whales, giant crustaceans, and ships hopelessly sucked under. Off the western coast, some split-tailed, horned, and frilled spirit of evil has attacked a giant lobster. Below it is a vacca marina, a sea bull, popping its horned head out of the waves, and a pair of giant fish half swallowing smaller creatures. In far northern waters, below Islandia, a ship has sunk its anchor into a mammoth tusked creature inside the belly of which two earnest people are to be seen carefully tending a pot over a fire. A spouting monster has its maw wide open to swallow a small vessel that has come too close. And beneath the Isle of 5

A fascinating example is George Stubbs’s The Kongourou from New Holland, painted in England from written descriptions and notes taken on Cook’s first voyage by Sir Joseph Banks. This conception of the “kangaroo” metamorphosed into the received notion of these animals in the Western world.

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148  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Tile, a giant “balena” (whale) casts the sea out of double spouts above its angry eye. The territorial space is rife with figurations, including, in Lappia, a pair of reindeer drawing a wagon from the rear of which a hunter is on point of shooting an arrow. Here, then, is a meticulous positioning of strange (and inexplicable) creatures in direct relation to specific geographical points, as if to incite the imagination or give fair warning to those who would venture into these hitherto unmapped zones. Our Maria could well have wished for opportunity to study a similar “map” showing where creatures like Valentine resided, vivacious, uncouth, bright-eyed, loaded with cell phones and innocence. A similarly interesting early document is the Miller Atlas of Brasil (a trio of maps published in 1519), which records aspects of the wood trade and of exploration to obtain red dyes. Unclothed natives chop trees, supervised by armed and befeathered leaders, while apes climb the branches and fabulous birds swoop overhead. A village, a wanderer with a staff, a remarkable flying dragon, and numerous other figurations decorate the map, laying upon the geographical spread a whole other tissue of suggestion, implication, and pleasurable incitement. In a 1457 Genoese World Map, Ethiopia is qualified by an extraordinarily long-necked dromedary. By the eighteenth century, the fabular recording we see evidenced in works like these had been significantly supplanted by hard-minded scientific rigor and measurement, the pleasure of having and stipulating knowledge now dominating flights of fancy. With the Cook voyages, as Europeans encounter the unanticipated, we find less an imaginative retreat from cultural realities than carefully registered curiosity and meticulous description, even of the morally unimaginable. The navigators’ second visit to New Zealand bore somewhat shocking fruit: They met with indubitable evidence that the natives were eaters of human flesh. The proofs of this fact had a most powerful influence on the mind of Oedidee, a youth of Bola-bola, whom Capt. Cook had brought in the Resolution from Ulietea. He was so affected, that he became perfectly motionless, and exhibited such a picture of horror, that it would have been impossible for art to describe that passion with half the force with which it appeared in his countenance. . . . The conduct of this young man, upon the present occasion, strongly points out the difference which had taken place, in the progress of civilization, between the inhabitants of the Society islands and those of New Zealand. It was our commander’s firm opinion, that the only human flesh which was eaten by these people was that of their enemies, who had been slain in battle. (Kippis 300–301) Somewhat shocking because hardly a singular account. In 1729, Pierre Vander Aa in Leiden had published the more than remarkable album La galerie agréNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   149 able du monde, which was sumptuously larded with magnificent etchings of the people and creatures to be found in North and South America, including a legion images of strange and half-familiar beasts, many of them gigantic, menacing, and curiously posed; but spiced, as well, with multiple images of cannibals in society, feasting with their children upon the severed body parts of their victims. “Les Brasiliens mangent les têtes des hommes,” read the caption of one. “Even before the eighteenth century,” writes Julie Peakman, “we see a belief in most travelers that the foreigners they encountered were bestial, savages, or at the very least below themselves in terms of human specimens” (38), and Benjamin Schmidt comments, more broadly, “Over a period spanning the final third of the seventeenth century and first third of the eighteenth, a new conception of the world and of Europe’s relationship to it developed in sources of exotic geography. These new materials—a vast body of textual, visual, and material objects—presented the world as distinctly ‘agreeable’ and thus accommodating in various ways. They addressed, moreover, a singular European spectator, or consumer, of this world” (3; emphasis original). All this recollecting Montaigne’s adage, “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice” (152). By the time of Cook’s third voyage, his observations had been sharpened by both sociological and geophysical illumination. To their women, he noted, the conduct of Europeans among savages “is highly blameable; as it creates a jealousy in their men, that may be attended with consequences fatal to the success of the common enterprise, and to the whole body of adventurers, without advancing the private purpose of the individual, or enabling him to gain the object of his wishes.” By this point in his career, Cook was neglecting “nothing which could promote the knowledge of science and navigation. . . . he settled the latitude and longitude of places; marked the variations of the compass, and recorded the nature of the tides” (Kippis 97; 99), and he corrected earlier, inaccurate positionings of islands as recorded by other travelers. But in a way, reports of the Cook voyages, as popular literature, constituted one of our very first instances of appreciation by a mass public of the adventure of exploration, a kind of germ version of the action spectacles and exotic stories cinema would deliver later. In the Cook annals, much as in contemporary cinema, one finds an enthralling pleasure in being at large, being opened to discovery, coming upon spaces no member of one’s culture has previously trod. Our each new voyage to the movie theater replicates discovering unforeseen territory, heavily populated by glorious Otherness yet to be known. Cook institutionalizes the pleasure of meeting, deciphering, and wondering about strange customs (and customers), the pleasure of moving off into the sunset, the pleasure of not being quite at home. Yet imbricated with the thrill of encounter was the continual possibility of becoming lost in the apparently boundless expanse of the Everywhere. Without great care and meticulous Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

150  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e technique, one might be bobbing in the waves as the sun rose and set, as the stars glowed overhead and disappeared in the dawn, with no sense of the East; with no way to know how far one had floated from home. This special sense of being lost in the sea, this consciousness of the difficulty of navigating, of calculating position, is the subtextual oceanic stream upon which Clouds of Sils Maria moves.

Clocking Direction In two ways time plays a central role in eighteenth-century exploration, especially as it is organic to the experience of film. Most obviously, passage across the sea in wind-powered ships was inexorably slow—at least by our standards—so that travelers would markedly experience their own aging as they sailed. This trope of locomotional relativity, in which travelers’ experience of time on extended voyages becomes vitally compromised, is a popular one in science fiction, which easily transposes the oceanic sailing voyage of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries into interstellar space (two peculiar and interesting cases being The Martian Chronicles [1980] and Passengers [2016]). More problematic, not to say more anxiety-producing, than losing one’s youthful vitality on the waves was losing one’s place altogether, floating without position. And in the context of remedying against the horrific possibilities of this fate, scientific endeavors were multiply directed toward developing a technique for finding longitude. In the eighteenth-century search for longitude was born the marine timepiece, which indicated a wholly revolutionary, forward-looking approach to the problem of clock-building in general and the method of ascertaining and verifying time.6 The voyage was always a time problem, yet also one that was configured in the imagination in spatial terms. Before the English Longitude Act was passed in 1714, with a huge reward for anyone who could come up with an incontrovertible method, numerous figures both professional and lay worked haplessly at possibilities of carrying time to sea. William Hogarth’s much celebrated A Rake’s Progress (1735), commencing in its caption, “Madness, Thou Chaos of the Brain,” shows a wide range of pathetic and comic types trapped together in a huge cell, and one of 6

One is reminded of the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson) in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Thief of Bagdad (1940), eagerly pointing out his royal blue pendulum clock that “tells the time! Sheer magic, isnt’ it!” His curious visitor, the evil Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), comments, “I hope this dangerous device will never be allowed into the hands of the people! . . . If people once begin to know the time, they will no longer call you the King of Time. They will want to know how time is spent.”

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a million th in g s   151 these, a bearded devoté with a skullcap, stands behind an open door marking lines of longitude upon a globe drawn on the wall. The principal problem was to calculate distance from some agreed upon meridian (various such were employed before the consensus to use Greenwich “because of the dominance of British railway companies, which standardized time for their own use” [Meaney 7]). The basis of the endeavor, founded in the notion that “the earth itself is a regular timekeeper” (Dunn and Higgitt 57), lay in the earth’s rotation through three hundred and sixty degrees every twenty-four hours, which means one degree every four minutes. What was needed was a way of telling time at a ship’s present location—easily done by means of instruments that could measure the sun’s position against the horizon—as well as keeping the time at the point of a trip’s origin. There was a need for a clock that could sail, or to put this more metaphorically, a clock that could be a traveler (in the way that, with Clouds of Sils Maria, we see that a traveler might be a clock). Changes in temperature, air pressure, and dimensional stability all had to be brought into account, because any of these could affect the precision of the instrument and precision, only precision, was the true value. The pendulum clock was found to be the most useful, because watches were inexact: Watches are so influenc’d by heat and cold, moisture and drought; and their small Springs, Wheels, and Pevets are so incapable of that degree of exactness, which is here requir’d, that we believe all wise Men give up their Hopes from them in this Matter. (Whiston, qtd. in Dunn and Higgitt 58) But unfortunately, pendula could lengthen or contract with heat or cold, thus losing or gaining time. Solutions to this and other problems were arrived at by the man who would become the master clockmaker of the eighteenth century, John Harrison (1693–1776). He used the tropical hardwood lignum vitae for the bearings of his clock, thus essentially avoiding the need for oil, “the curse of clockwork” (Dunn and Higgitt 77), which could cease to lubricate in cold temperatures; and he invented the “gridiron pendulum,” made of both brass and steel, two metals that expand and contract at opposing rates, each thus canceling out the alterations expected from the other. After three expensive and only partially rewarded experiments, he evolved the marine timekeeper H4 in the mid-1750s. Without time, it was impossible to make a precise calculation of longitude. But one might argue, without longitude it was impossible to know the time. While the problem of location is taxing and elusive when we come to spatial displacements, such as were to be found tellingly in the eighteenth century at sea, it is utterly confounding in displacements of feeling and experience, not at all so conventionally mapped and understood. Maria and Valentine are only Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

152  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e seemingly voyaging together. As Clouds progresses, it becomes more and more transparently clear that we are watching twin voyages, and movement in different longitudes. For these women the clock has become a profound riddle. Maria cannot grasp what Valentine already does or does not know about herself, about relationships, about feeling, about chance. And Valentine has no hook for seizing hold of the rigging of Maria’s strange and passionate life. For two people to hold civilized discourse, to use the rules of etiquette, is superficially easy in such a case: keep your distance, keep to your space. But for age to touch youth, and youth to touch age, to make contact with the stranger, is another matter.

Gho s ts In Clouds, one observes characters marooned in the infinitudes, lost together on the Sea of Experience. But if we consider time as extensive and unmeasurable, if we think back through long history and forward to a long future, any one individual life ceases to be a strict temporal rule, and the sea on which it is possible to lose one’s way becomes a very great, a boundless expanse. In thinking of travel upon this sort of surface, we must invoke the long dead and the still unborn—in short, ghosts. Could the need to position oneself in space and time be resolved in relation to someone who is not there in the palpable way that we see in Clouds of Sils Maria, someone who is both without and within, or who moves incalculably, or whose very existence is a question? The figure of the ghost is, after all, as enchanting as the figure of the New World stranger, and even more difficult to assess. In Assayas’ next film, Personal Shopper (2016), we are offered opportunity to meet and fall into rapture with another “islander,” a native type, certainly a beautiful stranger. Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is in Paris in her mid-twenties (romantic heaven!), a hungry and intelligent loner but also, as we are given to know early in the diegesis, a person of special “sensitivity.” It is not yet clear what this might mean. She is occupied officially as the personal shopper of an internationally famous model, who has churlishly invoked the rule that Maureen must never actually try on the (fabulously expensive) clothing and accessories she goes out on her moped to purchase. (Her moments of playing with the dresses, belts, shoes, etc., are thus always furtive, masturbatory. In one key instance Maureen actually does try on a particularly exciting piece of clothing in the model’s empty apartment, goes to the huge bed, and masturbates herself to sleep.) But as we begin to approach it, Maureen’s inner life seems unequivocally engaging. She was—or is—a twin, whose brother died very suddenly, in the recent past, of a hereditary cardiac condition that she shares. There is a tender medical examination scene in which we observe her hearing from her doctor Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   153 that while at the moment she is fine, there is no way to predict the progress of the condition. She is living on borrowed time. Living on borrowed time, but also definitely living. She and the brother evidently made a pact: that whoever died first would send back a sign. Maureen has been waiting patiently and with senses keenly sharpened. Waiting, in fact, is her principal reason for staying in Paris. The City of Light has become a waiting room. She experiences plasmatic revelations, as in nineteenth-century spiritualist manifestations, and also hears thudding sounds, cultured no doubt by her deeply absorbed study of the ghostly events that were reported to have transpired at the séance table when Victor Hugo spent time on the Isle of Jersey. As the film proceeds, we find Maureen speeding through the boulevards—bustling traffic, profuse evocations of style—with her sensibilities only superficially attuned to commercial shopping (for which she is keenly watching the merchandise on offer, a serious professional, but picking choices without what might seem an inner passion) whilst she is engaged in another kind of shopping altogether, a truly personal shopping, the hunt for her own lost self and blood. As waiter, she is fully devoted to watching the Everywhere and hearing the Everytime. “Is that you?” we barely hear her whisper. (Worth mentioning is Assayas’ magic, and Stewart’s: that the preposterousness of the plasma Maureen sees early on, to the hyper-rational minds of modern film viewers; the incredible suggestion that the brother will really send a sign; the apparent shrinkage of Maureen’s nobility as she commits herself to this unworldly anticipation and hunger—all of these slowly and imperceptibly melt away, until we have fallen into such rapture with her person and her condition that whatever she fears and believes we agree to and accept. “Is that you?” indeed.) Stewart is again and again the only figure on the screen. Standing, waiting, breathing, listening, holding her breath to listen more fiercely. Every rustle, every bump, every fluff of breeze. Her beautiful youth, her openness, her anticipation without specific readiness. Her eagerness to be touched, yet not by the living. Her wide opened eyes, eyes we can see in William Hodges’s watercolors on the faces of figures in canoes on golden lagoons. Here is a voyage story told from upon one of the islands, its protagonist one of the beautiful heathens. The effortlessness, even naturalness, of Maureen’s easy conviction in the possibility of a ghost, the sweet casualness of her clearly tuned attentions, echoes a haunting recollection of Walter Benjamin’s: The dread of doors that won’t close is something everyone knows from dreams. Stated more precisely: these are doors that appear closed without being so. It was with heightened senses that I learned of this phenomenon in a dream in which, while I was in the company of a friend, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

154  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e a ghost appeared to me in the window of the ground floor of a house to our right. And as we walked on, the ghost accompanied us from inside all the houses. It passed through all the walls and always remained at the same height with us. I saw this, though I was blind. The path we travel through arcades is fundamentally just such a ghost walk, on which doors give way and walls yield. (Arcades 409) “In the second half of the eighteenth century,” Susan Owens writes, “the idea of the sublime introduced the concepts of terror and wonder as emotions to be pursued, whether as direct or vicarious experience. Ghosts were the kings and queens of these dark, indistinct regions” (126–27). Owens points to the October 1801 première in London of phantasmagoria. To be sure, phantasmagoria shows had been offered on the continent since Tuesday, 23 January 1798, at 6:00 p.m., a production by Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, “the most celebrated and skilled projectionist of his time” (see Mannoni 147), that “succeeded beyond all expectation” (151); Robertson based his work on (Mannoni indicates he “stole tricks” [147] from) that of Philidor (Paul de Philipsthal), a Fleming who “came to Paris in 1792 and had a great following” (Montucla 551, qtd. in Mannoni 146), and became rich in the process. Philidor, it is interesting to note, may have borrowed his stage name from François-André Danican Philidor (1726–1795), the chess master whose famous book is used as an iconic agency of transfer between Conductor 71 and Peter Carter in A Matter of Life and Death. Philidor “varied his projections, and perfected his macabre mise en scène” (Mannoni 152), all with a view to debunking childish belief in ghosts (Harry Houdini would follow this path much later; see Pomerance, “Empty Words”). Still earlier instances of “haunting” were to be seen in the magic lantern shows of the seventeenth century, with images painted on glass projected onto screens or walls to make, as Samuel Pepys noted, “strange things . . . very pretty” (254, qtd. in Owens 128–29) that might float or even apparently advance toward the spectator’s eyes. But a “frisson of terror” was added in the phantasmagoria, according to Owens, because of the large screen, the dark room, in general the proto-cinematic quality of the experience of seeing unexpected visions in a space filled with strangers (Owens 129). The point here, as with earlier experiments such as Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon, that added sonic effects, was to make images seem to advance upon the viewer with the pressure and presence of the real, in short, as one might say, to obscure the “stageline” between imposture and actuality, between the picture-of and the thing itself.7 The problem of ghosts and stagelines is evoked brilliantly in 7

In 1771, Loutherbourg became director of the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, London, invited by Garrick. In 1785 he staged the Omai Pantomime, “a trip around the world,” based on the

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a million th in g s   155 David Lowery’s film A Ghost Story (2016), where the obscuring of a crucial boundary is handled by structurally mapping the ghost figure onto the perceiving consciousness of the viewer by means of the camera presence. Casey Affleck’s character “C” dies early in the film and is replaced by a ghostly figure in a white drape, something that would strike contemporary audiences today as a beautifully elaborated Hallowe’en costume. We continually see social scenes played out before us but are then shown this ghost standing nearby and watching them just as we are: silently, patiently, almost always without taking action. The ghost is affiliated with, and then becomes, the camera, and through this metamorphosis we, through “our” camera, become the ghost. Thus are life and experience metaphorized into ghostly apparitions themselves. Another strange cinematic ghosting takes place well into Ariel Vromen’s Criminal (2016), where Jericho (Kevin Costner), a toughened thug in longterm solitary confinement, is turned over to the CIA with a brain implant from a recently deceased operative, Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds). In a crucial scene he is with Pope’s wife (Gal Gadot), sharing a whispered moment of tenderness, and confides to her, in but a momentary flash and in precisely these words (scripted by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg), “He loves you so much!” This is nothing less than a revivification of the dead man through his re-braining in the (former) criminal, an extension of Pope’s shortened life through a ghostliness produced with the aid of high science. The brevity makes for the chill. Soon later, meeting the vicious terrorist who ended Pope’s life, he scowls, “You killed me” and the frisson is invoked again. In these films, as in “ghostly” manifestations classically produced for stage and other visual enterprises and in the “ghostliness” of cinema seen broadly, the ghost need not have constituted the exact depicted image content, need not have “actually” been in front of the eye, so long as it could have been imagined as a force that fashioned and propelled images at the audience. Ghostly image experiences called for an acceptance of ghostly projection, ghostly manifestation, a ghostly behind-the-scenes, in such a way that the impresario, regardless of his panache, might seem only the front agent of a team of unfathomables whose labor—invisible and untouchable—made the theatrical experience full and hearty. Cultural address to ghosts is very old, and rather than seeing in Maureen’s sensitivity to the “other” a trivial or raw primitivism one may think it grounded in long past traditions and beliefs. She is a person transported in time, born elsewhere and dropped without ceremony into the modern world (Paris as capital of modernity). She is reticent to actually name her dead brother, for instance. Frazer teaches that “one of the customs most rigidly observed and Cook voyages (Omai was an island native brought to England by the explorer, and was presented there to George III).

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156  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e enforced amongst the Australian aborigines is never to mention the name of a deceased person . . . to name aloud one who has departed this life would be a gross violation of their most sacred prejudices” (349). The East African Masai change the name of the deceased soon after death, assuming that “ghosts are notoriously dull-witted; nothing is easier than to dupe them” (354–55). Among the North American Indians, Jesuits reported that “the name is a vital part, if not the soul, of a man” (365), indeed, “the mightier the person the more potent must be his name” (384); and so eliminating a name or ceremonially renaming after burial become central features of the treatment of the dead. The Canadian Hurons believed they could bring the dead to life again through the bestowal of a name (366). Throughout Shopper, we note Maureen’s odd taciturnity, the brevity of her expressions, and her general silence in the presence of memories, stimulations, and other circumstances wherein a ghost might manifest itself. Thus, her experiences of visions and anticipations are presented to us wholly in terms of optical compositions, with only the slightest and most delicate amendment from sounds. The spirit of the dead brother, at least for Maureen, gains potency and possibility expressly through her hesitation to address it fully. For Géza Róheim, it is plain that “ghosts and dreams are practically identical” and “dreams come out of gates—in other words, the dreamer goes into a gate, passes through a gate, a vagina” (279). Maureen’s “sensitivity” is inflamed by virtue of her work with the ostensibly stunning female figura of the model for whom she works, a vaginal icon for the age of publicity and a metaphorical “gate” through which, or in association with which, Maureen’s visions of her brother’s ghost become evident. Further, she is having trouble sleeping, her dreams are waking dreams. And the nervous, somewhat high-strung Stewart may be bringing real elements of her nature to bear in playing out this facet of the role.8 There is, unsurprisingly, a religious underpinning to traces in the contemporary age of a conviction in ghosts and their qualities. Keith Thomas notes that although in the 1500s “the basic possibility of ghosts, as such, was never disputed,” there was a change with the Reformation (702). “The reformers denied the existence of Purgatory, asserting that at the moment of death all men proceeded inexorably to Heaven or Hell, according to their deserts; from neither world could they ever return” (702). But in the eighteenth century, according to Boswell, Dr. Johnson “thought the possibility of apparitions a necessary corollary of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; the only uncertainty, as he saw it, was whether or not such spirits could make them8

Lotte Jeffs remarks on her interview with Stewart in the actress’s home, while they drank iced coffees. “Brimming with overcaffeinated energy,” Stewart tells Jen Yamato, of Maureen. “Trust me, she would love to wake up in the morning and get coffee and be normal. She just has this preoccupation with these larger questions that don’t have answers, and it trips her out to a point where she can’t function.”

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a million th in g s   157 selves perceptible to living men” (703), this situation indicating “how far the position of the early Protestant reformers had, in this as in many other respects, been subsequently diluted. For although it may be a relatively frivolous question today to ask whether or not one believes in ghosts, it was in the sixteenth century a shibboleth which distinguished Protestant from Catholic” (703). We are not given clues as to Maureen or her brother’s religious ­affiliation— Thomas notes that the belief in ghosts “was to be found among almost all religious groups, and at virtually every social level” (708)—but we do have before us an unmistakable array of significations as to her conviction that he will remain present to send her a sign, present in her proximal space. Ghosts, Thomas summarizes, “personified men’s hopes and fears, making explicit a great deal which could not be said directly” (717). A sharper pointer to the texture, implication, and mystery of Personal Shopper would be hard to phrase. Once one has been convinced there is a signal in the surround, one is faced with the challenge of discriminating the signal from the ground, the melody from the noise. Is it the pattern of cars on the grand avenues she must traverse on her moped? Is it water dripping from a tap she did not turn on? One day she comes to the model’s apartment and meets Ingo, the jilted boyfriend, a surly fellow full of self-regard (Lars Eidinger): INGO: What are you doing in Paris? MAUREEN: I mean— Waiting. I’m gonna go. INGO: What are you waiting for? MAUREEN: My uh . . . brother died here. My twin brother . . . died in Paris. INGO: An accident? MAUREEN: Yeah. Well, heart attack. I actually have the same . . . malformation. INGO: Does it scare you? MAUREEN: No. It didn’t scare him. INGO: You’re staying here to mourn. MAUREEN: No, I’m waiting. I told you I was waiting. INGO: What are you waiting for? MAUREEN: So we made this oath. Whoever died first would send the other a sign. INGO: A sign. From the afterlife. MAUREEN: You could call it that, you could call it a million things. INGO: But, how do you know if it’s a sign? MAUREEN: I’m not a medium. He was a medium. I’ll just know it. Soon after, as she initiates a quick voyage to London to collect a particular garment (by way of the Gare du Nord, the Chunnel train, and so on—all of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

158  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e her journey filmed in real space with extraordinary rendition of the topological and social reality), Maureen receives an unidentified text initiating a conversation about . . . herself. The filmmaker magnifies her cellphone on the screen, so that both parts of the chat, one in gray, one in blue, are clearly legible if at the same time utterly silent beyond the signal buzz that accompanies every incoming line: UNKNOWN: I know you and you know me You’re off to london M: Who is this? (She is moving through the first-class lounge, fixing herself a café from a little espresso machine.) Have a guess (Fast thumbs:) No answer my question (She walks around with her coffee, in her leather jacket with her leather bag, and with her earphones plugged in, alone in this dense urban chaos yet also not alone, to the extent that she is busily in communication with the invisible.) R u a man or a woman? (The 9:35 to London is called. She boards the train, passport in mouth.) What difference does it make? (She finds her seat, earphones still in. Puts her bag up, sits, types:) R u real? (The train pulls out, we have a long shot of the tracks north of the station.) R u alive or dead? (She is anxious.) Alive or dead ?? There is no reply. (She clears her throat.) Lewi— Lewis? (The thumb hesitates; she hits SEND and turns the phone to AIRPLANE MODE. She covers her face with a hand, weeping. She pounds the seat, chews her fingers, breaks into sobs, hides her head in her jacket.) (Time passes and we see her emerge from the toilet, her hair moistened and drawn back, her face freshened, her jacket off. She wears a knit sweater. The phone is ON again.) UNKNOWN: I want you Stop (she types). I want you and I will have you (She is walking forward through the moving train.) How did u get this number? (Thumbs racing:) I’m blocking you. You don’t want to know who I am anymore? Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   159 (She is standing at a table in the bar car, with a black coffee. The phone is on the table in front of her. Nearby, men and a few women are going about their business, looking away.) I’m here I’m watching you (She looks up—people are conversing, drinking, looking out the window. We hear the drone of the train. She looks down at the phone.) I’m kidding I’m not there But I may be in London A stalker? A hungry rapist? A jokester? A total stranger at first sending off a message to the wrong number? Yet, because Maureen responds, the stranger keeps it going? Is the signal actually coming from a person she (and we) know already from earlier in the film—how many such people might there be? Ingo? The sister-in-law? The arrogant model? Maureen’s own boyfriend, who has seemed entirely sweet and amicable, insofar as we have seen him, because it is only via Skype that he has appeared? Or— Or is the message coming from her brother? Assayas is making it plain visually how the ghostly Other can be manifest everywhere in our contemporary culture, since we are so caught up in texting, celling, e-noting presences we do not touch, perhaps do not even directly know. The ghost of language, the ghost of technology. We are surrounded by ghosts. If it seems senseless in an officially declared Age of Science to proclaim the possibility of ghostliness, yet can any one of us truly claim to fully inhabit an age of science? The “age of science” is one of our popular myths. In some ways our most official declarations come from cinema, and this particular film is enunciating the presence of a ghost. We may benefit from science without giving it credence, without offering it our allegiance. And in any event, does not science view, and proclaim its view of, the invisible, yet another of our ghosts? Science looks for signs from the ineffable, as Maureen does, which makes it reliant on the incalculable. And, as Ingo warns Maureen about what we detect, “How do you know if it’s a sign?” Are all sounds and visibilities signs? Is everything interpretable? We can affirm this possibility in theory, but movement, navigation, discovery, even persistence of feeling would all be impossible if nothing could be disattended. And given that whatever the viewer’s philosophy of mortality clearly Maureen believes there is some existence after death and the viewer is caught up with Maureen, can we truly say the absent Lewis is discernably, demonstrably, less likely an origin for this odd conversation (with the other side) than anyone else, since all we see is the chain of words etching themselves across her iPhone screen? Maureen is increasingly caught up in talking to someone who isn’t there, just as she is caught up in buying clothes for someone who isn’t there, and in waiting for a message from someone who isn’t alive, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

160  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e reading assiduously about someone from another century. Words with their own apparent existence materialize and float in front of Maureen’s eyes. A Text without an Author. In the beginning was the Word. Someone surely does seem to know Maureen, we can see: to know where she is at present but also to know where it is that she is present, and to have grasped enough of her sensibility to know precisely how to strike at her attentiveness. Is it, as she wonders, a man or woman?—and is she asking this question because she wishes to believe it is her brother and is looking for any shred of substantiation at all? Is the person here, nearby, in the station, on the train, and thus perhaps a physical enticement or threat (regardless of what is claimed on the little screen)? All the way to London the conversation proceeds, with Maureen at first diffident but soon becoming wrapped in curiosity and responding with questions that provoke further questions on the other end. And all the way back to Paris, from St. Pancras to the Gare du Nord, until she has unlocked and started up her moped and is on the Paris streets again. Words on a screen in plain, perfect, intelligible English. Words as indices of a speaker. Any signal as an index of a signaler. Far less important than the identity of the stranger (we are never permitted to discover it) is Maureen’s eager willingness to be in conversation with an invisible spirit, artfully invoked here, at a distance (as it was in Clouds), by the cellphone as receiving device. Maureen’s “sensitivity” to spiritual realities extends to her willingness at blind interaction, her conviction in the presence and palpable reality of the invisible author behind the screen of her phone. Again, from the point of view of the film’s audience, it is far less significant to wonder who is writing to Maureen than to wonder about her, engaged with nothingness, caught up with pure language (the medium of the sign). She is attuned to signage, she is waiting for a sign, she must decide when and where she may be on the receiving end of one. To rationalize what the film shows: this is just a stranger imposing him or herself on Maureen’s private line, a stalker if not of a body at least of a dialogue. Yet to be convinced there is no longer a brother, that she is not receiving any signs from beyond—is entirely to miss Maureen and her convictions as they are, at least to her. She is at home in the modern world (evidence of her perfectly fluid comfort is repetitively offered us) but this means, in part, being attuned with the eyes and ears of her inner spirit to the territory of the “beyond” and believing in a kind of transcendental immortality which for her is mere Presence, casual, here and now, in the everyday. Does the cellphone conversation indicate that Maureen is being spoken to now? Or is someone from across a temporal boundary speaking to her? And if so, what exact Maureen is the intended receiver of the message? In small scale, organizing the activities of her day, she can plot a timeline without effort, she can be a regular person going through life in a regular way. But who is she in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   161 the large scale, in a context more historical and enduring? What is life, that it may end but messages still come? As a “sensitive” being, Maureen is completely disengaged from the historicity of the everyday. While her modern avatar can scoot from assignation to assignation on deadlines, and deliver the famous model her outfits without ever being late, the inner Maureen lives timelessly, in a way that is perfectly rendered in the few moments where she pleasures herself on the model’s sumptuous bed. The pleasuring evaporates temporality, thus pointing to, summarizing, a much more general condition in which Maureen dances (without specific rhythm) through life. She is lost in experience, lost in sensation, lost in wonder, lost in anticipation and hope, lost in flickering discernment, lost in the sea of ambiguity, on the surface of which the past bobs no less distinctively than the present, and where the living hold no dominion over the dead: Is someone here now? If yes, knock once. If no, knock twice. Off to Oman she goes, to visit the boyfriend whose face is so charming, but also only pixels, and who has insisted she get out of Paris. Long voyage. Brilliant sunshine. White clay buildings, vast desert, a long drive with a chauffeur. The little building where she expects to find him . . . . but he isn’t there (another mere trace of presence). A sound nearby. Maureen is startled. “Hey, G?” She rises and stands in the doorway to a second room, where through ancient window slats the afternoon sunlight streams in angles. The sound of children playing outside somewhere, a sound from the other side of a veil, now penetrating her space, such as, in The Passenger, we heard outside the window when the girl was describing the world outside to Locke/Robertson: LOCKE: What can you see? GIRL: A little boy and an old woman. They are having an argument about which way to go. or again in that film, in the shattering finale, during a long acoustic obbligato of realities in the plaza outside the bedroom at Hotel de la Gloria (see Pomerance, Michelangelo 228–29). We are behind Maureen as she enters this inner room. A drinking glass is floating in mid-air, gliding leftward to one of the shafts of sunlight. We saw a glass float this way before, at her sister-in-law’s one afternoon, when having met the sister-in-law’s new boyfriend she sat tranquilly in the tiny garden and through the kitchen window behind her the figure of a young man momentarily appeared. She was turned away but we saw. In that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

162  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e instance, it would be easy to conclude, “Here the filmmaker boldly figures the ‘ghost’ he insists we believe in, as Maureen does.” But that was before. Now we are seeing the glass again, and it is moving across the room of its own accord, and it has become our familiar and Maureen’s familiar, too. It enters in the sharp, magnificent ray of sunlight. It sails . . . before dropping to the floor and smashing. Maureen is visible waist up, her expression querulous. Was the brother holding this glass?—have we made a marvelous journey to a realm where such things are possible? (Because, frankly—and here nothing but frankness will serve—if a ghost is not moving this glass through space, this glass that flies slowly through the air, who is?) Maureen is breathing and hesitating; hesitating and breathing. “Lewis.” A long pause. “Are you here?” A thud, that makes her shake. Noises from off. “Have you been waiting for me?” Thud. Her eyes closed, her mouth dry: inhalation. “Are you at peace?” Thud. Her head nodding a little. The eyes closed. “Thank you.” Turning her head, but noises again. Her eyebrows raised. “Are you not at peace?” Thud. Approaching the camera. A knocking sound, off. “You playing with me?” A knocking sound. “Do you mean harm?” Silence, then: Thud, thud. “I don’t know you.” Taking in air, backing up. “Who are you?” And angrier, “Who are you?” Breathing. “Lewis, is it you?” nodding, “Lewis, is it you?” Shaking her head a little, just at the threshold of our discernment. “Or is it just me?” A single thud. She opens her eyes wide—with a sharp exhalation, as in a laugh of amazement. The screen goes white.

Tw i n Lewis, we must remember—although we have never met him and he is thus, for us, ever nothing but a ghost, even if he was invoked by a girl sensitive to ghosts and by a doctor confiding privately to that girl and by a widow who will not forget him though she has another man—was Maureen’s twin. Not merely her brother, but her twin. For all intents and purposes, whichever of them was born just ahead of the other, he shares her timeline, or did so until he died (do spirits age?). If in Clouds of Sils Maria two “navigators” of sorts are divided temporally, if exoticism and strangeness are invoked because of the movement across that division, here Maureen and the friend she keeps closest to her Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

a million th in g s   163 heart are one and the same, divided now by only space. Yet where can we say they are together? Therefore, more precisely: given that Maureen is so very indeterminate about Lewis’s condition and position, much as we are invited to be as we identify with her, she is as lost in both space and time as Lewis is, as much a ghost in some ways. As Lewis is her ghost, Maureen is Lewis’s. Because Maureen is so tightly and biologically bound to Lewis (the invisible Lewis); because his cardiac condition is also hers, and therefore his mortality potentially hers, always; because whatever signal or message he might conceivably transmit to her—as she so urgently hopes—would be private in the extreme, a signal that could be meaningful to no one else, in a practical sense Maureen is Lewis, and in her living quest she is a phantom searching spacetime to find a proper connection. Watching Maureen, we have been watching a ghost. We have gone on the journey, following her eager ghostly searches, her hungry ghostly wonderings, always with no sure conviction in our position in the universe. Maureen’s conundrum and our rapt involvement with her have unmoored us and sent us off. Like sailors we can see the sun rise and set but we are without a clock as long as the film unwinds. Without a clock and lost at sea.

Wor k s C i t e d Anderson, George William. The Whole of Captain Cook’s First, Second, Third and Last Voyages, Undertaken by Order of his Present Majesty, for making new discoveries in Geography, Navigation, Astronomy &c. IN THE SOUTHERN AND NORTHERN HEMISPHERES, &C. &C. &C., Revised, corrected and improved by William Henry Portlock. London: Alex Hogg, 1794. Baudelaire, Charles. The Parisian Prowler [Le Spleen de Paris]. Trans. Edward K. Kaplan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Boswell, James. Boswell’s London Journal: 1762–1763. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. 1950. Reprint, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Cavaco, Paul. “Kristen Stewart: Her Allure Photo Shoot.” Allure (12 October 2009). allure. com/gallery/kristen-stewart. Cavell, Stanley. Themes Out of School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Collard, David. “Pretending for Others.” Times Literary Supplement (9 October 2015): 7–8. Diehl, Jessica, and Ingrid Sischy. “Hollywood’s Rebel Belle.” Vanity Fair (21 June 2012). vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/07/kristen-stewart-vanity-fair-cover-story. D’Souza, Christa. “Untamed Heart: Kristen Stewart Cover Interview.” Vogue (October 2012). vogue.co.uk/article/kristen-stewart-vogue-cover-interview. Dunn, Richard, and Rebekah Higgitt. Ships, Clock & Stars: The Quest for Longitude. Glasgow: Collins, with Royal Museums Greenwich, 2014. Feuer, Jane. “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment.” In Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 543–57. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Dell, 1969.

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164  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Forster, George. A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5. London: B. White, 1777. Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Part 2. “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul.” 1911. Reprint, London: Macmillan, 1976. “GLAMOUR’s Best Dressed Women 2012.” Glamour UK magazine (June 2012). glamourmagazine.co.uk/gallery/glamour-best-dressed-women-2012. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Gombrich, E. H. The Preference for the Primitive. New York: Phaidon, 2006. Herzen, Alexander. From the Other Shore and The Russian People and Socialism. Trans. Moura Budberg. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956. Hill, George Birkbeck, ed. [James] Boswell’s Life of Johnson: Including Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. James, William. “The Perception of Reality.” In Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 283–324. 1890. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1950. Jeffs, Lotte. “A New Light: Kristen Stewarts Most Open Interview Yet.” Elle UK (18 August 2016). elleuk.com/life-and-culture/culture/longform/a31346/icons-of-change-inte​rvie​wkristen-stewart/. Kippis, Andrew. Voyages Round the World Performed by Capt. James Cook; with an Account of His Life, During the Previous and Intervening Periods. London: George Cowie & Co., 1831. Klevan, Andrew. Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. London: Wallflower, 2005. Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. New York: Scribner, 2003. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Lawrence, Will. “Interview with Twilight’s Kristen Stewart.” The Telegraph (13 September 2010). telegraph.co.uk/culture/twilight/7980271/Interview-with-Twilights-Kristen-Stew​ art.html. Logan, Elliott. “Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria.” In Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances, Vol. 1: America, ed. Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens, 274–85. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Mandeville, John. The voiage and travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt., which treateth of the way to Hierusalem; and of marvayles of Inde, with other ilands and countryes. 1725. Reprint, London: F. S. Ellis, 1866. Manguel, Alberto. “Shelf Life.” Times Literary Supplement (4 December 2015): 8–9. Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Meaney, Thomas. “Persons Who Dine.” Times Literary Supplement (11 March 2016): 7–8. Montaigne, Michel de. Complete Essays. Trans. Donald Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948. Montucla, Jean-Étienne. Histoire des Mathématiques. Ed. Jérôme de Lalande. Vol. 3. Paris: H. Agasse, 1802. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Nigg, Joseph. Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map. Chicago: Vehic Press, 2013. Owens, Susan. The Ghost: A Cultural History. London: Tate, 2017. Peakman, Julie. Amatory Pleasures: Exploration in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

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a million th in g s   165 Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. Vol. 7. London: Longman, 1972. Pereira, I. Rice. The Nature of Space: A Metaphysical and Aesthetic Inquiry. New York: n.p., 1956. Picard, Liza. Dr. Johnson’s London. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Pomerance, Murray. “Empty Words: Houdini and Houdini.” In Invented Lives: Biopics and American National Identity, ed. William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, 25–48. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. ———. “Michael Curtiz’s Gamble for Christmas.” In The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance, 221–35. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. ———. Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ———. Moment of Action: Riddles of Cinematic Performance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. ———. “Untitled, on David Cronenberg’s Crash.” Newsletter of the Film Studies Association of Canada 21, no. 1 (Fall 1996). Pomerance, Murray, and Kyle Stewart, eds. Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances. Vol. 1: America. Vol. 2: International. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Read, Herbert. “Bushman Art.” The Listener (27 August 1930). Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems. Trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940. Róheim, Géza. The Gates of the Dream. 1952. New York: International Universities Press, 1970. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 1991. Vander Aa, Pierre. La galerie agréable du monde: où l’on voit en un grand nombre de cartres tresexactes et de belles tailles-douces, les principaux empires, roïaumes, republiques, provinces, villes, bourgs et fortresses. Leiden: Pierre Vander Aa, 1729. Vasari, Giorgio. “Proemio delle Vite.” In Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, vol. 1. Florence: Milanesi, 1878–85. Whiston, William. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston. London: Printed for the Author, 1749. Yamato, Jen. “From Blockbusters to Art-house Muse, Is Kristen Stewart the Best Actress of Her Generation?” Los Angeles Times (10 March 2017). latimes.com/entertainment/movies/ la-et-mn-kristen-stewart-personal-shopper-20170309-story.html.

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166  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e ch apter 5

Rhapsody in Green

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. Proust, Swann’s Way

A

bout halfway through Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954), one of the last films to be shot with the three-strip Technicolor camera and thus a signal example of the apogee of 1940s and 1950s possibilities for filmic color, the protagonist, Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), is returning to his lavish lakeside home. By this point in the film, Merrick is known to us as a man of delicate moral sensibilities and profoundly felt commitment, unfortunately caught up in the predicament of having being framed—whilst he was helpless, because seriously injured, and therefore quite unknowing—as the worst kind Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   167 of cad, a trumped-up and narcissistic, far-too-privileged reprobate responsible for a good man’s death. Emergency resuscitation equipment headed for Dr. Phillips, the kind old country physician but now victim of a coronary, went instead to save the playboy Merrick, the local magnate, who crashed his speedboat (toy). So dances the power of capitalism and class. As much as it may be possible, our Merrick has been working behind the scenes to make amends to the widow. We may note (in fact, given Sirk’s careful design, we would find it almost impossible to neglect) that Merrick is always, somehow, associated with rich color. For a present example, he approaches his house in a British (right-hand drive) Bentley that is painted a sumptuous maroon and gray, gleaming in the splotches of sunlight that drip through the surrounding pines. Much later in the film, in a Swiss village inn, he will be surrounded by profuse bouquets of provocative lilac and by lushly green exterior vegetation seen just outside the balcony. At another, early, point, when by lakeside he entertains the sightless Mrs. Phillips (Jane Wyman) in his creamy shirt, she sits eagerly at his side in a mint green bathing suit the color of which seems to rebound off him. He works to improve Mrs. Phillips’s life with the help of a close confederate, Nancy Ashford (Agnes Moorehead), who was at one point her nurse; Nancy sports copper-red hair and wears deep magenta coloring on her lips, again a vital color contrast to the dignified Bob. Pine trees and lush house plants seem always to be peeking through the windows or decorating the room when we see him, the gray or navy colors he wears working to set off his healthy skin and to make the vivid colors around him jump out in bold relief. Bob is informed by his butler that Tom Masterson is awaiting him. Sirk’s melodramas, of which this is a signal case, are jammed with characters who live their lives in complexly interwoven relationships: this Tom is the boyfriend of Joyce Phillips (Barbara Rush), daughter of the man who died and, along with her mother Helen, at this juncture, a dedicated loather of Merrick—for what seem to her the sanest reasons. Merrick greets Tom (Gregg Palmer) in his living room. The conversation that takes place here between these men is in some ways central to the turning of Sirk’s story (based, like that of John M. Stahl’s 1935 version, on the Lloyd C. Douglas novel of Christian redemption), but my interest in the filmic moment lies at some distance from the arc of the script. A certain element of the scenic design catches my attention, index, in some ways, of many other such designs in the film that rely on the same at once challenging and enchanting clue. Casting the eye around, one finds the walls of the room wood-paneled and stained gray; the hearth wall made of horizontal strata of pale gray granite; the furniture gray-striped; Merrick suited in pale charcoal gray—all of this delicious, soft grayness being a kind of establishment. On the coffee table is a small bowl containing a pyramid of vibrant oranges Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

168  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e and red apples. But punctuating the space dramatically are table lamps with lambent forest-green shades. There is a mullioned window, pale gray, with a lush growth of vivid green foliage outside it. Nearby, on a table, is a lush green houseplant. In various camera set-ups, such as a close shot of Tom with Bob seated on the arm of the sofa to regard him, the greens of the room, the foliage and the lampshades, receive special attention, utilized always to block a dramatic and aesthetically crucial part of the image rectangle. To go on a little: in another scene in this room we see Merrick ensconced on that sofa, pipe in mouth, with a rich green lampshade behind him and a few books, one with a matching green cover, on a table in the left foreground of the shot. On the far side of the hearth is a dark brown easy chair, behind which is another effusion of greenery, philodendra. When Helen sustains a brain injury and is sent (secretly) by Merrick to Switzerland for medical consultations, there we find her in a hotel room richly furnished with large philodendra, their leaves gleaming green. In the film’s finale, a lush green monstera deliciosa decorates the southwestern hospital room in which Helen recovers from critical surgery with Merrick (in a dark blue suit) at her bedside within a pale yellow space. The leaves of this plant, and other greenery meant to be seen as growing outside the hospital room’s plate-glass window, frame the landscape that is the culminating shot of the film. Red, orange, maroon, blue, yellow, brown, green: these colors. I have mentioned already how, in historical time, they fall back to very early cultural referents, how, for instance, the red and blue of early stained glass permeated the sensibility of the looker with the deepest saturations and evocations. But in personal time, which each of us lives as though having begun a universe with our earliest sensations, color also goes far back into a past that, if it is shallow, in fact feels deep. In later life we often find ourselves beset with piercing aidesmemoire, color provocations that draw us back to a period before we stamped our sensations for posterity. The primal red, the primal blue, the primal green that confront us now through traces, hauntings, and reprises, may call up some strange mixed and misshapen memory of an experience too early to know, earlier and, as it were, before time as we knew—knew, not recognized—it. I recall a children’s book with drawings executed in red and black: workers riding a little train into a dark mine cave, opening their lunchboxes, withdrawing food. An apple and a thermos of milk and some kind of sandwich. For me, at least, most long-lost memories are gone into the depths of such a cave, a cave or a sea, or a sea cave, so that if on occasion a sensation is produced in a striking but incomprehensible way it is some present trace, as I think it, leading back to an origin impossible to know, thus in effect a ghostly apparition. Hanging on a wall before my eyes one day was John Everett Millais’s Mariana and the Moated Grange (1851), in which the principal figure stands stretching her back and appareled in the most intoxicating, the most luminous and primordial Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   169 blue, a blue that drew me forward toward the canvas and then back in time, as though I were falling slowly, somehow into a sea, even perhaps the sea invoked by Luc Besson in Le grand bleu (1988) as his divers go deeper down, and yet deeper, until they are beset by wonder, yet, I am sure, also some deeper, older, not even liquid sea, an ocean of time. (While I do recognize this is only my own experience of color, I know at the same time that Millais was not thinking of me when he painted his picture; that the blue is there to draw in anybody in what must surely be a similar way.) “What an abyss of uncertainty,” thinks Proust, “whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing” (55). The red of Merrick’s apples and the orange of his oranges are perfunctory as we see them, bluntly indicative or referential: they assist the eye in identifying the fruit, and through the identification knowing the housekeeper’s taste for simple, natural, healthy things. The brown of Merrick’s chair is chthonic, suggesting the fertile earth out of which growth comes—thus, an implication of temporality, mortality, fertility, natural change. The blue of his suit is a responsible, respectable, noble blue, the blue of aristocracy, of far horizons, of high skies, yet also a socially neutral blue, offering little to the imagination beyond the thought that the wearer bespeaks a certain propriety of manner and dignity of posture. Banker’s blue, executive’s blue, schoolteacher’s blue. The pale yellow, another color repeated in the film, suggests, perhaps, the very faintest ray of sunshine, of hope, yet a ray still diluted by a preponderance of whiteness, which is to say, optically thwarting blankness. But the green (and here we tremble): The green is the only color in this film that seems real in itself. In itself, spontaneously, and for itself. In itself, of itself, to itself, from itself. An existential color, whose essence follows from its existence. The color, we may think, of the Garden of Eden, which is there before the thoughtful Adam and Eve make their entrances. A green out of which we are born. Marvell’s invisible green, the “green thought in a green shade.” Green is perhaps the most problematic of all pleasures, at least whilst spoken of, because it is too deep. As Frank Kermode reminds, “The word pleasure is problematic . . . because it glides over the abyss” (58). Real in itself: that is, not pointing to an object or figuration that may also be taken to be real—a necktie, a stoplight, the emerald in the ballet from The Band Wagon (1953)—an object that requires to be green instead of any other color so that it will not be confused with another object. We agree to think of the sun as yellow and so pictures of the sun make it yellow; this is the language game of color to which Wittgenstein pointed. When we say “real,” therefore, it is not to suggest or give the nod to the extrinsic idea of “reality,” what a culture might esteem and flag as real through its investments of capital and agreeNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

170  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e ment, but instead to indicate the ground upon which one stands in making a regard. Thus, the “green of money”—greenbacks—in linkage to the wealth of Robert Merrick is not what Merrick’s particular green is, or is about. We must imagine a less indicative, less supramundane propensity (indication flies above the plane of everyday experience), a green that delicately brushes against the invisible. Greenbacks do have their own chill. Robert Benton’s Still of the Night (1982) has a green moment dependent on a recurring green dream that a middle-aged man, victim of a murder, had confided to his lover (Meryl Streep). He’s clutching a green box, which dramatically falls out of his hands. But in the film’s climax the lover exclaims with shock, “It’s not a green box. It sounds like green box, but it isn’t.” She recounts an anecdote about another character who didn’t trust banks and insisted on taking her salary in cash. “Greenbacks” is a nickname for the American dollar, which is always green. This “Greenbacks” is, of course, the killer, and the victim wanted to signal that. A similarly illuminating, and equally chilling, green moment, similarly charged with sound, so that it suggests and offers what we might call the sound of green, frames one of Hercule Poirot’s key revelations in Murder on the Orient Express (1974): having seen, but lost recollection of, the passport of the young Countess Andrenyi (Jacqueline Bisset), in which her maiden name is listed as Grunwald, he proceeds to question another passenger on the train, aging Princess Dragomiroff (Wendy Hiller), who is the young woman’s stepmother. We cut to a sharp medium close-up in which the old princess says, “Greenwood.” A haunted name, to be sure, since the mother of poor little Daisy Armstrong, who was shown kidnapped and murdered at the outset of the film, is also a Greenwood by birth. Greenwood and green biography; a green history; a green revenge. And Poirot is suddenly screaming with enlightenment: “Greenwood! Grunwald is the German for green wood!” Which is to say, the young countess is the bereft mother’s sister! (A very typical Agatha Christie biographical knot.) The spectator, at this moment watching the antics of Poirot with only smug detachment, since the cardboard characters and put-up murder are mere fodder for an afternoon’s casual entertainment, is jolted awake, because when in his deep and resonant voice Albert Finney enunciates his discovery that the secret is a green wood, a green charge passes out of the screen. Green wood, Grunwald, the woods of death, the princess and the huntsman, the dark Schwarzenwald, venue of fairy tales, home of goblins and witches, repository of darkest truths, the blood that links person to person finally becoming a green blood. Green as the endlessly seductive, boundlessly charged, always flowing sound of green. When I say of green, the green of Magnificent Obsession, that it is real in itself, I mean that it derives its power from being actually present, exactly like the phrase exactly like the phrase, not only on the plane of the film image (the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   171 plane of text) but also in the reality that stood before the camera (that lies in the reader’s incorporation of words). Present not to offer meaning but present to constitute presence. The green as an ever-living presence, always alive and always here, sempervirens, ever-ongoing. Green as chlorophyllic: in the sense of Frazer’s dying and reviving god. Green as nutritional. Green as experiential. Not only are the characters of this story often “green” to one another—uninitiated—but they live, they are shown to live, in a green surround, green outside their windows and beside their hearths, green on their tables, green beside their beds: they are in an untransformed, inarticulate world. The green world does not indicate, it continues. At first Bob Merrick’s green lampshades, then the green plants that push themselves into view behind and around him, prick out of their dull surround, pointlessly obtrude into the space of each character’s present experience as if to whisper, “Time is also here.” There is a shot in which a green lampshade and a green plant margin the screen, actually encapsulating Merrick: green life on one side, green light on the other. This Sirkian green is a distillation of all possible greens, green of the ocean, green of the summer sky at twilight, green of the forest, green of charming eyes, all greens in one green, a green that is only itself, only its shockingly vivacious self in the context of all these proclamations, queries, meanderings, babble. The moral point of Magnificent Obsession is that it doesn’t matter, finally, what you say, it matters what you are and what you do. And if it be true, as Paul Goodman once told me, that for a writer speaking is doing, there rests a limiting case that does not apply in this film, where no one is a writer except only one, Whom we do not see. In each other Merrick and Helen Phillips need to recognize a presence that is beyond talk.

G re e n O u t a n d I n A green of nature, often that chlorophyllic and continually reviving green, is brought into the domesticated living space—the film viewer’s cultivated body of understanding—as token, ghost, perduring reminder. An outside drawn in. “The exterior as interior becomes a crucial emblem for [Walter] Benjamin’s analysis of the nineteenth century,” Tom Gunning writes, because this ambiguous spatial interpenetration responds to an essential division on which the experience of the bourgeois society is founded, the creation of the interior as a radical separation from the exterior, as a home in which the bourgeois can dwell and dream undisturbed by the noise, activity, and threats of the street, the space of the masses and of production, a private individual divorced from the community. (106) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

172  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Green to undo the divorce, green to ameliorate, heal, unify. We may think of the ways in which, entering the sanctum of the movie theater, we feel ourselves safely divided away from the social press outside, secluded in our reception, enveloped in darkness, encountering a framed hypothesis that takes the place of unframed fact. The green that is inside the quintessentially bourgeois Merrick’s living room—his lampshades, his house plants, and the penetrating, framed view of the greenery outside—marks his privacy, sets him away from the green of the (primeval) forest by only indicating (mocking) it, similarly to the way, described by Gunning, that in Parisian society of the nineteenth century, windows and well-placed mirrors functioned to bring the outside in, figuratively but not really. The image as pleasing mockery of the thing, a trick for the eye. No more profound trick for the eye than a green trick, since green is nature and pictured green is a clue, only a clue. Only a clue, but a clue. On tricking the eye, on bringing the outside in, we can recollect the trompe l’oeil of Melchior d’Hondecoeter discussed by Marrigje Rikken, his “heightening” of effect (that I noted above). Red berries, red-wing birds, gray fieldfare, brown wood, out of the green world and onto the green canvas. About colorful painting importing a representation of the outside world to the cloistered interior Loughman and Montias, who inventoried Amsterdam collections from the seventeenth century, note that “paintings were around three times more numerous and considerably more expensive than the other works of art that we have investigated: prints, maps, sculptures, alabaster plaques and so forth” (132). They point to Gombrich’s reference to the acquisition of pictures as a “domestication” of easel painting (which had been shown mostly in churches and public buildings). The position of pictures on walls was lowered, “and they became valued commodities,” this evidencing a “growing respect” among collectors “for paintings in their care” (132). The paintings were no longer higher than windows, they became windows themselves. Later, the movie screen could function like a painting come alive. Lassaigne and Delevoy point to Peter Paul Rubens’s “love of nature”: Sketches of fallen trees, shrubs and leafage, made in early youth, testify both to his interest in such motifs and to his powers of observation. Notable is the sureness with which he chalks in the high light on a treetrunk or records the exact color of a bush. On the back of one of his drawings we find this pertinent remark: “Trees reflected in water have a brownish hue and more distinctness than when they are seen in the ordinary way.” (145) The rich, even richly muted green of trees in water can be seen in A Shepherd with His Flock in a Woody Landscape (1615–1622); The Watering Place (1615– Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   173 1622); and Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock (1638). Henry James is enraptured by the Dutch painters. “We never fail to derive a deep satisfaction from these delectable realists—the satisfaction produced by the sight of a perfect accord between the aim and the result. . . . Essentially finite doubtless: but the infinite is unsubstantial fare, and in the finite alone is rest” (77). “In the finite is rest”: Merrick’s green lampshades. Pleasure as pathway to repose. Contrapuntal in some ways to Bob Merrick’s “homestead” in Magnificent Obsession, consider an interesting arrangement visible in the domestic scenes of Clarence Brown’s The Yearling (1946), with the yeoman Baxter family (Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, Claude Jarman Jr.) in their stone cabin set within a lush, green Florida backwoods in 1870. The Baxter home, effected by Cedric Gibbons and Paul Groesse, has interior walls of stratified stone, the image of an historical original that could have inspired Merrick’s imitative desires (his home was built by Bernard Herzbrun and Emrich Nicholson). When young Jody goes frolicking with his yearling pal through the lightstruck forest, we can note the immediate presence of a green wilderness, a zone layered with “historical green,” as we might name it, in reference to deep history; but this color is not used by the Baxter family to decorate their interior as it is by Merrick to decorate his. There are no landscapes on the Baxter walls, no mirrors to bring the outer world in as décor. The green world is the place in which the home is set, the real substructure. The homestead is abstracted out of it. An equally ancient green, a flood of the past, is provided by Hitchcock in the redwoods sequence of Vertigo, shot on location at Big Basin. Here once again the curtain of historical green, dark and disturbingly lush, reaching outward and backward in time, but also unmirrored in the interiors of the film, which are strictly urban: indeed, Midge Wood’s apartment deconstructs—but only deconstructs (a modernist fantasy)—this green through sharp yellow and blue design elements. The Baxter home reflects a postbellum cultural construct but was designed to embody the sensibilities and desires of an optimistic postwar American viewership, viewers who would have noted and felt the impact of the blunt division between the forestial and the domestic worlds presented in their growing bourgeoisie, and wished to retain any slender thread that could bind them to the yeoman wilderness consumerism had abandoned. When in the early 1950s Sirk brings a forestial exterior into Merrick’s space, he expects with a sureness that his audience will recognize the visual idea of an outside “brought in.” If under the surface of Magnificent Obsession runs a current of mortal danger, darkness, melancholia, and distrust, everything we come to know about Merrick works to stop and convert it, to make a world where health can be wrested from debilitation, where love can replace the agony of hatred, and his affiliation with green becomes the visual code for this urge toward renewal. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

174  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e

Go o d G re e n Recall Levesque de Pouilly’s idea of green “exercising the fibres of the eye, without weakening them” (28). A moderate exercise for the fibers of the eye, he writes: how simple it would be to dispense with this kind of reasoning in light of the eye’s anatomical construction, its link to a dense nerve, its internal humorous orb, the liquidity, the splendid array of retinal cells. But if we think of the eye as we experience it, if having sensed the self as embodied we then migrate toward the eye as it is feelingfully imagined, does not the conceit of “fibres” seem as descriptive as any other? We easily speak of the fibres of our being; the fibres of our soul; and here is the suggestion that if hot colors like red are exhausting—if, in fact, we put up a shield against them—the moderate action of green is a blissful relief. In the marvelous library lovemaking scene of his Atonement (2007), Joe Wright positions a tuxedo-wearing James McAvoy against a floor-to-ceiling cherrywood bookcase, jammed with volumes, and the slender, quivering body of Keira Knightley. Knightley here is virtually emaciated, the “fashion” of femininity in the early twentiethcentury British landed aristocracy. She wears a long shimmering gown of unearthly—yet utterly earthly—emerald green. Emerald green, pond green, fairy green shifting in the slender thread of light. The young man’s every staunch propriety is countermanded not by the girl, who is herself caught in the strictures of social nicety, but by the cocoon of green in which she has sensibly hidden herself. The green is passion and starvation, and the tuxedo cannot possibly fail to contact it. Knightley’s gown catches and draws the eye not because it points to the naked innocence beneath but because it is already, itself a skin, a kind of Uralian rhapsody, something distant, mined, radiant with the body’s light. Knightley’s gown has its own too-persistent embodiment already, always. When McAvoy moves his hand underneath, it seems utterly unnecessary, given how enunciatory, how vibrant, how quivering is that green. In his Theory of Colours (1840), Goethe pays curiously scant attention to green. Of vegetation he notes, somewhat swiftly, “Light . . . places it at once in an active state; the plant appears green, and the course of the metamorphosis proceeds uninterruptedly to the period of reproduction” (135). Green the color of reproduction, of living, of new beginnings, of union, but also of transcendence; the momentary color of a phase. Winter comes and green is gone. Or, what was green is turned white. It is said the celebrated American modern decorator Elsie de Wolfe thought green and white the only colors worth using; everything should be green or white (see, for a pleasurable discursion, Bemelmans). On buried green I think of the marvelous openingcredits sequence of Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (2009), long avenues of Milan as the soft snow falls, snow blanketing everything, the camera slowly Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   175 panning across dark pines draped with snow, shot after shot as though without end, and all to the haunting music of John Adams, the Foxtrot from Nixon in China (1987). “Green was associated with Indian mysticism, Persian poems and Buddhist paintings,” writes Victoria Finlay, “and became even more popular after the Romantic period began in the 1790s, with poets like William Wordsworth reflecting the general feeling that nature was suddenly something wondrous rather than dangerous, and that, in all ways, Green was Good” (289; emphasis mine). One feels in the Guadagnino that green is always present, even under the blanket of winter. Always good. Always to be beckoned. For Goethe, green was also, like other colors in his optically based schema, not a presence but only an appearance, only a trick of the light. Green was a virtually mathematical union. He proceeds to a fabulous elaboration, dividing the determination of color into two categories, what he calls “plus” (yellow, a warmth) and “minus” (blue, a coolness), in this way discriminating action from negation, force from weakness, repulsion from attraction, proximity from distance (151). Then, writes Goethe, If these specific, contrasted principles are combined, the respective qualities do not therefore destroy each other: for if in this intermixture the ingredients are so perfectly balanced that neither is to be distinctly recognized, the union again acquires a specific character; it appears as a quality by itself in which we no longer think of combination. This union we call green. Green is not “repulsion + attraction,” then, nor is it “neither repulsion nor attraction,” or even “first repulsion and then attraction,” but some ineffable superimposition upon “repulsion” and “attraction,” “force” and “weakness,” “proximity” and “distance.” A superimposition and a negation, which suggests to me some forceful arrangement for pointing to which Goethe finds language an impossible tool. Here we find a suspicion that green is somewhat less real as a thing in itself—if really not less apparent—than its germinal anlages yellow and blue. Yet when I experience it—markedly in cinema but also in apprehension or in memory—green seems no additive sum of more elemental colors, but present as and in itself. Green takes me over as a coherent and ­singular hand. Wittgenstein: A less yellowish green, however, is not a bluish one (and vice versa), and there is also such a task as choosing, or mixing a green that is neither yellowish nor bluish. . . . Even if green is not an intermediary colour between yellow and blue, couldn’t there be people for whom there is bluish-yellow, reddish-green? I.e. people whose colour concepts deviate from ours. (3) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

176  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e The green that is buried in winter is not, for me, a blue and a yellow combined, and the green that emerges in the spring is, for me, as direct and pure as any yellow or any blue could be. Green possesses an innocence of declamation. When it appears, Goethe admits, “we no longer think of combination,” quite in the way that when a child has matured, although one can find traces of the parents one in fact no longer sees these by comparison with the startling, fresh personality of the individual who bears them. Like a child (product of reproduction), green seems only to be itself, and boldly so. And our experience is in the seeming. Always in the seeming, from which it is impossible to escape. In that case, green is, and is only in itself. Finlay recalls the Chinese green, mi se, a “secret colour” (271).

T o G i ve G r e e n a N a me Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) gives a startling treatment to the green of nature, a green now fully emerged from the winter (of I Am Love) and fleshed out in the lush, strangely silent countryside of northern Italy. We are given to watch a teenaged boy coming to terms with sexual politics and sexual feeling, as during a summer sojourn he helps his parents entertain a visiting postdoctoral student from America. That young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is a precocious genius, a musical talent of some note, and a charmer, and that from the moment of first seeing him he is in love with the cool, Adonis-like Oliver (Armie Hammer), that the human relations of Elio’s family and their strange guest are ostensibly the woven materiel of the story, does nothing to diminish the power of color not to merely set the action but to act as a principal protagonist. The waving tall grasses, the herbs in profusion, the tall sedate trees surrounding the house through the high windows of which a green light falls, the treetops above the high stone walls, the green fields by which the two friends cycle, the green waters of a pool reflecting surrounding vegetation, the watery green bouncing off Elio’s skin, the greens of Elio and Oliver’s swimming trunks: a presentation of summer nature and natural impulse in its fullest, signaling the maturity and fullness of the green that emerged in spring. Elio’s burgeoning impulses can be seen extending from blues and yellows— the royal blue of his decorative shorts, the yellow of a ripe peach with which he entertains himself—but the awkward constructedness of this formula melts away when the two friends are alone in spontaneous greenery, when they leave the proprieties of formulae behind and discover touch. The constant presence of dense greenery onscreen suggests that nature, too, has discovered touch. And the recurring birth of this green natural world, its annual youth, draws attention to the natural touch between Elio and Oliver as youthful, too. The boy’s parents, for all their generosity and sympathy, are imprisoned in lanNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   177 guage games, games of civility, requirements and regulations of decorum. The decorous elders are mannered and sophisticated, but in their raw touch Elio and Oliver are green. And it goes without saying that their green touch is their secret color, their own mi se. A “secret green” of another cast is the magically appearing verdigris, the Greek green, belonging to little Peter (Dean Stockwell) in Joseph Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair (1948). This antiwar allegory posits a boy who discovers suddenly that his hair is green, not at all unlike the way a copper fixture or statue would be if subjected to the air; yet with real verdigris a long time is required and with Peter it’s a matter of waking up. He has become a kind of metaphorical statue, a symbolic figuration. The hair is a true emerald green (three-strip Technicolor), dense, blaring, in every sense spectacular. In order to convey to the world the message that war is not good for children (he believes himself to be a war orphan), he has become a kind of advertisement taken at its simplest, a center of attention. If this green does not seem “natural,” in the sense often derived from infusions of chlorophyll as they affect our spirit, it has a nature not vegetative but mineral, implying eons of gravitational pressure, chemical formation, the deep secret of the recipe of life. When at film’s climax the boy agrees to be shaved, we see his personality retreat into a kind of barren, even artificial space and realize that the green hair was no mere authorial signifier, no cinematic prop to grab and focus the audience’s imagination, but something real for the boy, an inherent, evanescent, other-worldly spirit of life. Rove through a range of cinematic representations—beyond Magnificent Obsession, Vertigo, Call Me By Your Name, The Boy with Green Hair, and The Yearling—and you will find this real green, enduring—even painfully enduring, a green of unmodulated, uncultured presence that states its force and thrust without direction, without introduction, without the obsession of purpose, without signification, its blazing existence coming before, even in place of, any symbolic meaning. Green seems to have been here before the human made an entrance with language, before the act of taking and naming a view, before the impulse to interpretation, while other colors, by contrast, seem to send signals in response to the interpreter’s hunger. Green precedes that hunger, precedes even breath. It has no meaning. In his Fahrenheit 451 (1966), François Truffaut has the jazzy red fire engine (the truck that creates fires) zooming through a green suburb to find Linda and Montag’s house: dotting all the streets are tall green birches, giving the impression of houses settled in a forest clearing. The trees are there in the zero-reality of the scene, their lushness a trace of actuality against which the vivid “redness” of the story proceeds. At the film’s conclusion, we find ourselves in another forest, now in late autumn when most of the green has faded, though through this fading it makes appearance as a “dying green” soon to be blanketed by the first snow (as wee Earl Younger recites Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston and the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

178  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e end credits roll). We find the green radiance of the flying saucer and off-putting green tint of the aliens’ complexion in William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953): a quality of eternal threat diffuses through that eerie green: the green threatens, it does not signal “threat.” The spreading green field in which Gregory Peck argues desperately with Jennifer Jones in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), a vast enriching presence that diminishes their marriage as mere statistic. The explosive spangled lime green in the circus parade in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), as promising as the earliest buds of spring, and intoxicating in radiance; it leaps out from all the many other colors, stabs the eye with its directness. Again, directness of experience as we watch, not the idea “direct,” “directly,” “direction.” The topologically sharp green of the forest as multidimensional lair in Predator (1987). This green covers, protects, strategizes, but does not utter the theme “secrecy,” or “protection.” Judy Barton’s outrageous green dress in Vertigo, a scream of presence. The fresh and haunting green of the village of Brigadoon, especially its glen with the rippling stream and cautioned deer, as Harry Beaton tries to flee (1954); the vegetation here mimics the dancer Hugh Laing’s Harry, leaping and thrusting from the frame edge, a wholly new and spontaneous green, Edenic, original, unparalleled, sudden. Hopeless Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window (1954) in her sad green dress—not a dress that implies sadness but a dress that is the quintessence of sadness already: is she some lost cultural residue, and has her husband, with an imperiously raised hand, disappeared into history? Cyd Charisse is a green girl: the spangled green of her dress in the ballet of Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the midnight green gown and shocking green gloves that she wears visiting Jack Buchanan’s flat in The Band Wagon (1953)—will she be dancing with her hands?—or her dour green frock, abandoned for a faery finery, in Silk Stockings (1957). The vast, mysterious green forest (entirely hand-made) of Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985; see Pomerance, “Gorton”): not a green that whispers “forest” but a green that is the full constitution of forest; literally a forest green, which is to say a green forestial, a green in which forest creatures live. The vibrant honey green bedroom in the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the past meets the future in a pinpoint of real and unreal time; the green is a Temporal Green. The green torrent in Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953), vivacious and deathly in its flow: one swims in green, a character drowns in green—not so much in the river which is green but in the green which is a river. The sacred green forests in Silent Running (1968), luminous in the black of space, and to be preserved against mankind at all costs. The riddling, multiplying, expanding, finally terrifying green of Oz (1939), pervading green, blood green, skin green, sky green, urban green, witchy fingers green, redemptive green. That splendid and inexplicable effusion at the finale of Rohmer’s Le rayon vert (1986), green of God, green of the universe. The green sward, with children playing, in the powerful finale Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   179 moment of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2009), seen from above so that it is a map of the world. Linda Blair’s hideous green projectile vomiting in The Exorcist (1973), interior green, abysmal green, the green denial. The sharp green grass outside Dan Fawcett’s farmhouse in The Birds (1963), with Jessica Tandy suffocating in shock as she races past it; hopeless green, green that cannot save. The green alligator slipping into the green pond in the opening shot of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998). The misty green nocturnal field with the shadow of a water buffalo in Apichatpong Weeraseethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010); Nastassja Kinski and young Hunter Carson, both clad in forest green, reunited in a silent embrace in Paris, Texas (1984). Green cars, dignified, perennial—David Hemmings’s in BlowUp, Nina Foch’s in An American in Paris (1951), Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney’s in Two for the Road (1967). The Green Lantern’s cooling, exciting green fire (2011). The green lake of jealousy in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), where green youth sinks. The myriad greens of the jungle in Apocalypse Now (1979), edible green, poisonous green, lethal green, primordial green. Not a signal of primordial time but primordial time itself, now traipsed through by the American military. The grassy green yard where a little boy weeps because he has disappointed his father, in Bigger Than Life (1956), one real truth of generations and generation. The green miasma of Moulin Rouge (1954), a choking absinthe-filled world. The green complexions inside the ivy green cemetery in La chambre verte (1978). The green of definition and extension, as in the Edenic jungle of Green Mansions (1959) or the vast aristocratic lawns of Greystoke (1984). The green of terminal danger as in Green Zone (2010). The green of the labyrinth, as in Wonderwall (1968), a voyage into the lonely heart. In Ghostbusters (1984) the hideous, toothy Slimer, shocking green. Woody Harrelson devouring neon green key lime pie in Natural Born Killers (1994), the green of artifice. Robin Williams’s magical “flubber,” gelatinous translucent green, the green of dreams (1997). The blazing lime green of Matt Damon’s bathing suit in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), green of forbidden desire. Impenetrable flickering code of The Matrix (1999), arcane green. And the stellar green of Altair-4’s atmosphere in Forbidden Planet (1956), a thirstinducing, tropical, alien, phantasmagorical green. There is a sense in which all these greens strike the eye in a similar mode: regardless of their emotional evocation, and of any situated meaning we may force through the interpretations that plots always force, to the eye they insist upon distinct and simple presence, immediacy—that is, presence without mediation; presence before interpretation—just in the way that the natural world is distinctly and simply present always and already and available to our experience with no mediation and before interpretation, too. If warm colors may be read as suggesting urgency, potentiality, and pulse, and thus as portending or describing action and its eventuations (the race and spillage Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

180  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e of blood); and if cool colors may suggest withdrawal and meditation, as when we gaze at the sea or the skies (admiring, say, the seascapes of Vernet or the weather-filled landscapes of Constable), green’s claimed intermediacy and openly known directness decline altogether to suggest, but instead directly state the moment of presence. “I am,” not “I stand in for.” Green is beyond decoration, beyond the slavery of the sign.

P r i m o rd i a l This triumphant, disturbing green has been with us at least since Van Eyck, as I have already intimated. One day, I found opportunity to stand for a very long time before the Arnolfini Portrait—otherwise called The Arnolfini Marriage— in the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery, as, in nondescript gaggles and cliques, a parade that seemed unending, hundreds of admirers shuffled through the room, waited muttering, and shuffled away. For me it was a question of moving close to the thing, backing away, taking angles, moving close again, backing away but only to gain energy for again moving close, finding ways to relax the eyes and relax the spirit, letting go, moving a little, moving a little more—the whole process in some strange way cinematic but also ritual, of the body, of an ancient time. I was always necessarily waiting for the room to clear and gaining only snatches of privacy with that canvas. And in truth only the green of the gown caught me, in any event. It was only the “Arnolfini green,” as I privately name it (yet I doubt I am very private), only that particular green, but all of it, every molecule, that I wanted to absorb and understand, understand if possible through voyaging inside, since I did feel, as in waves the substance penetrated my consciousness, that it was transporting me back to something very early in my own life, a moment just prior to any other moment of which I still possessed a fragmented memory and yet, still, a moment of which I could be certain, firmly, unshakeably certain, within the stout and reassuring frame of the perpetually unkenned logic and library that guarded and shaped my thought. Curtains seemed to present themselves, and threatened to part—I had that precise sensation—yet never did part . . . so that the challenge of the green persisted and taunted, would not evaporate, beckoned without fully presenting itself like a teasing Harlequin. “You know me,” this green said, “Can you remember?” Doubt assailed me, in the sense of a force that penetrated and jerked my memory. We “can never hope to know beyond reasonable doubt, what exactly the picture shows,” Mark Roskill wrote of this (Hall xviii), and Edwin Hall adds, “Standing before the picture is a riveting experience for any but the most insensitive viewer” (1). My eye, meanwhile, was passing into and out of the folds of the woman’s garment, diabolical folds in their power to grip and paralyze, in and out, and over the surface of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   181 the illumination, leaping away only to obsessively return. Her stance next to the husband, and the man himself, his hand imperiously raised, meant nothing to me, nor did the woman’s posture have weight as gesture, nor, though I love dogs, did I care about the little dog at her feet (about whom critics adore to think), or the so-called marriage bed, or the teasing mirror, or the hanging lamp. The green, only the green. And then one had to think, perhaps this exact green was only a place-holder, calling up vague traces of some other, still more rigorously hidden, more powerful green, a different green, the paint on the side of a barn seen across a wintry field, some mysterious primal green inhering in an object, a Rosebud, impossible to remember. Perhaps this green of the dress was itself the primal green. My ability to position it in time and space was, at any rate, broken. Here is Carola Hicks on the Arnolfini Portrait. She has studied many of the materials of the scene it presents, especially the demure woman in the all-toogreen gown, whom many have taken to be Arnolfini’s (new) wife: Her green gown must be the most recognizable garment in the whole history of dress. It has astonishing dimensions, and although she is already holding up quantities of the fabric, a heavy train still trails on the ground. . . . While Arnolfini boasted the new black, his wife seemed to be locked in the previous [fourteenth] century when bright colours like red, blue and green were the preferred options. . . . Green dye was made from a combination of woad and the herb weld (Dyer’s Yellow) and was easier to brew than fashionable dark shades. Green clothes did of course remain in use in the fifteenth century. (29; 31) In her noting how he painted various clothing features “lovingly” (31), in her writing of this particular painting, generally, through the lens of sumptuary expertise, and in her being principally fascinated by the particular apparel Van Eyck shows and his careful way of showing it (this a reference to cultural standards of dress at the time), Hicks positions herself at some distance from fully engaging with—one might say rhapsodizing in—the garment’s splendid greenery. She is a true and elegant model of Scholarship stepping aside from Experience. It is one thing to point coolly at this garment and name it “green,” or “the most recognizable garment in the whole history of dress,” and quite another to experience the gravitational pull of the color, to feel oneself falling in and losing the shape of the forms, the boundaries of the space. Being drawn by the green gravitation of this garment, one cannot manage the objectivity and clear indication we find in Hicks. In fact, as one concentrates on that green the whole perspective of the painting seems to twist and shudder, and reshape itself. The perspective of the painting, then of the wall behind it, then of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

182  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e room in which the painting rests, and of one’s body in that room, and of the world that hovers all around . . . To see a color in relation to some happenstantial form, in this case green as a feature of a particular robe depicted in a particular way, and even the robe as appertaining to the posture and presentation of a young woman and her “husband,” is but a fragmentary (and delimiting) way of perceiving, however factual. The same distancing from experience is accomplished by seeing color as a feature of realistic representation, in this case the modulation in the brightness and darkness of the green as it dips into and out of the folds of the fabric in this dress in real three-dimensional space as an authentic rendition of fabric and design. Or, in Magnificent Obsession, the play of darkness and light as it pertains to the positioning of the plants’ leaves in various scenes, or pertains to the “roundness” of the lampshades catching and losing light in curvature, as a kinetic realism, a signal that Merrick is real and lives in a real world; or that disposable income is his to play with. In the same objective discursive light, Peter’s hair in Boy can only be surreal, and for all its caricature and all its posture the film remain an exercise in surrealism, too. But to place one’s body and self before a green, here the Van Eyck green, and be open to its powers, is to feel radiance and penetration, to feel oneself plummeting backward in time toward some earliest, now artfully hidden, green originality. The folds of the garment quiver and evanesce, the garment itself disappears, the woman wearing it becomes only an armature, a pretext; the chamber, with the shoes and the bed and the mirror, the candelabrum, the little dog—Panofsky elaborates on it as a “Flemish interior” (126)—itself vanishes, and all that remains is the pure greenness as optical challenge. Green as radiance. Green as given. If confronted in such a way red will seem to flee urgently, and blue to throw one into mystery and paralysis. This green persists on announcing itself, on stating its direct manner of interaction. How can I come to terms with its brazenness, with the too prominent fact that it is here just as, gazing at it, I am here, and that I am looking at it and only looking, being and only being? As one retreats in time, the green mischievously hints that only a little further back, just around the corner of the fence, just another few steps into childhood, is . . .

A G re e n F a c e Green, certainly Van Eyck’s green, has a face of its own, a face just such as we see with any filmic character. Green has a characterological presence. Just as Merrick gives us a recognizable and provocative (Rock Hudson) face, the lampshades in his living room, such utterly perfunctory items, businesslike and helpful, have a face, too, and it is this face, not their status as furniture, that merits the coloration (that is, our attention). Here they are, glaring and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   183 smiling greenly. The green of the lampshades is a distinct personality, selfaffirming over and above the tenor of the conversation it overhears—and also notwithstanding the choreography of the human forms posing and shifting in the shots. In the Arnolfini, the woman’s gown affirms itself in the same manner, claims attention, seizes the viewer’s consciousness for its own hidden purposes. “Look my way, I am the thing to be looked at.” The vertical fringing on the gown—Hicks notes the use of pinking shears—is a stunner, quite as though the fabric has erupted into blossoms, and is achieved with a splendid control of the small brush (the same control that one would have found, after the 1930s, in Hollywood’s painters of optical mattes, such as Matthew Yuricich or Albert Whitlock). But having been stunned briefly by the technique, one draws back to find that persistent green again, that sempervirens green. A green always to be discovered anew. An always new green. Van Mander was in rapture over Van Eyck’s small brush technique, and over the painter’s astute perception of the small, the telltale, variations in nature such as are to be discerned in the human face. Referring to the Ghent Altarpiece, he argues: The learned Johannes gave the greatest concentration to this work, as though to convince Pliny of the incorrectness of his statement that painters who have to paint a hundred faces, or even a smaller number, are unable to compete with nature, who scarcely produces two similar ones in a thousand, and generally make some resembling others. In this painting are about 330 faces, of which not one is similar to another. (8) Mander goes on to observe the beautiful rendering of plants and grasses (a rendering, I might argue, that Sirk remodels): “The hairs in the portraits, in the blazes and manes and tails of the horses, can almost be counted separately, so thinly and delicately are they painted” (8–9). The green dress in the Arnolfini Portrait benefits from much of the same kind of delicate, detailed painting, but the green itself, the particular resonating green, is of a character at once recognizable and mysterious, at once to be named and to elude naming, to be understood and to escape understanding, just as in the face. There is no other green like this green (although, to contradict Hicks, if we were to examine only the shape and construction of the garment we might recognize that there are plenty of garments roughly like this one). The green face, the face of greenness, occupies the space, not of the Arnolfini bedroom but, of our consciousness as chamber, as though the green is a welcome visitor, a familiar, an ancestor. In a similar vein of openness to identification, we can sense ourselves “visiting” the salon of Robert Merrick and recognizing the green lampshades, the green leaves, the green presence as a welcome and welcoming feature of the place. Green goes beyond being an empty face upon which an artist may inscribe; it is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

184  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e a persona that speaks, or sings, and to invoke it is to issue an invitation. “When we first hear a musical chord,” writes William James, “it has a certain richness and volume, but no distinct parts are apprehended within it yet. By setting the attention in a certain way, however, we discern first one and then another of the notes. There is a quality in each note which identifies, individualizes, and distinguishes it from the rest” (363–64). The green dress, the green lampshade, the Italian green around Elio and Oliver, strange Peter’s green hair, all are identifiable, individualized, distinguished notes merging with other greens in a rich but unapprehended chord. The universal green. Charisse’s green gloves again, transforming her. She now has green hands, vivid green hands, hands that are vegetations, hands alive. Whatever she touches will come to life. Poor Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire), whose career seems at an end, who will go his way by himself, all alone in a crowd: will she touch him and bring him back to life, a man old enough to be her father, a man with whom she feels she cannot possibly dance? The ice between them one cannot imagine being cut. Yet by mutual agreement they journey to a green space, a green utopia, Central Park, and in a copse there, a configured space not quite reality and not quite motion picture sound stage, they move in their white garb to the music of an unseen orchestra (conducted by the music director of MGM, Johnny Green), Arthur Schwartz’s “Dancing in the Dark,” every twirl and stasis, every glance a classical form, every breath a promise of life. Green hands flashing in anger when she wears those gloves, anger or hunger? Green hands moving against the air, reaching for a spirit to revive. But in the park, the green transmitted from her hands to the place itself. Life-giving green.

Maryon If in painting the Arnolfini green is the apotheosis of all greens, the green that sums and incorporates, magnifies, simplifies the green experience, in film that green is to be found in Blow-Up (1966). Blow-Up’s green park. Here is a green that denies even space, because it denies limitation. A green supporting all movement, thus an unmoving green. Green of eternity. Green of Eden and Arcadia. We are in Maryon Park in the village of Charlton, adjacent East Greenwich, fruit, as I was told by he who found it, of a considerable search all across the London area to find just the right sort of place, just the topos that would inspire the master. The presence of the tennis courts in the lower portion of the park, entirely unanticipated by Antonioni before he saw them, led to his improvisation of the closing—and then the opening—sequences of the film involving the mimes (Julian Chagrin and Troupe). All parks are green, yet watching this film—that is: studying the park as a cinematic t­ ransformation— Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   185 one has the overwhelming sense of a quality of character inherent here that sets the place apart from all others, real and imagined, that makes this park its own universe. Part of the thrill of the place stems from the paucity of sound (Maryon Park is tucked away in a quiet residential enclave, but the film characterizes the spot as silent, too): the wind is blowing in a lullaby rhythm; a photographer’s shutter is opening and closing; that is all. And at a crucial moment, far too close to this photographer’s ear, a twig snaps or a pistol is cocked or a shutter opens and closes, we will never know which. It is not a large park, especially. I stood on a stage once that had looked enormous from the audience, on which some vast comprehensive drama had drawn in all the places of the planet, but was now, as the boards were beneath my feet, and the light drew round me like an embracing blanket, proportionate only to my own body, the flies rushing upward into the darkness of a safe heaven I could well imagine. Maryon Park feels this way when one stands inside it, safe, visible, as green and close as a skin. It is possible to patiently, respectfully tread the walkways, circle the tennis court in a methodical dolly, climb the stairs. Climb the wide stairs where Vanessa Redgrave is still accosting David Hemmings, grabbing for his camera. A gentle park, gentle green, persuasive green, whispering, lullabying green. Also seductive, elusive green, green both present and in flight, riddling green, confounding green, the green that protects and the green that hides. (The green of breath, but also the lush green of death that reminds us how John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley [1941], detailing generations and regeneration in the green utopia of forgotten Wales, was shot in black and white, a pure invocation. A green so powerful we can see it in the thin air, so invisible we can see it only in the thin air. Antonioni’s mimes wear stark black and white, their every gesture intimating beginnings and ends, wholly assiduous, and each one is lifted, as it were, from John Ford’s valley.) While the convention of Antonioni’s story (adapted by Edward Bond from Julio Cortázar’s short fiction) would have it that a photographer has chanced into a pleasant park (is “taking a walk” for the pure pleasure of the action; has found his ideal pleasure garden), and is celebrating his joy by photographing whatever happens to pass in front of him—pigeons, a groundskeeper of oddly indeterminate gender, a pair of entranced lovers—and that, snapping some shots, he comes to the attention of a subject not at all happy to be photographed, who begs for his film; and that printing up the pictures (after giving over a false spool) he thinks he sees something odd; and that returning to the park by night he discovers, beneath a sumptuous bush, a corpse, and so on: in short, that the park is the scene of the lovers’ tryst and the murder, that the tryst was the murder and the park was its emplacement, a true Arcadia: while the story might be conventionally spelled out this way, while virtually everyone does spell out the story this way, because nothing could be easier, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

186  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e in the truth of our experience as we actually watch the film the park seems something else altogether. It seems to clothe our consciousness, a green jacket (just as the photographer goes to this place in his green jacket). The ­photographer—the script names him “Thomas” but he is never called anything in the film—with his relentless, incessant snapping of the shutter (it’s like a tiny verbal tic), is our simulacrum in the scene. We perforce see what he sees, and as he sees it. And as we undertake the vision, our sight and our thrill are intrinsically bound up with the greenness of the place, there is nothing to be seen more fully than the visible green, the challenging green, the deep and vibrant green that he is shooting in black-and-white (as though in preparation for Technicolor!). Already this is Arcadia for us, what it will also become for him, far too soon. Mythic, endless green. Undying green. Green beyond life. We sense the spreading carpet of grass, soft, lush, sparkly green; the lines of trees, foreboding and green and dark; the limit of vision, a green line against nothingness. The general silence, the sound of only the wind, that primordial sound, sound of the original Eden before a voice. Before an informative voice. The sound of experience before analysis. Experiencing green as a mythical residuum of the past, or as a forward-­ moving spirituality or essence always modifying its expression to reflect present circumstance, thus progressively hiding its truths, becomes a problematic project in modernity, an era of noted commercial exploitation on all fronts. With commercial exploitation the era of truths is at an end. Enchantment is at an end. Not the definitive but the provisional. And the deep past has become inutile as a fuel or tool for helping us in the rush forward. Keith Thomas notes one of the latent problems of widespread commercialism: “In commerce past experience was increasingly irrelevant,” this to the degree that: In this new mental climate it became increasingly difficult for educated persons to believe that the men of the past could have foreseen modern problems or that their experience could have qualified them to predict their outcome. Ancient prophecies presupposed a continuity between present and past which experience no longer supported. (432) Thus, perhaps, a prevailing tendency in approaches to contemporary film, which in this case could see Sirk’s greens being independent of Van Eyck’s, subject to new laws and new formulations, because always one looks for new laws and formations instead of reinvocations of the past. Antonioni’s greens, likewise, could seem independent of Sirk’s. Always an eye on the new, the new and improved. To fragment and isolate, look at one green by itself, signaling importance in its own comfy context. Always a belief that things are getting better, or at least more interesting. I would argue for the trans-sociality, the trans-culturality, the atemporality of the green effect, that greens affect us now Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   187 as they affected our ancestors, calling up visions—I think, Arcadian visions— hopelessly lost in generation after generation, because in new generations as in all generations the frail green memory experiences the green erosion of time. A timeless green making palpable and visible the working of time.

G re e n, G r e e n , Gr e e n , a n d Gr e en Once more to that London park, but now with a mind still swimming in the unforgiving folds of the Arnolfini gown. I could spell out gestures—the Arnolfini appears full of gestures, the raised hand of the husband, the woman clasping her belly, the dog looking up, the woman looking down. Here we have another catalogue: the arcane gestures of the man and woman (Ronan O’Casey, Vanessa Redgrave) garbed in their pleasing pale gray because they, too, emerged from John Ford, hugging and tugging, smiling and staring, as the wind blows and blows in this green sward. What do they want, these two, that they have not had before? Their kissing, their imploring, his apparent refusal, her apparent repeated request, the taunt, the tease. It’s like a ritual dance. The moment is derived from one in Cortázar’s story “Las Babas del Diablo” in which, on the Île de la Cité one nondescript afternoon, and observed by a diligent photographer (who narrates), a pretty woman seduces a young boy. Antonioni has let the boy grow up, but even with his salt and pepper hair this figure retains the desires of boyhood, unending desires, desires it makes little point to satisfy unless one has forgotten. We see the bodies thrown against one another in a series of poses, almost as though, conscious of the photographer who watches, they are working consciously to help him prepare an advertisement. And there he is, our friend, snapping away, crouching, running from spot to spot, with the wind blowing through the trees, snap snap. All the greens harmonize in a symphony of green, the trees, the great bush before which the lovers stand, the dainty picket fence that borders the space, the forest growth behind it, the splendid carpet of grass. As a metaphor the scene is very powerful: the birth of Adam and Eve in a garden, the murderous impulse (that we will eventually be forced to discover, at the photographer’s side, holding our breath in his darkroom, gasping in his studio as he pins up a print) a kind of serpentine intrusion, the breath of the Deity supervising all, the eagerness of desire in the face of form and perfection, the sacred absence of goodness. Needless to say again (as I do here, without a voice), this green scene is without dialogue. But there is colored music (as in Scriabin); the color is music. Further: when we speak of the many greens in a symphony of green, when we mention the word “green” in relation to so many color perceptions that can clearly be taken as different one from another, what is it (again to ask a Wittgensteinian question) that is in each of these different “greens” that makes Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

188  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e us think it sensible, apparently, to call them all “green”? Sensible, apparently, as in this tiny description of Tahiti from chapter 18 of Herman Melville’s Omoo, quoted by Oliver Sacks: “The prospect is magnificent. It is one mass of shaded tints of green, from beach to mountain top; endlessly diversified with valleys, ridges, glens, and cascades” (24; emphasis mine). A single diversified mass, possibly because the alarm of such profusion, the greens mounting upon the greens, is unbearable. The problem of finding words for green, for distinguishing one subtle green from another, that is, for making discursive reference to our experience of making these distinctions, finds resolution variably according to language, and certainly English has here, as with other issues, its stinging limitations. One tends to specify a green in terms of its application to surfaces or objects, as though something might be thought obvious and salient in the way we experience the green of a ball, a barn, etc. I have had no alternative but to use words in the same, rather imprecise—interestingly imprecise—way here, since words are the tools at my disposal and poor English is the repository of my tools. Look at the list we can find by paging through even one book, W. G. Sebald’s magnificent Vertigo in English translation by Michael Hulse: fresh green leafage (10); a pair of green spectacles (20); a green-painted iron gate (43); a little way further out in the green and hilly water landscape (46); deep green pastureland (50); the aspic-green waves (52); a man in a worn green loden coat (53); the fog lifted and I beheld the green lagoon outspread in the May sunshine and the green islets like clumps of herbiage . . . (65); the everlasting green of the trees (70); the green forest and every single leaf of it (73); bright green touches of Veronese earth (84); the wooden stalls in a military shade of green (86); the Franciscan sister also slipped a green ribbon (106); I dreamed of a green field of corn (112); sitting reading outside the bar with the green awning (127); the waiter in the green apron (134); the pouring rain, which veiled every outline and shape in an even grey-green (146); the huntsman’s dark green country (165); a green loden cape (172); soon beautiful green meadows came into view (175); she speaks of how her love made the burning sand green (189); a pike-grey jacket, the collar, cuffs and edgings of which must once have been grass green . . . (216); one of the chairs by the green metal table (219); frightened green-coated hunters (222); her tight-fitting green skirt (241); a lilac limousine with a lime-green roof (244); a purple cloak with a lime-green border (245); his grey-green attire was hardly disturbed (247); the pale green winter wheat (253) And always knowing when one utters “green” that the world and the word are separate, that the words are arbitrary, that these things I can experience and, in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   189 reading Sebald reflect upon having experienced or imagine experiencing, are none of them, beyond saying, what one says they are. Antonioni’s green trees, the green grass, the green bush, the photographer’s green jacket: all these are different, taste different, are remembered differently, yet we use the one word, “green,” for pointing to each. When I see one of these greens—say, the green grass—am I really seeing green, or am I seeing something that is essentially outside of language but that I call “green” or “grun” or “vert” or “yarok” or “zielony” or “zelenyy” or “lüsè” or “akhdir,” and so on? In the way that the thing I am seeing may be outside of language I begin to fathom what is lying underneath the green of the woman’s garment in the Arnolfini Portrait, what is before and behind it in my past, in all of our pasts. To escape from the labyrinth of metaphors, to give up caring about whether this man and this woman will find their release of the moment, one can focus on the scene as artistic achievement, and in this way note how the camera-eye and film stock manage to collaborate in touching, sensing, capturing, retaining, finally conveying the quality of that symphony of greens. Symphony because each different green is a face, a personality, with its own voice or vocal timbre that can express itself only optically, all the greens expressing together and with modulating phrases as the camera moves through and around, guiding the photographer or following him. And which is it, indeed, guiding or following? We had seen him outside the park, from near an antique shop that he was thinking about acquiring, as he backed up the little roadway that led to the park entrance (where we could see tall trees waving in the wind) but at that moment, with his face turned away from the greenery, he was absorbed making snapshots of the shop. Back, back he moved, snap, snap. Then swiftly Antonioni cuts to a view from inside the park looking out, past that row of tall trees that we can now see forming a kind of “gate,” with the photographer, his back still turned to our camera, continuing to back our way, shooting that shop until, as on some natural impulse, as though he must of course do this, he turns and moves toward the camera and into the park. He is following us, then. And we, of course, are following Antonioni. But the achievement: of the photographer’s craving camera in finding the green, of registering the green, of imbibing the green. Some of the grass in the park, especially in the upper level (at the top of the stairs) called Cox’s Mount, the green grass there, was painted green by the designer Assheton Gorton and his team, in order to facilitate this delirious registration. But what is it for Antonioni, and his cinematographer Carlo di Palma, to take note of this green, to be hungry for it, to compose every shot with a view to enhancing the symphonic variation of the green? Here, and very unlike many of the instances I adumbrate above, the green is no punctuation, no punctum, but a field and a universe of concentration in and for itself. Before the lovers invade this ­ atching, greenery, this Arcadia, it is already there singing; and we believe, w Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

190  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e ­ atching and waiting, patiently, with a silence beyond patience, so that when w they left, each in a separate way, it would still be there, still radiating, still the green that it essentially is. It is in pitch of night that the photographer returns and discovers the corpse of the man and the empty memory of the woman, but now the green park is even more radiant, lit not by moonlight but by a turquoise neon sign (the color of the neon mint turquoise, like Claudette Colbert’s dress in Cleopatra) that floods—that ices—the territory. What is it, what was it, to adore this green in the way that this peculiar light adores this green? (Because the sign wasn’t just there; the sign was designed and built by Gorton to help Antonioni achieve his rhapsody in green.) “Jan Van Eyck’s fundamental innovation in art was to convey light and its effect on the visible world convincingly,” write Stephan Kemperdick and Friso Lammertse: In his work, the light really seems to fall on the objects in the painting and affect their appearance, brightness and colours. This innovation made it possible to express surfaces, materials and textures very naturally—a breakthrough that still fascinates modern viewers, who grew up with photography. (16) Is there not in this evocation a precise pointer to Antonioni’s garden, that radiant expression of “light and its effect on the visible world”? Indeed, as one watches the park sequences of Blow-Up, one begins to think of light as green. Not that we are seeing a light that has been colored green with gels (as  in Coppola’s One From the Heart [1981] or Refn’s Drive [2011]), but that luminescence is greenness. That greenness is light itself. Light whose principal, pervasive quality is that it is. Surely the green in its ineffable presence is more directly responsive to illumination, more grateful for illumination and vibrant in its bath, than any other color. And, of course, once one is photographing in color, colors have become things, so green is the dominant thing of the film as we receive it. Kemperdick and Lammertse go on, as though about Antonioni, who surely knew Van Eyck, “The essential factor of Jan van Eyck’s art is perhaps the keen observation of the way things and phenomena manifest themselves in the visible world” (92), the true innovation lying “not so much in the observation of the form of individual objects [read, the topographic delineation of the park and the symbolic meaning of the lovers’ postures] as in the depiction of their appearance in light and shade” (93). Imagine that Antonioni had decided to film the story “BlowUp” on the streets of Paris, where it is set; that our lovers were on a corner, with pavement beneath their feet. None of the effect would transfer. To see the depiction of appearance in Van Eyck, with eyes wide open, is to see it as well in Antonioni, and in Robert Merrick’s plants and lampshades, and in the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   191 forest of Michael Curtiz’s Robin Hood, Victor Fleming’s Oz, Cyd Charisse’s animated gloves. To see and to desire, but through the eyes, and only the eyes. As we are reminded by Wölfflin, If real movement is present, so much the better, but it is not necessary. It may be intricacies of the form which of their very nature produce a picturesque effect, or peculiar aspects and illuminations; over the solid, static body of things there will always play the stimulus of a movement which does not reside in the object, and that also means that the whole only exists as a picture for the eye, and that it can never, even in the imaginary sense, be grasped with the hands. (24) The whole exists only as a picture. Never grasped. Ortega reminded us that “an age-old habit, founded in vital necessity, causes men to consider as ‘things,’ in the strict sense, only such objects solid enough to offer resistance to their hands. The rest is more or less illusion” (111). So this whole, in Antonioni’s case this green park, for all the realism of its look, is far from the real. Yet our experience of it is real. Our experience of the green park is real and palpable. The green park, as given to us, is a picture, but the green of the green park, as Antonioni learned from Van Eyck, is a thing. Certain classical problems do not interest Antonioni here, nor do they plague Sirk: the division between objectivity and design, depth as established by planes, the tangibility of bodies. All that matters is the totality of color, the insurmountable plenitude of green and its pure illumination. The original question is thus desire, not understanding. The filmmaker reaches toward color. Red would evade him, it is always in flight, skittish, anxious, blaring its pain. Blue would mystify, it is hollow and hungry. Yellow would be insistent, possibly upon happiness or sweetness, but either way it would tickle until it produced irritation. Purple would riddle, “I am while I am not.” But Antonioni has found a new nature in his park, has “invented” a new nature, a “young world,” an “idyllic nature that ignores winter” and “a spring rich in hopes” (Boucher, qtd. in Rosenberg 13, my translation). Because here in this shapeless place, or here in this sitting room with these provocative sculptural lampshades, we see what could never exist except here and now, in this way, moving forward in darkness to stagger the eye.

G re e n S p e e c h Short diversion to the (loud) neon sign: One will find reprinted, on page 252 of my volume on Antonioni, a graphic representation of the neon sign mounted a hundred feet high above the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

192  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e magical park. In the daytime sequences this device is barely visible against the pewter gray sky. At night, it is the (sole) source of the illumination that floods the park, the light by virtue of which the corpse is made optically tangible to the photographer (whose life’s calling is to render the world as he sees it). I had a friend who owned a movie theater on the screen of which this film was showing. He snipped one frame and sent it off to Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), author of Framework of Language, among numerous other titles, at Harvard, asking for a translation of the glyph on this sign. Back came the reply: “No known language.” We do not know, then, what the green sign “says” or means, but because it is constructed with lines and curves, precisely to simulate language, we have the sense that there is saying and meaning. Yet at the same time, a saying and meaning that is intended to be withdrawn from us, kept behind a veil. A green veil. This is perhaps a stunning and strange version of Michel Chion’s acousmêtre, “the one who is not-yet-seen, but who remains liable to appear in the visual field,” a voice speaking from behind the veil in such a way that the identity of the speaker—and thus, finally, the nature of what is spoken—is a secret: This was apparently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose followers would listen to their Master speak behind a curtain, as the story goes, so that the sight of the speaker wouldn’t distract them from the message. (19) The message here being that there is no message, then, the voice behind a sign like this must not be permitted to intrude.

t he m o m e n t a r y Gr e e n If we consider that perhaps especially in cinema colors take their value from the light that shines upon objects; and that objects reflect light back to the camera; if we acknowledge color as a manifestation of light, then Sirk’s greens (in Magnificent Obsession but also in All That Heaven Allows [1955] and Written on the Wind [1956]) and Antonioni’s (in Blow-Up but also in The Passenger [1975] and The Red Desert [1964] and Identification of a Woman [1982]), just as Van Eyck’s, offer up an objective intoxication effected by virtue of lighting. Antonioni’s green park has one essence by day, because of the diffuse daylight, and a second at night because of the strange neon sign. By making the sign unintelligible as language (any signposted word could attract attention as language) Antonioni mystifies and diffuses our “reading,” backs us off to consider the lettering as pure form. (Assheton Gorton confided to me that after he had designed the sign, Antonioni leaned in and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   193 added one tiny line of his own—but he could not remember which!) The sign is not “a word,” then, but “word,” or “utterance.” And the content and meaning of the utterance is greenness itself, greenness which is the sign’s final product. This special and very particular green—a visit to Maryon Park in real life, being far too tactile, fails to bring it close—is only and wholly a screen green, only and wholly a pleasure of cinema. We are in a dark space as we catch it, likely surrounded by a myriad strangers holding the breath. Michael Arlen adduced a nocturnal “eroticism” in the act of going out into the city at night, going to the movies, and our experience with this screened park is surely an erotic experience, one in which we are rendered especially conscious of being alive in our watching, conscious of vivacious sight. Yet at the same time, and like others of its sort, this pleasure has an ancestry, a link in a chain that leads back, through Sirk and Minnelli, past the cornfields in The Wizard of Oz, past the lush dark green foliage in The Toll of the Sea (1922), past Cézanne and Courbet, past Constable’s Hay Wain and Turner’s Bridgewater Sea Piece, past the grass in which Cuyp’s cattle grazed, past Jan Van Huysum’s sumptuous grapes, back and further back all the way to Van Eyck’s innocent (or not so innocent) woman and her flowing robe. An old green pleasure, electrified and modernized, but with no reduction in its power or its form, in Magnificent Obsession and in Blow-Up and in legion other films. In Antonioni’s park at night, although the illumination is neon—the light of commercial display— the green does not become commercial itself but remains organic, mortal, Arcadian. And also, strangely, incomparable. As green is outside the realm of indication, there is no fruit in comparing one instance to another according to any scale of values. It is the momentary, shocking presence of greenness as it meets our confronting stare that states the truest color value. The momentary green. Artificial or natural, mythical or mundane, green transcends context, transcends even coloration itself. As in Blow-Up the green park breathes the green corpse seems to breathe with it: green breath, immortal breath, with life and death apparently incidental. After his discovery, the photographer takes himself off to a pot party where he is seduced by a pack of young hipsters and spends a transcendent night (ein verklärte nacht). The morning light is harsh and crystalline. He returns to his park, but now, of course, there is no body, the very air might have been evacuated. Was there a body at all, then, in the past that he can no longer quite touch? The haunting green body reaching out of the past and saying, “Remember me?” The sign is still shining, hardly perceptible against the white sky. At the tennis court he participates vicariously in a mimed game, and when the “ball” flies over the enclosure’s fence he races across the lawn to retrieve it. The grass is not so green now, the green is departing. But the “ball” does fit nicely into his hand, or so it would seem, by the way he hefts it. The Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

194  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e “ball” is real, as real as anything we think we can touch (and, we must agree, quite as green as the grass upon which “it” was standing).

C o nf e s s i o n a l It was not out of whim that I entitled this foray “Rhapsody in Green.” I wanted to explore some ways in which a very particular pleasure of cinema derives from not only color onscreen but the domain that includes all of the variations of what we call “green.” I wanted to wonder about greenness as a lure and vivacity in its own right. But as well, I mean here to make an admission and put forward an argument. The admission is that without hesitation, and with full knowledge, I have written here in a vein one could describe as rhapsodic rather than clinical, analytical, categorical, or—most crucially—­ scientific. Scientific in the simplest, earliest, and broadest possible sense, indicating a movement toward explaining, rationalizing, predicting, getting a utile grip on things; scientific as in theorization abstracted and experimentation repeatable; scientific as in progressive. I have written to go in a different direction. To rhapsodize, to write out of one’s enthusiasm, can be a legitimate way of speaking or addressing a subject and a reader. Rhapsody is always already a valuable and beautiful form. And rhapsody, further, is a valuable and legitimate response to cinema, a response, it ought to be said, that is sorely lacking in the critical literature. As to argument, this text, pointing to cinema as a green font of pleasure, rests on the claim that filmic color—here, green—is observable as such, quite regardless of its application in narrative context. We can admire, swoon over, fall prey to, and involve ourselves in discussion of color per se. Indeed, cinema is a medium in which it is possible to gain exceptional and very particular articulation of color. Far beyond its use in identification—grass that is not green has dried out—color affects us palpably and directly in and of itself, it touches our depths because of what it is, not because of what it signifies. Beyond this, color in film is no mere reflection of what is already out there in the world. It is the result of a creative process involving technique and skill. Film stock and methods of processing provide an equivalent to the painter’s palette, and therefore the filmmaker and cinematographer can work, along with the designer and costumer, as a team dedicated to rendering onscreen very specific shapes, heavy or light, substantial or ephemeral, filled with express colors. Further, the actor moving and shifting in the light makes the color breathe and move. Colored objects onscreen—take those table lamps in the Sirk living room, or the green-faced corpse in Antonioni’s park—are not there for us to see by happenstance, they are expressly designed for a final effect, and have been crafted, out of a considerable range of possibilities, by Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   195 a team of skilled artisans working in harmony to bring various talents to bear on achieving a precisely focused end. In color film, the colorations to be seen onscreen, stimulating, aggravating, soothing, provoking, are there by design because film does not register color as the human eye does. The camera does not simply “see.” If it is design that confronts us, we can choose to dissect it as trivial manipulative pablum; or to know its basis in the history of art and technology; or, should we choose, to achieve appreciation, a challenge which is far from casual. That third option is the one I have chosen both to exercise and to emphasize in these pages. We receive film by yielding to its force and sensing the delicacies of its construction and depiction. That reception involves our openness to the kinds of pleasure and the particular forces already discussed here. I adduce Blow-Up as a central part of this discussion of film color—more precisely, screen green—because in Antonioni we have a true adept of color production, a filmmaker who for many years made express, powerful use of color and whose use of it here is both stunning and very calculated. He used special paint colors on set in order to produce saturated and effective color onscreen so that viewers would be given to see coloration expressly intended for the eye, coloration designed carefully to work in an exact way in every pictured moment. He was benefitting from his earlier experience with Technicolor Rome in securing specific paint materials that would be rendered with subtle nuances in The Red Desert. Blow-Up has instances of considerable location painting, not only those in the park itself but surrounding streets, facades and walls of buildings, and the paving of the road outside the park, itself. Paint was applied in order to achieve densely saturated color effects that would work at night. Of course the “magic” of the image seems wondrous largely because viewers are uninformed about its construction. At the Technicolor lab, to give one example (although Blow-Up was not produced there), it was possible to work delicate adjustments to the visible colorations in the final imbibition print (as we saw with A Matter of Life and Death): each of the red, blue, and green matrices could be adjusted for exposure individually, thus allowing for the control of the “amount” of a particular color in the shot. Some of the location painting in Blow-Up compensates for the Technicolor lab’s absence, working to shift saturations and adjust color contrasts beyond the limit of what could be achieved at MGM’s Eastmancolor lab, where the work was done. All this is a way of suggesting that filmmakers rhapsodize about color in their own ways, and Antonioni was rhapsodizing about green in the first place, sufficiently to worry about making necessary preparations to render it. Our experience of the critical scenes in the park, at day and at night, relies upon that rhapsody. Rhapsody as an intensely affective and recursive concentration, a kind of swooning creativity that falls into the perceptible world, surrenders to, and is devoured by the very effect it produces. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

196  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Not only does cinema rhapsodize, and not only can we offer a rhapsodic response when we watch. It is possible, as this chapter sets out to show, that one can rhapsodize about a cinematic element, say green, in order to write about it the way I am (consciously) doing. There is a kind of rhapsodic attention to which I am making reference, or which my sentences are built to reveal, and that kind of attention I imply as a possibility, always, when we are watching film. Rather than holding back and scanning for plot, for navigation, for evaluation, for being informed, one may fall. Fall for film, fall toward film, fall away from the scaffolding on which film is exploited, fall in love with film. Film as artistic completion rather than as grist for critical analysis can be the focus of our eyes. It may strike a reader as a quirky sort of confessional, the admission that filmic moments have the power to render one susceptible to sensations, and to thoughts, that travel outside the bounds of convenient rationality. Rationality, after all, is the byword of science, and the technical age has caused all of us to take science—and what we call scientific advancement—with the greatest seriousness. “I saw it lately given as one of the incontrovertible discoveries of modern science, that all our present enjoyments were only the outcome of an infinite series of pain,” wrote Ruskin in 1884: I do not know how far the statement fairly represented—but it announced as incapable of contradiction—this melancholy theory. If such a doctrine is indeed abroad among you, let me comfort some, at least, with its absolute denial. That in past aeons, the pain suffered throughout the living universe passes calculation, is true; that it is infinite, is untrue; and that all our enjoyments are based on it, contemptibly untrue. For, on the other hand, the pleasure felt through the living universe during past ages is incalculable also, and in higher magnitudes. (17) It is in a scientific, not an artistic, mode that we respond to narrative cinema as a system of substitutions and manipulations geared to take advantage of the viewer’s critical consciousness; and we make this response in the committed belief that critical consciousness is the very supremest of mental endeavors, the clearest and most productive way to think. But rational discourse in itself cannot be honest about our experience, which is often muddy, confused, haunted, and shockingly charged. To make nothing but rational analysis of filmic material, to see only themes and developments, sociocultural biases and political machinations behind the scenes, is to fail in being touched by the aesthetic moment. To fail, I should add, as Goethe did not fail on his Italian journey. Reacting to some student actors, he claimed, “Their performance reminded me once again of the worldly wisdom of the Jesuits. They rejected nothing which might produce an effect” (Italian 24; emphasis mine). In the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   197 fishing scenes of Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It (1992), where two reunited brothers cast their lines into the stream, for example, to concentrate principally or only on their masculine psychologies and mutual competitiveness, on their social class privilege, on racist attitudes implicit in the dominant white world they inhabit, on power relations, is to avoid seeing the sparkling green of the water, with the sunlight flickering down in myriad unfathomable ways, and in that avoidance to subtract away the river that is the only source of sound and the true source of pleasure, for characters and viewers alike. We may lose the seduction of nature and the beauty of the innocent apprehension of its moment. Rational calculation leeches a scene of its setting, its colorful (feelingful) texture. With analysis based in dissection and evaluation, feeling and the memory of feeling must be either denied or diminished. Rapture must be disavowed or neglected. To take Blow-Up, a rational approach to viewing, a focus on story and moral eventfulness, could lead us to discount the presence of color altogether; or to see color only in perfunctory terms, as index of the reality of objects and climates, a way of pointing to a “real” world rather than a way of suggesting something buried, interior, expansive. Or worse, color as mere decoration, frivolity, eye candy. V. F. Perkins quotes one sufficiently eminent rationalist, the film reviewer of The Observer from 1947, who avows with full conviction that “films are not an art. . . . It is not within the power of electrical engineering or mechanical contraption to create. They can only reproduce. And what they reproduce is not art” (9). To which moribund statement of closure Perkins sagaciously offers this reply: The movie offers two forms of magic, since its conquest of the visible world extends in two opposite directions. The first, on which the realist theory concentrates, gives it the power to “possess” the real world by capturing its appearance. The second, focus of the traditional aesthetic, permits the presentation of an ideal image, ordered by the film-maker’s will and imagination. Since the cinema’s mechanism incorporates both these tendencies, neither of them can be condemned on rational, technical or aesthetic grounds. (60) And later, still more pregnantly, “The meanings which are contained most securely within a film are those formed at the deepest level of interrelation and synthesis. . . . A movie cannot be both absolutely self-contained and meaningful. It draws non-stop on the values and knowledge which we bring to it” (117). To values and knowledge, I would eagerly add, desire. The film, as we see it, is a way for us to address our yearning, our recapture of memory and establishment of forward heading. We live our way through films, much as filmmakers do. We commit the time of our lives, recognizing that the performances we see Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

198  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e onscreen are given by actors who have also committed the time of their lives. Indeed, what we see onscreen, shot after shot, is a series of records of time that actors gave to cinema. It is in our humanity that we regard images with desire. Some aspect of the image addresses, and serves, a querulous emptiness we bring in looking. Here is D. H. Lawrence reflecting on Cézanne: He terribly wanted to paint the real existence of the body, to make it artistically palpable. But he couldn’t. He hadn’t got there yet. And it was the torture of his life. . . . He wanted to be a man of flesh, a real man: to get out of the sky-blue prison into real air. He wanted to live, really live in the body, to know the world through his instincts and his intuitions, and to be himself in his procreative blood, not in his mere mind and spirit. . . . After a fight tooth-and-nail for forty years, he did succeed in knowing an apple, fully; and, not quite so fully, a jug or two. That was all he achieved. It seems little, and he died embittered. But it is the first step that counts, and Cézanne’s apple is a great deal, more than Plato’s Idea. Cézanne’s apple rolled the stone from the mouth of the tomb. . . . What we have to thank Cézanne for is not his humility, but for his proud, high spirit that refused to accept the glib utterances of his facile mental self. (n.p.) For those of us who would take pleasure with our visual world—the visual world that has become, in the early twenty-first century, so thoroughly ­cinematic—this last little riposte is a serious and daunting challenge. So effortlessly may viewers unaccustomed to philosophy simply scan the surface of films, gulp down too-often quick-boiled narratives, rest securely and insensate with the conviction that plots are more significant than images, that character actions are more pungent than the pictures that display them. And for those who love to think through cinema, even to write about it, easeful, dangerously easeful is the plunge into recantations of favored theories, rituals in which visual art is subsumed under the rubric of postulates and formulae (often originally conceived without reference to imagery at all). Here, then, emerge the two great Audiences of our day, the Silent and the Chattering, the former always hungry to turn off all manner of thought for the next thrilling (that is, athletic) “carnival ride”—desperate, indeed, lest thinking erode their intoxication—and the latter hungry, slavishly hungry, to work out and display smartness, to assume superiority over the material they watch. Lawrence is throwing a conceit and a critique in the face of both these crowds, as he opens the door to an experience of profound, even incalculable depth and terrifying richness: a spirit that is beyond utterance, an apple that rolls the stone from the tomb. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

rhapsody in g reen   199 A spirit for which we wait . . . an apple that rolls the stone . . . or wind blowing in the black night through the green trees. As we are in Antonioni’s garden, we are in cinema’s garden, too. Or: the cinema we watch is a garden of delight. Garden or perhaps sanctuary, where the apple hangs from the tree, and the tennis ball flies over the net—there, there, can you see it? Sanctuary and perhaps temple, residence of a ghost. A beneficent ghost, surely. Even if one does not see it, yet it is there.

Wor k s C i t e d Arlen, Michael J. “Eros in the Emerald City: The Low Spark of High-Rise Towns.” Rolling Stone (6 October 1977): 43–44. Bemelmans, Ludwig. To the One I Love the Best. New York: Viking Press, 1955. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Finlay, Victoria. Colour: Travels through the Paintbox. London: Sceptre, 2002. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey: 1786–1788. Trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. London: Penguin, 1970. ———. Theory of Colours. Trans. Charles Locke Eastlake. 1840. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006. Gombrich, Ernst. The Uses of Images. London: Phaidon, 1999. Gunning, Tom. “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective.” boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 105–30. Hall, Edwin. The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Hedley, Jo. François Boucher: Seductive Visions. London: Wallace Collection, 2004. Hicks, Carola. Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait. London: Vintage, 2011. James, Henry. The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts. Selected and ed. by John L. Sweeney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. James, William. “The Original Datum of Space-Consciousness.” Mind 2, no. 7 (1 July 1893): 363–65. Kemperdick, Stephan, and Friso Lammertse. The Road to Van Eyck. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2012. Kermode, Frank. Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lassaigne, Jacques, and Robert L. Delevoy. Flemish Painting from Bosch to Rubens. New York: Skira, 1958. Lawrence, D. H. “Introduction to These Paintings.” In The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence. London: Mandrake Press, 1929. Levesque de Pouilly, Jean. The Theory of Agreeable Sensations. Boston: Bradford and Read, 1812. Loughman, John, and John Michael Montias. Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Panofsky, Erwin. “Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait.” Burlington Magazine 64, no. 372 (March 1934): 117–19, 122–27.

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200  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Perkins, V. F. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Pomerance, Murray. “Assheton Gorton: A Life in Film.” Film International 13, no. 1 (July 2015): 56–104. ———. Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Random House, 1934. Rikken, Marrigje. Melchio d’Hondecoeter: Bird Painter. New Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2009. Rosenberg, Pierre. “Preface” to Esquisses, Pastels et dessins de François Boucher. Versailles: Musée Lambinet; Paris: Somogy, 2004. Ruskin, John. The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford during His Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship. Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1884. Sacks, Oliver. The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Sebald, W. G. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 1991. Van Mander, Carel. Dutch and Flemish Painters: Translation from the Schilderboeck. Introduction by Constant van de Wall. 1604. New York: McFarlane, Warde, McFarlane, 1936. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Color. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Trans. M. D. Hottinger. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932.

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ackn o w led gmen ts   201

Acknowledgments

M

y sincere thanks to Gillian Leslie, Richard Strachan, Eddie Clark, Rebecca Mackenzie, and the staff of Edinburgh University Press, and cover designer Paul Smith: artful and amicable collaborators! I would have been quite lost on this journey without a great deal of guidance, from these kind ciceroni: Lawson Bell (Winchester), John Belton (Brooklyn), Lisa Bode (Brisbane), Alexis Bouton (Toronto), Nadia Buick (Brisbane), Cathleen and the late Stanley Cavell (Brookline), Alex Clayton (Bristol), Brian Cookson (The Wallace Collection, London), Adrian Danks (Melbourne), Glenn Donner (Melbourne), Victoria Duckett (Melbourne), Martin Flynn (London), Lisa French (Melbourne), Steven Gaunson (Melbourne), Gayatri and the late Assheton Gorton (Montgomery, Wales), Cecile Guédon (Cambridge), Michael Hammond (Lymington), Kate and Will Hole (Firle), Eben Holmes (Toronto), Richard Haines (Hudson River Valley), Fincina Hopgood (Melbourne), Patrick Howard (Dublin), Dan Iacavone (Edinburgh), Jason Jacobs (Brisbane), Alexia Kannas (Melbourne), Mark Kermode (London), Andrew Klevan (Oxford), Matthew Leggatt (Winchester), Dominic Lennard (Hobart), Elliott Logan (Brisbane), Glenn Man and family (Honolulu), Douglas and Catherine McFarland (San Francisco), Angela Ndalianis (Melbourne), Tom O’Regan (Brisbane), James Pearson (Somerville), the late Victor Perkins (Coventry), William Rothman (Miami), Steven Rybin (Mankato and Atlanta), Dan Sacco (Toronto), Robert Sinnerbrink (Sydney), Kyle Stevens (Somerville), Deborah Thomas (Brisbane), Dan Varndell (Southampton), Constantine Verevis (Melbourne), Huw Walmsley-Evans (Brisbane), Charles Warren (Boston), Kieron Webb (BFI), Nick White (Toronto), Linda Ruth Williams (Southampton), Nigel Williams (Cardiff), Anthony Woodd (Edinburgh), Justin Wyatt (East Greenwich, Rhode Island). Painting fed me regularly. I am in debt to the staffs of The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Bristol Museum and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

202  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Art Gallery (Bristol), The British Museum (London), Christie’s (London), The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York), The Courtauld Institute (London), The Dulwich Picture Gallery (London), The Fogg Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge), The Frick Collection (New York), The Getty Center (Los Angeles), The John Soane Museum (London), The Metropolitan Museum (New York), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), The Morgan Museum (New York), La Musée de la Chasse (Paris), La Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), La Musée du Jeu de Paume (Paris), La Musée de l’Orangerie (Paris), La Musée d’Orsay (Paris), Museum of New Art (Hobart), The National Gallery (London), National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin), The National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), The National Museum of Wales (Cardiff), The Neue Gallery (New York), The Queen’s House (Greenwich), The Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane), The Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum (Bournemouth), The Scottish National Gallery (Edinburgh), The Southampton Art Gallery (Southampton), The Tate Gallery (London), The University Church of St. Mary the Virgin (Oxford), The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The Wallace Collection (London). And gardens came to be of significant note, especially at Cambo Estate (Crail), Charleston (East Sussex), Kellie Castle (Pittenweem, Anstruther), Monk’s House (Rodmell), St. Andrews Botanic Garden (St. Andrews), the University of Oxford Botanic Garden (Oxford). My special gratitude goes to a number of librarians: the staff of the Beinecke Library, Yale University (New Haven), The National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum (London). At the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Kate Hutchens. At the British Film Institute, Anastasia Kerameos and Jonny Davies. At Widener Library, Harvard University: Eugenia Dimant, Ashley Ifeadike, Neiel Israel, Allen Wilson. At the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Haden Guest. At Houghton Library, Harvard University: Monique Duhaime, Susan Halpert, Mary Haegert, Micah Hoggatt. At Littauer Fine Arts Library, Harvard University: Mary Clare Altenhofen, Rachel Goodyer. At Pusey Library, Harvard University: Jonathan Rosenwasser, David Weimer. The staff of the Heritage Reading Room, State Library of Victoria (Melbourne). This book was inspired and facilitated by a serendipitous honor, an invitation to spend some time as visiting scholar at Harvard University, during the winters of 2015 and 2017. In the first of these periods it was my fate to trudge to the libraries with a torn anterior cruciate ligament and in the midst of a seemingly unending blizzard the likes of which even my Bostonian friends could not remember. Kirkland House was an authentic oasis of friendship and nutrition of all kinds—especially, for my at that time beleaguered frame, within the quiet bosom of Hicks House, my library dream. There did I learn, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

ackn o w led gmen ts   203 and only with happiness, the burning truth of Boswell’s comment to William Johnson Temple: “Let us study ever so much, we must still be ignorant of a great deal.” May I offer undying thanks to Tom and Verena Andermatt Conley, Scott Haywood, and Kate Drizos Cavell for kindnesses and hospitality unbounded. To Nellie Perret and Ariel Pomerance, who tolerate my numberless ­eccentricities day and night, my love and gratitude, here, now, and always.

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Index Note: page numbers in italic indicate images “Abend” [“Evening”] (Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1910), 130 Ackerman, Diane, 105, 106 cetacean sperm competition, 105 Adams, Amy, 68 Adams, John, Nixon in China, 175; see also I Am Love Adjustment Bureau, The (George Nolfi, 2011), 72 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (Michael Curtiz, 1938), 191 Affleck, Casey, 65, 75, 76, 155 After the Fall (Arthur Miller, January 23, 1964), 104 Albee, Edward, 8 Alfred Hitchcock Presents see Hitchcock, Alfred Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), 76 Allegories of the Arts (Carle Vanloo), 18, 21; see also Vanloo, Charles-André All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), 192 American in Paris, An (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), 47, 67, 111, 179 ballet, 47, 67, 111 Amsterdam, seventeenth-century collections in, 172 Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012), 3, 42 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 72, 184ff, 194 interest in color, 194 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), 72, 179 Arcadia, 185ff, 193 Archenholtz, Johann Wilhelm, 84, 85 Kensington Gardens, 85 tea gardens, 84–5 Aristotle, 4, 59 color theory, 59 the pleasantness of youth, 80 Aristotle and Averroes Disputing (Girolamo Da Cremona, 1483) see Da Cremona, Girolamo Arlen, Michael J., 193 Arnold, Hugh, on stained glass, 50ff

Arnolfini Marriage, The (Jan Van Eyck, 1434), 48, 49, 180–4 Arnolfini Portrait, The (Jan Van Eyck, 1434) see Arnolfini Marriage Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), 68 Arundel, West Sussex, 82 Castle, 82n3 Wetland Centre, 82n3 Assayas, Olivier, 139, 141, 144, 146, 153 Astaire, Fred, 71, 111, 184 Atget, Eugène, 105 photography in St. Cloud, 105 Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), 6, 42, 134, 174 Austen, Jane, 77, 79, 94 Ayres, Lew, 67 Bacall, Lauren, 47 Bach, Johann-Christian (1735–82), 24, 25 Sinfonia in E-flat Major, 24, 25; Eulenberg score for, 24 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750), 15, 33 Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), 1933 Baigneurs au repose (Paul Cézanne, 1875–6), 49 Bailey, Raymond, 13 Baisers volés [Stolen Kisses] (François Truffaut, 1968), 52 Baker Street, San Francisco, 93; see also Vertigo Band Wagon, The (Vincente Minnelli, 1953), 3, 47, 111, 169, 178 “Dancing in the Dark,” 11, 184 Banks, (Sir) Joseph, 147n5; see also Cook, Captain James Barefoot Contessa, The (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954), 5, 67, 100, 112–17 and narrative multiplicity, 112–17 Barthes, Roland, the punctum, 14 Bates, Alan, 134 Battisti, Carlo, 74 Battle of Algiers, The (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), 74 Baudelaire, Charles, 33–4, 36, 88ff, 93, 133 flâneur and, 88ff

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in dex   205 inspired by “The Man of the Crowd,” 88 see also “Loss of a Halo,” “Painter of Modern Life,” and Le Spleen de Paris Beaumetz, Jean de, 50 Beautiful Mind, A (Ron Howard, 2001), 3 Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, 1935), 47 Bel Geddes, Barbara, 8, 13 Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (Robert D. Webb, 1953), 38n1 Benjamin, Walter, 65, 90, 91, 153–4, 171 analysis of the nineteenth century, 171 arcades, 154 doors in dreams, 153–4 Parisians, 91 proclamation of interest in the city, 90 Bentley (motor car), 167 Beregi Sr., Oscar, 89 Bergman, Ingrid, 74 Berlin Wall, 69 Bertillon, Alphonse, and photographic cataloguing, 87; see also Gunning, Tom Beverly Hills, 113 Big Sleep, The (Howard Hawks, 1946), 68 Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956), 110, 179 Binoche, Juliette, 135, 144 Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), 179 Birds and a Spaniel in a Garden (Melchior d’Hondecoeter, 1660–95), 58 Bisset, Jacqueline, 170 Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947), 40 Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929), 74 Blair, Linda, 179 Blake, William, 100 Blast, 9 Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945), 40 Bloom, Claire, 69, 103 “Blow-Up” (Julio Cortázar, 1959) see “Las Babas del Diablo” Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), 6, 74, 166, 179, 184–97 Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993) see Three Colors Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), 60 Blunt, Emily, 72 Bogart, Humphrey, 67, 110, 111, 112 Bol, L. J., 58 Bola-bola, 148 see Oedidee Bonaparte, Napoléon, 2 Bond, Edward, 185 Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950), 67

Borsay, Peter, 78, 82 Bosschaert, Ambrosius, 55, 58, 105 Boswell, James, 1, 2, 23, 28, 31–2, 106, 156 admiring King’s walks, 83 correspondence with George Dempster, M.P., 23 on David Garrick, 137 his Lady Mirabel, 2 on Johnson and apparitions, 156; dining at Pringle’s with Johnson and Cook, 79–80 Ranelagh, 83; Rotunda, 83; see also Ranelagh Gardens with Thomas Sheridan, 137 Bottle Hoax (London, 1749), 137; see also Picard, Liza and New Theatre Boucher, François, 61, 94 Boulding, Kenneth, 39 Boy with Green Hair, The (Joseph Losey, 1948), 177, 182 Boyd, Stephen, 91 Brazzi, Rossano, 100, 113, 119–20 Bridge, Joan, 44 Bridgewater Sea Piece, The [Dutch Boats in a Gale] (Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1803), 49, 193 Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), 133 Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954), 1978 Brown, Lancelot “Capability,” 82 Brown, Simon, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins, 45 Buchanan, Jack, 47, 178 Buddha (Gautama), 28–9 Bumstead, Henry, 10 Burgundy, Court of, 50 Burton, Richard, 69 Bushmen, African, 146; see also Read, Herbert Butterfield, Asa, 70 Cagney, James, 67, 110–11 Caine, Michael, 71 California, wilds of, 75 Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017), 1, 6, 176–7 Camino Real (Tennessee Williams, March 17, 1953), 27 Cannes, Film Festival, 135 cannibalism, 148, 149 Cardiff, Jack, 40, 41, 44, 47 Carey, Gary, 113 Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), 42 Carroll, Edwina, 70 Carson, Hunter, 179

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206  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus (1539; 1572), 147 Dania, 147 Finmarchia, 147 Gothia, 147 Islandia, 147 Lappia, 148 Tile, Isle of, 147–8 vacca marina (sea bull), 147 Cavell, Stanley, 36–8, 133 evanescence of film, 133; see also “What Becomes of Things on Film” Central Park (New York), 184 Cézanne, Paul, 49, 60–1, 105, 107, 193, 198 the apple, 198 paintings of bathers, 105 paintings of the Jas de Bouffan, 105 paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire, 105, 107 CGI (Computer Generated Imagery), 55, 62n3 Chagrin, Julian (and Troupe), 184ff Chalamet, Timothée, 1, 176 Chaplin, Charles, 34, 67 Tramp character, 67 Charisse, Cyd, 11, 47, 178, 184, 191 Château de Bellevue (near Meudon), 17, 22, 24, 25, 30, 33 Cheetah (the chimpanzee), 131 Chion, Michel, acousmêtre, 192 Chippenham, 83 Chiswick, 83 Chocolat (Lasse Hallström, 2000), 136 Christie, (Dame) Agatha, 170 Christie, Julie, 134 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, on palimpsests, 110 Cinémathèque Française (Paris), 131; see also Dreamers, The Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 109, 110 Charles Foster Kane, our knowledge of, 109 possible influence by “In a Grove,” 110 Civil War, American, 66 Cleopatra (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934), 40, 190 Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014), 5, 134–52, 160, 162 at 2014 Cannes Film Festival, 135 Colbert, Claudette, 40, 190 Cold Creek Manor (Mike Figgis, 2003), 136 Coleman, Herbert, 93; see also Vertigo Collard, David, 136 Collins, Wilkie, 101, 102 Comingore, Dorothy, 109 Comstock, Daniel, 37, 61

concentration camps, Jewish remembrance of, 88; see also Marathon Man Concerto No. 5 in F, Op. 103, for piano, “The Egyptian,” (Camille Saint-Saëns, 1896), 94 Conley, Tom, 76n2 Constable, John letter to C. R. Leslie, 82, 105, 180 paintings of Dedham Vale, 105 paintings of Salisbury, 105 Conte, Richard, 74 Cook, Captain James, 2, 3, 6, 79, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 147n5, 148, 149, 154n7 annals of his travels, 143ff, 149 appropriation, 147 and cannibalism, 148 death, 147 and Eaheinomauwe, 79 H.M.S. Endeavour, 79 exoticism and, 147 first voyage, 147n5 natives met by him, 146 and Oedidee, 148 and H.M.S. Resolution, 148 and search for knowledge on third voyage, 149 second voyage, 144 and strangers, 149 third voyage, 149 visiting New Zealand, 148 voyages, 154n7; reports of, 149 Cook, Douglas, 155 Cookson, Brian (Wallace Collection, London), 25 Cooper, David, 24, 93, 94 Cortázar, Julio see Hopscotch Cortese, Valentina, 113 Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012), 136 Costner, Kevin, 155 Cotten, Joseph, 17, 109 Courbet, Gustave, 48, 61, 193 courtly love see European court life Cox’s Mount see Maryon Park Crash (J. G. Ballard, 1973), 73n1 Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), 73n1 Crawford, Broderick, 67 Criminal (Ariel Vromen, 2016), 155 Cruise, Tom, 68, 111 Cuyp, Aelbert, 105, 193 paintings of Dordrecht, 105 Da Cremona, Girolamo, 29 Damage (Louis Malle, 1992), 136 Damon, Matt, 65, 72, 75, 76, 179

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in dex   207 “Dancing in the Dark” (Arthur Schwartz) see The Band Wagon Daney, Serge, 1 Dangerous (Alfred E. Green, 1935), 141n2 Davis, Bette, 39–40, 68, 111 Davis, Brad, 68–9 Day, Doris, 67 Day After Tomorrow, The (Roland Emmerich, 2004), 71 Day for Night [La nuit américaine] (François Truffaut, 1973), 131 Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995), 74 Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller, February 10, 1949), 104 De Heem, Jan Davidsz., 55, 105 De la Serre, Jean-Puget, on voluptuous pleasure, 80 De Largillière, Nicolas, 23; see also Vertigo De Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques, 154, 154n7 invitation from Garrick, 154n7 staging of Omai Pantomime, 154n7 see also Eidophusikon and Omai Pantomime De Quincey, Thomas, and the palimpsest, 109 De Saussure, César (François), on Hyde Park, 86 De Sica, Vittorio, 73 De Vaucanson, Jacques, animated duck of, 11 De Wolfe, Elsie, 174 DeBolla, Peter, 84 Dedham Vale (Wiltshire), 105; see also Constable Delacroix, Eugène, Morocco notebooks, 80–1 Delicate Delinquent, The (Don McGuire, 1958), 111 DeMille, Cecil B., 40 Denham Studios (Buckinghamshire), No. 4 stage of and A Matter of Life and Death, 62n3 Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler, 69 Devil, the, familiarity with, 74 d’Hondecoeter, Melchior, 56ff, 172 trompe l’oeil of, 57–8, 172 Di Palma, Carlo, 189 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 111 Dillon, Sarah, 109 Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933), 133 Disney (Walt) Studios, cartoon productions, 132 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931), 3, 111

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941), 111 Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), 71, 110 Doidge, Norman , 20 Dordrecht (Netherlands), 105; see also Cuyp Double Life, A (George Cukor, 1947), 141n2 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 87 Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), 101 Dreamers, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), 131 Dressler, Marie, 133 Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), 190 Dutch flower painting, 5, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 105 continual development of still life, 105 dark backgrounds, 55 and knowledge of the natural world, 55–6 and social class difference, 56 and travel, 56 trompe l’oeil, 6, 56, 57–8 with Wan-li vases, 55 Eaheinomauwe, and Capt. Cook’s voyages, 79 East Greenwich (London), 184 East Indian curiosities, 58 Eastmancolor negative film see Technicolor Corporation Ed Sullivan Show, The (1948–71), 40 Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), 3, 111 training sequence, 111 Edinburgh, 109 Education of the Eye, The (Peter DeBolla, 2003), 84 Eidinger, Lars, 157 Eidophusikon, 154; see also De Loutherbourg Eliot, T. S. see “Little Gidding” Empire Strikes Back, The (Irvin Kershner, 1980), 133 England, 147n5; see also Kongourou English language, limitations of, 188 English Longitude Act (1714), 150 English Patient, The (Anthony Minghella, 1996), 136 Ethiopia, 148; see also Genoese World Map European court life, courtly love in, 119 Exodus (Otto Preminger, 1960), music, 96 Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973), 179 Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966), 14, 111, 133, 177 Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, et al, 1940), 38n1

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208  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966), 90–1 Fassbender, Michael, 68 Fazio, Bartolomeo, De viris illustribus (1456), 49 Fellini, Federico, 74 Fiedler, Leslie A., 39, 141 myths and compass directions, 39 racism or anthropology, 141 Finlay, Victoria, 28, 29, 175, 176 Chinese green, 176 Finney, Albert, 170, 179 Fjastad, Roy, 25 flâneur, 5 Fleischer, Richard, 91; see also Fantastic Voyage Florida, backwoods, 173 Flubber (Les Mayfield, 1997), 179 Flynn, Gertrude, 100 Foch, Nina, 179 Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956), 71, 179 Ford, Brinsley, 56 Ford, John, 186 Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), 70 Forrest, Frederick, 72 Forster, George, 79, 143–4, 143n4, 145 observations of vegetation and people, 145 47th Street Diamond District, New York, 88; see also Marathon Man Foucault, Michel, punishment and information archives, 87 Four Stages of Cruelty, The (William Hogarth, 1851), 101 Framework of Language, The (Roman Jakobson, 1980), 192 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Mary Shelley, 1818; 1823), 101 Frazer, (Sir) James George, 155–6, 171 Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), 69–70 French critical theory, the médiathèque, 132 Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972), 60 Gadot, Gal, 155 Gardner, Ava, 100, 112 Gare du Nord (Paris), 157, 160 Garland, Judy, 47 Garrick, David, 137, 154n7; see also Boswell, James Gass, William, 27–8 Genoese World Map (1457), 148 George III (King of England), 154n7; see also Omai

George, Dorothy, 84 Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002), 5, 65, 75–6 Ghent Altarpiece, The (Jan Van Eyck, 1432), 48, 49, 183 different faces on, 183 Ghost Story, A (David Lowery, 2016), 155 Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984), 179 Gianni Schicchi (Giacomo Puccini, 1918), 94; see also “O mio babbino caro” Gibbons, Cedric, 173 Girouard, Mark, 56 Glass Menagerie, The (Tennessee Williams, March 31, 1945), 66 Gleber, Anke, on Franz Hessel, 89 Go-Between, The (Joseph Losey, 1971), 134 Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 75 Goffman, Erving, 13, 138 play-within-the-play, 138 the “say-for,” 13 Golden Gate Park, San Francisco see Vertigo Gombrich, Ernst, 146, 172 pictures on walls, 172 Goodman, Paul, 171 Goring, Marius, 36, 43, 46, 61, 67, 100, 112, 118 Gorton, Assheton, 189, 190, 192–3 Grand Tour, the, 85 Grant, Cary, 67 Greatest Show on Earth, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952), 38n1, 47, 178 circus parade in, 47, 178 Green, Johnny, 184 Green Closet, Ham House, Surrey, 56 Green Lantern, The (Martin Campbell, 2011), 179 Green Mansions (Mel Ferrer, 1959), 179 Green Mile, The (Frank Darabont, 1999), 74 Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010), 179 Greenwich (London), British railways and, 151 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (Hugh Hudson, 1984), 179 Groesse, Paul, 173 Guard, Dominic, 134 Gunning, Tom, on color, 51–2, 59, 60, 61 87, 171, 172 on Bertillon’s system, 87 on branding iron in Mysteries of Paris, 87 exteriors and interiors, 171 Parisian society of the nineteenth century, 172 see also Benjamin, Walter

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in dex   209 Guys, Constantin, 88; see also Baudelaire, Charles Haines, Richard W., 37 Hall, Edwin, 49, 180 Hammer, Armie, 111, 176 Hancock, Sheila, 109 Harlot’s Progress, A (William Hogarth, 1731), 101 Harrelson, Woody, 179 Harris, Burtt, 88; see also Marathon Man Harrison, John, 151 and timekeeper H4, 151 Harrison, Susan, 68 Harvard University, 192 Harvey, Laurence, 103 Harvey, William, 78 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 48 Hay Wain, The (John Constable, 1821), 193 Haymarket (London) see Bottle Hoax and New Theatre Helmore, Tom, 15 Hemmings, David, 179, 185f Hepburn, Audrey, 76, 110, 179 Hepburn, Katharine, 67–8 Herrmann, Bernard, 94, 95 trademark double chord, 96 see also Vertigo Hertford, Earl and Countess of, reworking Percy Lodge, 83 Herzbrun, Bernard, 173 Herzen, Alexander, 138 Hessel, Franz, “art of taking a walk,” 89; see also Gleber, Anke and Weimar Berlin Hicks, Carola, 181, 183 colors of Arnolfini Marriage, 181 Higgins, Scott, 37 Hiley, Nicholas, 52 Hiller, Wendy, 170 Hillier, Erwin, 47 His Majesty O’Keefe (Byron Haskin [and Burt Lancaster], 1954), 3, 38n1 Hitchcock, Alfred, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 23, 25, 66, 93, 96, 173 “Breakdown” (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 13 November 1955), 17 the “Hitchcockian,” 15 Hitchcockian camera, 97 as narrational architect, 17–19 Paramount productions, 11 Hodges, William, 79, 144, 147, 153 Hogarth, William, 5, 108, 122 Holiday (George Cukor, 1938), 67 Holiday, Judy, 67

Hollywood, 112 backstage musicals, 141n2 film of the 1950s, 11 film production in, 11 optical matte painters, 183 screening during classical age of, 131 Hopscotch [Rayuela] (Julio Cortázar, 1966, trans. Gregory Rabassa), 52–3 Houdini, Harry (Ehrich Weiss), debunking spiritualism, 154 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Arthur Conan Doyle, 1901), 76 Howard, Trevor, 133 Howe, James Wong, 103 How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941), 185 Hudson, Rock, 70, 166, 182 Hugo, Victor, on the Isle of Jersey, 153 Hunt, John Dixon, on Vauxhall, 83 Hunter, Jeffrey, 66 Hunter, Kim, 42 Hurons of Canada, 156 Hyde Park (London), 86; see also De Saussure, César and Picard, Liza I, Claudius (Herbert Wise, 1976), 70 I Am Love [Io Sono Amore] (Luca Guadagnino, 2009), 3, 174–5, 176 Adams Foxtrot, 175 “I Got Rhythm” (George and Ira Gershwin), 67 I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958), 74 Identification of a Woman [Identificazione di una donna] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982), 192 Île de la Cité (Paris), 186 IMDb (Internet Movie Database), 132 Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934), 132 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), 132 “In a Grove” (Ryūnosoke Akutagawa, 1921), relation to Citizen Kane, 103, 110 In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), 67, 111 In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967), 74 In Which We Serve (David Lean, 1942), 40 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (Jack Arnold, 1957), 13 Industry and Idleness (William Hogarth, 1747), 101 Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007), 136 Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953), 178 iPhone, 159 Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), 60, 179

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210  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Istanbul, 69 Italy, northern, 176 J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2001), 111 Jacobi, Derek, 70 Jacobs, Steven, 33 Jakobson, Roman, 192 James, Henry, and Dutch painting, 173 James, William, 136, 184 musical chord, 184 Jarman, Claude Jr., 173 Jas de Bouffan, 105; see also Cézanne Jaynes, Julian, 17 Je vous salue Marie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985), 135 Jersey, Isle of, 153; see also Hugo, Victor Jesuits see North American Indians and Von Goethe Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938), 39–40 Jocelyn, June, 24 Johnson, Celia, 133 Johnson, Samuel, 79–80, 86, 156–7 on apparitions, 156 gifting coins to children, 86 see also London and Boswell, James Johnson, Van, 68 Jones, Henry, 30 Jones, Jennifer, 178 Joy of Living (Tay Garnett, 1933), 3 Julius Caesar (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953), 119 Jumper (Doug Liman, 2008), 136 Just Imagine (David Butler, 1930), 72 Kafka, Franz, parable, 77 Kalmus, Herbert, 37, 61 Kongourou from New Holland, The (George Stubbs, 1772), 147n5 Kaye, Danny, 111 Kealakekua Bay (Sandwich Islands [Hawaii]), 147; see also Cook, Captain James Keats, John, 81 letter to his brother Tom, 81 Keith, Robert, 68 Kelly, Gene, 67, 111 Kelly, Grace, 67 Kemperdick, Stephan and Friso Lammertse, 50, 190 Kermode, Frank, 169 Kierkegaard, Søren, 65–6, 130 Kill Me If You Can (Buzz Kulik, 1977), 74 Kinski, Nastassja, 179 Kippis, Andrew, 143 Kiss, The (Gustav Klimt, 1907–8), 26

Knightley, Keira, 174 Koch, Jr., Howard, 88; see also Marathon Man Kodak (Eastman Kodak Company) see Technicolor Corporation Kolker, Henry, 67 Korda, Alexander, 62n3 Krapp’s Last Tape (Samuel Beckett, October 28, 1958), 79 Kubrick, Stanley, 70 Kurosawa, Akira, 103 L’Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948), 74 Lassaigne, Jacques and Robert L. Delevoy, on Rubens, 172 L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), 76n2 L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), 74 L’heure d’été [Summer Hours] (Olivier Assayas, 2008), 136 La chambre verte [The Green Room] (François Truffaut, 1978), 179 La Cucaracha (Lloyd Corrigan, 1934), 47 La galerie agréable du monde (Pub. Pierre Vander Aa, 1729), 148 La galerie agréable du monde (1729), 2, 165 La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), 73 Lady in White, The (Wilkie Collins, 1859), 101 Laing, Hugh, 178 Lancaster, Burt, 68 Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock (Peter Paul Rubens, 1638), 173 “Las Babas del Diablo” (Julio Cortázar, 1959), 185ff; see also Blow-Up Lawrence, D. H., on Cézanne, 60–1, 198 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), 73 Lean, David, 40 Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945), 179 Legend (Ridley Scott, 1985), 178 Le grand bleu (Luc Besson, 1988), 169 Le rayon vert [Summer] (Eric Rohmer, 1986), 178 Le salaire de la peur (Jacques-Henri Clouzot, 1962), 72 Le Spleen de Paris (Charles Baudelaire, 1869), 36 Leiden (Netherlands), 148; see also La galerie agréable Leigh-Hunt, Barbara, 60 Lem, Stanislaw, 16, 70 Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Léos Carax, 1991), 135–6

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in dex   211 “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (George and Ira Gershwin), 71 Levesque de Pouilly, Louis-Jean, 54, 174 Lewis, Jerry, 111 Lewis, Wyndham, 9 Life of Johnson (James Boswell, 1791), 79 Lili (Charles Walters, 1953), 38n1 Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), 74 “Little Gidding” (T. S. Eliot, 1945), 9 Livesey, Roger, 46 Living It Up (Norman Taurog, 1954), 132; see also Nothing Sacred Loews Incorporated, 119 Logan, Elliott, 136n1 London, 68, 76, 84, 85, 92n4, 103, 144, 157ff, 160, 186 and Hodges, 144 Johnson’s London, 85 route to Paris via Chunnel, 157–8 Lord of the Rings, The (2001–3), 62n3 Lorrain, Claude, 94 Lorre, Peter, 110 “Loss of a Halo” (Charles Baudelaire), 33 Loughman, John and John Michael Montias, 172 Louis XIV, 25 baroque and, 25 Louis XV, 25 rococo and, 25 Louÿs, Pierre, on cigarettes, 80 Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955), 67 Lover’s Discourse, A (Roland Barthes, 2010), on scenes, 80 MacAndrew, Craig, drunken comportment, 71 McAvoy, James, 174 Magnani, Anna, 74 Magnificent Obsession (Lloyd C. Douglas, 1929), 167 Magnificent Obsession (John M. Stahl, 1935), 167 Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954), 6, 166–73, 177, 182ff, 192 Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), 68 Malleson, Miles, 150n6 Malouel, Jean, 50 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston, 1941), 110 Mandeville, (Sir) John, 145–6 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 112, 113, 120, 121–2, 126 editorial control of Barefoot Contessa, 113 use of flashbacks, 112

“Man of the Crowd, The” (Edgar Allan Poe, 1839), 81, 88–90 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Nunnally Johnson, 1956), 178 Man in the Iron Mask, The (Randall Wallace, 1998), 111 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934; 1956), 132 Mannoni, Laurent, 154; see also phantasmagoria Manhattan Melodrama (W. S. Van Dyke [and George Cukor], 1934), 74 mappa mundi, 2 Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1986), Diamond District scene, 88, 94 Mariana and the Moated Grange (John Everett Millais, 1851), 168–9 Marker, Chris, on Vertigo, 11 Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), 110 Marriage à la Mode (William Hogarth, 1742–5), 5, 100, 101, 102, 121, 122 “The Countess’s Morning Levee,” 101 “The Killing of the Earl,” 101 “The Marriage Contract,” 101 “Shortly After the Marriage,” 101 “The Suicide of the Countess,” 101 “Visit to the Quack Doctor,” 101 Martian Chronicles, The (Michael Anderson, 1980), 150 Marvell, Andrew, “green thought in a green shade,” 169 Mary (Abel Ferrara, 2005), 136 Maryon Park (Charlton, London), 184ff, 193 Cox’s Mount, 189; see also Blow-Up Masai of East Africa, 156 Mason, James, 110, 119–20 Massey, Raymond, 46 Master of St. Veronica, and circle in Cologne c. 1400, 50 Mastroianni, Marcello, 73 Mathieson, Muir, 92n4 Matrix, The (The Wachowski Brothers [now Lana and Lilly Wachowski], 1999), 179 Matter of Life and Death, A [Stairway to Heaven] (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946), 5, 36, 36ff, 40–7, 116, 133, 154, 194 Locations: Devonshire, 42; English Channel, 42 Marius Goring in, 118 Philidor and, 154; see also Philidor, François-André piano melody in, 133 Mauvais sang (Léos Carax, 1986), 135

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212  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Maybeck, Bernard, 92 Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), 47; see also “Trolley Song” Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 119, 184, 194 Eastmancolor lab at (Metrocolor), 194 Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema (Murray Pomerance, 2010), 191 Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978), 68–9 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (William Shakespeare, c. January 1, 1605), 46 Milan, 73, 74, 174 Millais, John Everett, Mariana and the Moated Grange, 168–9 Miller, Arthur, movement from earlier to later work, 104 Miller Atlas of Brasil (1519), 148 Milner, Martin, 68 Mineo, Sal, 111 Minnelli, Vincente, 193 Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), 71, 72 Miracolo in Milano (Vittorio De Sica, 1951), 74 Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The (Peter Paul Rubens, 1618–19), 49 Mitchell camera, modified see Technicolor Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), 34 Mont Saint-Victoire, 105; see also Cézanne Montaigne, Michel de, 149 Monte Carlo, 113 Monroe, Marilyn, 104 Moon by Whale Light, The (Diane Ackerman, 1991), 105 Moonstone, The (Wilkie Collins, 1858), 101 Moorehead, Agnes, 167 Moreau, Jeanne, 73 Moretz, Chloë Grace, 135 Moritz, Carl Philip, 79, 83, 84 reporting families going once a year to Ranelagh, 84 seeing the Rotunda at Ranelagh, 83 as traveler, 79, 83 Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1954), 179 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 3, 6 13ff, 30, 31, 33 composing in C Major, 24 Symphony No. 34 in C, K. 338, 13, 25–6, 28 Müller, Robby, 75 multiplied narrative, 5

Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (Agatha Christie, 1926), 108 Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974), 170 Murderer, The (Edvard Munch, 1910), 49 Music (Carle Vanloo), 18, 21–2; see also Allegories of the Arts My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936), 3 Mysteries of Paris, The (Eugène Sue, 1842–3), 87; see also Gunning, Tom and Phéline, Christian Naked Spur, The (Anthony Mann, 1953), river in, 47, 178 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The (Edgar Allan Poe, 1838), 143n4 National Gallery, The (London), 100, 180 Sainsbury Wing, 180 Nativity, The (Piero Della Francesca, 1470–5), 49 Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), 179 Neame, Ronald, 40 Netflix, 41 New Theatre (Haymarket, London), 137; see also Bottle Hoax Newman, Paul, 103 Newton, Sir Isaac, 54 New Zealand, 148 Nicholson, Emrich, 173 Nicholson, Jack, 72 Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950), 74 Night Must Fall (Karel Reisz, 1964), 108–9 Niven, David, 42, 43, 46 Nixon in China (John Adams, 1987), 175 Foxtrot, 187 see also I Am Love Nolan, Doris, 67 Noli Me Tangere (Titian [Tiziano Vecellio], c. 1514), 107 Norman, C. P., 40 North America, 149; see also La galerie agréable North American Indians, Jesuit reports of, 156 North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), 7 Nothing Sacred (William Wellman, 1937), 132; see also Living It Up Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999), 84 Novak, Kim, 96 Nutty Professor, The (Jerry Lewis, 1963), 111

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in dex   213 “O mio babbino caro” (Giacomo Puccini, 1918), 94; see also Vertigo Oakland, Simon, 67 O’Brien, Edmond, 112 Observer, The, 197 O’Casey, Ronan, 166, 186 Oedidee, youth of Bola-bola brought out by Capt. Cook, 148 Offray de La Mettrie, Julien, 54, 80 entering desired object, 80 Ogborn, Miles, Vauxhall made of spectacles, 84 Oliver-Goodwin, Michael and Lynda Myles, 93 Olivier, Laurence, 88 Olsen, Christopher, 110 Omai, brought to England and presented to George III, 154n7 Omai Pantomime, 154n7; see also Omai Oman, 160 Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (Herman Melville, 1847), 188 On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), 68 On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012), 136 One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1981), 190 Orpheus and Eurydice, 16–17 Orry-Kelly (Orry George Kelly), 39 Ortega y Gasset, José, 191 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 131 Outrage, The (Martin Ritt, 1964), 103; see also Rashômon Oudry, Jean-Baptiste, 61 Owens, Susan, on phantasmagoria, 154 Oz, Frank, 133 “Painter of Modern Life, The” [Le peintre de la vie modern] (Charles Baudelaire, 1864), 88 Painting (Carle Vanloo), 18, 21, 29; see also Allegories of the Arts Palance, Jack, 47 Palmer, Gregg, 167 Panama-Pacific Exposition (San Francisco, 1915), 92 Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002), 136 Panofsky, Erwin, 182 Paramount Pictures (Los Angeles), 10, 11 Paris, 152, 155, 160, 172, 190 capital of modernity, 155 route to London via Chunnel, 160 Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), 5, 75, 91–2, 179 Pasadena, 72

Pascal, Blaise, 94 Passenger, The [Professione: Reporter] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), 5, 72–3, 74, 160, 192 Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016), 150 Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), 74 Peakman, Julie, 149 Peck, Gregory, 173, 178 Pepys, Samuel, 154 Percy Lodge (East Sheen), 83 Pereira, I(rene) Rice, 140 Perkins, V. F., 96, 197 Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016), 5, 129, 152–3 phantasmagoria, 154 continental shows (since January 1798), 154 and Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, 154 London première October 1801, 154 Phéline, Christian, 87 Philidor, François-André Danican, chess master, 154; see also Matter of Life and Death Philidor (Paul de Philipsthal), 154 arrival in Paris, 154 Flemish origin, 154 see also Philidor, François-André Picard, Liza, 65, 82, 86, 137 beasts in London, 82 Bottle Hoax, 137 Hyde Park (London), being seen there, 86 John Cross and Company, Piccadilly, 82 St. James’s Park, London, 86 Place in the Sun, A (George Stevens, 1950), 74 Platonic form, 44, 52, 60, 198 Pleasence, Donald, 91 pleasure gardens, 5, 78–90 typical characteristics of, 85 Pliny (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), 49–50, 183 Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov, 1957), 109 Poe, Edgar Allan, 89, 90; see also “Man of the Crowd” Pollitt, J. J., The Art of Ancient Greece, 49–50 Pompadour, Madame de (Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour), 17, 25, 33 Pope, Alexander, 101 Portrait of a Man with a Pink (Hans Memling, 1475), 49 Pound, Ezra, 9, 107; see also “Waste Land, The” Powell, Michael, 41, 43, 44

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214  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), 178 Pressburger, Emeric, 44 Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813), 77–8, 79 Prince of Wales (prob. Frederick of Great Britain), visiting pleasure gardens, 86 Prince Valiant (Henry Hathaway, 1954), 38n1 Pringle, Sir John, hosting Boswell, Johnson, and Cook, 79–80 Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012), 68 Proust, Marcel, 166, borders of the mind, 169 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 67, 131 Puccini, Giacomo, 94 Pygmalion and Galatea, 31ff, 121 Pythagoreas, 192 Quattrocento, the, 107 Raiders of the Lost Ark (George Lucas, 1981), 76 Rake’s Progress, A (William Hogarth, 1733–5), 101, 150–1 Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942), 133 Ranelagh Gardens, 2, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 94 Rotunda at, 84 Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), 5, 103, 122 remake of, 103 Rawnsley, David, 40 Ray, Nicholas, 66, 111 Read, Herbert, 146 Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), 67, 70, 178 Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), 111 Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) see Three Colors Red Desert [Il deserto rosso] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), 192, 194 redemption, Christian, 167; see also Douglas, Lloyd C. Redgrave, Michael, 134 Redgrave, Vanessa, 134, 166, 185, 186 Reformation, the, 156 Reid, Carl Benton, 67 Rendez-vous (André Téchiné, 1985), 135 Rennahan, Ray, 44, 47 Reynolds, Ryan, 155 Rikken, Marrigje, 56, 172 River Runs Through It, A (Robert Redford, 1992), 197 Robards, Jr., Jason, 67 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard, 154; see also phantasmagoria

Robinson, Edward G., 74, 103 Róheim, Géza, dreams and gates, 156 Rome, 147; see also Carta Marina Ronan, Saoirse, 134 Rosewell, Roger, 50 Roskill, Mark, and Arnolfini Marriage, 180 Rossellini, Roberto, 73 Rothman, William, 17 Royal Wedding (Stanley Donen, 1950), 71 Rubens, Peter Paul, love of nature, 172–3 Rue du printemps (Gustave Courbet, 1861), 48 Ruisdael, Jacob, 61 Rush, Barbara, 110, 167 Ruskin, John, 81, 196 on mystification, 81 Ruysch, Rachael, 105 Ryan, Robert, 47 Ryave, A. Lincoln and James M. Schenkein, 68 Sacks, Oliver, 188 Saint Cloud, Parc de (Paris), Atget photographing, 105 St. James’s Park, London see Von Bielfeld, Baron St. Pancras Station (London), 160 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 94 Salisbury (Wiltshire); see also Constable San Francisco, 68, 92, 96; see also Vertigo Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) see Kealakekua Bay Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983), 11 Sar-e-sang [Place of the Stone] (Afghanistan), 28 Scandinavia, 147; see also Carta Marina Schenck, Nicholas M., 119, 120 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 33 Schmidt, Benjamin, 149 Schwarzenwald (Black Forest), origin of fairy tales, 170 Scorsese, Martin, 66 Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich, 187 Sculpture (Carle Vanloo), 18, 21; see also Allegories of the Arts Searchers, The (John Ford, 1956), 66–7 Sebald, W. G., 189 Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1962), 70 Sense of an Ending, The (Ritesh Batra, 2017), 3 Separate Peace, A (John Knowles, 1959), 129 Shall We Dance (Mark Sandrich, 1937), 71 Shamroy, Leon, 47

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in dex   215 Shane (George Stevens, 1953), 47, 133 ending dialogue, 133 Wyoming mountains in, 47 Shayne, Konstantin, 20 Sheen, Martin, 72 Shepherd with His Flock in a Woody Landscape, A (Peter Paul Rubens, 1615–22), 172 Sheridan, Thomas, 137; see also Boswell, James Sierra Club, 75 Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016), 74 Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1968), 178 Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957), 11, 178 Silver Chalice, The (Victor Saville, 1954), 47 Sinatra, Frank, as singer and screen actor, 107 Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952), 67, 178 “Singin’ in the Rain” (Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown), 67 Sirk, Douglas, 167, 171, 173, 183, 186, 192, 193, 194 Sirkian green, 171, 192 Sitwell, Osbert and Margaret Barton, on pleasure gardens, 85 Skype, 159 Sloane, Everett, 109 Society Islands, 148 Socrates, 4 Sofaer, Abraham, 63 Somewhere in Time (Jeannot Szwarc, 1980), 133 South America, 149; see also La galerie agréable Space Between Us, The (Peter Chelsom, 2017), 70 Spain, 121 Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), 133 Spielberg, Steven, 71 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedito de Espinosa), 6 Spy Who Came In from the Cold, The (Martin Ritt, 1965), 69 Stack, Robert, 47 Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), 76, 141n2 Stanton, Harry Dean, 75 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer, 1991), 3 Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), 68, 71 Stein, Fritz see Bach, Johann-Christian Stevens, Warren, 112

Stewart, James, 8, 13, 67, 70, 96 Stewart, Kristen, 129, 135, 136n1, 141n3, 144, 152, 153, 156 and Narcissus, 141n3 and nervousness, 156 Still Life with Birds and Hunting Gear in a Niche (Melchior d’Hondecoeter, c. 1633), 57 Still of the Night (Robert Benton, 1982), 170 Stockwell, Dean, 177 Stolen Life, A (Curtis Bernhardt, 1945), 68, 111 Streep, Meryl, 170 Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950), 74 Studlar, Gaylyn, 80 Study in Scarlet, A (Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887), Holmes meeting Watson, 87 Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952), 141n2 Sunflowers (Vincent Van Gogh, 1888), 49 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927), 71 Supremus No. 50 (Kasimir Malevich, 1915), 49 Swann’s Way [Du côté de chez Swann] (Marcel Proust, 1913), 166 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957), 68 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 4 Switzerland, 167, 168 Szasz, Thomas, 16 Taheiti see Tahiti Tahiti, 144, 188 Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Anthony Minghella, 1999), 179 Tandy, Jessica, 179 Tarzan the Ape-Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1932), 131 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), 71 Technicolor 5, 11, 37–8, 40, 41, 42, 45n2, 45–6, 47, 60, 61, 113, 177, 186 Academy ratio in filming, 38 British Technicolor, 40ff, 44 and C41 negative processing (at conventional labs), 41, 42 Corporation (Romaine Street, Hollywood), 5, 11, 37, 60; see also Kalmus, Herbert damaged separations, 38 discomfort on set while shooting, 47 founders, 37, 61 history of Technicolor filming, 40 and Hollywood design, 39 “key” for flashing, 45n2

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216  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Technicolor (cont.) Kodak black-and-white recording film, 37, 38 and making dissolves, 45–6 matrix control, 194 modified Mitchell camera, 37 monochrome, 41 negative printing of Eastmancolor by Technicolor labs (using contact method to make separations and matrices), 38 1950s Technicolor spectacles, 113 and optical printing, 45–6 as process, 61 producer deals with Technicolor Corp., 47 proto-Technicolor, 40 three-strip process, 37ff, 47, 61, 177 wash temperature control, 45, 194 Technicolor Rome, 194 terrain vague, 76, 76n2 “Test, The” (Stanislaw Lem, 1966, trans. Louis Iribarne), 70 Testament of Dr. Mabuse, The [Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse] (Fritz Lang, 1933), 89 Thames, River, 75 Theater Royal, Drury Lane (London), 154n7 Thief of Bagdad, The (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1940), 150n6 Thin Red Line, The (Terrence Malick, 1998), 179 Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (Mervyn LeRoy, 1944), 68 This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944), 40 Thomas, Keith, 156, 157, 186 on distinguishing Protestant from Catholic regarding belief in ghosts, 157 on enchantment, 186 Three Colors Trilogy (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993–4), 136 Time Machine, The (George Pal, 1960), 133 Time Machine, The (Simon Wells, 2002), 133 Todd, Richard, 76 Toll of the Sea, The (Chester M. Franklin, 1922), 193 Tom Horn (William Wiard, 1980), 74 Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935), 3 “Tree of Jesse” (c. 1180–90), stained glass, York Minster Museum, 51 “Trolley Song, The” (Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane), 47 True Crime (Clint Eastwood, 1999), 74 Truffaut, François, 131, 177; see also Day for Night and Fahrenheit 451 Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934), 3

23 Paces to Baker Street (Henry Hathaway, 1956), 68 Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008), 136; see also Twilight saga Twilight saga (Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, David Slade, Bill Condon, 2008–12), 136 Twilight Saga: Breaking Down – Part 1 (Bill Condon, 2011) see Twilight saga Twilight Saga: Breaking Down – Part 2 (Bill Condon, 2012) see Twilight saga Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade, 2010) see Twilight saga Twilight Saga: New Moon (Chris Weitz, 2009) see Twilight saga Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967), 179 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), 70, 71, 178 Tyndall, John, 29 Uglow, Jenny, and dramatization in Hogarth, 101 Ulietea, 148; see also Oedidee Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952), 74 Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The [Les parapluies de Cherbourg] (Jacques Demy, 1964), 3 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (Philip Kaufman, 1988), 135 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weeraseethakul, 2010), 179 Undertow (David Gordon Green, 2004), 136 Van Eyck, Jan (Joannes), 48ff, 61, 180ff, 193 Van Huysum, Jan, 55, 58, 105, 193 Van Mander, Carel, 49, 50, 183 Ghent Altarpiece, 183 Schilderboeck (1604), 49, 50 Van Sant, Gus, 76 Vander Aa, Pierre, 148; see also La galerie agréable Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001), 68 Vanloo, Charles-André (Carle), 17ff, 24; see also Vertigo Vasari, Giorgio, 50, 146 Vase of Flowers (Jan Van Huysum, 1722), 55 Vauxhall Gardens, 2, 82, 83, 86, 94 and academic painting, 84 nightingales singing in, 85 Veidt, Conrad, 150n6 Venice, 147; see also Carta Marina

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in dex   217 Vermeer, Jan, paintings of women in closed rooms, 104–5 Vernet, Claude Joseph, 180 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), 4, 8, 9–35, 38, 39, 52, 53–4, 57, 92–7, 173, 177, 178 Bernard Herrmann score for, 25, 96; responsibilities as music director, 25; Wagner as source, 25 blue in, 13ff, 28; ultramarine, 28; see also Finlay, Victoria Locations: Big Basin State Park, 10, 12, 95, 173; Cypress Point (near Carmel, California), 26, 29; Embarcadero, The (district, San Francisco), 20; Empire Hotel (Sutter Street, San Francisco), 97; Ernie’s (Montgomery Street, San Francisco), 10, 15; Golden Gate Bridge, 95; Golden Gate Park, misidentified, 93; Mission Dolores (Mission San Francisco de Asís, 16th and Dolores Streets, San Francisco), 12; Mission San Juan Bautista (San Juan Bautista, California), 10, 12, 30, 33, 34; 900 Lombard Street, San Francisco, 32; Palace of Fine Arts (Baker Street, San Francisco), 92ff, 95; Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco), 12, 17, 22, 23, 39, 53; Podesta Baldocchi (Grant Avenue, San Francisco), 12, 15, 32, 52, 53, 57; Ransohoff’s (Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco), 10, 32; Russian Hill, San Francisco, 32; San Francisco Bay, 53; San Francisco landmarks, 95; Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, 32; Twin Peaks district (San Francisco), 16 Musical cues: “The Park,” 92, 92n4, 96; resemblance of “The Park” to “O mio babbino caro,” 94 Painting in: Architecture (Carle [CharlesAndré] Vanloo), 18ff, 21–2, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 33, 39; see also Vanloo, Charles-André and Allegories of the Arts; Flowers Before a Window (Jan-Frans Van Dael, 1789), 53; Portrait of a Gentleman [Victor-Marie d’Estrées] (Nicolas de Largillière, 1710), 23, 26; Portrait of Carlotta (1958), 53 Related locations: Australia, 39; Hawaii, 39; Pacific Ocean, 39; Point Lobos Avenue, San Francisco, 39; Seal Rocks, San Francisco, 39 Scenes: Palace of Fine Arts scene, 92–7; redwoods scene, 10, 173; Revelation

scene, contention about, 93; Sanatorium scene, 13–30 Vertigo (W. G. Sebald, 1990, trans. Michael Hulse), 188 View of Ornans (Gustave Courbet, mid1850s), 48 Vigo, Jean, 66 “Virgin and Child, The” (c. 1330–5), stained glass, St. Michael and All Angels, Eaton Bishop, Herefordshire, 51 VistaVision, 11 Von Bielfeld, Baron (Jakob Friedrich Baron von Bielfeld), at St. James’s Park, 86 Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 21, 26, 58–9, 174, 175, 176, 196 color theory, 58–9, 174, 175, 176 green as union of blue and yellow, 175 Italian journey, 196 Wagner, Richard see Vertigo Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967), 76, 110 “Waste Land, The” (T. S. Eliot, 1922), edited by Ezra Pound, 107 Watering Place, The (Peter Paul Rubens, 1615–22), 172–3 Watson, J. S., 86 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 61 Wayne, John, 66–7 Webb, Kieron, 41–6 Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968), 72 Weimar Berlin, 89; see also Hessel, Franz Weir of Hermiston (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1896), 177–8 Weis, Elisabeth, 24–5 Weisberg, David, 155 Weismuller, Johnny, 131 Welch, Raquel, 91 Welles, Orson, 109, 110, 131 cherished by Truffaut, 131 Werner, Oskar, 133 Westcott, R. Burton, 37, 61 “What Becomes of Things on Film” (Stanley Cavell, 1978), 36–8; see also Cavell, Stanley White (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) see Three Colors White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), 111 Whitlock, Albert, 183 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), 72 Widmark, Richard, 74 Williams, Grant, 13, 68 Williams, Laura, 78

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218  c i n e m a, if yo u ple as e Williams, Nigel, 56–7 Williams, Robin, 179 Williams, Tennessee, 66 Wings of the Morning (Harold D. Schuster [and Glenn Tryon], 1937), 44 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 59, 169, 175, 186 color theory, 59 green, 175 language game of color, 169 Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming, 1939), 40, 75, 178, 191, 193 Wolf and Fox Hunt, The (Peter Paul Rubens, 1616), 101 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 62, 63, 191 Wonder Man (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1945), 111 Wonderwall (Joe Massot, 1968), 179 Worden, Hank, 67

Wordsworth, William, 175 World, the Flesh and the Devil, The (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), 68 Worms, altar wings (c. 1260), 50 Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956), 47, 68, 192 Wyman, Jane, 167, 173 Yearling, The (Clarence Brown, 1946), 6, 173, 177 Younger, Earl, 177 “You’re All the World to Me” (Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner), 71 Yumibe, Joshua, 58 Yuricich, Matthew, 183 Zoo Story, The (Edward Albee, September 28, 1959), 8

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